Ordinary Hazards

by Anna Bruno

  His rain slicker is all that remains of him. Outside, the rain is still heavy, a translucent gray sheet of indistinguishable drops. I imagine Yag sprinting home, drenched in blood and water, clothes stuck to his body, eyes squinting to see through the gray. If he runs fast and the police don’t pick him up first, he will be in his parents’ basement in twenty minutes. He might not lose too much blood. His mind will process the night like a dream, and he will deny that any of this ever happened at all.

  11PM

  ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES HAVE passed since Yag bolted, and no one has done anything, unless you count Amelia popping the tops off a round of Bud Lights that Cal ordered to calm our nerves. The only people in the bar are Cal and Summer, Jimmy, Short Pete, Fancy Pete, Amelia, and me. It’s possible a neighbor heard the gunshot but there are no sirens in the distance, which means no one reported it. A single shot could have been a truck backfiring or a firecracker, which kids are apt to set off at all hours of the night around here.

  “We need to call the cops,” I say.

  “No cops,” Cal says.

  “Martin was shot. He should go to the hospital,” I say, looking at Jimmy for support. He says nothing. Short Pete and Fancy Pete sit next to each other facing the bar, as if this is just another night.

  “The bullet grazed his shoulder,” Cal says. He’s over at the far wall, behind the pool table, dislodging the bullet from the Sheetrock with the paring knife Amelia uses to cut limes. He slips it into his pocket. “It’s nothing more than a flesh wound.”

  “There was a lot of blood,” I say.

  “Nothing an ACE bandage can’t handle. Dr. Yag can patch himself up just fine.”

  “He held a knife to my throat.”

  “Sack up,” Cal demands. “You’re fine.”

  “Cal, your daughter just watched you shoot somebody.” I throw up my arms.

  “Summer hates cops.” He looks over at her and she raises a small fist in solidarity.

  “Jimmy, got an opinion?” I ask.

  Jimmy shrugs.

  “You guys are acting like children,” I say.

  There was a knife at my throat. Someone got shot. A ten-year-old child saw the whole thing. And these guys are just going to drink beer and pretend it never happened.

  Amelia eyes the phone handset, which is off its base. She’s ambivalent. Cal notices this too. “No cops,” he repeats.

  We’re all drunk, with the possible exception of Amelia, and drinking more because we need the booze to cut the edge of adrenaline.

  “Everyone knows you don’t invite cops into a domestic dispute,” Cal says. “That’s how people get hurt. We’re a family. We’ll handle this like a family.”

  Short Pete and Fancy Pete nod in agreement.

  “And what if Yag hurts himself? Or someone else? What if he goes home and slices his parents’ throats before taking his own life?”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Emma,” Cal says. “He’s probably sleeping it off as we speak.”

  “Amelia, give me the phone,” I say. I could just go over and pick it up, or use my cell, but I want Amelia’s tacit support. I need someone to back me up, and I assume, for no other reason than she is a woman, she will be rational.

  She shakes her head. “You’re outnumbered, Emma. Sorry.” It occurs to me that Amelia doesn’t want the cops to come, because the story will be all over the news—Shooting at The Final Final—and the place will become even more of a backwater townie shithole than it already is.

  “Emma,” Cal says, his tone firm but full of feigned compassion, like a negotiator talking me off the ledge. “Martin always found you judgmental, but we—the rest of us—don’t think that’s true. You want what’s best for us. You worry about us. You care about us. Even Yag. But the police will only make this worse. For all of us.”

  “You don’t have a permit for the gun, do you?” I ask.

  “I have a license to carry,” Cal insists.

  “Just not a license to shoot a guy.” Jimmy chuckles. I should slap him. This is serious.

  So many things can go wrong in a matter of just minutes. Of all people, I understand this. As far as I know, Martin Yagla doesn’t own a gun but what the hell do I know? This is Upstate New York, and he is a disaffected white guy who will never achieve his full potential. I also don’t know why the guys are so adamant about not calling the cops. All the family this and family that and we don’t trust the cops in our domain is a sack of garbage. I’m pretty sure everyone is just afraid the bar will get shut down, and they’ll have no place to drink.

  * * *

  I SIT ON THE closed lid of the toilet and collect my thoughts. The time on my phone reads 11:34. For all I know, Yag’s already dead. I do the adult thing and call 911. I say there was a shot fired in The Final Final, and a man with a knife has fled. The operator asks if the shooter is still in the bar, and I say yes, but he’s one of the good guys. It was self-defense. My heart sinks because Cal’s right—he’s going to take some heat for this.

  My decision to make the call from the bathroom isn’t cowardly as much as it’s a personal precaution. If I’d tried to make it in front of the guys, they would have physically stopped me, and I’ve had enough of that for the night.

  The 911 operator tells me to stay on the line, but I say quickly that everything is fine now, we’re all safe, and hang up.

  Everyone is huddled together, now on a second round of Bud Light. There is an open bottle, presumably for me, lonely on the bar top. I pick it up and announce the cops are on their way.

  I expect the guys to give me shit, to say Yag was right after all—I am an uptight bitch—but no one does. Shit-giving comes from a place of love, not anger: a lighthearted pastime. They hang their heads in acceptance, as if they already knew it was coming but just wanted one more drink together.

  * * *

  THE IDEA FOR THE hedge fund came to me on a plane. I was headed home from a talk I gave at Michigan’s Ross School of Business. One of the students asked a question about the predictive value of stories, whether I thought there was an arbitrage opportunity. A good question. The short answer was yes. The longer answer was that figuring out the opportunity would be very, very tricky.

  It’s not like I’d never thought about this before. Heck, I named The Breakout Effect after a financial concept. And, as I mentioned earlier, a major news event can lead to a breakout. But you can’t trade people like securities, and even if it is theoretically possible to predict when a human being will break out, the likelihood that this event would translate to the movement of a security is remote.

  Still, the kid’s question got me thinking: How do you humanize a company or a product? You find a story about the people running the company, the people cleaning house at the company, a whistle-blower, a savant who emerges out of the woodwork, a woman whose dad was a bookie. These people are the protagonists of publicly traded companies.

  Protagonist is a term most business people haven’t used since high school English class, but only when an investor understands what it means to be a protagonist in the corporate world can he or she begin to predict when a story might be sufficiently humanizing to move a stock. In effect, investors should stop thinking about people in the Freudian sense, as id, ego, and superego—as human capital—and start seeing them in the Shakespearean sense, as actors on the corporate stage.

  A researcher would first need to find those special, needle-in-the-haystack stories. This would be the easy part. A story doesn’t move a stock by merely existing. It isn’t told in a vacuum. It blossoms in a political and cultural climate. It undergoes a process of galvanization—word of mouth, social media, mainstream media. There are hundreds and sometimes thousands of complicating factors.

  But the kid from Michigan was onto something—stories could be predictive. They exist before, sometimes long before, they have an impact on a person, company, or stock. With the right models, a reasonable amount of intuition, and some media savvy, a couple of old pals from Harvard could ma
ke a significant amount of money.

  Lucas and I did not discuss the fund much initially, though he was aware I’d been making calls and had a partner in Boston—Grace Hu, my old friend from Harvard. When I wasn’t on the road, I was glued to my computer.

  Eventually, I asked Lucas if he was okay with investing some of our own money in the fund, to which he said, “You earned it; do whatever you want,” and went back to playing with Lionel. Then I mentioned we could extend the offer to his parents, and he looked at me like I was an alien with no understanding whatsoever about what they sacrificed to accumulate their nest egg. Anyway, I extended the offer to them as a kindness. My own father invested an enormous sum of money.

  * * *

  3:17 A.M. GLOWED GREEN on the clock when Lionel cried out. I thought, If only I could sync his circadian rhythm with the alarm, which was set for 5:30. I had to be in the city before noon.

  Lucas reached over and touched my back gently. It was the subtlest push in the history of the world: You take this one.

  These latest middle-of-the-night outbursts were not motivated by hunger, as they’d once been. We assumed they were spurred by dreams, scary dreams, though I could not fathom the nightmares of a one-year-old. Tickle monsters? Sad bunnies? A global Cheerios shortage?

  Lucas continued to snore (how was that possible?), which created a kind of chorus with Lionel’s shrieks. Addie sat, alert, on the end of our bed, ready to bolt into Lionel’s room with me. Her ability to dip in and out of sleep all day and all night was a gift.

  I rolled out of bed onto my feet but my body wasn’t ready to stand so I ended up in a wobbly downward dog.

  Lionel stood up in his crib, grabbing the wooden slats like prison bars. He was red faced, with teary, squinted eyes, and his mouth was open in the shape of a hamburger so maximum sound could escape. An effective technique. No one ignored this kid.

  He always hated the crib like it was a punishment. Who could blame him? For the first six months of his life he got to sleep in our king—Lucas, Addie, and me, all the company he ever wanted, like a party. When I left town, Lucas caved, a result of his own loneliness, and invited Lion back. And then there was the guest bed right next to the crib, which Addie jumped on in the middle of the night because she liked Lion’s smell and no one stopped her from pulling back the quilt and getting into the soft duvet. Lion wanted to be there with her, his protector, a warm furry thing offering face licks and limitless snuggling.

  But the crib was safer, and I insisted on it most of the time, save an occasional nap when we figured the battle over where to sleep would lose the war, sleeping at all. If only. If only.

  Picking him up from the crib, I felt how heavy he’d become, how he’d miraculously grown into a big boy, hearty and strong. There was a time, just a month or two prior, when he just wanted to be held, but now he squirmed violently, arms flailing. He didn’t nuzzle into my chest as I hoped he would; he pushed off.

  I cycled through emotions so fast I couldn’t keep track of them: annoyance, longing, rejection. In hindsight, I see this was love—complex, intense, and painful—but at the time, it felt like something else. The longer I held Lionel, the louder he wailed.

  I remember thinking, It’s okay; he’ll love me later.

  Lion threw a right hook to my ear. The pain was real. For some reason, Addie wanted in on this horseplay. She stood on hind legs, pushing her nose into the action.

  Lucas called out, “Bring him in here.” The image of Lucas reclined in bed struck me with fury. We’d had fights about Lionel sleeping in our bed. As a newborn, co-sleeping made it easier to breastfeed in the middle of the night, and Lionel was a cuddly little thing, secure and happy. Later, I advocated sleep training, and consistency, though I had no control over what Lucas did when I was on the road. Whatever we were doing wasn’t working.

  I ignored Lucas, and the crying grew louder, if that was even possible. By then I was sitting down on the bed, holding Lionel’s legs with my left hand and attempting to rein in his arms with my right. Addie sat on the floor but kept her nose out of it.

  “He’ll calm down in here,” Lucas muttered, groggy. What I heard was, He’ll be happy when he’s in bed with his dad.

  “Baby, what do you need?” I whispered. “It’s okay. It’s okay—”

  Between sharp, high-pitched squeals, Lion said, “Zoo. Zoo. Zoo. Zoo. Zoo.” It seemed like a coded answer to my question. I had no idea what it meant.

  I spoke to the dog, the only one less likely than me to know what was going on. “Did he have a dream about the zoo? Did an animal escape?” I hated zoos. We’d never taken him to the zoo. “Did Lucas read him a book about a zoo? Was it Joan? Did Joan take him to the zoo? That’s an hour drive. I did not authorize a trip to the zoo! Maybe Lion thinks he’s in a zoo? Is his crib a cage? Does he feel trapped?”

  Addie crossed her paws and looked at me like I were an insane person.

  An errant tear morphed into full-on weeping as soon as I processed why I was so upset. I felt, at the same time, both devastated that I was about to leave my child, and relieved that as soon as I hit the road, I would have four hours to myself. I could not reconcile the pain of being away with my desire to be away.

  Lucas appeared in the doorway. His presence made me realize that I held my son not like a mother but like a nurse on a psych ward, focused solely on restraint. I turned his body around so he faced me and squeezed him into my chest. His head bobbed back. “Zoo. Zoo. Zoo,” he repeated.

  Lucas walked around us to the other side of the crib. A stuffed monkey, a gift from Joan, was on the floor in the corner. “He wants Chuang Tzu,” he said, gently pushing the stuffed animal into Lionel’s face, giving him a rapid series of monkey kisses. Lionel grabbed the monkey and smiled.

  “Chuang Tzu?” I said.

  “That’s the monkey’s name,” Lucas said. He tightened his lips and took a deep breath.

  “No, it’s not—” I started.

  “He’s a Taoist monkey.”

  “His name is Monkey,” I said.

  “He is a monkey. His name is Chuang Tzu.” When Lucas said Chuang Tzu, it flowed quickly. It sounded like Ju-an-zoo.

  “Why would a baby have a Taoist monkey?” Lionel sat in my lap, happily playing with Chuang Tzu. Snap of the fingers: his mood shifted. Addie jumped up on the bed so she could sniff the monkey. Their happiness fueled my feeling of being left out. None of this had anything to do with me.

  “The reason his name is Monkey,” I said, “is so Lionel can learn what a monkey is.”

  “He’s not a monkey,” Lucas said. “He’s an organic, cotton plush toy that my mom overpaid for at the craft fair.”

  “You just said he is a monkey!” I said.

  “Well, he can learn about monkeys while learning about religion.”

  “Religion?” I wasn’t sure if Taoism was a religion or not. The whole idea of it seemed anti-religious. I’d taken a Zen Buddhism course in college, which, granted, was not Taoism—but in the middle of the night the distinction was lost on me—and at the time it did not play like a serious subject. In fact, it seemed an insane stroke of luck that the professor, with his signature tuft of gray chest hair poking out from his short-sleeve rayon button-down, and his slow-talking mellow vibe, had woken up from a drug-fueled haze and found himself with tenure.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Lucas said. “I just gave him the name a few weeks ago. Lion likes it. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Maybe next time, you should let me in on your inside jokes.”

  “It just happened. Lionel was playing with the monkey on the floor, and I looked over at the bookshelf, and we started calling him Chuang Tzu.”

  “Well, to be fair, Lionel calls him Zoo.”

  “Right, sure. We can call him Zoo.”

  “Shall we spell it T-z-u?” Lucas picked up on the sharp tinge of sarcasm in my voice.

  “Monkey’s fine,” he said. “It’s just—”

  “It’s just what?”
>
  “It’s cool that we get to teach him things. That’s all. We get to explain the universe, the world, all the animals and plants and bugs,” Lucas said.

  “And the Tao,” I added.

  “And the Tao,” he repeated.

  “He might be a little young for that, Lucas.”

  “You can teach him about business and investing.” I’m sure Lucas meant this sincerely but it came off like a dig: I’m going to teach our kid the mysteries of the universe, and you can teach him about money.

  Lucas reclined next to us on the bed, and I put my head on his shoulder. Lionel’s breathing grew heavy. He clutched Chuang Tzu as he drifted off to sleep. We were all there in that moment: Lucas, Lionel, Addie, and me. We fell asleep together like that: four bodies on top of the duvet. Then, from the other room, I heard my alarm go off.

  Lucas took him from my arms, placed his head on the pillow, and tucked his little body under the covers. Addie curled up at his feet. Before I could say, We should put him in his crib, Lucas said, “I’ll stay here with him. You go shower.” I didn’t protest. They all looked so peaceful—a man, his son, and the dog—their bodies close, their breathing synchronized.

  * * *

  ON MY WAY OUT of town, I had to drop Lion off at my mother-in-law’s house because Lucas had to get to a jobsite. I wanted to leave Lion on the doorstep in his stroller, ring the bell, and run, but I’m not a psychopath.

  Joan invited me in, offered a cup of coffee, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. While I gulped it down, she fussed over Lion. “Where are those red pants I gave him?”

  “They are already too small, Joan. We told you not to spend money on clothes. He’s growing too fast.”

  “Hi, dollie. You’re a big boy, aren’t you? Such a big boy.”

  I looked at my watch. “I have to run, Joan.”

  “Where to this time?” she asked.

  “Just a quick trip to New York. I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.