Reborn To Repent

What The Teachers Never Knew

He tested it the way you'd test ice.

First the small things. He stood up too fast and didn't get dizzy — his old knees would have complained, and these didn't. He walked to the window and looked down at Avenue B and it was Avenue B, but wrong: fewer restaurants, a bodega on the corner that had become a nail salon sometime around 2011 and hadn't yet, a payphone that still had its handset. He stood there long enough that a woman on the sidewalk below looked up at him looking down, and he stepped back from the glass like he'd been caught at something.

The wallet on the dresser had forty dollars in it and a student ID with his face on it, unlined, and a Whitfield Partners offer letter folded in thirds, the paper still sharp at the creases. He read the letter twice. Analyst, fixed income desk. Start date the following Monday. He remembered getting this letter. He remembered exactly how it had felt — like a door opening onto the rest of his life, which it had been, just not in the way he'd have chosen if anyone had shown him where it led.

He didn't remember the wallpaper. He didn't remember the smell of the hallway, cigarettes and someone's cooking, garlic and something with paprika. He stood in it anyway, in the smell and the wallpaper and the sound of a radiator that was going to keep banging every morning at six whether he wanted it to or not, and he thought about the teachers.

He hadn't thought about them in years. Not really. He'd signed off on quarterly statements that mentioned the Ohio Teachers' Pension Fund by name, dozens of times, hundreds maybe, and the name had never once resolved into a person for him. It was a line item. It had the shape of a client, not the shape of a woman named — he didn't know her name, that was the thing, he had defrauded thousands of people over eleven years and could not produce a single name.

He tried anyway, standing in the studio apartment he hadn't stood in for thirty years, and got nothing. No face. No name. Just the abstraction he'd built to make the work possible, still intact, still doing its job even now.

That bothered him less than he expected it to. That bothered him, a little, on a second pass — the fact that it bothered him so little.

He went out for coffee because he didn't know what else to do with a body that didn't need anything and a mind that needed everything to slow down. The diner on the corner was still a diner. He ordered the coffee and it came in a cup he remembered, thick white ceramic, chipped on the handle, and the waitress called him honey in a voice he hadn't heard in three decades because the woman attached to it had died sometime in the two thousands, of something ordinary, and he hadn't gone to the funeral because he hadn't known there'd been one.

He sat with the coffee for a long time. He thought about the letter on the dresser and what waited for him behind it — the fixed income desk, and eventually Meridian, and the men who would teach him, cheerfully, over lunches and golf and late nights at the terminal, exactly how the mechanism worked, because none of them had invented it either. He'd learned it. He could unlearn it, in theory. Or he could walk into Whitfield on Monday with the sharpest advantage any first-year analyst in the history of finance had ever had, because he already knew which trades would work, which regulators would look away for the right amount, which of his own bosses would be indicted eleven years before anyone else saw it coming, and which ones he could get there first.

He caught himself doing the math. Actual math — dates, positions, the CDX trade in year three that had made his reputation, the timing on a specific short in a specific August that even the SEC never fully unwound. He could see the whole board laid out again, decades ahead of everyone at the table.

He put the coffee down.

"You want anything else, honey?" the waitress asked. Not the dead one. A different one, younger, with a name tag that said RITA and hands that shook slightly when she poured, early-stage tremor, maybe fifty-five. He didn't know this woman. He would never know this woman. He would come in a handful more times over the next week and then his life would swallow this diner the way it swallowed everything else that didn't generate a return.

"No," he said. "Thank you."

She topped off the coffee anyway and moved on, and he watched her go table to table, patient in a way he had not been patient with another human being in longer than he could accurately place, and he thought: I could leave her a hundred dollars on an eight-dollar check and it wouldn't cost me anything and it wouldn't fix anything either.

He left her forty dollars. All the cash in the wallet. It wasn't generosity. He understood that even as he did it — it was closer to a kind of panic, the thing you do because you don't know what the correct thing is and this at least resembles it. Rita found the money after he left and came out onto the sidewalk looking for him, but he was already around the corner, and he let himself believe that not seeing her reaction was a form of modesty instead of what it actually was, which was that he couldn't stand to watch her be grateful for something so cheap.

He walked until the sun went down and didn't decide anything. He thought about David — twenty-four now, maybe, still two years from starting the company that would fail because of him. He thought about a woman named Sophie Marchetti, who he hadn't let himself think about in a long time, whose face arrived uninvited and stayed longer than the teachers had. He thought about a version of Monday where he walked into Whitfield and simply didn't take the first trade that started it, and another version where he took every one of them faster and cleaner than before, and he could not honestly tell, standing on a street he wouldn't recognize in ten years and had already forgotten in thirty, which version felt more like him.

By the time he got back to the apartment, the radiator had gone quiet. He lay down on top of the sheets in his clothes and stared at the water stain shaped like a continent, and somewhere before he fell asleep he understood, without wanting to, that whatever this was — dream, hallucination, something stranger — it was going to ask something of him that forty dollars to a stranger wasn't going to cover.

He didn't know yet what would.