by Walter Witty
He splashed hot water into his face, and looked back into the steaming mirror. Who are you? he wanted to demand. But then, still wary of the foreboding possibility of actually finding the answer, he put a towel over his face and pressed hard, instead.
The key fit snugly, almost purposefully, into the lock. Then a second key was engaged, not his. The girl who simultaneously turned both keys did not look like his girl--like his imagined girlfriend--at all. Same red hair, but she was cherubically freckled all over her arms, her legs, and even her cheeks, too. She spoke with an unnaturally high and bright dramatic flair, as though she were making a training video. Or being watched by hidden camera.
"There you go, Mr. Leiter," she said, lifting a set of polished blue nails toward the opened space. "Will you need a private room?"
"Yes, please," he replied.
She perambulated in front of him, her generous hips swiveling inside a pleated blue skirt that wound and unwound with her every confident stride. When she reached a set of narrow doors down a short hallway, she tried the nearest doorknob with her left hand, but then recoiled with the sudden nervous tic of a smile, and moved to the next door. Opening that one, she motioned him inside.
"Let me know when you're ready," she said, beaming. Then she marched away, but not before glancing down at the locked knob of the door now to her right.
He went into the bare room, shut and locked the door behind him. There was a modular mahogany desk and chrome chair. No decoration, or even an attempt to avoid monotone. He was reminded of rooms he'd lived in, off and on, here and there, for years. Small, quiet rooms with only a desk, a chair, a dresser, and a single bed.
He put down the metal box he held, and sat at the desk. When he heard a door close in the hallway he scooted his chair closer. He stared down at the box. How long had it been? Two years at least, he reckoned, since letting go of his job, his career, his life.
He took a deep breath, then placed his hand on the lid. He held his hand there a moment before lifting it. Then he stared down at what was inside.
It looked like a segmented clear plastic snake. He almost recoiled at seeing it again. Each segment held a round coin, like a shiny scale. He lifted one end of the long coil, imagining it dead now. The word phobia came to mind, but he resisted the implications. Mustering the will for it, he draped and wrapped the heavy snake over and around his neck. Feeling its ample heft, its dead weight, then, he couldn't help but smile. For the coil contained over one hundred Krugerrands, each an ounce of solid gold.
Beneath it was a sheaf of stock certificates. He unfolded these next, and noted the name.
Bernard-Martinson Mining Ltd.
Remembering yet another purchase, he felt, at last, toward the back of the metal box, back past the hinge of the lid, for a small, square felt case. Clasping it between forefinger and thumb, he now pulled it out and into view.
It was a ring case.
He flipped it open, almost casually. But there was no ring there, as he already knew . Instead, there was a stone. A stone too big to risk mounting on any ring. A flawless fourteen carat blue-white diamond.
2
Returning to his trailer with only the key, he logged onto his computer, using his full given name, David Allen Leiter. It was the same five year old laptop he'd used before Wall Street first crashed, and mainly for research, backup, and the field notes he'd taken at a dozen observatories around the world. Many of those files were still there, catalogued by institution. But there was nothing unusually sensitive or proprietary about that. No mere laptop, regardless of hard drive capacity or computing power, had a prayer of crunching the kind of numbers involved in calculating air turbulence above an ELT or Extremely Large Telescope. Because multi-conjugate adaptive optics had led to the advanced multiple object laser tracking of the guide stars utilized to compensate for atmospheric blurring effects, such projections required super computers. Meaning his own now battered and ancient portable had served mainly as a scratch pad. A storage facility for routine paperwork and inter-colleague emails.
He wondered, as he wistfully scanned those files, what two of his former colleagues were doing now that funding had been cut to their own already beleaguered budgets. Were Jeremy Klinger and Bob Wood now working at Wal Mart or at McDonalds, judiciously cataloging stocks of frozen chicken nuggets? Were they more into peanut clusters than star clusters?
Hey, this ain't rocket science, he imagined a pimply teenage night manager telling them, in showing the proper way to clean a milkshake machine to men boasting both thousand yard stares and advanced degree in astrophysics.
Instinctively, he navigated to Google, but instead of typing any remembered names into the search box, he typed the phrase The fear of spending money, instead. Then he stared at the answer.
Chrematophobia.
Well, that was it, then. There was an actual name for it, which probably figured into his extreme frugality and paranoia, too. Luckily, or unluckily as the case had almost proved to be, he figured he'd been afflicted with this aversion to handling and spending money ever since MIT, a school which he'd attended on full scholarship, escaping a history of poverty and loss. Before that, perhaps being abandoned by a poor cabbie father had something to do with it. Or, more significantly, losing his long financially victimized mother to colon cancer. He'd certainly inherited his tenacity and paranoia from her, although not her love of television evangelists. Which explained how he'd parlayed the unfortunate hand he'd been dealt into his own royal flush, the ace of spades being a patent on Aurora MOAO---the adaptive optics system he'd helped develop in the second year of his career as an engineer, and utilized by the military in their latest night vision scopes.
As for his recurrent depression and insecurity, he hoped that the simplest explanation for that was his inexperience in other matters. Too busy analyzing data, he'd neglected establishing any traditional life for himself. Since his early retirement, he'd owned no fancy car or typical possessions, either. Instead, he'd let the cash in his bank account balloon automatically, by direct deposit, until the Fall of 2008, when what some called the Great Crash began. Then, with science projects terminated or soon slouching to their extinction, he'd bought into gold and hunkered down for the bad times ahead.
Times these days, of course, were truly bad for the industry. Worse, the woman he'd vaguely hoped to woo--a one time friend and colleague he'd first met at the Large Binocular Telescope atop Mt. Graham east of Tucson--had irrevocably rejected his half hearted advances for a man whose showy, confident style, old family money, and impeccable manners trumped his mostly dormant hopes. Soon after that he'd drifted into becoming singularly, supremely alone.
Now he placed his cursor over the root file for his engineering notes, including those taken at LBT with April's help, and drew it to the trash. Then he hit the Delete button. A box came up, asking if he really wanted to do this. He wasn’t sure, but he felt that he should do it. That he needed to do it. That it might even be long past time to do it. So he hit YES, and after five seconds it was done.
Next up, on the computer, came his blog files. These dated more recently. He'd only stopped writing the blog three weeks prior, when he noticed that traffic to the site of his rantings had dropped to nearly zero. Then it was like writing into the void. Into deep space, where no intelligent signal had ever returned.
He'd called his blog The Bottom Feeder. It was mostly tirades about how funding cutbacks to science would result in America becoming a third world country, which it was already becoming for many other reasons. Interspersed with this commentary were news tidbits about bailed-out banking executives relocating to Dubai, which had become the center of the new financial reality, following a partnership with oil rich neighbor Abu Dhabi. The UAE was where a transcendent post-American currency based on the free exchange of raw commodities like oil and gold seemed to be emerging, and where brain dead pop stars, trust fund brats, and prosperity gospel televangelists alike had been congregating to live the lifestyle to wh
ich they'd become accustomed, despite coming financial Armageddon for middle class America.
He clicked on a random blog, and read what was there. . .
Dear Bottom Feeder Reader,
They say that ninety percent of the paper currency circulating in Washington DC is tainted by cocaine. The city also has a high share of cynics, alcoholics, and murderers. What do they know that the rest of us don't? Is it just that power corrupts? Or maybe it's more salient than that. Maybe they alone realize that our faith in government accounting practices is as misplaced as the Black-Scholes formula used by the banks in derivative Ponzi schemes, and that blind trust is a shell game fated to collapse like a house of cards in a tornado.
The lawyers and liars who run the big poker game on the Hill are already turning over their busted flushes, and without even blushing. Soon our Chinese bankers will split while a thousand prancing Madoff clones kick up their heels in a chorus line across the national theater of the absurd. What then?
Maybe the thing to do now is to buy gold while it's still below five figures. If you have anything left after catastrophic deflation caused by the bailed-out banks trying to cover losses they should have declared in the first place. Maybe it's time to bury your TV and plant a Victory Garden around it while you still can. Maybe that's the only way not to go down in flames after everyone carrying a torch for the Fed drops it onto the termite-infested ruins of what was once their homes. The writing is on the walls, my friends, and on billboards too: WE BUY GOLD. What do they know that you don't? Why do they want to buy your old jewelry so desperately? Maybe it's because paper burns. Paper with traces of cocaine on it or not. --D.S.
Of course by then he'd already bought his gold on the internet. Gold mining shares too, while the golden glow of Dubai faded a bit due to the worldwide recession. Besides gold, the crown jewel of his possession was the stone he'd purchased at auction for a ring bigger than April Ellis could imagine. Which was saying a lot, since she was an astronomer.
Now he placed the cursor over his blog files, and drew them to the trash. Then, with a finger on the Delete button, he realized he wasn't going to wait until the Fed finally stopped the insanity of printing money to pay its bills. That he'd been freed of that, somehow. Freed from fretting over some dismal, apocalyptic future, too. Because the savage act he'd considered committing had uncovered his addiction to resisting the inevitable, mitigating his depression and anger over his mother’s treatment in the process. From this sudden new perspective, it seemed oddly easy to see the futility of it all. Who had ever followed his blog advice, anyway? What faceless stranger had ever reached out with concurrent empathy to be his compatriot? None. Instead, everyone seemed to burn their candles at both ends, blithely grinning into oncoming catastrophe. Given that, it seemed possible, as well, that fate would conspire to cheat him of any safe oasis or last laugh. So maybe the thing to do next was the opposite. To join the trust fund brats and money-gospel entertainers in their perverse bacchanal. To see if such a lifestyle experiment would lead to a clearer insight, if not a permanent, personal revelation.
And Dubai was just the place for that. A bargain at present, too.
With courage gained by his brush with death, bolstered further by an entire bottle of Sangria to finally be done with it forever, he called April's number and waited through six surprisingly agonizing rings before her voice materialized in the electronic ether like a ghost from some imagined past or alternate universe.
"Hello?" she said.
"Hi. April. This is David Leiter." By the way, I saw you, just the other day.
"David?" A dull surprise, devoid of delight. "What. . . do you want?"
Want. He considered that. What did he really want, now? Did he want her at all? Why was he calling her, and what did he expect from the call? That she might be forced to admit to herself that she'd been wrong in rejecting him?
"I'm not sure," he said, unexpectedly. "Your opinion, maybe. Got a minute?"
Everyone had a minute, he guessed, when their curiosity was roused. At least until the end of whatever brief attention span television had left them. Being no exception, April replied, "I guess. What's this about?"
"Shopping," he heard himself confess.
3
For a man who didn't own a suit, the store seemed indulgent, the clerk gay. When the tailor's tape began its measurements he sneezed, as though from an allergy. He looked down at the bald spot of the man kneeling at his pant cuffs, and asked, "Does this material breathe well?"
"Yes sir, it should," came the reply. "It's not a winter suit."
"Good," he said. Then he took in a deep breath, but strangely did not need to force the question, "Can you make me one in gray, and blue, and white too, then?"
He bought matching shirts and ties next, some cotton, some silk. Feeling invigorated by the profane obscenity of it, he bought socks and underwear for the first time in over a year, and his very first pair of Speedos. Then he bought three pair of shoes, one Italian brand simply because it was the most expensive pair in the store.
Taking April's advice, he then found a luggage store nearby, and there bought a set of high end tooled leather suitcases. On a lark, he also bought a silver liquor flask, and a pair of Bolle sunglasses.
What's next? the curious voice inside him asked. A Porsche?
No, he wouldn't need that. Not where he was going. He'd said as much to April, and she had agreed. Her tone was particularly dismissive by then, even after admitting her contract at the LBT might not be renewed, and that she also worked as a tutor at the University of Arizona to make ends meet. When he'd mentioned owning the diamond, she'd countered with claims of ownership herself. Although her diamond wasn't quite as big. It was only an engagement ring, after all.
He imagined her sitting on her apartment's green overstuffed couch, one hand obsessively combing her long red hair, the other poised atop an appointment book as she waited for her lover's call. She would have his evening planned, no doubt. Along with the rest of his life. At least he hoped that was the case. But would she find enough conversation in common with her playboy to merit decades of interest? Could the guy bear discussing the significance of accelerating cosmic expansion on cosmological theory, or the mystery of gravity leaking into other dimensions? He wouldn't wait around to see. He had to let her go, and somehow find a way to let his mother go in the process. And the best way for that was for him to leave. To take a long vacation first, including a visit to France. To drink some red, red wine and discover what was next, if not the end. Maybe he would send April a postcard from one of Dubai's five star hotels, though. Unsigned.
No, a voice inside him said. Let it go.
The next morning, while packing for his layover in New York, he realized he was already letting go, in the physical sense, with emotions dutifully following in lock step. If nothing else, he reasoned, a vacation was a vacation, and wandering around the new ultra modern capital of world finance--also known to be a canvas for the unrestrained imaginations of all the best architects--certainly beat staring at the fading wallpaper of this dilapidated trailer, afraid of what tomorrow might bring. It was the perfect place to bury one's chrematophobia, too, along with any failed delusions of romance as well. Finally, it was also where Dr. Douglas Etherton, former colleague and director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, often went. Not that Doug was rich, but rather because one of Etherton's newer friends--and the solar observatory's biggest private benefactor--was a citizen of the United Arab Emirates.
He took out the brochure that the travel agent had given him. On the back of it he'd scribbled Doug's local UAE phone number, given to him by another Kitt Peak contact, John McBee, an astronomer at the facility's relatively new 3.5 meter New Horizons survey telescope. His first attempt at calling the number had reached only an answering service, but his call to Kitt Peak had also confirmed Etherton was “on another sabbatical” in Dubai, and no doubt staying with his benefactor-friend.
David imagined joining them at var
ious Dubai nightclubs, taking in the heady views of some of the tallest and technologically original skyscrapers on the planet, then shopping at what were described as the largest and most decadent malls in the known universe. Of course, he wouldn't impose on anyone's hospitality. No need. He'd cashed in his gold and gold shares, besides transferring the remaining cash balance of his bank account to an American Express Platinum card. The only thing that remained in his safety deposit box now was the diamond.
Diamonds are forever?
Maybe so, but he wasn't.
He called a cab, and on his way out glanced back one last time at the corrugated metal box he’d thought of as home. "Who are you?" he asked through the open door. He waited for someone to appear with the answer, but when no one did he gripped the door with his right hand, and slammed it shut. "Wait for me here, then," he said, "whoever you are."
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