In a bathroom at another bar, you snort the rest of the coke, which is probably too much. You’re not just flying, you’re hurtling, atmosphere-bound. You wander down a street and see a huge house with a party going on. There are people on the lawn taking turns at a keg, Solo cups in hand. You pluck one off the lawn, walk up like you belong, and pour yourself a foamy beer. Some faggots stare at you but don’t say anything. Inside, there is music that makes the blood in the veins of your scalp pulse. It’s maddeningly hot inside. Cheap plastic fans try to circulate air, but there are too many bodies. Many of the guys have their shirts off, many of the girls are in strapless dresses. Every set of tits swells, every color radiates with magic and glitter, the walls inhale and exhale, every drop of sweat sparkles in the frosty light. Maybe you’re dizzy. You decide to take a seat on the melting cushions of a couch. You sip your beer. After a while a guy comes and sits beside you, black hair, tall, pores like elevator shafts.
“What’s the word,” he says.
You pretend like you don’t hear. You drink.
“You look like my cousin’s boyfriend,” he says. He has a huge tattoo on his neck, cursive scrawl. Threnody, it says. Probably his band or something equally retarded.
He’s asking for your name, so you mutter about taking a piss and stalk off. There’s a staircase, and you find a bathroom at the top. Rather than fumble for a light switch, you do your business in the dark and hear urine splashing on the floor.
In the hallway, you see the bedrooms now. There’s just enough light coming from the bottom of the stairs that you can see these rooms belong to people with stuff. Computers. Televisions. Maybe jewelry or expensive shoes. You poke your head into one. An even deeper heat envelops you. It looks like there’s a pile of clothes on the bed, but as you move closer you realize it’s a girl sleeping. She’s got her knees turned to the side and her arms splayed like goalposts. You touch the sticky skin of her shoulder but she only breathes shallow, husky breaths. She’s wearing a black dress with spaghetti straps, black hair flowing like a still wave across her face. A weak chin and thunder thighs. You can see the air swimming around her.
You go to the door and close it. There’s no lock. You undo your belt and pull her knees apart. Lowering your cargo shorts, you get your cock out and scoot her dress up. Silky thong underwear. She doesn’t even stir. Your mouth is dry, so you swig some beer and set the cup on the windowsill where a thin gruel of light splits each slit of the blinds. You crouch over her and push in. She makes a sound in the back of her throat and tries to lift her head but sets it back down. You begin. It’s that awful feeling like in the car on the way down with Claire Ann. You’re hard, you’re horny, but there’s no sensation there. And it’s so very hot in the room. The sweat comes broiling off your face. You squeeze her breast and wonder if this will wake her. You keep going until you can feel the sensation creeping in. You’re so hot, your back is soaked, you feel like you’re in an oven, you feel like you might pass out. You lower your face to hers. Her breath is vodka and corn syrup. She whimpers but doesn’t wake. Then abruptly, you come.
You pull out and stare at her dress bunched around her thick thighs glowing in the timid light. Her head lolls from side to side, and then she goes still again. You pull up your shorts and buckle your belt. You take your beer and go back downstairs.
On the couch again, you drink. Then he’s standing over you, Threnody. He thrusts a finger at you.
“Man, you don’t know anyone here,” he says. You sip. Your hair drips like mop water. “You don’t know anyone,” he says again.
That night, you sleep sitting up in a bank vestibule, and of course you dream of the lion. You sit on the forest floor and wait for the pink umbrella to find you. You watch as the dot zips the lion into existence. It blinks, and stands for a second, eyeing you with those cool predator eyes. It opens its cavern full of slick, wet teeth, and you plunge into those jaws headfirst, aiming to immediately gouge your eyes on the two longest, sharpest canines you can find. Your scream thunders in your throat and echoes in the forest, with tone and pitch. In fact, it’s nearly a song. You feel the lion’s jaws close and that bizarre dream-pain, which doesn’t hurt so much as imply what hurting could feel like.
The next day you have a hangover for the ages, and Claire Ann is furious. She picks you up in your truck, and she’s immediately bawling that she thought you were dead or arrested, and you try to explain, but you can’t entirely remember what happened that got you separated. Eventually she falls asleep in the passenger seat. You stop for gas and a Red Bull. It’s a day where the sun has the tar on the roads melting. Between the lingering booze, coke, X, weed, and heat, your consciousness feels like the wreckage of a storm.
Back on the road, you stare at the macadam traveling under the bumper and almost believe it doesn’t really exist, that right now you’re living a dream and if you steered the car onto the other side of the highway, you would pass through the other vehicles as if they were made of fog. You’re already forming a plan. After you drop Claire Ann off, you’ll nap and then you’ll pack. After all, you have a car and a little money for gas. You can go practically anywhere you want.
Your head rocks with the rhythm of the truck, and you think of the field behind your old house, well after Ameritrade took it but before they bulldozed. You went there the day it happened, when you didn’t know where else to go. Through the tunnel of oaks to the field. You slunk past old tractor tires, a combine, a few plows, a piss-yellow rotary tiller—all coated in rust. On the horizon there was a barbed-wire fence staked too far apart so the lines sagged. Penning in some farmer’s marbled cows, still as sculptures. You sat in the grass between the decaying blades of the combine, pulling up fistfuls of tall cool grass and smushing ants with your thumb until the sun dipped too low, and the darkness frightened you back over the field to your home.
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2016
Abstract: Today my mother and I had a conversation that excavated certain emotional reactions I’ve lately experienced due to my family, my work, my father’s funeral, and, for reasons I have difficulty articulating, the National Basketball Association. Consider this an effort to understand the ways in which they refract and reflect one another. I’ll begin with the context: a recent trip to Las Vegas with my financier, Peter, and the success of our proprietary black box, the Sports Almanac.
My final semester at MIT, I went in search of a professional gambler to finance the development of my modeling system for predicting the outcomes of NBA games. As was typical, major financial institutions had been circling us young quants, and I had lavish offers from firms in Boston, New York, London, and Tokyo—institutions eager to exploit the hard-won mastery of those with superior neurochemical wiring in the interest of market share. My peers failed to appreciate the dark humor I found obvious: that if they could, these elaborate boxes of capital would lobotomize us for this wiring without hesitation. If I was going to gamble for a living, I knew I’d prefer to do it on basketball, which had been a childhood obsession and which I still followed with more scrutiny than my studies. I should make clear I bore no resentment toward my peers who chose Wall Street. Mostly I found the thought of hopping from one bubble to the next tedious. It does not take an intellect capable of navigating higher order differential equations to understand that these firms are not in the business of creating economic value. I had no interest in joining a hedge fund. It seemed too easy.