by Robert Pobi
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For Kenneth Meany—
Mentor.
Evil genius.
Grouch.
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
—NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB,
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
—OSCAR WILDE,
Lady Windermere’s Fan
1
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City
Dana Goldrich wondered how many this made. Five? Eight? Not that it really mattered, because this was it—her last drink. Well, not the last one. But the one that would nudge her from not tipsy enough to almost perfectly drunk. It was a fine line of demarcation—one that had taken thirty years of golf tournaments, charity auctions, five-figure-a-plate galas, endless corporate events, and months of homebound COVID-19 boredom to perfect—and she enjoyed the exercise.
But she didn’t want to drink so much that she embarrassed herself; her father had taught her that there was nothing worse than a sloppy drunk. So this was it—the final sip at the fountain. And in order to make sure things didn’t go south, she needed to make a pledge, so she called up the biggies: Scout’s honor; pinkie swear; honest Injun (was that one allowed anymore?); cross my heart and hope to die.
The cross my heart one ticked the most boxes. It had conviction bolstered by the romantic notion of death being preferable to dishonor.
Cross my heart.
She crossed her heart.
And hope to die.
She hoped to die. But left out the part about the needle—there was no need to tempt fate.
In crossing her heart, Dana spilled a little of her drink, which she found hilarious for some reason. She licked the vodka off her thumb and decided to head up the ramp.
Everyone else was amusing themselves talking shop, which meant one of two things tonight—the Big Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose, Revive) or stock tips. Dana found this particular mix of eco-corporate-dot-com people a hissy fit waiting to happen. Inevitably, one of the natosexuals would insult one of the venture capitalists, things would heat up, and someone would end up with a drink in their face. Maybe get cussed out. But she doubted anyone would throw a punch—as brutal as the Wall Street types liked to think of themselves, they weren’t physical people. And the carbon-footprint-obsessed folks? They believed in group hugs, not gang fights.
Her husband, Sheldon, was mingling with some of his hedge-fund buddies somewhere in the atrium below. Dana scanned the sea of evening wear, but there were an easy five hundred people in here, half of them wearing dinner jackets, including the waiters. Throw in that Shelly was not particularly tall and it was like looking for a diamond in an ice bucket. Which was ultimately fine with her; Dana wasn’t interested in hearing him pitch another of his funds—this time it was foreign annuities, mostly Saudi backed.
Of course, everyone was talking about the company hosting the event—Horizon Dynamics. Shelly was excited about a rumor circulating among his buddies that they were expecting a big announcement tonight—the kind that would make everyone involved a lot of money when the IPO went live tomorrow morning. And there had to be some truth to the rumor because Dana had already heard a few of the guests discussing various ways to circumvent the tax man.
She moved up the corkscrew gallery with slow, deliberate steps that indicated her blood alcohol ratio was somewhere near perfect. She had read up on this once—it was a matter of basic biology: ethanol passing the blood-brain barrier hijacked balance because humans inherited their inner ear from sharks. It was so simple you almost tripped over it. Which she did. But caught herself on the railing. And spilled a little more of her cocktail.
Dana ran into the wife of one of the account execs in Sheldon’s office, a woman with one of those saccharine finishing school nicknames that she could never remember—Muffy or Missy or something. She was with a friend who was rocking the Cruella de Vil look, complete with a two-tone marcel wave.
When Muffy/Missy saw Dana, she squealed and did an excited Pomeranian foot stamp. “Dana! What a lovely surprise.” Her facial muscles barely moved, but she was still able to pull her lips into what most people could figure out was supposed to be a smile.
Dana leaned forward, careful to hold her drink to the side, and they metronomed air kisses. “How nice to see you,” she said, trying to remember the woman’s name.
Muffy/Missy introduced her friend, but the name was lost in the noise. She displayed the same taxidermy procedures—and her mouth looked like an overbaked pizza pocket.
More air kisses.
Muffy/Missy asked about the kids (which Dana didn’t have), and wondered when she and Sheldon (only she called him Shelbon) were going to come out to the beach for another fabulous weekend (they had never been there).
Dana indicated a vague spot up the ramp. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she lied. “I promised someone I’d talk to them about an internship for one of their children. I’ll see you back downstairs.”
That seemed to satisfy Muffy/Missy, and she and Cruella continued their downward trajectory.
As Dana worked her way up toward the skylight and confetti machines, she ignored most of the art on display. The decor—which was all it really was—was a mix of Ansel Adams’s iconic photography of the natural world interlaced with Andy Warhol’s prints of mass-produced landfill. The Wall Street guys were throwing terms like juxtaposition, negative space, and rampant consumerism around as if they understood—or cared—about them. Dana worked in the art department at Christie’s, and she knew advertising when she saw it. When you looked at Warhol’s soup cans beside one of Adams’s Sierra portraits, it was impossible to miss the message: too much garbage, not enough forethought. Which was why they were all here: Horizon Dynamics was going to change the world. Or so the seven-story foil banners hanging from the ceiling declared in a classic ad agency focus group slogan: Today’s Solutions for Tomorrow’s Problems!
All of Warhol’s work looked like T-shirt art to her. Sure, it was popular. Sure, you immediately knew what you were looking at. Sure, it was a time stamp from an important cultural period. But so what? When Dana looked at the posters and silk-screen portraits, all she saw was a guy who had bothered to show up.
But as an investment? Warhol was a touchstone for both the nascent collector and the uninformed alike; he had brand recognition. It didn’t matter if it was a Brillo box, a portrait of Jagger overlaid with camouflage, or one of his early shoe sketches—they were all known commodities. Looking up a Warhol piece at auction was so much easier than going through the mental anguish of trying to understand how a small painting could be worth more than a large one. When you purchased a 1969 Campbell’s Soup II, signed in ballpoint and stamped with its series number, all you had to
be able to do was read a catalogue.
But Adams was the real deal—an American giant. That his work was hanging here beside Warhol seemed like a snide remark to Dana. But she understood that not everyone got Adams—the biggest obstacle she faced when speaking to clients was getting them to equate his oeuvre to other art forms. It was sad how he had lost some of his relevance to an age where everyone who carried a cell phone camera fancied themselves a photographer. But to Dana, Adams’s work was like reading Whitman—and you either got it or you didn’t. And most people didn’t.
She was halfway through the final turn around the ramp when she realized that her glass was empty. And since she had spilled half of it, she was entitled to one more. But that would be it—a single drink. Then it was quits for the night. Cross her heart.
Dana looked over the railing to the atrium below. The bar was too far away to make in these heels. And she wasn’t in the mood for running into Muffy/Missy and Cruella on the way down to discuss children she didn’t have and trips she wouldn’t take.
She looked around for the elevator just as the lights began to dim. She steadied herself on the railing and looked down into the atrium far below.
The string section began a playful little composition that sounded like birds chirping.
Then foil confetti began to snow from the machines hanging beneath the skylight—fluttering down in a thick, mirrored swarm. The lasers punched into the cloud and it pulsed, developing a heartbeat. It looked alive, playful.
The atrium erupted in applause.
Holograms blossomed from the floor, sprouting up toward the falling foil—three-dimensional tree trunks that grew in accelerated time lapse, branches reaching toward the skylight. The outstretched holographic limbs contorted as they rose and touched the falling foil confetti, and the transformation was complete.
For an instant, the Guggenheim was a lush translucent forest, heavy trunks of computer-generated old-growth trees ascending into the thick canopy of foil foliage overhead.
The gentle chirps generated from the violinists changed pitch and turned into the calls of exotic birds, each voice different.
The room disappeared, and Dana was transplanted to an ancient point in time, before man began to tiptoe toward the happenstance of evolution.
She began to clap with the rest of the partygoers.
Then—
Dana’s mind had time to register the flash.
And the initial instant of the explosion.
But everything disappeared when she was destroyed by the shock wave.
2
Montauk, New York
Lucas Page was out on the deck, turning things over in his mind. It was past two A.M. but he had lost track of time to one of those warm fall nights that made him feel like winter might never arrive. He sat in the big cedar chair with a cup of coffee that had passed peak-consumption temperature hours ago. His beaten leather mail bag was on the deck under his chair, filled with term papers that he needed to go through, but his attention was focused on the broad misty strip of the Milky Way. The rhythm of the surf scratched at the beach and he suspected that this was as close to meditation as he could get—something the doctors, in the vague but polished nomenclature of their profession, had tried to convince him could be a useful tool during times of stress. But when the voices started up, there was no convincing them to be quiet; they operated on their own schedule. And the hour he spent watching network news earlier gave them all the excuses they needed for a little emotional mischief; there was nothing like a flashback to start the voices chattering.
His head was back on the big deck chair and he focused his good eye on the stars. Out here, beyond the visual noise of the city, he could get a pretty good view of the sky if the weather was in a giving mood. The telescope was out, but it was really for the kids, part of his oft too-aggressive attempt to teach them a little more about the universe. They had taken turns peeking up at the cosmos after supper, but Lucas was still thinking about the explosion back in the city, and the kids had eventually drifted back into the house. Evidently he was no fun to be around when he wasn’t paying attention to them.
Lucas preferred the human eye over the telescope out here because it pulled focus and let him take in the Big Picture without zeroing in on details—a hard-wired problem with his thinking since childhood. His attention wandered from star to star, constellation to constellation, unconsciously and automatically mapping the movements as the minutes ticked by. He was staring at the Seven Sisters and could see five of the girls—not bad with the naked eye at this time of year—when Erin came out.
She sat down in his lap, careful to put her weight on his good leg. “Hey, Mr. Man. I thought you might have gone for a swim.”
He smiled into the dark; the water out here was never warm, but this far into October it would be at hypothermia temperatures. Also, with or without his prosthetics, Lucas had all the hydrodynamics of a cast-iron sewing machine. “Can’t sleep.”
“So you’re staring up at the sky?”
“I am.”
She nodded over at the telescope. “Why aren’t you using your fancy coatrack?”
“That’s for the kids. I don’t like it. Too much chromatic aberration.”
“Of course. Chromatic aberration. Silly me.”
He smiled and leaned forward, putting his face in the thick red hair that fell over her chest and the blue Wonder Woman T-shirt. She was warm and smelled of that Bvlgari perfume that was a big part of the mental snapshot he carried around. “I’m just thinking about things.”
They had both been involved in a silent dialogue from the moment they saw the news, and even though things was not much of an answer, it was enough.
“How long will we be hiding out at the beach?” She leaned her head back on his shoulder and followed his line of sight up to the sky.
He reached over to the other chair and took the blanket off the back with his right hand, doing a decent job of covering her. “We’re not hiding out.”
“Okay.”
“We’re waiting. Events like this often come in multiples. Right now I’m more comfortable out here, where statistically there isn’t much of a chance of our children being blown up.”
Their silence indicated that they agreed on that one point.
Erin pulled her feet up onto his lap under the blanket. “The hospital hasn’t called, which means we didn’t get any of the survivors.”
“That’s because there weren’t any.”
By the way she stiffened, he could tell that she hadn’t thought of that as an option. “How do you know?”
The cell phone footage aired on CNN and the telephoto shots of the Guggenheim on Fox had provided the broad strokes: the skylight and front doors had been blown out, but there was relatively little damage to the outside of the building. When you factored in more than five hundred victims so far, it meant that the blast had been designed to affect soft bodies, not hard surfaces. And there was only one kind of explosion that provided those two very specific data points. “Trust me.”
“Is that why you’re sitting out here, looking up at the sky that you seem to prefer over us humans much of the time?”
He could tell that she had reached the end of her rehearsed dialogue, which meant that she would either go back inside or ask him what she had been trying not to.
She rested her head on his shoulder. “You think they’ll call you?”
And there it was.
“I don’t do terrorists. At least not this kind.”
“Are you sure this was terrorism?”
“I’m not certain of anything at this point other than a lot of people were killed.”
“What humanity needs is a little more humanity.”
“What humanity needs is to finish what it started and go extinct.”
“Don’t be a cynic. I can live with your sarcasm, because a lot of the time it’s funny. But you’re too kind to be a cynic.”
“They’ll mobilize the entire American int
elligence community to nail these people down. They might pull everyone out of mothballs, but this isn’t my field. This particular subset of people has a pretty standard operating procedure, and they’re not that smart—it’s just a matter of time until they get caught. The office might ask me to look at a few things. If that happens, I want you and the kids to stay here.” That was as honest as he could be.
“So how about we go to bed?” She got up slowly, using his aluminum leg as a pushing-off point. She held out her hand. “Choose your response wisely.”
They went inside, leaving the telescope pointed up at the night sky.
3
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Brett Kehoe, FBI special agent in charge of Manhattan, paced the length of the Blue Bird command vehicle, overseeing his people as they coordinated with the men on site. But Kehoe was in another dimension, one where nothing—not even the command vehicle—existed; all there was, all he saw, were the video feeds of his team culling the debris inside the building.
The wall of monitors looked like HD cams broadcasting an archaeological dig from the bottom of the ocean. The Quasar task lighting threw focused beams through swirling dust that resembled silt being stirred up. The men in the specialized safety gear could have been deep-sea divers, their chemical respirators not dissimilar to heliox helmets, their movements slow and deliberate. All that was missing were bubbles.
The departments involved—the NYPD, the FDNY, and the FBI—wasted no time wondering if the explosion had been accidental; the Guggenheim was one of the high-visibility soft targets on the FBI’s anti-terrorism list and was a well-known quantity regarding accident probability. The building’s infrastructure offered no possibility of an event resembling the explosion.
What worried Kehoe was that the creative types tended to compound malice with all kinds of bonus bad ideas: biological and chemical weapons topped the list, followed by the big bogeyman of radioactivity. And if they lacked the funding or smarts for any of those, even the minimally talented could plan secondary events to bolster their branding: kill a bunch of people, wait for first responders to arrive, then set off more carnage.
