The arsonist, p.1
The Arsonist, page 1
The Arsonist
by Ken Coulson
© Copyright 2024 Ken Coulson
ISBN 979-8-88824-256-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The names, incidents, dialogue, and opinions expressed are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
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For Tracy, who was here for all of it
ONE
THE BENDS
Some things are simple; others are hard. Often, we confuse the two.
The doorbell rang successively, accelerating, echoing, pounding in my head. The bell was still set to the five-note descending Japanese pattern Beth had installed before she left. It rang again and again, restarting before it could hit the fourth and slightly melancholy note, full of ancient wisdom, as music from Japan often is.
I was trying to do something important. I didn’t have time for this. I had a deadline, so to speak. I slid my highball glass across the granite island in the kitchen and tied my plush fleece robe tight across the bulge in my stomach. Who the fuck? Ring-da-ding-da-dong. Then a pause.
I stopped in the brick-lined pass-through filled with dying plants that led to the atrium and then to the grand three-story foyer. Had they given up? Smiling to myself, I turned . . .
Ring-di-ding. Ring-da-ding. Ring-da-ding.
“Motherfucker!” I swung the heavy oak door open.
Not him. Not today.
He was dressed in a yachty suit complete with the billowy linen scarf and navy jacket with gold leaf embroidery. He had on mirrored aviators and white pants. The outfit wouldn’t have been complete without the captain’s hat, perched slightly askew. It was my neighbor, Randy Welltower, and he was dressed for a sail—in October.
“Minor, I was beginning to think you weren’t home,” Randy said with a laugh that always sounded forced.
“What gave you that impression?” I asked. Was it the fact that you had to ring for fifteen minutes?
“Well, glad you are,” he said, ignoring my question. “Drink?” He rattled the oversized shaker in his right hand. Randy leaned back as if his head was filled with some dense material that his gangly frame of six feet and change couldn’t hold up. He sniffed the air to clear his nose, which was large and bent to the side from a drunk driving accident for which there were no repercussions.
“Mine’s inside,” I said flatly, with eyes that could strangle. Predictably, he didn’t notice. When he tried to step inside, I moved to block him. “No, thank you, I’m busy,” I told him. And when he just stood there smiling, I added, “What can I do for you, Randy?”
He shuffled through his coat pocket and pulled out a thick bone-colored card, waving it in front of me like candy. “Jackson’s annual. It’s to-mor-row!”
My face found my hand, then I craned my neck to look past him toward the circle drive and rolling lawn speckled with American Beech trees, Japanese maples, and Belgian block landscaped gardens wrapped in blue-black mulch. Beyond that, the property stretched back into a nature preserve, extending the backyard ostensibly for another thousand acres. If I were to kill him, would anyone see it?
He’d driven his kitted-out, neon-blue golf cart from his seven acres to mine. From his big box modern farmhouse reproduction bursting with bonus rooms and secret alcoves and guest houses and Maldives-style pool cabanas and mature specimen planting and everything else, it was identical to mine save except that he’d ordered the jumbo package from the builder, clocking in at a monstrous fourteen thousand square feet to my seven.
I didn’t like Randy. He was aloof and a total snob. He’d been born with money, then swallowed too much water from the dead-end gene pool growing up. He’d stumbled through boarding school, made it to Harvard via a new library wing with his parent’s name on it, and fell stone drunk into daddy’s private equity firm. He’d been clipping coupons from companies he’d never even visited ever since.
But Jackson Seeger was worse. His family had just sold their nutritional supplement company for ten billion dollars. The Seegers were the blond-headed, always-tanned and smiling, health-nut version of Swiss Family Robinson, except they all did cocaine. To keep the weight off, of course.
Sure, the party would be astoundingly lavish. I could probably get laid a few times. There might be an exotic animal or two. Maybe even a lead for a job . . .
No, fuck that. I couldn’t handle any more Riverwatch Connecticut. Randy and Jackson were par for the course.
It went on and on and on and on. Eighteen percent of all hedge funds are in a twenty-five-mile radius, including a trillion-dollar behemoth down the street.
Half of all new products on the shelves of Whole Foods are “created” by bored Riverwatch housewives taking a break from their affairs. They are manufactured in some nondescript contract manufacturing plant in Utah, slapped with the organic label du jour, and shipped across the country for endless consumption at hefty 200 percent margins.
The Pharma Bros, C-Suite execs of the major pharmaceutical companies, live in large estates ringing a nearby man-made lake. The principals of private equity firms that generated billions in fracking convinced the town to carve out some of the wildlife preserve, where they built a private gated community aptly called Mint Gardens. But Riverwatch is more than just a haven for Tesla-driving absentee landlords who’ve gotten rich off the extraction economy. Other types flock here, too.
Numerous celebrities own a fourth or fifth estate here. Johnny Depp, Paul Simon—you name it. Some don’t even move in. High-ranking US officials like the beaches, woods, and general anonymity of living in a town where private equity billionaires, high-profile divorces, and controversial dog parks get all the headlines.
I’m a blip on the radar, an interloper living on borrowed time in the gardens of Elysium.
Why?
Well, I’d gone belly-up in every way possible. Duped by the crisis of the same name—DUPE (derivatives of university placement equity)—the implosion of the $3 trillion student debt bubble and the cascading destruction of private credit markets.
It was a simple headline, easy to miss as the cattle prod of crisis often is.
“Harvard and Yale Law Schools announce starkly lower placement rate.”
We’d been talking about the automation of white-collar jobs for years, the technological S-curve of artificial intelligence, but still, the swiftness surprised everyone. The schools had bet on their stellar placement rate by staking the students’ NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in lieu of full tuition. With suddenly dimming job prospects, the assets collapsed, and the complex derivatives the endowments had written against them exploded. The chain reaction of swooning endowments set off a massive sell-off of risk assets. It was the final nail in the coffin of the promise of upward mobility—the American dream was declared dead.
I’d been riding high as a star multi-asset trader until the tide went out. The firm imploded. In an instant, I’d swapped millions in stock for a sorry-looking cactus Beth had given me. In hindsight, it must’ve been a warning that she was about to grow thorns.
When Beth finally did leave, she turned the screws, and I guess it was the only fair thing to do after all. A half a million in alimony. The fully paid Charleston house.
I’d say she turned the kids against me, but I’d be hard-pressed to prove it.
And my friends . . . what about them? The young traders I’d made rich. My bosses who’d shared healthy profits for years. The guys I came up with blowing rails off various silicone-enhanced body parts.
Well, after five years of unreturned phone calls and near-miss reinventions, I guess I’ve learned the truth about Wall Street. It’s less “Call me anytime, friend” and more “I’m having trouble remembering how we met.”
“Come on, Minor, you must come.” Randy waved the envelope closer to my face. If I pounced, I thought I could take his pointer finger off. I wanted to see that shit-eating grin disappear.
Sure, men like Randy would smile at you. But ask him for a job in his private equity shop, and he’d no longer know your name.
I’d tried everything. Big data, cyber, you name it. And forget about the mainstream shops. Since DUPE, the world—and the game—has changed rapidly. High finance has a new face, an expensive one, and a far larger ass that it needs to fit into a small chair. Digitization, consolidating wealth, shrinking profit opportunity, and a social march toward political correctness have all but marked my kind for extinction: over forty white males in the field of finance who don’t program computers.
“Sorry, Randy. I’m afraid I will be unavailable,” I told him. In more ways than he would know.
“Minor, don’t be such a commie liberal fuck. It’ll cheer you up,” Randy mused.
I think Randy knew. He had to know. My divorce wasn’t clean. Things were broken. My Boxster had ended up in the pool one night. He had to know.
You see, I was still valuable in one way. In the race for wealth, schadenfreude, gratification from someone else’s misfortune, is a big part of the chemical cocktail the brai n needs to justify all the other types of destruction industry can reap. The ego needs fuel, and the destitution or harsh fate of others is like magnesium shavings over shredded birch bark. It’s like the spank bank for self-praise.
At least I’m not Cal Minor, they could say. What the hell happened to him?
Here I am, guys and gals: a forty-eight-year-old white male, once highly-functioning alcoholic, still alcoholic, a decent tennis player, possibly a scratch golfer with the right mix of drugs, a reformed sex addict, once divorced, and currently living alone in this cavernous space.
Randy had changed the subject. And the one he chose was an icepick to my brain. “Jesus, Cal! This market!” Another all-time high was set this morning, and I was burning the last of my IRA statements that showed a million dollars in early withdrawals and a zero balance, alongside my partially-written memoir and myself, if people would just stop bothering me. It was some respite that no one would be around to pay the penalty when the IRS came knocking.
“Randy, the truth is, I am trying to kill myself, and you are putting me decidedly behind schedule . . . if you don’t mind.” I nodded, feeling oddly gratified. My mother was right. The truth does feel good. Even when it’s morbid. I moved to close the door, but Randy’s red schooner slip-on blocked it.
He looked shocked; his jaw dropped, a mix of emotions quivering across his thin mustache. “You missed Bitcoin?” he asked. After multiple halvings, the cryptocurrency supposed to “democratize finance” traded north of $350,000. Let’s just say the underbanked were not dancing in the streets. But Riverwatch had an enclave for those types, too. I called it Glowing Lamborghini Land, complete with turf lawns and pet emus.
“No, Randy, not Bitcoin.” Another face-palm. Randy was ruining my suicidal bliss.
“What’s the real reason you’re not coming?” he pleaded.
Hmm, how about more truth—there’s nothing to lose anymore when you’ve lost it all. “I hate you, Randy, and I hate Jackson even more,” I told him, my face emotionless.
“Okay, Minor, I’ll play.” Randy took a swig from his shaker directly, and his face shuddered in ecstasy. “So, how are you going to do it? This suicide thing, Minor.” He seemed genuinely curious.
“I’m going to burn the house down, succumb to the smoke, and be rendered ash alongside this money pit. Hey, care to join?” I figured I’d be doing the world a service.
“Tempting, Minor, but I’ve got a 1 p.m. tee time. And Masterson cheats. . . . I can’t be groggy.”
“But you’d be dead, no need to worry . . .” Randy leaned forward, his neck cracking audibly, and placed the invite on my chest.
I turned to see what he was looking at.
Sophia had her blond hair loosely tied back and wore an old Colorado sweatshirt I thought I’d thrown out. She had on her backpack and wheeled a weekender roller behind her.
“I’m moving down to Sarasota with my sorority sister. It’s been fun. Thanks,” she said to me.
She walked past us, nodding to Randy and smirking at his outfit before rolling down the ramp and toward the garages.
Randy watched her ass in tights until I cleared my throat.
“Geez fuck, Minor, you dog. I see why you’re busy.” Randy slapped his leg with one hand.
Sophia was my niece. She’d been living in our nanny wing for the past eight months, taking classes at Fordham, and I’d totally forgotten about her.
I briefly flashed back to late nights involving weed and tequila, loud music, and God. At least, I’d given up hookers, I think. Here, I thought I’d been living in an empty house, but I actually hadn’t.
“She’s family, and she’s eighteen,” I told Randy.
“I’ll bet,” Randy said with a wink-wink, grin-grin. “You know you really must come to Jackson’s. It’s going to be incredible. Bring”—he gestured toward the garages—“her—they’ve got a waterslide park installed with class-4 rapids!”
I pulled the invitation out of his hand, which was still on my chest, and stared at it in my shaking hand. I knew exactly where this was going.
Randy was saying something else, but his voice sounded like an overactive orangutan’s unintelligible chirps.
I slammed the door in his face midstream and shuffled back through the kitchen, grabbing my glass. I walked through the dining room, noting the empty space where my barnwood sixteen-top table once was. Back behind the bar in the cavernous and equally empty great room, save for the plush vegan recliner and my original Dr. Seuss painting, I poured myself another stiff old-fashioned and made my way. It was eleven in the morning. I had transcended time. Each second remaining was an eternity.
Randy was a momentary distraction. A blip in my march to power down my matrix.
Ring-ring-ring. Oh, not the fucking phone now. To have a heart attack after having planned such an elaborate suicide would be truly tragic, but, thankfully, it stopped.
If I only had the time, I could tell you some stories. They were already written down, after all, stuffed and cramped in a four-foot totem of past-due notices, foreclosure warnings, and my divorce papers. All those stories, soon to become spent carbon.
Stories of endless nights of dance music, scores of hookers, and mountains of cocaine. Stories about enormous amounts of money being paid, made, traded, and lost in a unique world that just happens to be the center gear of our economy. Our whole way of life, really, our ethos, and our belief in the possibility of endless growth. Stories of opportunity, excess, exaltation, rapture, obsession, addiction . . .
The confessions of a dead man—it would have made a good book. Maybe a better movie.
Step right up. Here, you will find tales of characters grasping futilely, like Dante’s Casella, for immortality through a gilded legacy. The good, the bad, and the ugly—the side effects of a career in the markets that are seldom told, not treated with therapy, but often treated with pharmacology.
You might enjoy these stories.
I ran the redhead against the striker and relished the sound of the hiss and the bright whiteness of the spark. The sulfur smell drifted up and clung to the back of my throat.
TWO
THE HOPEFUL DOCTOR
My body pressed back against the worn skin of my favorite chair, and I sloshed back some bourbon. The liquor’s warmth against the cool ice orbs tasted like smoke and leather. The ice cubes rattled in a dance of delight and certain death. Bourbon was a slow and sure path, but fire would be resolute.
I let the match burn up at an angle, watching the yellow and orange chase the blue until the hairs on my knuckle shriveled and crisped. The burn felt like home, breaking through the numb, and then the tiny flame flickered out. Dry run . . .
I held a picture of Beth and me in London. It was a crudely taken shot by a drunken colleague named Monroe after a Saturday spent, as they say in England, on the piss.
I was set askew like I often am, posing as if I were auditioning for a pop music album cover, and she was centered and pristine, the half-smile beaming from her face that spoke of passion and depth. Beth, before the rise and fall. Beth, with eyes full of aspiration and kindness. Beth, as she once was before . . . me.
It was 2003, during the spring, when we first met. It was two years after my company was transplanted to London via acquisition. She was a lawyer who’d graduated from Columbia Law after having attended undergraduate at Virginia. She was on the cusp of something new when I met her. She’d realized she’d wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon, actually.
Smart and empathetic, she wasn’t cut out for the gray area her work as a corporate defense attorney required. Not that gray areas didn’t exist in medicine, but Beth saw it as a field where she could assert her ethical controls and ultimately achieve a balance she hadn’t found in the law. Besides, in the early 2000s, no one was aware of the extent of conflicts between the makers and prescribers of medicine. We had yet to experience the vulture capitalism of private equity firms snapping up life-saving drugs and health centers, then raising prices astronomically. Nor had we entered the tragic period marred by opioid addiction and the complicity between the drug makers, distributors, and prescribers that fueled the flames of the catastrophe. Even if Beth had an inkling of what evolutionary path lay ahead in healthcare, surgery was always one of the few areas, as she liked to say, that could be black and white. When we met, she’d just quit her job and was taking prep courses for med school.
