I’d worked in the industry since college, when I interned with Ricky at Merrill Lynch. I was twenty-six when the housing bubble burst, but the nature of derivatives was such that vast degrees of separation existed between the families who’d taken out subprime loans and the guys like me who’d blindly traded CDO packages, each of which contained literally thousands of these mortgages. I’d been trained to imagine my market movements as purely hypothetical, a grand-scale sudoku that would increase my annuals without affecting the mechanics of American life. We weren’t Nazi soldiers following orders, but entrepreneurs following the rooted imperatives of our system, the promise that success comes at the expense of faceless others.
These others were out of sight, in Middle America, a place that mostly existed, for me, in midcentury novels by the Great White Males who’d been extinct for some time. And though I grew up an heir to financial depression, I still had trouble picturing the boarded-up houses and tent cities, the families ruined by debt. I couldn’t fathom the fallout from our actions, the factory closings and depleted pension funds. I couldn’t see how this recession would shape the next decade’s economy and lead to the current crisis. If I could see those things, I couldn’t connect them to what I was personally enacting.
There’s a long version and a short version of how I lost all my money. The long version is boring, and involves balance sheets and credit swaps, the broken dream of Detroit’s renaissance. It involves failures of predictive modeling and optimistic long positions. It involves the death of my daughter and a new inclination toward risk. And, if I’m being truly honest, it involves a not-insignificant measure of greed.
The short version is simple: I bet on America.
I soon found myself poorly leveraged, my liabilities threatening to outweigh my assets, and my sympathies for left-wing ideology steadily increasing. So while it would be easy to brag of my altruism by asserting that my shifting beliefs were based on a comradely desire for systemic fairness, the real source of my newfound empathy was that the system had failed me as well. I’d done all the right things—gotten the right job, married the right woman, made the right purchases based on Amazon’s recommendation engine—and I’d ended up with a dead child, a slumping marriage, and financial ruin.
I waited in line, waited for my pills to kick in, watched the coffee junkies queuing for their fixes: eyes glued to shoes, hands darting in and out of pockets, feeling the phantom buzz of their phones. I checked my own, which had been ringing with clients, debt collectors, and this morning’s half dozen missed calls from Wendy. I didn’t call anyone back.
When I reached the counter, the tele-barista said, “Good morning.”
It was twelve hours earlier in Manila, and I could see the blinking city through the window behind his head. These cyborgs combined the precision of automation with the frugality of outsourcing to provide a uniquely shitty customer service experience, though it’s worth noting that they rarely messed up an order. Their monitor heads livestreamed humans in the Philippines who remotely operated the robot bodies that brewed the coffee.
“And good evening to you,” I said, hoping to get a laugh in response, though, like the baristas of old, my guy was humorless, an underpaid teen with no time for chitchat.
“My name is Arnel, may I take your order?”
I told him what I wanted, and Arnel nodded, and a door opened in the robot’s belly. I watched my coffee being poured.
“I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, “but someone appears to have shat all over the bathroom floor.”
“Are you reporting an act of vandalism?” said Arnel. “Do you wish to lodge a formal complaint?”
His face was too close to the camera. I could see my reflection in his eyes. His question seemed like a trick or a threat. I was wary of reporting anything in an official capacity, afraid of paperwork or a delay in service.
“I’m just saying maybe someone should clean it up.”
“Copy that,” said Arnel, and he must have clicked his mouse or hit a key, because a siren went off above the bathroom door. The store’s human employee came pushing a mop bucket to meet it. She typed a code into a wall panel that turned the siren off. I didn’t understand why the bots couldn’t clean bathrooms while the humans served guests. I’d been told they didn’t have the dexterity. A metallic arm extended my coffee toward me. I wished Arnel a good day.
Ricky wasn’t answering his cell, but I was friendly with Donnell, his doorman. When he wasn’t signing for packages, or working evenings hawking iPhones at a Verizon store, Donnell wrote a blog that considered sports and pop culture through the lens of his life as a single dad. He was an excellent writer and, if the universe were remotely fair, he would have been writing for a larger audience than his few hundred daily readers, and for more coin than he got running banner ads. Years ago, I’d endeared myself by donating discards from my sneaker collection as giveaways for the blog’s donation drive, and, ever since, Donnell and I had enjoyed a rapport, longing for the days of pre-replay refereeing and the great elbow throwers of yore.
When I arrived in the lobby, Donnell did not look up. A book was open in his lap, and the doorman bent over it, presenting his graying Afro to anyone who entered. Donnell, I knew, was roughly my age, but he looked prematurely life-worn with his Don King haircut and plastic rim bifocals, his food-stained doorman’s gold-button blazer. On his desk sat a half-eaten egg sandwich. A peek of a circular sausage stuck temptingly from the bread’s square edge.
“You gonna finish that?” I asked.
Donnell nudged the sandwich in my direction. He closed his book and placed it face up on his desk; it was a hardcover copy of
