The Wholecoiner

“The Wholecoiner”

I.

It was something he was loath to admit since it made him seem frivolous and without substance—plus no one believed him anyway—but Frank knew deep down inside that the relatively quick turnaround of his financial situation was largely due to his seeing a Hollywood movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

   He saw it with his friend Joseph, who was back in town after spending the previous two years across the country in New Mexico. Now that he was back, Joseph had moved into the same apartment complex that Frank lived in, albeit in a different building. The space between their units suited the former roommates just fine. Neither wanted ever again to share living space with someone they weren’t romantically involved with, but having a friend as a neighbor proved useful (more for Frank than for Joseph) and allowed them easy access to social interaction when the infrequent desire arose. Even though both were far more comfortable being alone than in the presence of others most of the time, every now and then it was nice to talk to someone who spoke your language. After being friends for almost twenty years, the two of them understood each other on a fundamental level and by this point their friendship had accumulated enough lore that both joyous remembrances and soul-cleansing diatribes (depending on what they were in the mood for) were instantly accessible. Sometimes all it took was an utterance as nondescript as “screen door” to trigger a shared memory of a mutual friend’s antics one lazy summer day back in high school, and the lengthy reminiscence that followed would kill the better part of an hour. There were maybe four other guys in their core group of friends, all of them having met when they were teenagers. They had now reached the age when most of their conversations were recapitulations of past events, old stories told for the umpteenth time like a never evolving stand-up routine. (This was especially the case when three or more of them got together, each able to recall details the others had forgotten.) That the stories, even in their telling, never changed, nor did they concern events that could be considered recent, didn’t bother them much, despite the implication that all the memorable times of their lives were behind them. Frank always found outsized comfort in the familiar, and the memories he had of his friends were among his most treasured, involving a carefree past he was all too happy to relive.

   Neither of them had any particular interest in the movie that night. Of the two, Frank was the more easygoing consumer of entertainment, willing to sit through nearly anything as a way to pass the time. Joseph, on the other hand, felt aggrieved when he watched a bad movie. His time, after all, was precious, and to waste a couple hours of it was a supreme insult that he took personally. It had been left up to Frank to choose the movie (Joseph was largely unaware of what was playing at any given time), and he had picked the one that looked the most entertaining. Not only that, the subject matter—high finance—was one he thought would interest his friend. Money was a topic Joseph seemed increasingly eager to discuss as of late, usually in the friends’ group chat, which had morphed into long, scrollable blocks of text about investment opportunities and financial strategies (along with a fair amount of invective hurled at taxes and other drains on one’s hard-earned capital). Frank had nothing to contribute to these discussions and mostly stayed out of them. Having no money himself, he figured it just didn’t concern him and that reading all their back and forth on the subject would be an even bigger waste of time than watching the worst movie in the world.

   Over three hours later they emerged from the theater reasonably satisfied. The movie had been, for the most part, entertaining, fun, and briskly-paced (if a little long). It was exactly what one wanted from a Hollywood film: attractive actors in an expensive-looking production. They discussed the movie afterward over veggie tofu burritos at their usual haunt, a place that served fast food versions of authentic Mexican cuisine. They both agreed that even aside from the insanely attractive lead actors, the movie had been hard to relate to on numerous levels. The fulsome, garish displays of wealth within the movie’s milieu was far removed from anything either of them had experienced in their lives, and an obvious point of the whole thing was to illustrate how dissimilar the people being depicted were from the average movie-goer. In many ways, it was closer to science fiction than realism, the characters more alien in their lifestyles and outlook than anything recognizably human.

   But since the movie was based on a true story there was no denying that these events had more or less happened, that these people had actually existed and lived those extravagant lives (while of course allowing for typical Hollywood embellishment). It was this loose connection to reality that stayed with Frank after the credits rolled. Joseph had been merely entertained—a win for him when it came to contemporary movies. But Frank saw something else in it, one of those occasional recognitions that can jostle one out of a rut or ever so slightly shift a calcified worldview. At its core, the movie was a classic rags-to-riches story, and half an hour into it the protagonist, played by the ridiculously charismatic DiCaprio, had more money than he knew what to do with. This vast wealth came with concomitant problems (as the saying goes), and the movie’s dramatic arc involved Leo having to deal with various setbacks for another two-plus hours. But these problems were of an incontrovertibly privileged nature, and to Frank they seemed to be nice ones to have (as another saying goes). That the character procured his mind-boggling riches through unscrupulous means was supposed to frame his inevitable downfall as retribution: a greedy man getting his just desserts. It also allowed the audience to enjoy what was essentially a villain’s story, knowing they would come out ahead in the end—at least morally speaking, as if rectitude were a consolation prize for never being able to afford a lambo. But there was no denying that this charming rake’s ascension looked awfully fun, and that a certain vicarious glee was had watching the lives of the rich and dissolute.

   Already in his mid-thirties, Frank had given up on the idea of becoming fabulously wealthy. Making money had never been a concern of his. He had even considered the naked pursuit of it gauche, having internalized the lessons permeating the culture during his formative years of growing up in the nineties, a time when the worst thing one could do was to “sell out”—a principled stance rooted in a knee-jerk aversion to the “greed is good” era of the previous decade. It was also easy not to think of money when you didn’t have any. But Frank was starting to see how this indifference to his finances had done him no favors in life. He was, at 34, living paycheck-to-paycheck with a negative net worth: nothing in the bank and about two grand in credit card debt. Even worse, his job gave him no reason to have any financial optimism. He was twelve years into being a counter jockey at a very corporate coffee shop (even the title of “barista” seemed to aggrandize his lowly position), making eleven dollars an hour plus whatever change the customers left behind, with no possibility of occupational advancement. His was a textbook example of a dead-end job, what was supposed to be a stopgap measure that had gone on way longer than it should have. It was now a rut he had all too predictably carved into his daily existence. He wasn’t much of a self-motivator, and he had an annoying habit of doing the bare minimum. And since he had no one to look after or take care of other than himself, he was able to subsist on the paltry sum he made. He usually had enough money to pay for his rent and groceries, though he had to carefully adhere to a strict budget and things were always tight—if not precarious—to the point where an unexpected expense of $100 would be a stressful hardship. More times than he cared to admit he’d had to rely on his Chase Visa card to help with necessities, adding to a balance that was never paid in full, just continually chipped away at every month with the lowest amount he could get away with paying, the barely perceptible dent these minimum payments made in the total balance always negated by the accumulative interest charges. His secret, more shameful than his debt, was that he didn’t mind this predicament all that much. Working forty hours a week and living a life most would call ascetic (he didn’t even own a car) just to break even was part of the running-in-place struggle he had grown accustomed to.

   And if it weren’t for Nicole, he probably would’ve gone on not minding it for the rest of his days. Her presence had changed his life’s trajectory, and he knew that he would eventually have to earn more than he currently did. But there was no real pressing urgency for him to improve his situation. It’s not as if their relationship was contingent on how much he got paid. She had had a pretty good idea of his financial situation from the start and assured him that, clearly, his borderline penury did not adversely affect her feelings toward him; how could it, she said, when she had always been similarly unconcerned about money and was now in the same boat he was in, with no real savings to speak of? At the same time, he did not have his head completely in the sand about the major stumbling block his finances created for them. It was evident that his salary could not cover the day to day expenses of the lifestyle she knew and wanted. This unfortunate truth was rarely addressed by either of them…why create friction by stating the obvious?

   Money was really only brought up after they had had a particularly good day, when they were both sweaty and contentedly exhausted, lying in his bed with their limbs entwined, holding each other close and giving tender voice to their most ardent wish to be together like this every day, imagining the seamless happiness they would feel, both agreeing that it would be wonderful. In those moments a life together always seemed so close but as their thoughts turned to the practicalities of transforming these dreamy imaginings into hard reality, the execrable subject of money would be brought up again—their lack of it, and how having it would make things so much easier—and it was like an unsightly blot in their otherwise crystalline notion that they were meant to be together. It made him feel inadequate, even flagrantly irresponsible, and if she sensed this or caught the self-reproach in a stray mutter, she would reiterate that his lack of money didn’t change the fact that she loved him. This was the only thing that mattered, even to him, and they would change the subject to more light-hearted, less worrisome fare.

   The thought of providing enough for a household of two was overwhelming enough, but there was another, bigger obstacle to their creating one life together: her daughters. From the start it was abundantly clear that her girls’ well-being was paramount to Nicole, a position so self-evident and such a matter of course that Frank readily adopted it as his own. There were a handful of times they would desultorily pursue a hypothetical line of thought, speculating on what life would be like, the four of them in one household, but it was such a big leap from their current lives that it had the aspect of pure fantasy. To split his salary among four people was a surefire way to consign them all to misery. And so it remained for them a largely unaddressed issue, though their reticence did nothing to weaken it as the strongest argument against just “getting together.” Frank, to his credit, embraced it as an insuperable barrier, referring early on to a “14-year plan,” which is how long it would take for the girls to become adults and be close, or at least closer, to becoming financially independent. (On top of that, it would spare Frank the prospect of becoming a father figure to children, something he had never given any thought to whatsoever.)

   All of Frank’s friends—and even Nicole herself—had been amused by the interminable timeframe of his plan, but Frank meant it unironically. It didn’t sound so bad to him; after all, what was fourteen years in the face of forever? That is how he put it to others, but truthfully Frank took to the plan for a less noble reason than an aim to preserve the girls’ happy childhood, which is that he was always willing to put off doing something until later. To delay brought him an outsized relief and freed him from the burden of action, and a decade-plus-long plan of inaction sounded great to an inveterate procrastinator. But time, inexorably, moves forward, and the sizable number in his plan ticked down, slowly, steadily. Before they knew it the younger daughter was starting high school, the older one a year from graduating, and the light at the end of the tunnel was shining directly in Frank’s eyes. It made his heart race—not with elation, but with dread. The concern about finances was suddenly too big to ignore, and it was a problem that was no closer to being resolved than it had been ten years earlier. Frank had always had some inchoate plans to save money over the years that never quite crystallized. It didn’t help that he had never made more than $28,000 a year, before taxes. And even though he had managed to get by on this paltry salary, there were times when he lived beyond his meager means, times when he had to eat 25-cent packets of off-brand ramen for the last ten days of the month just to minimize the amount he would have to put on his credit card to help pay the rent to his single-bedroom apartment. Months that contained five Fridays—meaning he’d get an “extra” paycheck—were a godsend. There was just no extra money to save, and so his desire to build a savings was always superseded by the need to just survive.

   With the long-awaited (yet paradoxically fast-approaching) window of opportunity for starting a life together with Nicole a scant four years away, a frantic attempt to save even enough for a down payment on a suitable place in which they could live seemed all but futile at this late juncture. Suddenly, even a modest life seemed beyond his grasp, let alone the glamorous life of the rich and depraved depicted in the DiCaprio movie—the kind of life that made him burn with envy. But something had to be done, he had to take a chance on something to get his life on the right track, like Leo’s character had done in the movie.

   When it came to having wealth-building aspirations of any size, Frank had no real life role models to follow. Joseph was the most well-off person he knew, and his friend’s success was not replicable. Frank couldn’t just snap his fingers and become a PhD graduate of Dartmouth College in physical chemistry like Joseph was, and then get hired by the premier federally-funded research lab for defense in the whole country, a position that came with security clearances and an obscene amount of money and benefits, and then, on top of it all, be talented enough to code every line of an astronomy app for phones in his spare time, an app that would eventually spend 184 consecutive weeks in the top ten education apps in the world, the windfall from that allowing him to quit what many in his field considered a dream job and be essentially retired at the age of 30. (It’d probably be easier to become Leonardo DiCaprio than follow in Joseph’s footsteps.) But Frank’s friends were inspirations to him—even the less successful ones, who were still far ahead of where he was in life. And so when he got back home from the movie, with images of yacht parties and doing coke off stripper’s asses still fresh in his mind, he found himself scrolling through the money-centric group chat he had been mostly ignoring. Over the years, his friends had discussed traditional investments—stocks, IRAs, real estate—as well as more esoteric ventures as prospective ways to get in on the ground floor of something that would make them truly wealthy. Those were the kinds of things Frank was most interested in: something that had the possibility of massive returns in the shortest possible time. Buried in the chat history over the years were brief discussions about possible investment opportunities involving cell phone towers in Argentina, houses made out of literal bags of dirt, and start-up companies that aimed to be the “Netflix of clothing.” A lot of these off-the-wall possibilities were mentioned once and never again, as most of the guys stuck to the time-honored investments with which affluent people filled out their retirement portfolios—safe things that accrued reliably steady returns and whose modest gains were amplified by the large amounts his friends could put into them.

   But Frank noticed that recently one of these non-traditional speculative assets came up again and again in the chat, something called “bitcoin.” A couple of his friends had dipped their toe in it, and every few months they would post a link to an interview or article with an attached “Verrrrry interesting” or “You know, the more I read about this, the more sense it makes.” Soon they were posting entire podcast episodes and videos that were hours long. Frank skipped over the links, but what really caught his attention was the price. Over the last twelve months there had been a meteoric rise in the value of bitcoin: it was now sitting at over $900 per coin. An incredible return on investment, especially for the one friend who had bought it at under $100. Everyone who had made the plunge with this new “cryptocurrency” had no complaints, and their enthusiasm inspired Frank to stroll over to Joseph’s apartment the next day on a fact-finding mission. He found that his friend was all too willing to provide guidance on the subject. Even though he had been late to the game with an average cost basis of $175, Joseph was riding high on his gains and eager to proselytize. For the next hour, Joseph patiently explained what bitcoin was as Frank absorbed as much as he could. There was a ton of terms with which Frank was unfamiliar—things like “blockchain,” “hash rate,” and “sha-256”—and even comparisons to already established technologies like BitTorrent failed to signify for Frank, who was not exactly the most tech-savvy. There was no doubt that Joseph knew his stuff, but a lot of it flew over Frank’s head and he was left with a limited and oversimplified understanding of something that seemed to him exceedingly mathy and complex. But his lack of understanding of the technical aspects was no real worry—Frank’s only real concern was how he could make money from it. He wanted to know whether it was too late to jump in—had the ship sailed on capturing meaningful, life-changing profits? No, Joseph told him, it was still ridiculously early. After all, most people had never even heard of cryptocurrencies, let alone had considered buying any. Plus, he personally was up almost 500% and had zero intention of selling, so what did that tell Frank about his expectations of upward price action in the future?

Frank listened to his friend’s unbridled enthusiasm and began to feel the first small flame of genuine interest flicker inside of him. At the end of their confab, Frank asked Joseph what made him decide to buy bitcoin in the first place. Joseph’s response was plain and straightforward: he thought it was the most beautiful and elegant thing he had ever seen in his life. This assessment, coming from someone qualified to make it, was enough for Frank. He asked to use his friend’s computer, and he signed up for a Coinbase account right then and there—Joseph’s preferred crypto exchange. It turned out to be the easiest online account he had ever opened, and within ten minutes he had transferred the $200 he had in his bank account that was leftover from the cash his parents had given him for Christmas, pressed the buy button, and was now the proud owner of 0.19519403 bitcoins.

   When he got back home, he fired up his laptop and created a new Excel spreadsheet, setting up a purchasing plan for the rest of the year. Although he always considered himself broke, the truth was there were nonessential expenses he could cut out of his budget, little things he bought himself to forestall depression or to give himself a jolt of pleasure to distract him from his dreary life. New clothing, take out orders at restaurants, an impulsive purchase of a CD or magazine—all of which could be halted immediately. However, the biggest extraneous expense, and the thing it would hurt him most to cut out, was all the things he bought for Nicole, the little tokens of affection he got her to ensure that she continued to view him favorably. Grocery store flowers, boxes of chocolate, pairs of shoes she offhandedly mentioned she loved—all part of a literal poor man’s version of a rich guy lavishing his partner with extravagant gifts. He knew they were on solid enough ground that it was no longer necessary to spend money on her in this way (she would say it was never necessary in the first place) but the truth of the matter was that getting these things for her gave him as much pleasure as it gave her. Since he never had a lot of it, he had always considered money—and the things it bought—to be the most valuable thing one could give another person, and it would make him sad to deny Nicole expression of his major love language. But doing so was also for her benefit—their benefit, together—and it would have an even greater effect in the future than any trinket he could afford to buy her now.

   He figured that if he stopped spending money on absolutely everything except absolute necessities like food and rent, he might be able to scrape together a couple hundred dollars every four weeks or so. This was essentially what Joseph recommended he do: buy periodically, regardless of price—something called DCA, or dollar cost averaging. He could even cobble together more money by selling stuff on eBay, all the things of any value that were just lying around his apartment in a state of disuse. He felt the pressure to move quickly. Taking these first steps toward fiscal responsibility felt good, but despite Joseph’s reassurances he was pretty sure he had already missed his chance to become fabulously wealthy. Instead, he viewed this as an opportunity to play catch-up, an expeditious way of joining the middle class he would’ve already been in had he made better decisions earlier. He was pretty confident about bitcoin reaching a $10,000 price point (though he was unable to say why he felt good about that number; it just sounded right to him) and 10x gains on any money he put in would get him back on his feet, financially speaking, provided he was able to invest as much as he could before the price skyrocketed.

He felt great about his decision for about twelve hours. In what he would come to know as a common occurrence and a sort of rite of passage for all first time buyers of crypto, bitcoin started dropping as soon as he bought it, putting him immediately in the red. By the end of the month it was at $823, a 20% drop from his initial purchase.

   Still, he bought another $200 worth.

   He tried to interest Nicole in buying some, too. He was still worried that he wouldn’t end up with enough to support them both, and it would be great for her to come in on this with him. But even if she’d had the money to do so, putting it into a new, intangible asset was too big a step for her, and her reluctance won the day. It was just another thing he couldn’t persuade her to do, like becoming vegan (which Joseph had also convinced him to do, a couple years earlier).

   In the third week of March, another $200 purchase put his accumulated total over one entire bitcoin and he became what the community of BTC enthusiasts called a “wholecoiner.” This also inducted him into the “21 million club”—a putatively select group of people. Being in it meant that no more than 21 million people in the world could own more bitcoin than you did, due to its hard-coded supply cap. In actuality, “bitcoiners” (as they liked to call themselves) pointed out that the number was a lot lower due to lost or irretrievable coins, and a much-bandied about bit of trivia was that if every one of the 17 million millionaires in the world decided to buy a whole bitcoin, there was not enough for all of them to get one. It was a fact that was supposed to confer status and exclusivity to those who made it into the club, though it was hard for Frank to feel particularly special about his inclusion, given that entry into the club currently cost $567.01 and he had paid $800 for the privilege.

By June he had sold everything he felt he could get enough money for to justify the hassle of putting it on eBay. This included a pair of Ray-Bans he’d had since high school, an arcade fight stick he no longer used, barely worn Nikes, and the designer clothes his parents had gotten him for Christmas throughout the years that he hadn’t even taken the tags off of. With no other way to generate money, he now had to rely on that $11-an-hour salary to fund further bitcoin purchases.

   The year continued to not be very pretty for his new investment. It seemed as if the price of bitcoin hit new lows every week. He tried not to think of how he was always down, but every time he opened his spreadsheet to record his latest purchase, he was confronted with a solid block of red squares. There was a minor price recovery during the summer that nearly brought him back to break-even, but any gains were soon lost as the price continued to plummet, ablating away the money he had put in.

As a way of preventing a spiraling depression, he began to educate himself about aspects of bitcoin other than its dollar value. He watched the videos that Joseph sent him, featuring people who were just as smart as his friend enthuse about this new digital asset. He learned about money—not cash but the concept of it in the abstract, what made it truly “sound” and the fraught history of mankind’s search for the perfect medium of exchange. There was a feeling of deep satisfaction listening to people cogently explain things he had always intuitively felt, like how money as most people knew it, in the form of US dollars, was never worth more than it was right this second, its purchasing power constantly being eroded by the inflationary tactics of its issuers, the United States government. This fact made building a savings with only dollars seem like a fool’s errand. Why put off spending a dollar when it would buy less than a dollar’s worth of goods a year from now, and even less in five years, ten years, and so on? This was why gold had always been useful as a store of value, a scarce commodity that couldn’t be created out of thin air like the dollar could. Gold had been the best sound money humanity had had for the last three thousand years, but now along came something that seemed to improve on all the qualities that made gold such an attractive investment. Bitcoin was a revolutionary invention created by a pseudonymous entity who might as well have been God, the way that he (or she or they) had vanished without a trace and was now uncommunicative. It was an internet-based digital asset that held the promise of revolutionizing money in the same way that the internet had revolutionized entertainment, communication, and consumerism. Proponents of bitcoin cited its superiority in every criteria of what defined sound, or ideal, money: it was more divisible (one hundred million units (or “satoshis”) vs. the hundred pennies into which a dollar could be broken), more portable (able to be transferred with the click of a button and at the speed of light; try doing that with a hundred pounds of gold), and more scarce (not only could there never be more than 21 million coins, the supply of newly minted coins would literally halve every four years and continue to dwindle to nothing) than anything that had come before it. That it was intangible was a feature, not a bug, and this was something denizens of the 21st-century were in a better position to understand than anyone else in history. Everything of any value was becoming digitalized, and people were discovering that something like music, for example, was no less valuable for being streamed on your phone instead of being on physical discs that you had to find a place for on your shelves. Now it was money’s turn to become an entirely digital enterprise, and, even better, one that was not controlled by a government or corporation. It was peer-to-peer, open source, something truly by and for the people. And while it was true that its decentralized nature and immunity from counterparty risk made it an attractive payment method for those who engaged in illegal activities, bitcoiners pointed out that most criminals still defaulted to what they had always used: cash. (Was there a more universal symbol of criminality than a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills?) In fact, some argued that universal adoption of bitcoin would eliminate criminal activity, specifically the most heinous kind perpetrated by governments all over the world. It was easy to engage in an illegal, never-ending conflict with another country when you could just print the money to fund it. But what if everyone had a finite source of funds, with no way to buy an unlimited number of bombs, planes, manpower? That was the promise of bitcoin; as one fan-created song put it, there would be “No more money for wars and evil, bitcoin buying for the people.”

   Absorbing all these pro-bitcoin arguments (as well as going down the rabbit hole of memes, gifs, and other amusing bits of media) was a way for Frank to pass the time, and he could see why a common refrain from bitcoiners was that the price was the least interesting thing about it. But he still had his eyes on the prize, and was waiting with fluctuating levels of patience for his investment to pay off. All the theory and elegance and beauty of bitcoin would mean nothing if he didn’t make any money from it.

   One morning he woke up to the news that the largest bitcoin exchange in the world had been hacked. Everyone’s coins were gone, just like that, stolen by untraceable thieves, and there was no central authority to turn to for support or possible compensation. The community at large was freaking out and the group chat was full of nervous chatter. What was referred to as FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—had spiked to the highest levels Frank had ever seen. He went over to Joseph’s that very day, seeking reassurances. His friend did not disappoint, brushing off nearly all his concerns. First of all, the private keys were not hacked, as many bitcoin detractors had automatically assumed. The bitcoin protocol itself was just as unhackable as it’d always been. The exchange had been careless with storing its bitcoin in a “hot” wallet instead of “cold” storage, and siphoning away their stash had been mere child’s play for the hackers. It was a stupid mistake on their part, Joseph said, shrugging, but what did one expect from a custodian that had arbitrarily decided to pivot to cryptocurrency after starting out as an online exchange for the Magic: The Gathering cards a lot of the guys used to collect back in high school. (It was a game that had never taken off for Joseph, who still derisively referred to that dark time of sitting on the sidelines witnessing everyone’s obsession as the “Plague Rats Era.” Frank, on the other hand, wished he still had his cards; they were the only thing from his youth that had any value now. His collection, while more modest than those of his friends who had actual jobs in high school, if liquidated would’ve been able to buy several bitcoins now. Unfortunately, he foolishly left his cards behind when he moved out of his parents’ home and they were unceremoniously disposed of at some point.) It did however underscore the dangers of trusting someone to store one’s crypto and the importance of eventual self-custody. As the community liked to say: “Not your keys, not your coins.” But the Mt. Gox incident reminded everyone that one of the most lauded features of bitcoin—the power to be one’s “own bank”—was also one of the most nerve-racking. If something went wrong, there was no customer support to call, no service employee bending over backwards to make things right, no manager to ask for when all else failed. These considerations made Frank hesitate to transfer his stash off Coinbase and onto a hardware wallet. He ultimately figured that his exposure was not enough there to be overly concerned; at this point he owned only seven and a half bitcoin, worth about $1700 dollars, and that was only about half of what he had paid for it.

   His second year of buying bitcoin went a lot like the first: trying not to get too depressed whenever he opened his spreadsheet to log another purchase. The indomitable block of red signifying month after month of lost money was impossible to ignore. He had to remind himself that the losses were only on paper and theoretical; he’d only truly be in the hole if he sold, which he had no intention of doing. Still, it was impossible not to feel a little grim about always being down forty percent (or more) on the very first investment he had ever decided to make.

   But then, toward the end of 2015, the price started to wobble in the other direction. It happened suddenly and without warning and for no immediately discernable reason. Frank was too overjoyed to get hung up on the “why’s” of it all. All he knew was how good it was to be up after almost two years of dutiful accumulation. The end of the year brought even more gains, and a lot of people in the bitcoin community couldn’t help regarding it as a cosmic Christmas present rewarding the faithful. Unable to help himself, Frank kept opening his spreadsheet—something he used to dread—just to marvel at the last cell tallying his overall position. It was highlighted—bathed, even—in glorious green.

   While his conviction had never wavered, the lightness of spirit with which he started 2016 was new, and, as the year progressed, his sense of well-being only deepened. Each month brought with it another green square, and the days of losses rapidly seemed to be behind him. By the summer, the price of bitcoin jumped to $672, and Frank suddenly found himself, at 37 years old, with over ten thousand dollars in assets for the first time in his life. The most he had ever had previously, he remembered very vividly, was $3000 in his bank account for a brief moment fourteen years ago, right before the month’s rent and other bills were due. (And part of that was because of the few hundred dollars George W. Bush sent every citizen that year, the only time the United States government cut everyone a no-strings-attached check in Frank’s lifetime, making it a very memorable event indeed.)

   During this time of unprecedented interest in improving his financial fortunes, Frank paid little attention to what was going on in world (or even local) events. The sort of things that usually preoccupied the populace at large were steamrolled by his single-minded focus. News of missing planes, celebrity deaths, deadly outbreaks, military coups, terrorist attacks, refugee crises, train derailments, church shootings, and high-profile murder trials came and went without much notice. Even galvanizing events like the Cubs breaking a hundred-and-eight-year curse or the hometown football team literally snatching victory out of the air in the face of certain defeat right at the goalline with no time remaining in one of the best Super Bowls ever played failed to register much. His preoccupations, while few, took up all his time: working forty hours a week at his $11-an-hour job, seeing Nicole as much as possible, and buying bitcoin whenever he could. Everything else seemed incidental and irrelevant, distraction and noise.

   Even the presidential election that year, which caused the biggest political commotion Frank could remember since the 2000 debacle, failed to captivate him in the way it had everyone else. Frank had never voted in any election, not even for class president in high school, and he wasn’t about to start now. He considered himself to be as apolitical as they come; he thought it just didn’t matter all that much who was in office at any given time. (Besides, registering to vote made him susceptible to potential jury duty, an assignment he thought sounded worse than death.) If he were forced to cast a ballot, he would’ve voted for Trump simply because he was the only candidate advocating for a repeal of the individual mandate, that little proviso in the much lauded (or riviled, depending on which side of the aisle you were on) Affordable Care Act that had harried Frank for years. He considered it the epitome of twisted government logic, this $700 annual fee levied against people too poor to afford insurance, a group Frank had been in his whole life. It was a significant amount of money to someone who was accounting for every last dollar in his budget, and he could only stew about the thousands of dollars he had racked up in penalties over the years that could’ve been put to better use—mainly buying bitcoin, naturally. The way he saw it, Obama personally owed him about six or seven bitcoin for including that nasty provision in his eponymous (colloquially, at least) healthcare bill. (So oblivious was he of what an incendiary position this was, especially to someone more politically-minded, that when he blithely expressed it to a friend who asked whom he was voting for on election day, it completely torpedoed the friendship and they never talked again.)

   And so time passed, steadily, implacably, and every few months another milestone was reached. On July 11, 2016, his holdings crossed the 20 bitcoin mark. At the end of the year, the price of bitcoin rose above $1000, finally reclaiming the initial price it had been when he bought it for the first time, three years prior. His $200 purchase in April of 2017 put him at $10k—ten thousand dollars!—in the total amount of money he had invested in this enterprize. Reaching that number gave him momentary pause. When he reflected on it, he was justifiably proud of the way he had been disciplined enough to save that much money after knowing no other reality than a paycheck-to-paycheck existence from the moment he had entered the workforce at the age of 19. The way he had not only flipped the switch so suddenly but maintained his drive in this endeavor astounded even him. He had become further proof of an adage he had seen bandied about: bitcoin teaches you how to save money. Having ten thousand dollars (ten! thousand!) in his bank account would’ve smoothed over so many of the bumps he had faced over the years, and now he had it. Or, rather, he didn’t. Not exactly anyway. It wasn’t in the form of dollars he could withdraw from the bank, and the knowledge that it COULD be instead of tied up in an asset that had proven to be highly volatile made him, for the first time, a little nervous about what he was doing. But whatever trepidation he had at this point dissipated completely when he checked the value of his holdings, which had serendipitously cleared $30k (thirty! thousand!)  at the same time he reached his five-figure milestone. He needed no further motivation than that to stay the course for a fourth year.

   By the summer, the price of bitcoin had doubled to 2,800 dollars, and Frank started to feel queasy in way that was entirely new to him. It was a mix of nerves and excitement, a sustained moment of disconnect when something was happening that you had long predicted, but only you knew how much that prediction had been propped up by blind hope. The figures were getting big, even a little unwieldy, and harder to fully comprehend. He was having to consider a really significant amount of money here, the kind of money that rivaled—or exceeded—the biggest purchases a typical adult could be expected to make in his or her life: a new car, a down payment on a house, a son or daughter’s college education (a couple semesters-worth, anyway). But Frank had neither the need, nor desire, nor opportunity for any of those things; the only thing he wanted to buy was more bitcoin. So he did. But it was no longer without anxiety. (It was almost funny the way he was more nervous about it now than he was at the beginning when he started putting hundreds of dollars into something he barely understood.)

   The big event happened so fast. A few days after his birthday in August, bitcoin shot up to $4500, and he owned over 23 of them, and his net worth was all of a sudden six figures for the first time. One hundred thousand dollars. While the road to this point had been long, the ramp-up at the end had seemed blindingly fast. It took him two-and-a-half years to reach ten thousand dollars; barely a year later he was sitting on ten times that. The speed with which it’d happened obviated any sense of delicious anticipation (or even anticipation of that anticipation) he might have otherwise felt leading up to it. It turned out Hemingway’s famous line about going broke also applied to getting rich: it happens gradually, then suddenly.

   And that was how he felt: rich. He thought about who he was at various times in his life and what an insane amount of money that person would consider one hundred thousand dollars to be. His 21-year-old self getting an apartment with roommates for the first time. His 26-year-old self, who was living on his own and stressing about how to pay the rent and his bills but was so full of dreams and ambition and hope. His 30-year-old self, who wanted to spoil his girlfriend with fancy things and have enough in his bank account to make her feel secure about their future together. His 34-year-old self who had no money and no reason to feel any optimism that things would get better. He thought about the happiness, gratitude, and relief that money would’ve brought each of them. He was still that same person, only now he had the insane thing that his past selves didn’t. One hundred thousand dollars. He had it. He did it. He had to admit that it made him feel complete, like a person who could actually exist in society, as if one hundred grand had always been the buy-in cost to sit at the poker table of life. He felt his long-abandoned hopes and desires returning. The money unlocked something in him, rekindling an optimism that he had allowed to go dormant because there didn’t seem to be any point in maintaining it. It gave him permission to dream again. 

   One hundred thousand dollars. After looking at that number on the screen for many minutes, processing all it represented, he broke down crying. He would never again have such an emotional reaction to a dollar figure.

II.

Among the infinite directions his life could take from here swirling in his head, he knew the one he wanted to make his reality. Having improved his financial situation, he set out to improve the other aspects of his life. There were a few things that needed to happen, but first things first: he had to get his driver’s license. He had never had one, let alone a car. How a person who was nearly forty had survived for so long without a vehicle—especially when he lived all his life in rural New England and not some bustling metropolis with robust public transportation—began to beggar even HIS imagination. He had always managed this constraint with the same stolid practicality that he had when spending his last few dollars to get 25-cent off-brand mac and cheese at the end of a particularly tight month. He made sure to always live within walking distance of possible places of employment. He would rely on friends to take him to appointments and out for groceries, always buying as much as he could like an isolated settler in colonial times gathering provisions for a long winter, so as not to annoy those helping him with multiple trips to the store. He knew taxi services’ phone numbers by heart. He made due. Some might’ve called his resourcefulness impressive, but for Frank it was a persistent, albeit tamped down, source of sheepish embarrassment, a mild humiliation he did his best to hide from others, as one would a limp or impaired hearing in one ear. Any curiosity people had about the matter could usually be satisfied with a vague implication that he was trying to save money. Some assumed he had lost his license due to legal troubles, drunk driving or something even more lurid. In those cases he said nothing to disabuse them of the idea that he had had a run-in with the law, since it added flavor to his personality and made him seem more dangerous and interesting.

   Getting behind the wheel of a car was easy enough; throughout the years Joseph had offered him use of his vehicle if he wanted to practice. Frank had never shown any inclination of taking him up on this offer, which was why his friend was mildly surprised that he was showing the initiative now. But Joseph was characteristically accomodating, and a few days later they were in his car, Frank in the driver’s seat, spending a couple hours going haltingly to and fro. Everything more or less came back to Frank during the course of the day: the rearview and seat adjustment, ten-and-two, up for the right blinker, down for the left, turning on a red, and not parking within fifty feet (or whatever it was) of a hydrant. He had taken driver’s ed in his youth, though it was a couple years after everyone else had, during the summer after graduation. His enthusiasm for learning to drive in high school had fallen off a cliff when his parents scoffed at the idea that he’d be allowed to borrow the family car every now and then. He’d have to get his own vehicle, and since he had never been employed a day in his life that was not going to be a possibility. Like his peers, almost everything he did at that age was driven by hormones, and with his parents completely shutting down his fantasy of taking a girl on a date to a restaurant or the movies—or possibly more—his interest in driving was basically nil. It was the only reason teenagers wanted a car: it was a sine qua non of getting laid. But with his eighteenth birthday and ostensible adulthood approaching, both he and his parents agreed that it was high time to get his license. (He wished that the forces in his life that mechanistically drove him toward adulthood took as their concern his distressing virginity instead, but he supposed that was what college was for.)

   The driver’s ed class had gone swimmingly; he didn’t recall ever having any major mishaps on the road. There had been only one contretemps with the instructor, which Frank felt to the present day was the reason he had failed the road test. The class required each student to sit a certain number of hours in the backseat, observing another student driving. An hour-long observation session would usually be followed by the students switching seats and another hour of the observer being the driver and vice versa. One day when one of these lessons was scheduled, Frank showed up at the meeting place expecting to spend the next two hours observing and then driving. But he had gotten the times wrong, and he was an hour late. After a few minutes, the driving instructor’s car pulled up with the other student driving it. The simple misunderstanding was sorted out pretty quickly, and as Frank got into the driver’s seat to continue with the lesson as planned, the instructor informed Frank that he now owed the instructor thirty-five bucks. Everyone had been warned on the first day of class that if they missed a scheduled lesson they would incur a fee of $35 to cover the costs of a make-up session. Frank understood that there needed to be some sort of compensation for wasting the instructor’s time, but he thought the penalty was implicitly for missing a driving session, not an observation one. The instructor apprized him that no, a missed lesson was a missed lesson. Frank said that he had only missed half the lesson, so could he maybe owe $17.50 instead? The instructor shook his head, resolute on the point that he would now have to take additional time out of his busy schedule in order to accomodate a new, unplanned teaching session. Frank suggested that he could sit in with another observer sometime and fulfill that required hour without the instructor having to devote additional time to a separate lesson. The instructor insisted that it just didn’t work that way. Frank pointed out that, if he was understanding him correctly, when there was a session with a student driver and two observers, the instructor was apparently being compensated $35 for each person in the vehicle and didn’t $105 dollars seem a little exorbitant for sitting in a car for a couple hours passively instructing someone on how to drive? No, the instructor said testily, it didn’t seem that Frank understood him correctly at all. An icy vibe obtained in the car for the rest of the lesson, with little more said than curt instructions on where to turn and which manuevers Frank should do. This was too bad because the youngish instructor was usually affable and easygoing, and Frank enjoyed talking to him about sports and movies.

   The penalty fee was never paid. Frank didn’t have that kind of money readily available and he was afraid to bring it up to his parents, who would surely blame him for the mixup. Which was fair: it WAS his fault he got the time wrong. But what he feared most was the punishment they would mete out, which was always incommensurate with the crime. Overly harsh chastisements—groundings, loss of TV privileges, beatings, even, though that happened less frequently over time—were the customary reactions to venial transgressions—being late for supper, not cleaning his room, or, god forbid, getting a C on his report card. He didn’t know what a preventable $35 drain on his parents’ bank account would cost him, and he didn’t want to find out. To his credit, the instructor never brought it up again, and Frank figured that he had decided to let it slide. And since this forgiveness would be to Frank’s benefit (and outsized relief that his parents would remain oblivious of the situation), he soon forgot about the whole thing. That is, right up till the day of the test.

   At that time, driving instructors were authorized to give the road test to students in the state of New Hampshire. It made everything very streamlined and convienent; they wouldn’t have to schedule an appointment at the DMV or take the test with a stranger, which presumably made it easier to pass. It was even well-known that this particular instructor never made anyone parallel park, removing a major obstacle, at least in most students’ minds. On the day of the test, Frank felt confident and free from worry. He was comfortable behind the wheel and his driving style erred on the side of caution. He considered the test pro forma at this point and had little doubt that he would be authorized to drive alone by the end of the day.

Nothing seemed off as Frank drove to the next town over as he was instructed. He even made sure to exaggeratedly check for blind spots and kept his hands in the proper position at all times. Midway through the test, they rolled up to a four-way stop. It was an unremarkable event that passed without incident and would surely have been quickly forgotten if not for the lasting repercusions it had. Frank has thought about it frequentely for over two decades now.

   Here’s how it unfolded in Frank’s memory: as he approached the four-way stop the instructor directed him to make a left turn, and Frank accordingly turned on his blinker. Another car was coming from the opposite direction, and they arrived at what most people would consider “simultaneously,” though Frank considered that common driving assessment a little specious. It’d be almost impossible to coordinate a truly simultaneous action with another driver, and so in 99% of cases someone HAD to be first, if even microscopically. Frank was even pretty sure he arrived at the intersection first, though he’d be willing to admit that maybe the years had distorted his memory in this regard. Nevertheless, the salient point remained immutable and indisputable: there was no way the other car arrived first.

   Both cars came to a full stop at the intersection. The other car didn’t have any blinkers on, indicating that it was going straight. Frank of course knew that the other driver had the right of way, so he waited for the other car to go first before he made his turn. He waited, and he waited some more. At least three solid beats passed without the other car moving an inch. At this point any reasonable driver could assume that the person who technically had the right of way (which was debatable, if Frank had been right about arriving at the intersection first) was yielding. Still, caution ruled the day and Frank would’ve sat at that intersection forever waiting for the other guy to go if not for another car approaching the four-way stop on Frank’s left. Someone had to go before it turned all clusterfucky. And so, after waiting another beat, Frank took the initiative and made his left turn.

   After the test was completed, everything else about it was forgotten when the instructor infomed him that he had failed the test for not following the right of way rules properly at the four-way stop. Frank took this in silently, his head spinning. He sputtered out a protest, explaining his interpretation of the events, but the instructor was unmoved. He crisply gave Frank some documentation and wished him good luck in future driving endeavors. Even in the moment Frank found the instructor’s matter-of-fact demeanor strange and uncharacteristically cold. Then he later remembered the supposedly owed money for the missed lesson and it seem irrefutable that the instructor had decided to get his revenge in a most inopportune—not to say inappropriate—way.

   But resenting the instructor for his pettiness would come later. Right now the only thing on Frank’s mind was what was sure to be his parents’ explosive response to this turn of events. Never mind $35—his parents would probably feel that he had wasted the entire expense of the class, needlessly costing them hundreds of dollars, especially considering that in less than three months he would be 18 and no longer required to have a driver’s ed course under his belt to get a license.

As Frank stood there waiting to get picked up, he looked at the documentation the instructor had handed him. He noticed that the test result slip did not make it immediately obvious that he had failed. It started by validating that he had successfully completed the driver’s education course, fulfilling that prerequisite for those who required it. It was only farther down the page, buried in the third paragraph, that mention was made of the driving test results. If one glanced at it quickly, it would be easy to assume that he had passed the test. And so Frank decided to tell his parents yet another one of his patented white lies, all in the name of delaying his parents’ wrath and preserving harmony in the household. He had no idea whether this tactic was ultimately effective or not, but over the years he had done it so many times that it became behavioral, and forestalling a conflict with his parents by any means necessary became second nature to him, especially when there was the potential for violence.

   His plan went off without a hitch: he allowed them to think that everything had gone well and they barely looked at the papers he brought home. He had bought himself a reprieve of a few days, during which time he tried to think of his predicament as little as possible. But when his dad told him they were going to the DMV the next day to get his license, his anxiety came rushing back as it always did when he knew a decepetion of his would no longer be sustainable. A more reasonable person would have recognized that it was pointless to continue the charade and come clean. But his parents and their anger made Frank a most unreasonable person. Even a momentary respite from his parents’ anger was worth any action he could take, justified every decision he made. He was like a person hopelessly trapped in a burning building but still trying to escape the flames, seeking out any corner free of smoke just to survive for a few more seconds in the face of certain death.

   Frank didn’t say anything in the morning or on the drive to the DMV or when he and his dad were sitting in the waiting room. When his name was called and they got up and he trudged to the counter as if he were heading to the gas chamber, he had the momentary, irrational hope that the clerk would also be fooled and just automatically issue him a license without checking the paperwork too closely. But of course that didn’t happen and after a few seconds of perusing the documents she was handed, the clerk told them that he had failed the test and would need to schedule another test with them at some point in the future (though not the near future, as they were booked for the next month-and-a-half). It took a few moments for his dad to understand what they were being told and, when it sunk in, he turned to Frank and asked what was going on. Even at this point Frank couldn’t tell him the truth; he furrowed his brow and frowningly professed to be just as confused as his dad was. When cold, hard truths were exposed, Frank sometimes clung to a lie like a security blanket, right up to the moment it was ripped away from him.

   When they got home, his dad got on the phone with the instructor while Frank, unable to be in the same room, listened from the down the hall. After hanging up, his dad came into the room and announced what Frank already knew. Frank feigned a reaction of surprise, recognition, and acceptance, offering up a feeble, “I didn’t think I did anything wrong.” His dad processed the news with relative equanimity, but it was his unappeasable mom that he had to worry about. His dad never yelled or laid a finger on him in terms of corporal punishment (as far as Frank could remember) leaving it up to his mom to decide whether his actions warranted a physical response. So when his dad said they would have to see what his mother thought when she got home, it was with a sense of forboding that they both felt.

   His mom’s initial reaction to what had happened was her usual exaggerated shock and disbelief, with undertones of annoyance and distress and a sense of persecution, as if every bad or unexpected piece of news were a personal attack on her. She had a real disdain for surprises, something Frank was starting to realize he had inherited from her. Luckily she didn’t feel the need to hit him, instead choosing to berate him over and over for his failure. “The other car has the right of way,” she repeated innumerable times that evening. All he could do was keep muttering that he knew, he knew. (He also recognized in himself her inability to let things go sometimes, much to his chagrin.) Even when he didn’t catch a beating, there were other things to endure. His mom never called him stupid or incompetant or worthless. She would just shake her head and sneer and glare at him with contempt in her eyes, and his self-recrimination would fill in the blanks.

   He had every intention of retaking the test, but the summer passed quickly and soon he was off to college where incoming freshmen were prohibited from having a car. His life progressed in this fashion, as a series of what seemed at the time reasonable excuses to keep postponing the procurement of a license. When he moved back in with his parents after dropping out of college, they were so royally pissed at him that they weren’t going to offer him much support in anything, let alone allowing him use of their car for another go at the test. When he moved out on his own, money was indeed tight and the expense of a car would’ve been onerous. He lived in small enough towns that everywhere he wanted to go could be reached by foot; the only thing it cost him was time, which he had a surfeit of throughout his twenties. At a certain point he forgot everything he learned in driver’s ed, and the prospect of relearning everything was daunting to an individual who was purposely structuring his life to face as few hardships as possible. (For the longest time—possibly right up to the time he started buying bitcoin—he had a real problem recognizing those moments when inconvienencing his life a little in the present would greatly benefit him in the future.) But he also didn’t mean to go this long without a license, and he was dismayed at how the years had passed so peskily.

   Now in his late thirties, as he was driving around town for the first time, he couldn’t help feeling that he had missed out on something substantial. And he wasn’t even thinking of the time he could’ve saved or the untold number of dates he could’ve taken girls on. (Those dates being of course in prospect only; an unlimited number of complimentary “plus one” tickets were worthless if you never had anyone to accompany you.) It was the feeling of freedom he had missed out on, the sense of unlimited possibility a car represents to a young person. It was impossible for him to experience those feelings now. Part of it was the way maturity encages you, indurating your daily routines into inflexible components of an unchanging life. And part of it was an unfortunate awareness of his own mortality. It was hard to ignore that being in a car accident was the leading cause of death for those his age and younger (though overdosing on drugs was quickly climbing up the charts). It was a fact hardly acknowledged by teenagers, so sure were they of their unique invincibility. As a lifelong pedestrian, Frank had learned to appreciate and respect the awesome power of these two-ton metal battering rams on wheels. As cars whizzed by him as he walked on the sidewalk, he sometimes thought about how tiny a movement it would take—an incremental turning of a wheel a few degrees—for someone to summarily end his life. And from his vantage outside of a car’s false-security-fostering interior it was very clear that if two of them ever collided above a certain speed it would be game over for both drivers. These thoughts made Frank trepidatious about driving—more than that, if he were being truthful. He was outright scared. A little knowledge could be paralyzing and awareness a curse, and Frank wished he could recapture the free-spirited fearlessness of youth, embodied by the “No Fear” apparel that had been so popular when he was growing up.

   He would say, however, that it was a lot easier—and therefore safer, presumably—to successfully drive a car now than it had been in the past. Many features that most cars were equipped with these days made for a smoother ride, but nothing was as game-changing as the screen embedded in the dashboard showing the images from the many cameras installed around the car. No more incessant checking of blind spots, no more guessing how close to the curb you were, no more worrying about being too close to other drivers or other drivers being too close to you (the car would emit a series of helpful beeps if it even suspected that there might be a possibility of a fender bender). In some models, the car would even perform basic manuvers for you, and parallel parking, the thing that used to cause so much dread in teenagers, could now be done with the press of a button. Just another reason young people these days had it easier than he did, Frank thought before he could stop himself. He didn’t like thinking these things; it was an indisputable sign that he was getting older.

After a few more driving sessions with Joseph over the course of the next month, Frank felt comfortable enough to take the test again. Time was of the essence: Autumn had begun and he did not want to be tested—or even drive at all—in wintry conditions. As smooth as it had been to get back behind the wheel, he knew it would be a different story when there was a layer of snow and ice on the road. He found it somewhat strange and worrying that drivers weren’t tested on their ability to drive in the inimcal conditions that lasted around here at least three months of the year. There was just some sort of trust that everyone would figure it out. The whole enterprise of vehicular transportation was propped up on trust, really. There was no insuperable barrier to running a red light, you just had to trust that the other driver wouldn’t do it. The driving test was nothing to fear. It was a distraction, a falacious imprimatur instilling a false sense of security in those now thinking they were experts in something that involved too many variables to allow for the concept of expertise. Frank could see the whole thing clearly now, and he knew what he was being told. “Just take the farcical test, get your laminated ID, and try not to kill anyone out there.”

So it was with calm, smooth confidence that Frank retook the driving test in mid-October, twenty years after his first attempt. This time he passed with no drama, no small infraction that would haunt him for the next two decades. Accomplishing something an overwhelming majority of adults did with ease (barring physical or mental handicap) turned out, perhaps preedictatbly, to be the easiest step to take, and required from Frank the simplest shift in his mindset, the lowest psychic barrier to hurdle. (It was like when he took the SATs again, keeping in mind Joseph’s suggestion that he just “write down the right answer,” and increased his score 150 points, to a 1390.) The next step in his plan would be harder, and it would involve things which he had no prior experience with nor had ever given much thought to.

   Frank’s living conditions from the time he turned 18 could be aptly described as austere, adequate for his few needs, sometimes barely so. He went from living in a dorm room, to sleeping on his parents’ couch for a while, to then sleeping on his friend’s parents’ couch when his parents kicked him out. After that he roomed with his friend in a one-bedroom apartment, sleeping on yet another couch for a couple years. They brought in another friend at some point and they all moved into a condo-ish place where he technically got his own room, though it was the size of a slightly larger than average walk-in closet, too small to even accomodate a bed, forcing him to sleep on the floor on a mattress that needed to be propped up against the wall during the day so he could move through the room. Still, it was the most lavish place he had lived in since being on his own, a two-story abode with a big kitchen and living room downstairs. He would sit in a chair and look out his window and light cigarettes (he smoked at the time, sporadically) and be totally content. This arrangement didn’t last long, a few short months, before one of the friends decided it wasn’t working for him and left the house, taking his share of the rent with him. Frank had to scramble for another place to live and it just so happened that Joseph was entering the doctorate program at Dartmouth and needed a roommate. They found a two-bedroom apartment that was nice and upkept and also quiet and secluded, though still within walking distance of the coffee shop that had hired Frank on the spot. Frank took the smaller of the two bedrooms—still the most space he’d had since the room he grew up in. This lasted until Joseph left for the post-doc program at Loughburrow University in England. Frank moved into a single bedroom unit in the same apartment complex and had been living there ever since, over ten years now. Even with the whole apartment to himself, he found that he was still using the same amount of space that he always had. His living room was rarely ventured into and was used mainly as a storage area, with giant plastic bins stacked in front of the slider doors that opened onto an unused balcony. There were cobwebs in the corners and a noticable layer of dust on the never sat-upon couch.

   At no point in his life had Frank ever known the luxurious accomodations of a house. His adolescence was a succession of small, somewhat cramped bedrooms, kitchens that doubled as dining rooms, and no lawns or any private outdoor areas to speak of. It was an itinerant lifestyle dictated by his father’s enlistment in the US Navy. They bounced around the east coast and the midwest, landing in Illinois and Tennessee and Maryland, even doing a stint on a US-controlled base in Japan, where everyone mercifully spoke fluent English. Every home Frank lived in was temporary, every friend he made provisional. All the while his father was working toward an honorable discharge, looking to slough off the indebtedness he had incurred as a teenager, one who had grown up in poverty and for whom the military seemed to be the only surefire way to improve his lot in life. After his father got that discharge when Frank was ten years old, they moved to New Hampshire with the intention of settling down for good in the state his father had grown up in. Upon arrival they lived in his grandparents’ roach-infested trailer for six months while saving enough money to move into the two-bedroom apartment they would live in next. The apartment was a small unit, and the downstairs neighbors would constantly complain about the thumping they heard through their ceiling when Frank would run around, blowing off sixth-grader steam. Only in retrospect did this living space seem confined or inadequate; Frank had been overjoyed to get his own room for the first time in over a year, and there were densely wooded areas to explore behind the building and a patch of land between the two buildings of the complex big enough to play pick-up baseball games with the other neighborhood kids, and the young boy Frank was needed little else than that.

His best friend at the time lived next to the apartments in a capacious two-story house that seemed to have an unlimited amount of space. Every occupant—including the friend’s brother—had his or her own room, the living room could comfortably accomodate a gathering of ten or more people, the backyard was sprawling enough to contain a large garden and still have room to set up a badmitton net, the basement housed an intricate and continually expanding model train layout, and the covered porch had multiple chairs and a large table on which various board games were played as the sun went down on lazy summer evenings. Frank enjoyed spending time at this house, but he never got particularly covetous of where his friend got to live or rueful of the comparatively meager home he had to return to. He figured that people lived where they lived and that’s just how it was, almost as if everyone were assigned a way of life early on and there wasn’t a lot anyone could do about it. It was a callow assumption that contained the spirit of a truth.

   They lived in that apartment for two years before moving a couple towns over, presumably to relocate to a school district with a slightly better high school. (Even though the school they were moving away from was Frank’s father’s alma mater.) They moved into a not very new trailer set in a clearing down the street from a llama farm, surrounded by other trailers that were in various stages of disrepair. Frank had initially been excited about the prospect of having some semblance of a yard until he discovered that the roots of the close-grown trees made the ground too treacherously uneven to run around on safely. Inside it was more cramped than any apartment they’d ever lived in; the layout was a de facto hallway with no way to get from his bedroom at one end to his parents’ bedroom at the other without passing through every other room: the kitchen/dining room, a nook barely big enough for a desk, and the living room—all encroaching on one another, making it seem like one elongated shared space. Frank never knew whether the choice to live there was based on money or having to take what was available, but he accepted it with the same passivity with which he regarded all their previous homes. It didn’t even occur to him to protest or complain; he was a liquid that conformed with ease to any container you put him in. Even when one of his new friends came over and noted that he lived in “the back of a truck,” it embarrassed his mom more than it did Frank.

   The years he lived in it did nothing to alter Frank’s placidity about the trailer, even in the face of other people’s more desirable homes. The only thing that bugged him was its remote location, far removed from his friends and other places of interest. (It also made the bus ride home after school more than half an hour, a near-daily trip he’d had to endure all through high school.) When Frank graduated he left with no resentment about where he had spent his adolesence, heading off college with the same sense of wistfulness that his more lavishly housed peers felt. (He would especially miss the nerf basketball hoop installed near the ceiling in the threshold between the living room and kitchen.) It was only when he came back, after dropping out of college and needing somewhere to stay, that the trailer turned nightmarish in his memory. Granted, a lot of his souring on it was due to the constant resentment he’d had to endure from his mother, who was shocked that her son had flamed out of college so spectacularly; she did not handle well his presence in her home and the daily reminder of his failure. It didn’t help that they had converted his old bedroom into a storage/workout room when he left, forcing him to sleep every night on the couch in the living room, further telescoping the already tight quarters and bringing hot-tempered, highly combustible personalities into closer proximity, which eventually had predictable results. When he left the trailer for the final time with all his belongings in a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, Frank had one last shouting match with his mother—the last contact they would have for three and a half years.  “Living here was HELL,” he seethed at her through gritted teeth. For the next six months he stayed in the basement of Joseph’s father’s house, a pitiable indignity that was still better than living with his parents.

   Frank never dreamed of owning a house for the same reason a lot of people dismiss the notion: a severe lack of funds. But, additionally, having no warm or heart-tugging memories of living in a house during his youth did a lot to explain his lack of desire now; it was a classic case of not missing something you never knew in the first place. He was a lifelong renter who’d had to suffer through people telling him that it was “cheaper to buy a house” for the last ten or so years, ever since the bubble burst in a market he didn’t pretend to understand or care about. Even visiting his parents’ house did nothing to pique his interest. A few years after he stormed out they moved into a brand new house in a development that was built two miles down the road from the trailer. It was a two-story house, identical to the neighboring houses that lined the cul-de-sac in parallel rows but nice just the same, with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, living room with high, vaulted ceiling and a fireplace, kitchen with an island and adjoining pantry, wide open basement and car garage with automatic door opener. It had no relation to any living conditions he had ever known with them, and they were continually making renovations. Every time he came over he was shown some new improvement: newly installed hardwood floors, repainted rooms, a new front door with a more intricate glass design. The difference between how they used to live and how they did now was obvious, and to Frank it seemed that they were bent on widening the gap as much as possible. In their somewhat newly reconciled state, he was able to be happy for them, even noting with an offbeat amusement that he had had a small supporting role in their upward mobility: if he hadn’t dropped out of college (which his parents were paying for out of pocket) they might not have had the money to put down on the house. (It was a perspective he would never share with his mom, as it would surely cause another fight.) But as nice as their house was, Frank still didn’t want one or dream of it being left to him; even though he was their only child, he was sure it would get sold at some point to fund their retirement to warmer climates instead of being left to him. He never thought about possible inheritances. He was born to literal teenagers, and as he aged his parents seemed more like contemporaries than his elders. It was a coin flip that he would drop dead before either one of them, he was sure of it.

   What made him reconsider the prospect of home ownership was his relationship with Nicole. Her childhood was markedly different from his in many ways, not the least of which being that she had known the pleasures of living in a house. (Similarites to his own experience included being constantly uprooted during her formative years—albeit in a smaller way, splitting time between the homes of her separated parents, as well as her nana’s for brief period, but never leaving the confines of New Hampshire and Vermont—and having an overcritical mother who took out her frustrations with her only child in inapproprite ways that complicated their relationship to this day.) She was currently living in a house, one she had fixed up nicely. In fact, to call it “nice” was a severe understatement, in Frank’s opinion. Nicole had a passion and a knack for interior design and the aesthetics of living spaces. Every piece of furniture was carefully selected based on size, shape, material, color. The same consideration was given to every lamp, end table, piece of wall art, throw pillow, curtain—everything. Nothing was too small to conform to the vision she had in her head of domestic perfection; Frank remembered the time there was a protracted, months-long search for the perfect soap dispenser. These things cosumed her, and when she took on a major home improvement project she thought of little else. Frank knew that when she repainted a room he would be shown a dozen or more swatches that were barely distinguishable from each other and their conversations would be monopolized by her hemming and hawing over which shade to chose. He didn’t mind. He actually learned a lot during these times; for example he never knew there were so many variations of what presented to him as “purple”: mauve, indigo, fushia, lavender, plum, periwinkle…and to Nicole each was as different from the other as night was to day. (All this just to be scoffingly informed in the end that the color she chose was NOT purple but burgandy, a distinction lost on him that he could only shrug his shoulders at while she rolled her eyes at his lack of discernment.)

   She was also a total neat freak. She had an OCD-level compulsion to keep everything clean and tidy and just so, from her constantly dusted cabinet display of perfectly arranged crystal glasses to her immaculate bathroom with tri-folded hand towels. In her world things were put away immediately after their use, dishes were washed before they had a chance to accumulate in the sink, beds were never left unmade. This assiduous pursuit of order and tidiness resulted in a home that looked like those in catalogues or musuems; one usually saw rooms decorated with such precision only when the decorators knew they wouldn’t have to do it again. But she kept her house looking this way all the time, day after day, and she did it as a matter of course, seamlessly interwoven into her daily routines. Cleaning and organizing came as naturally to her as breathing with none of the anxiety or worry that afflict those with a true disorder about it. It almost seemed like a game she excelled at, and the smooth repetition required for such orderliness started to take on the aspect of talent in Frank’s mind. No one, after all, was going to call Michael Jordan anything but a beautiful genius for sinking yet another fadeaway jumper in the exact same effortless way he had hit it a thousand times before. And so it was that Nicole’s house was a testament to her single-minded drive, ensuring that someone could pop in at any time, without warning, and be confronted with perfection. (Frank had mostly been able to appreciate her gifts only through pictures of her home’s interior. There was the one time she let him in under the cover of night, but he had been too nervous to really appreciate the design choices she was trying to show him.)

   Frank’s place—and the way he kept it—contrasted profoundly with Nicole’s, to say the least. He had no sense of design or how to make a home feel inviting. Every piece of furniture was a castoff, discarded by friends or members of their family, accepted by Frank with an eye only toward their utility, resulting in rooms that had a patchwork or provisonal quality. Level surfaces became storage space for mail, books, notebooks, pens, coins—all the things that accumulate by simply existing. There was nothing to “put away” since wherever anything landed was its new permament spot, accordingly logged in Frank’s mental filing system. Whenever he wanted to find a specific item he usually knew which pile it was in. His home was cluttered and messy, sure, but it was HIS clutter and mess. He and Nicole liked to half-joke that he was messy but not dirty—an important distiction. Although things were starting to crop up that would seem to contradict that point: wall-to-wall carpeting that was old when he moved in, now ancient and never once cleaned; a layer of soap scum in the bathtub so thick that it would need to be scraped off, probably with a metal implement; ominous black stains on the walls in the corner of the living room, slowly expanding. There were little attempts by Nicole over the years to make his place seem more homey, a wall fixture or candleholder or attractive lamp, but in the end whatever she added to the mix only accentuated the disaster around it—a bright smear of crimson lipstick on a pretty disgusting pig.

   Needless to say, it was understood that Nicole wouldn’t be moving into his place, ever. Even if the apartment were deep cleaned and renovated and refurbished with up-to-date appliances and made to look modern and sleek, there simply wasn’t enough square footage to fulfill Nicole’s needs. She required ample space to decorate and to store her belongings—her clothes alone, already spilling out of the closet she was using now, would be a major consideration. Whenever they discussed cohabitation, usually in a dreamily contented post-coital state, it was with the understanding that neither his too-small apartment nor her house, which contained too much history, would be viable options. There was always in their hypothetical imaginings a third place they would live, and this place needn’t be a house, Nicole insisted, claiming that she’d be just as happy living in a condo or even an apartment, though one larger than a single-bedroom. (Even though her girls were soon to be on their own, there would need to be an extra bedroom for when they visited, she would muse.) When he expressed skepticism that she could downsize her home and remain happy, she doubled down and insisted that it was the truth, and it broke his heart a little to see her convincing herself that this was a pure and honestly arrived at preference instead of what it really was: a compassionate sensitivity to his meager finances. His straitened circumstances were too foregrounded to ignore even in fanciful daydreams of a life together, and he was made miserable by any hint of forgiveness for his inability to provide for them. He believed her when she said that being together would be the most important thing. He just wished that such assurances weren’t necessary in the first place.

   But now he had the ability to change things, or at least he was getting there. His holdings were worth about $140,000 at this point—appreciably more than the median net worth of US residents (a fact he was still struggling to wrap his mind around, having more money than half—half!—the households—the entire households! meaning more than one income in a lot of cases!—in the entire country), but still significantly less than the cost of an average house, which had been steadily rising in the last year or so and now hovered around $250,000. It was such an astronomical figure, the first tier of dollar amount to which the word “million” was commonly attached, and it was no less impressive for being “only” a quarter of it. But people bought houses all the time; about a decade ago they were practically giving them away if you believed the mythology about that reckless and profligate era. (Sure, it wreaked havoc on the global economy, but for being a supposedly wide-ranging global catastrophe, Frank felt little in the way of a direct effect on his life, and so he was prone to think of the whole bursted-bubble thing as a little overblown and exaggerrated by those who had lots of money to begun with and could afford to lose it.) So it seemed to him that home ownership would be within his grasp if he wanted it, if not now than in the inevitable near future.

   And if he decided that he did want a house, he knew exactly the one he wanted to get. He remembered the day vividly, he and Nicole driving around without agenda almost a decade ago, enjoying one of those cloudless, perfect summer days that never failed to make Nicole as happy as he had ever seen her. A flavored iced coffee with cream and splenda in her hand, an iced tea in his, the windows down, the wind blowing through their hair, and the car outpacing all their troubles. He heard her make a delighted noise—half yelp, half moan—before turning the car sharply down a driveway they had nearly passed. He asked what they were doing as she parked and got out, wordlessly beckoning him to follow her. As they approached the ranch house, she explained that she had noticed this place being built months ago and it appeared finished and ready to be put on the market if the realtor sign next to the road were any indication. She drew his attention to all the things she found cool or exceedingly cute about it, like the expansive veranda, the modern, open design that would allow in plenty of light, and the attached two-car garage that was the envy of all New England homeowners who had to suffer through winters without them. He pointed out that it lacked a second story, something her current house had and something that he knew she valued in a home. She countered that it probably had a good-sized basement, plus the ample lawn more than made up for it. She took his hand and they walked around the property, scoping out the rest of it. When they got to the back, he heard her gasp. The backyard was huge and there was a raised deck in a sort of alcove formed by the house’s U-shaped architecture. Dense woods lay beyond the yard and trees on both sides obscured the view of neighboring homes. Even Frank was impressed at how it managed to seem intimate and yet open to the world, giving the impression of being on an island or in a bubble floating on property that extended in a borderless fashion. He joked that if they lived here they could probably sunbathe nude on the deck and no one would be the wiser. Her eyes sparkled the way they always did when he said something lewd or mischeivous. As she turned back to look at the yard, a slight smile was on her face and he knew she was imagining the garden she would build, one a lot like the one she currently had outside her house, filled with perennials of the most colorful variety: Russian sage, oriental lillies, hydrangeas, coneflowers and more. She loved the activity of gardening as well as its resultant profusion; she would spend days mulching and digging on her hands and knees and getting as filthy as he’d ever seen her, but always finishing the day in a supremely contented state. She didn’t need to tell him how wonderful it’d be to live here and hang out on this back deck with the garden in full bloom and the sun going down and the dog running around and the two of them sitting side by side with an open bottle of zinfindel and two glasses. In that moment, it was a vision of happiness that they both shared.

   As they walked back toward the front of the house, they peered through the windows at the barren rooms, trying to get a sense of the layout. Everything was very clean and modern. The living room was especially impressive, with its hardwood floors and sleek-looking fireplace recessed into the wall. As they rounded the corner of the house they got a glimpse of a bathroom the likes of which Frank had never seen, at least in person. It was huge for starters with enough room in front of the sink and vanity to comfortably accomodate two people. All the fixtures were of the latest fashion and the marble finishing was of the highest quality. A four-legged porcelain bathtub set against one of the walls caught Nicole’s eye; she was an inveterate, if not semi-professional, taker of baths, always on the lookout for sweet-smelling bath salts and bubble bath solutions. But the thing that Frank could not turn his gaze from was the shower. In keeping with the rest of the house, it was an open design: no curtains, no sliding door, a half-wall providing the only border between the shower and the rest of the bathroom. It was large enough to feel like another space you were walking into, plus there was a rectangular block of travestine built into the corner that one could use as a bench. This seemed to Frank like the pinnacle of luxury and, if ever available to him, it would be something he knew he would never cease to enjoy. It immediately became for him a foremost distinction between the rich and poor: wealthy people could sit down in the middle of a shower, while the less well off had to stand the entire time.

   It was a fun afternoon of the kind of daydreams they frequently indulged in to take their minds off the more depressing aspects of their real lives. It didn’t take too long before the realtor sign was taken down and cars were seen parked in front of the property along with other evidence of habitation. For a while whenever they drove past the house they would express mock horror at how their house was now people by strangers. Nicole added that they were probably wrecking the inside too, making hideously unappealing aesthetic choices in there, if the chintzy flagpole they erected on the front lawn and the bright white rocks they filled the elegant stone flower beds with (rocks that could only be gotten rid of at great expense, she noted) were any indication of their tastes.

   For the first time in his life, it could be said that Frank was in the market for a house, but really it was just for that particular one. He would desultorily look at listings online and nothing he saw inspired him like the one he and Nicole had laid fanciful claim to. That afternoon had made an indelible impression on him, cathecting the house into something that heralded a fulfilling life for the two of them. In it he saw an unquestionable path to success and happiness; every other house, no matter how nice, seemed shrouded in uncertainty. Even as his holdings apprached a level that would enable him to buy a lot of the lower-priced houses outright, he still didn’t seriously consider any of them. His fixation on the ranch house with the incredible bathroom made him delay any final decision on the matter, which ended up proving fortunate in the end for a couple reasons.

   One, the value of bitcoin spiked after Thanksgiving, hitting $10,000 for the first time—the valuation he blindly believed it would achieve when he made his first purchase at a tenth of the price. No matter what happened from here, it was impossible to deny that bitcoin had proven to be a great investment and that he (or, more accurately, Joseph) had been one hundred percent correct about its potential. But with his expectations met, he found his appetite for gains had not been sated. He hungered for higher figures, and bitcoin did not disappoint. In early December, it continued its hot streak, and ten percent bumps in a single day were not uncommon. Frank found his net worth increasing by over twenty thousand dollars on those days, and to get almost his entire yearly salary in a 24-hour span in which he did absolutely nothing but sit back and let it happen was pretty insane to him. And it happened again and again over the course of the next two weeks. Needless to say, the price was no longer the least interesting thing about bitcoin.

   The second thing that happened coincided with the value of his stash topping three hundred thousand dollars shortly before Christmas. (At this point no figure surprised him that much, and three hundred thousand was noted without much internal fanfare. It started to seem like this thing could go up forever, so what was three hundred grand in the face of infinity?) He and Nicole were driving back to his place from her work, trying to take advantage of a short block of time they had after her shift, when she let out one of her patented squeals that never ceased to give Frank a heart attack. (He learned over the years that it was always hard on the passengers when the driver of a car emitted unexpected exclamations on the road, and he resolved that when he was a driver he woud be totally calm and collected for the benefit of all.) After getting over his fright, he looked to where Nicole was gesticulating and saw that they were passing the ranch house. He was about to ask her the reason for her outburst when he saw it: a realtor sign pitched into the ground near the road. For the rest of the ride, Nicole speculated for the umpteenth time about how nice it would be to live there, voicing all the scenarios that could land them together in that house, all the actions she could possibly take, both of them knowing she never would, at least under the current circumstances as she understood them. Ever since he formulated his own plan back in the fall, he stopped telling her the exact numbers of his situation, which she never remembered anyway. His windfall was too abstract and notional to take an active interest in; she was like the majority of the population who looked upon “digital currency” with extreme skepticism, as something having no real-life use cases and even a tenuous relationship to reality. The only thing they understood was the dollar, cold hard cash. (Not that anyone really understood that, either.) So while Nicole was wistfully daydreaming away about the house, Frank’s head was churning with ideas, ideas that could lead to actual consequences that even she would be unable to deny.

After he got home from spending Christmas with his parents (during which time he didn’t bring up his good fortune or his future plans; in fact, he had never once mentioned bitcoin to them, so as to avoid the inevitable lecture about how he was getting scammed) Frank scheduled a meeting with a representative at his bank to discuss a loan. He waltzed in on a cold and brisk day, a Tuesday, the day after the holiday, feeling so upbeat and optimistic that he would’ve been whistling if he hadn’t been one of those people who never learned how. Everything was pointing up and aligning so well that it was hard not to think that this was the master plan all along, just one he had not been privy to until now. He seemed fated to be here, in the position he was in, on this cloudless day with the sun shining as bright as his future. The world was broadcasting loud and clear that 2018 was going to be HIS year, finally.

   After sitting in the waiting room for a few minutes, a man with an impressively thick mustache approached him and introduced himself as Tom, his loan officer. They shook hands and Frank followed him into his office. They both took seats on opposite sides of a desk, and Frank was immediately offered coffee, which he refused. Tom made a crack about how Frank probably got his fill of the stuff at his work, and Frank wasn’t sure whether the man gleaned this information from the paperwork in front of him or recognized him in the way small town locals register the existence of those stalwart presences who maintain the same highly visible posts for a long time—the mail carriers, the pharmacists, the veterinarians, and the counter jockies like Frank, who’d been employed at the same place for so long he’d seen customers’ children grow into adults. He’d had plenty of interactions over the years with people who didn’t know his name but knew where he worked. (And he found himself doing the same, identifying people through their drink orders. Until she became so much more, Nicole was, to him, simply the large iced coffee with caramel swirl, cream, and four Splenda.) He wondered if the moves he was making would change the town’s perception of him, and a slight smile crossed his face at the thought of no longer being defined by coffee.

   The rapid clicking of a pen brought Frank’s attention back to the matter at hand. Tom wasn’t saying anything; he just stared at a sheet of paper he was holding up with one hand, his other hand at furious work clicking the pen in and out. With a scrunched up face he asked Frank if there were any additional sources of income he had neglected to disclose on his application. Frank shook his head. Tom’s expression got even more severe and his magnified eyes looked intense behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. More clicking. Frank started to consider the unforeseen. His pulse quickened and he could feel a build-up of sweat overwhelming his deodorant.

After a lengthy pause, Tom stopped clicking his pen and set the paperwork on the desk. He took a deep breath and exhaled without opening his mouth, expelling the air through his nostrils. In a curt, matter-of-fact way, he informed Frank that his loan application had been denied. Frank took a moment to process this before asking why. Tom said it was due to his lack of funds. This answer caused a minor short circuit in Frank’s brain and after he recovered he told Tom that he was under the assumption that a lack of funds was the reason people got loans in the first place. Tom patiently explained that the bank was, at the end of the day, a business and that it wouldn’t be very good business practice to extend credit to those who had no chance of paying them back. Frank reached over to his application and directed Tom’s attention to the lines where he had dutifully informed them of his bitcoin holdings and the money it represented that would allow him to cover any loan payment they put in front of him. In an anxious voice, Frank said that if it was a question of whether he actually had these assets, he could open up his Coinbase account right now and show them the balance. Tom dismissed this suggestion, informing Frank that, to be honest, the bank looked only at one’s yearly income to determine loan eligibility, and the figures on Frank’s last W-2 fell well short of the mark. With rapidly escalating desperation Frank pulled out his phone and tried to show Tom the Zillow listing of the house, explaining that the loan wouldn’t need to be its full value. Tom laughed in a haughty way that sounded almost derisive. He said that it just didn’t work that way, that prospective homebuyers came in first and then the bank determined the size of the loan based on the information they provided, and it was only after this determination had been made that the houses in their price range could be considered. The laugh and the clipped explanation had a chastening effect on Frank, like he was a little kid who had wandered into a playground game that he had inadvertantly broken the rules of and was now being taunted by the other kids. He could feel his face start to burn. In an attempt to recover his dignity, he threw out that he could practically buy the house outright, he just wanted a little help. Well, Tom said, that’s what he should do then. If, of course, those funds were legitimately available to him. Tom said he didn’t know much about this cryptocurrency stuff, but knew plenty of stories of the rug being pulled under people who put their life savings into it. Frank looked at the smug, condescending smile on Tom’s face and burned with anger. All his latent feelings of inadequacy were being put on display in front of this person he now despised. For an unreal moment, Frank thought he might actually create a scene and start shouting at the man.

   Then a weird, incongruous, and nakedly disturbing thought came into his head, the absurdity of which caused Frank to spontaneously chuckle. He was instantly becalmed, and he looked at Tom with newly lenitive eyes. Tom smiled back, mistaking his new attitude for aquiescence. The thought Frank had had was this: he might not have enough money for a house, but he surely had enough money for a hitman, if he wanted. Probably a pretty good one, too, one that would leave no trace of the body and stymie local authorities for years, if not forever. He could probably have this guy’s entire family killed as well. And the truth was that it’s hard to be resentful of someone whose life is potentially in your hands. It’d be like being angry at a trail of ants that you’re deciding whether to step on or not. THIS was as close—if not closer—to reality as anything Tom had just said, and it was what allowed Frank to walk out of the bank in a peaceful state of mind.

   Frank would reflect in the coming days on how the bank officer’s rejection of his loan request was completely justifiable in the grand scheme of things. After all, one of the postulations of those adopting the more extreme end of the pro-bitcoin stance—a position either extemely rational or extremely delusional, depending on whom you asked—was that should bitcoin become the world’s predominate medium of exhange, it would render traditional banks superfluous, quickly putting them out of business, and that this elimination of banks and their corrupt practices like fractional reserve banking would be a net positive for everyone on the planet. The loan officer, whether he knew it or not (and it was very likely he knew nothing about this stuff), was engaging in an oblique form of job security by not allowing his bitcoin holdings to influence a very regimented process that reinforced the bank’s ties to that which allowed it and everyone they employed to prosper, namely fiat currency—good old American greenbacks. And here Frank was barging into the guy’s office, flaunting the fact that he was on the verge of not needing what they had to offer, basically giving a middle finger to the time-honored financial traditions upheld so long and so fiercely by so many people that they’d become foundational. It was as though he had gone to a DUI hearing drunk, expecting leniency. In retrospect it was almost appropriate that he was essentially laughed out of the bank.

   It still made him plenty mad though, and he was more resolved than ever to see his plan to fruition.

   He set up an afternoon meeting with the realtor to be officially shown the house, which was fortunately still on the market. As he walked up to the house at the designated time, he saw a man wearing a parka standing by the front door. There was a noticable pause before he shook Frank’s hand.

Upon entering, they were enveloped in a blanket of warmth, the realtor having the consideration to turn the heat on beforehand, and they were able to take off their coats. Frank was guided through the rooms he had seen through the windows, while also being shown the bedrooms, basement area, and garage. They walked over hardwood floors that gleamed. Frank was shown all the seller’s attempts to make the place more enticing: a brand new water heater, the recently refinished porch, the latest model refridgerator and the newly installed granite countertops. Everything looked new, clean, barren. Rooms full of promise, exciting in their potential. (He knew most of the nods toward decorative flair—a framed print of a sailing boat in the den, the torquoisey chandalier hanging in the dining room, even the knobs of the cabinets in the kitchen—would be replaced by Nicole anyway.) It was more space than Frank had ever had to deal with in his life.

   At some point the realtor let Frank wander around alone, claiming he liked to let the place speak for itself. Frank padded through the rooms in a way that affected aimlessness, though he was making his way toward the one room he was dying to get a closer look at. When he entered the bathroom, it took his breath away all over again. It felt even more spacious than it did from outside, bigger than his current bedroom, and there were things he didn’t notice before, like the double sink and temperature controls on the wall to heat the floor. To him, the freestanding bath was ridiculously opulent and all the lighting in the room from the general overhead to the backlight around the mirrors to the spotlight accents pointing toward the shower were controlled by dimmer switches. He walked over to the shower and enterered it, unimpeded. It felt like its own separate space, almost an entirely new room inside the room, and he couldn’t wait to give it a try. He might have even availed himself of a quick shower if a towel had been hanging on the very modern wall rack, which looked like two stylistic orthogonal S’s on top of each other and was also heated like the floors.

   Frank tried to imagine what it would be like to use this bathroom every day. It was difficult, like imagining what it would be like to date a celebrity, the day in, day out-ness of it. One either lived that kind of life or didn’t, had certain things or never knew of them at all. And Frank supposed that those lucky enough to wake up and discover that this was their life got used to it after a while, took for granted the heated floors and the walk-in showers and driving a lambo and hosting yacht parties and seeing their hot supermodel girlfriends naked. All things constant eventually become unremarkable. But Frank was still hungry and rambunctious and not yet inured to anything worth a damn in this life. It was time for him to eat, finally, lustily, and he would, oh he would, he was never more sure of it, standing in that shower.

He found the realtor by the front door, engrossed in his phone, his parka back on. Frank had worn the nicest things he had, khakis and a button-up shirt, but was still severely underdressed compared to the realtor’s suit and tie. The realtor glanced up as Frank approached, handed him his coat, and breezily asked if he was all set while simultaneously reaching for the doorknob. There was always a purposeful and unidirectional force one could feel around the business-minded, an impatient energy born of being continunally harried by the next thing, life for them a never-ending series of next things, imminent and urgent. These people seemed to thrive on it, while normal people like Frank felt no small amount of anxiety in its presence. So it gave Frank a delicious thrill to derail this train going a million miles an hour. Frank told him he WAS all set and that he would take it. The realtor chortled and said wouldn’t they all as he opened the front door. “No,” Frank said, “I want to buy this place. Right now. Today.”

   The realtor slowly closed the door and looked at Frank. Okay, he said. Could he see some preliminary paperwork from an accredited bank indicating some sort of loan approval? Frank shook his head. In cash, he said. The look in the realtor’s eyes didn’t so much change as remain unnaturally frozen. It was clear that his assessement of Frank had been the opposite of Frank’s assessment of the house, and he wasn’t quite ready to give up that initial impression. Well, he said. The asking price was $350,000. Frank said that he understood, and that it sounded fine. A new staring contest took place. The realtor broke first, pulling out his phone. Fine, he said. For an unexpected cash bid, he’d have to call the buyer. Frank moved across the room, letting him talk in privacy. After a few minutes of intense sussuration, the realtor approached Frank and told him that the buyer was receptive to the offer but wanted to take the highly unusual tack of meeting Frank first, face to face. Frank said he saw no problem with that. The realtor said Good. He’d be there in ten minutes.

   When the front door opened twelve minutes later, in walked one of the most impressive-looking men Frank had seen in a while. He was an older gentleman, but the kind one wouldn’t be surprised to learn had always looked older than he was, entering adulthood instantly grizzled and fully formed and maintaining that appearance for the next fifty years. His thick silver hair was slicked back, and the darker strands running through it created a tarnished effect. He was surprisingly beardless, which exposed more of his leathery skin, creased and deeply tan. Despite the cold, he was wearing a short-sleeved button up shirt with a recurring palm tree pattern, tufts of chest hair sprouting from where the top was left unbottoned. It was safe to say that he would not be included in a representative cross section of the town’s residents. Frank could picture this guy taking permanent residence at some tropical resort, a cigar and drink perpetually in hand, a man out of time almost—a perfectly preserved specimen from the last generation for which cigarettes and alcohol seemed to have a salubrious effect, making some of them seem more radiant, cool, and asssured—complete, really—for their entire lives, until they died at an enviable age that began with the number nine, more or less in the same condition they were in from the beginning.

   The man walked briskly over to where the two of them were waiting by the fireplace. He made a slight head-tilting motion toward the realtor as if to ask “Is this him?” followed by a slight dismissive movement of his wrist and fingers as if to say “Ahh, of course it is.” He zeroed right in on Frank, who was immediately taken aback by the man’s intense slate-gray eyes. He extended his hand and shook Frank’s firmly, in a way that Frank could tell showed restraint. The smile he had on his face was like the rest of him: unplacable, at least not without more context. He said his name was  Gustav, and Frank resisted saying Of course it was. Frank introduced himself and automatically took a step back in deference to everyone’s personal space. Gustav did not move; instead, he stood there staring at Frank with those intense eyes, a barely perceptible flicker of his gaze the only indication that his intention was not intimidation but rather to take the full measure of the man he was meeting with. The three of them were silent for many long moments.

   Finally, Gustav’s mien softened somewhat and he turned to the realtor and shrugged. He mused aloud that if Frank had the money, he would be perfectly willing to take it and there was no need for much further discussion. He looked toward Frank and addressed him again, conceding that a part of him was more than moderately curious about how Frank had managed to attain this level of financial possibility. Frank assured him that his money was legal tender in every sense, but Gustav waved his hand dismissively. He told Frank that if every dollar he received were an absolutely moral one, he’d be a much poorer man. He told the realtor to gather the necessary papers and that he would do the same, and that they would close the deal as soon as possible.

   With the meeting coming to an end, Frank blurted out that he was wondering if they could negotiate on the price a little. The two men just looked at him. Frank said that since Gustav would be getting the total amount for the house in such a timely and unambiguous way, that maybe a discount would be in order. Gustav exchanged a glance with the realtor before turning his inscrutable face toward Frank. He took an ironic pause before stating that he’d be lying if he said that Frank reminded him of himself at a younger age. He added that there was probably a lot he wouldn’t ever know about Frank, and that the face Frank was presenting to the world had baked into it a fair amount of deception. But he himself was no stranger to dissimulation, a disclosure made with breezy nonchalance as if it were a simple statement of fact and not the sheepish defense against the charge of hypocrisy that a less assured man might make. Gustav stared into the fireplace, deep in thought, which spared Frank the impossibility of trying to meet his gaze. It was the first time Frank had ever heard someone use the word “dissimulation.” (With a heavy accent, no less.) When Gustav turned back to Frank, his eyes were clear and his jaw was set with purpose. He told Frank that he often made decisions both personal and financial based on nothing more than gut feeling and that since his intuitions had rarely steered him wrong he continued to trust them. Frank thought it more likely that Gustav made assmptions or declarations and that the rest of the world fell in line, forced to conform to his version of reality. What, Frank asked, did Gustav’s gut tell him to do in this circumstance? Gustav grinned and said his gut set the price at $325,000–take it or leave it. Frank nodded and Gustav let out a short laugh and reached over and awkward patted Frank near his shoulder: a parody of avuncularity that was the only false note in their interaction.

   It was on that note they parted. (When they were outside, Gustav asked Frank where he had parked and when Frank told him he had walked there, he saw the first glimmer of doubt on the man’s face and he prayed that Gustav’s gut would carry the day for another week or so.) When Frank got home he opened up his Coinbase account, went to his bitcoin holdings, clicked “sell” followed by “maximum amount,” and let his finger hover over the confirmation button. He had finally reached the decision he had been looking forward to but also dreading. He felt that overbthe years he had honestly bought into the arguments for bitcoin being a transformative digital asset. He believed that it was a force of good in the world, a thing whose mass adoption would benefit humanity at large. Something that could hold governments and banks accountable, finally. A truly democratic form of money, offering everyone on the planet access to a financial system that was censorship-resistant, permissionless, and devoid of greedy intermediaries or counter-party risk. Liquidating everything now felt like a betrayal of the ideals he had cultivated for the last four years, especially since the btc was being converted into a fiat currency everyone could agree was debased and depreciating rapidly. Bitcoin had always felt like hope, and selling it felt like an abandonment of a future beatitude. It was no real surprise that cashing out now made him feel a little sick.

   But he was also sick of being poor. He tapped the sell button and was instantly awash in the topsy-turvy feeling that he assumed all skydivers were chasing. The funds were immediately available and he authorized the transfer to his bank account as fast as he could, praying that the inscrutable forces that dictated the flow of money—which no one really understood—would not fail him at this crucial moment. He would be constantly checking his online account until the money was deposited.

He didn’t have to wait long. The next day there was a very atypical line in his account activity: a plus sign followed by an astronomical figure. He had purchased 23.46255778 bitcoin for $12,000 and sold it all for $16,521.17 per. After Coinbase took their cut, the amount he was left with was $379,734.89. Which is what was deposited into his account, an over 3000% return on his investment. He stared at the number, trying to feel something unscrambled. He actually had some money in the account that he would’ve bought bitcoin with that week, pushing his balance over three hundred and eighty grand. He had never been confronted with a bigger disconnection from the only life he had ever known. He had gone from having no money in the bank and a couple thousand in credit card debt to this. There were manifold ways of looking at a number this big, and he took the measure of all of them. The median net worth of American households was $104,000. Which meant that in four years he had gone from a negative net worth to having more money than 75% of the people living in the richest country that had ever existed in the history of the planet. He had substantially more money than even most of those who owned houses, which was the most common way to accrue wealth; homeowners had a median net worth of $269,000. And this metric was taking into account HOUSEHOLDS, meaning the combined assets of multiple people in many cases. He had managed to do this as a single guy who had never made more than $11 an hour. In order to save this amount of money from his salary alone, he would’ve had to eat ramen and not go out and not spend money on either himself or loved ones and be as frugal as possible while saving every last freaking cent, and he would’ve had to do it for 126 years.

Were you even supposed to have this much money in one account? Wasn’t it only insured up to $250,000?

   As early as that evening, when he had become semi-acclimated to his new financial standing in the world, Frank found his thoughts rather depressingly turning to how he could have further maximized this insane windfall. There were credit cards he could’ve maxed out. There were still things in his apartment he could’ve sold. He could’ve moved into a cheaper place and easily used the hundreds of extra dollars a month to double his investment, which would’ve of course doubled his return. He curled up in bed and wrapped himself up in his sheets, sinking into despair as he thought of the big what ifs: what if he hadn’t been such a loser, working a job any high schooler could get? what if he had had a regular job—more than a job, a profession—that gave him steady raises and paid him a salary commensurate with other skilled and experienced workers nearing forty? what if he’d already had significant cash savings with which to invest on day one? He experienced the regrets all successful investors have, excoriating themselves for not buying sooner, bigger, oftener. It took him until three in the morning to reach a couple soothing conclusions that allowed him to fall into a peaceful slumber for the rest of the night. One, if he’d had a good job and money in the bank already, there’s no way he would’ve bought any bitcoin whatsoever. He would’ve felt like he had already won, and he wouldn’t have seen bitcoin as an opportunity but as a risk to all his hard-earned and well-deserved prosperity. In fact, a case could be made that he was currently better off now than he would’ve been if he had a great job. After all, even if he made so much money that he could pocket some huge amount in savings, say twenty thousand a year, it’d still take him, what, nineteen years to save what he had now? The irony that his shitty job could be the thing that saved him in the end was too delicious not to chuckle at a little, alone in his bed in the middle of the night. And two, he had to remember that he didn’t do this to get wealthy. He did it to catch up to where he should’ve been had he been more fiscally responsible throughout the years. He’d always just wanted to be part of the middle class, and he had accomplished that and more. He had to remind himself that he should be happy, and he was. The hypotheticals rattling around in his head imopinging on his happiness were nothing more than greed and a propensity for dissatisfaction souring what should be a triumphant moment. The condition of always wanting more was rooted in a dismissal of what one already had, and it was a trap Frank was not going to allow himself to fall into. He was getting his first taste of how people could get inured to anything—even, or especially, success—and he found that he didn’t like it one bit. It was a choice to be grateful in the face of good fortune, and he would be grateful for what had happened, eternally so, if possible, and this decision would set his querulous mind at ease on otherwise sleepless nights.

On the subject of gratitude, Frank found it impossible not to extend it to two men in particular. The first was Joseph, of course. Without him Frank would probably still be in the dark about bitcoin even now in 2018. Joseph normalized for Frank this extremely esoteric asset, allowing him to get in early enough for it to have some positive effect on his life going forward. And he didn’t even want a finder’s fee or any remuneration, because they were true friends. The older Frank got the more he realized what a rare commodity that was, to have giving, selfless people on your side who were truly invested in your well-being and whose bond with you only strengthened over time, their loyalty like compounding interest over the years. Joseph, undeniably, was one of those friends, and he’d had such an outsized positive effect on Frank’s life that it was impossible not to feel gratitude.

   The other man might not even be a man, or a single person. Satoshi Nakamoto could be anyone or anything: a duo, a conglomerate, a whole think tank. Whatever this nebulous entity was, the white paper it shared with the world nine years ago created something out of nothing, something totally new that was unstoppable, undeniable: a tamper-resistant, totally decentralized digital currency that currently had a market cap of over 250 billion dollars. It was taking the world’s financial system by storm, and it all started with an eight-page document with a handful of footnotes. With 3600 words, he or she or they or it changed innumerable lives, Frank’s included. Frank would be hard-pressed to cite someone known to him or not who’d had a bigger impact on his life, not without going directly to the source of life itself: his parents, the first single-celled organisms, God. Mr. Nakamoto (as it were) was directly responsible for putting Frank in a position to finally start his life now, when he was halfway through it. Frank felt the human need to shake this entity’s hand, to introduce him to Nicole, to have dinner together and just say over and over again, Thank you. He went so far as to consider the feasibility and appropriateness of constructing some sort of permanent shrine to Satoshi in his home, now that he was about to have more room than he would ever personally need. (Nicole would probably have something to say about that.)

   The next couple weeks were taken up by a flurry of paperwork and two drawn-out meetings that were way longer than Frank felt was necessary. The first one was at a car dealership. It took him all of ten minutes to browse the lot and pick out a brand new Toyota Corolla, based on little more than it was black and what the internet deemed “reliable,” on sale for $16,500. The dealer was more than happy to get him seated in his office as he drew up the paperwork, and Frank spent the better part of an hour refusing everything the dealer had to offer him from coffee to extended warranties to various surface protections. Even after it was made clear that Frank wanted nothing more than the car as it was, there were things to sign, forms to fill out. Frank, who was used to just going into stores and buying things (even checking himself out in a lot of cases) and walking out as quickly as possible, thought he would be able to avoid a lot of this tedious paperwork by paying for the car outright, but apparently owning a car was a momentous transaction for both parties that required the solemn tradition of signing your name over and over. And of course when it came time to pay and Frank handed over his debit card, the card was declined, and Frank had to take the last bus rides he hoped to ever take to go to his bank, get a cashier’s check (which necessitated even more paperwork), and go back to the dealership. By the time Frank had ownership of the car and was driving off the lot, the sun was setting and the fatigue of doing an all-day activity made the fact that he was driving himself back home feel even more surreal to him. The car, the money, the life—everything felt borrowed and he had to constantly remind himself that it was his. His new reality was something that had to conform and bend to his will, not the other way around as had been the case for so many years. It was something he was looking forward to getting used to.

   If the procedure to buy a car seemed overly convoluted, Frank found that buying a house was positively labyrinthine. Even before the official closing date the realtor sent Frank packets of forms to peruse and sign. While the cash purchase obviated a lot of financial disclosures on Frank’s part, not to mention the customary need to have homeowner’s insurance, usually required by the bank issuing the loan, there was still a lot to get through to establish ownership. Frank did his best to expedite the process by waiving any third-party appraisals and holding off on the home insurance for now. Still, there was form after form after form. On the official closing date, Frank sat with the realtor (and an additonal attorney acting on behalf of Gustav) in a stuffy office for another three hours as legal documents were passed back and forth. The stack of papers in front of Frank slowly grew and in the end he was left with a big sheaf that included information about the house, receipts and confirmations of wire transfers, and the deed to the property, confirming once and for all that the house was his. Lastly, all the keys were handed over, somewhat unceremoniously. Frank had expected to feel a certain way about this moment, but the keys looked like any others to him, nondescript and unremarkable, and failed to signify anything other than an end to what proved to be a horribly tedious process. By the time Frank wearily stood up to leave, the thing he was most elated about was getting out of the uncomfortable chair he had been sitting in for hours. He limply shook the hands of the realtor and lawyer, both of whom seemed to be doing their best to pretend that they weren’t as bored and exhausted as he was, and trudged out of the office.

   He felt a little better as he hit the road and, twirling the keys in his hand, headed over to his new home. He pulled into the driveway and parked in front of the house for the first time as its owner. The sun had set and the lack of any illumination inside the house erased all the details of the building’s facade, turning it into a solid block of inky shadow as darkness set in. Frank walked up to the front door, turned the key, and entered. He hit the light switch in the kitchen and let his gaze ease over the areas of the room that the diffuse light revealed. He grasped the counter of the kitchen’s island. He turned the faucet on and off using the sensor on its curved spout. He bent down and felt the fine grain on the hardwood floor. He wanted to touch every square inch of the house. Yes, it was true that they were well into a digital era, but he grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s when everything was tangible. When playing a game meant pulling one out of a cabinet and moving physical pieces around and having everything that was necessary to play the game already in the box without further need of a microtransaction. When listening to music entailed running your fingers over an album cover and opening up a little book and reading lyrics and liner notes, and even before that removing the cellophane cover from a jewel case, which made every new CD feel like opening a Christmas present, and carefully removing the label on top with the name of the band and the album on it, peeling it off slowly so it wouldn’t leave a permanent sticky residue on the case, and thinking how cool it was when everyone started using a clear, transparent spine instead of the dark, oddly grooved one. How to even explain those tactile times to someone who did not experience them? The need to touch and hold a loved one—which the current younger generation had thankfully not abandoned—extended to EVERYTHING. Frank had done his best to adapt to this incorporeal age, to go along with the concept that imperceptible things had value, to be “hip” and “with it” enough not to seem like a dinosaur to those who seemed effortlessly cool simply because their birth year began with a two and who carried out their lives primarily online. But damn it, for as much as he believed in the revolutionary power of all those invisible zeros and ones—especially as it pertained to bitcoin—he had to admit that a part of him felt a great relief in trading his magic internet money for THIS, something solid, something he could see and touch and smell and walk around in. Something he could press against and feel press against him in response, his brain unable to interpret that Newtonian interaction of friction and pressure as anything other than comforting, blissful reality. Step into it.

   He took the two plastic bags he had brought in with him into the bathroom. He set the bags on the counter and took cleaning supplies out of one of them: a spray cleaner with bleach, a couple rolls of paper towels, rags, sponges, and rubber gloves. He spent the next hour deep cleaning the bathroom. When he was done, he opened the second bag and took out a change of clothes, a towel, a bar of soap, and a bottle of shampoo. He undressed and stepped into the shower. He rotated the knob in the wall as far as it would go and a steady cascade of water came out of the large rectangular showerhead and drizzled onto him. He wet his hair and closed his eyes and tilted his head up. The water felt like light rainfall on his face. He leaned back, out of the stream, letting water hit his chest and the rest of his body. He opened his eyes and found himself staring into a cloudless night through a skylight window he hadn’t realized was there. The stars a hundred pinpricks of light. He gave his body a cursory wash and went over and sat on the marble bench in the corner of the shower. He didn’t bother to turn off the water and just sat there on the bench with his back against the wall, listening to the soothing patter of drops on the tile. He looked up at the sky again but the window was fogged over from the steam. He had turned the light up to only about 25% of its maximum luminance using the dimmer switch. He sighed deeply and stretched his arms behind him, placing his hands on the bench to prop himself up. It felt like the culmination of something, an end point. But the best kind of ending, the kind that segued into a new beginning. He thought about the next day and the day after that. He luxuriated in the present while looking forward to the future. For the first time in a while, he thought that his happiness might have no limit. He wondered how long that feeling would last. But he didn’t wonder about it too long. There were still things to do.

III.

At this point, Valentine’s Day was so close that Frank wondered whether he shouldn’t wait until then. But it fell on a Wednesday this year, and the middle of the week oftentimes proved tricky to schedule meet-ups with any reliability. And so when Nicole called on the morning of the tenth, a Saturday, and said she would probably be able to hang out with him that evening, he decided not to wait until their customary Monday afternoon meeting. Now was the time, and he spent the rest of the day making preparations.

   When next she called, at around 8:30 at night, she was in her car heading over to his apartment. The plan was that she would pick him up and they would go shopping at the plazas in town. He told her that, to save time, he had made his way to the plazas already and that she should meet him there. She expressed surprise at this very unusual move from him, and after he assured her that he was already at the stores she headed toward him while they were on the phone. He made his way to the front of the TJ Maxx while they talked and waited for her there. When she pulled into the space next to his Corolla, he smiled. She got out of her car and approached him, smiling back as they both put away their phones. She asked again why he was already here and he shrugged. She apologized for being late and he said he didn’t mind, which is what he always said but this might have been the first time he meant it. She said they had a couple hours though, and he nodded.

   When she turned to go into the store, he grabbed her arm and she gave him a questioning look. He tilted his head toward the parking lot and told her to follow him as he guided them back to her car. She unlocked the doors and he got in the passenger seat and waited for her to open the driver’s side and get in. After she was seated, he leaned over and kissed her. When they pulled away, he saw the sparkle in her eyes dancing, her jubilant smile. She said that this was a nice idea and that she was happy to see him. He squeezed the hand that always seemed to be in his when others had no idea. He told her to leave the phone in her car and she obeyed without question.

   Getting out of her car put him right next to his. He stood there, not moving. She noticed he wasn’t following her to the store and looked back at him. She narrowed her eyes and called out for him to come on. In response, he took his keys out of his pocket, unlocked his car, and got in the driver’s seat. He waited several seconds for her to approach the car and open the passenger’s side. He looked over at her standing there, her confusion containing a million questions. He said nothing and instead straightened his gaze and looked out the windshield with an involuntary smirk. He felt as if he were floating.

   After she tentatively got in, he started the car and pulled out of the parking space. She was trying to get some answers out of him but could not quite finish one question before another superseded it, and so was left sputtering a series of overlapping interrogatory words. He laughed and told her she should buckle. When they were on the road, he told her to open up his wallet, which he had left on the dash. She did and saw his driver’s license conspicuously placed inside it. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye as comprehension seeped into her expression. He had kept from her everything: relearning to drive, selling the bitcoin, everything. Saving it for a surprise. He asked, as casually as he could, whether she liked his car. She didn’t say anything immediately. He stopped at a red light and looked over at her. Tears were streaming down her face. She reached over and hugged him around his neck, hard. A steady stream of endearments flowed from her mouth. He was momentarily taken aback, but he understood. She thought he had taken the first step toward real change, something that would benefit them both, as a couple. It was a statement of his belief in a unified them. And also a signal that he was willing to do the work. But she did not yet know. The change had already occured.

   He drove them to the house. He parked in the driveway and turned to her in a deliberate fashion. She chuckled softly, certain she knew what was happening. She expected him to say Someday. She thought new dreams would replace old ones—or slightly modify them—and she was happy about that. It was enough for her. His heart broke a little as he fully recognized how much she had always wanted for him, for them, and yet never demanded anything. She loved him, and the years they had spent together but separate had been as hard on her as it had been on him. He paused to reflect on the history of their relationship leading up to this moment. He almost wanted to stay in the car with her forever. Fear of action often stemmed from a reluctance to ruin either the perfection in one’s head or the imperfect but acceptable status quo. Additionally, his natural impulse was to think of worst case scenarios and allow them to paralyze him, though that did not pertain here. Everything had already happened, and they were good things, and all he was nervous about was unveiling these good things that had happened. There were no more decisions to be made, and it felt liberating to be rid of them. People spend most of their lives deliberating about unrealized choices, possibilities that are either nonexistant or unviable due to a lack of courage. But taking action makes you part of the natural world. Actions freed from the shackles of choice are aligned with forces of nature, acts of God, things whose purpose we are not expected to understand, leaving us only to react to what has been wrought. He was being swept up in what was occuring, things that were his doing. And it felt good.

   He got out of the car and went over to the passenger’s side and opened the door for her. She got out, confused but ready to follow his lead. He took her hand and they walked up the pathway to the front door. He pulled out his keys and opened the door and indicated to her with a flourish that she should enter. Her face had arrived at that total blankness of expression that lies beyond mere surprise, when neither suspicion nor presentiment had been harbored. She entered the house taking syncopated steps, seeming both drugged and remote controlled. They were greeted by a room illuminated only by candlelight, still bare save for the few things he had set out for the occasion. There was an A-frame chalkboard sign with a message he had written on it. Wine glasses and a bottle of champagne on the floor next to a pile of comforters and a pair of pillows. A dozen roses wrapped in cellophane. Speakers placed around the room, controlled by his phone, which he was now using to play an Alicia Keys song that held special meaning for them. She stood stock still, probably just taking it all in but with a clenched intensity, her breath all inhalation; she looked as if she were trying to remain composed through a medical emergency. He wrapped his arms around her from behind as she read the sign in the flickering light. The ambience was perfect and well worth the risk he took in leaving candles burning unattended in his new house. What he had written in chalk started with “Angel, welcome to our new home.” After she read the rest of the sign, she turned to him with aqueous eyes and a look on her face that was heartrending and poignant and almost abject in nature, and she buried her head into his shoulder and sobbed and sobbed. He held her, unspeaking.

   He let her cry for a bit, and then he gently took her by the the hand and moved to show her around the rest of the house. She would have none of it. She kissed him ferociously, animalistically, and before he knew it he had her pressed up against the wall. Their hungry mouths mashed twistingly together without once coming up for air as they pulled and peeled and tore off the pieces of clothing that were most obstructive to their mutual need. He entered her and thrust hard, harder. She lifted one of her legs, her foot trying to find purchase on his hamstring. He cupped her buttocks with both hands and let out an involuntary growl, and they rutted for a while against the wall. She kissed him and bit his lip and dug her nails into his back, all the while making sounds of exasperated frustration. She pushed him away and they stumbled to the bedding on the floor and fell onto it—a bit too wantonly as one of his knees crashed into the hardwood floor. Pain shot through him and she saw it happen but they were too consumed with desire to laugh about it. He immediately took her from behind, slamming into her with no heed for force or rhythm. As was often the case from this position, her unbridled cries seemed to indicate that she was about to come, and he thought she really might this time. Her elbows buckled and she stretched her arms forward, above her head, as if in worship. She buried her head in the pillow to muffle her yelps even though there were no longer any neighbors with shared walls to disturb or intrigue. (Not that either of them ever cared anyway.) Her knees slowly slid away from each other and her raised bottom got lower and lower and he felt like he always ended up feeling from this vantage: that he was pounding something as malleable as clay into the ground. By this time they were both sweating profusely in a room whose heaters he had made sure to turn up before they got there. He was starting to get lightheaded, though pleasantly so. He grabbed her waist and rotated her onto her back and got on top of her and continued thrusting. Their slick skin provided no friction and he invariably inched his way up as he slid in and out of her so that she was facing his chest, an alignment concordant with something he had read god knows where as a juvenile, some article or something about the most pleasurable angles for the woman; who knows if it was even true but it was something that he never forgot. His hand at first cradled her head then balled into a fist, grabbing copious amounts of her thick hair that he always wanted to pull, especially as the noises she made became more urgent. Her pelvis jerked up to meet his, over and over, and it sounded like two waterlogged objects slapping into each other. Her cries had reached a volume and pitch where it would be hard to tell without context whether they were a reaction to pleasure or pain. He made a half-hearted attempt to place her legs on his shoulders; he had had an inchoate notion of doing every possible position with her but he was too far along to last much longer and he knew she had not yet had an orgasm. So he flipped her over again and got on his back and she mounted him and immediately started grinding. She could only stand doing this for a few seconds before she straightened her legs and lowered her torso, assuming the only position in which she could come, historically. She propped herself up with her elbows and her face was above his and he felt the telltale grinding rhythm that always seemed to him suprisingly slow. She closed her eyes and her face scrunched up in concentration. He lifted up to provide more pressure (another thing that he wasn’t sure helped) and traced his fingers up her back and lightly caressed her neck (which he was absolutely sure did).  She gasped and caught her breath and there was no sound and then a sudden outburst, the sound of great resistance being overcome. Involuntary convulsions. Her face twisted up in an ecstacy that looked mostly like she had reached the end of a strenuous ordeal. Her hair sometimes fell over her face in this moment, which he always wanted to brush away though he rarely did, fearful that any extraneous movement would ruin it for her, but this time her face was in full unobstructed view and he witnessed all the twitches and creases and expressions so few had been allowed to see as she left the world for a momentary journey of total abandon. He was unable to help feeling a weird pride, every time, about releasing this store of hidden passion inside her, like an atom was being split inside of her and he was its discoverer. She collapsed on him and he felt her breasts flatten against his chest. He held her and heard her whisper that it was his turn. There were numerous positions in which he could finish and he picked one more or less at random, directing her to lie down next to him, facing away. With his face buried in her hair and both hands grasping her breasts, he would not last long, and as he crossed the moment of no return he grabbed her hips and slammed into her as hard as he could, knowing from extensive experience how many herculean thrusts he was able to get away with before the moment of sweet release. When that moment came, he allowed himself to slip out of her and immediately shot white globular strands all over her back as he gradually regained cognizance of the world. They lay in their communal dampness for a while, not speaking, as their breathing returned to normal.

   She turned around to face him and they smiled at each other and before she could say a word he got on his feet and helped her up and led her into the bathroom. More candles, and he had drawn a bath and covered the top with fresh red rose petals. She was again overwhelmed and said it was perfect, not with singsongy flattery but with the hushed awe one adopts when on the border of belief. He said they should take a quick shower; he even remembered to bring her shower cap so her hair wouldn’t get wet. They got in and laughed in the simulated rain and kissed, tenderly, roughly, and had more sex because they wanted to and the capacious shower made it so easy. They fucked against the tiled wall and she bent over with her hands on the marble bench and they fucked some more and he came again and she stepped into the shower stream and easily rinsed his semen off her back and down the drain. They toweled off and he drained half the bath and turned the hot water knob and added some bubble mix and as the tub was refilling he went to the living room and retrieved the champagne bottle and wine glasses and went back the bathroom and asked her if she rememebered the glasses. Of course she did. She had bought them for him thirteen years ago, for an ostensible Valentine’s Day gift even though they had not done anything yet, not even kissed. But they knew they were going to, and he knew even more than that, and she probably did too.

   He popped the champagne bottle—the first time he’d ever done so. It went okay. She asked him to make a toast. He thought for a second and said To our future becoming our present. He frowned a little and gave her a half-shrug and she said it was perfect and they locked eyes as they imbibed the drink. They eased themselves into the bath and he held her as they sipped champagne. He told her that he had initially been horrified about the wine glasses she had bought him. They seemed so fragile and delicate, the glass so thin that it wouldn’t survive a toast, the stem the width of a dandelion’s. He thought she was testing him, seeing how much care he would take with something she gave him and, by extension, how much he cared about her. She laughed and said that wasn’t her intention at all. He told her that nevertheless that was how he regarded them. So he had carefully placed the glasses on the top shelf of a cupboard he never opened, to ensure they would remain intact and be everlasting proof of his dedication to her. They remained silent in loving embrace and she wiped her eyes and asked him how many times he was going to make her cry tonight.

   They got out of the tub and dried themselves off and walked around the house, feet bare on the hardwood floors, hand in hand as he showed off the rest of the house. They popped into the garage for a quick look and he noted how indispensible it would be during winters. They viewed the back patio through the sliders and imagined what the summer days would be like. She mentioned all the things they could do to decorate the kitchen and living room and bedrooms, as he knew she would. He saw her acclimating in real time to his new world, and in so doing creating a prospective world they would share. A world devoid of “could’ve, should’ve”s and the two of them in a constant state of arousal, in the middle of the night, in the afternoon, in the early morning.

   She saw the time on the stove clock and reluctantly said she had to leave. He said that she really didn’t, and he was serious but not overbearing on this point. They had been walking around in dishabille and she gathered up her clothes from off the floor near the front door, putting on each garment as she found it. He got on his hands and knees and crawled over to her in a comically exaggerated fashion. He pulled down her underwear and stuck his tongue in her. She laughed at first and kept backing up and he kept moving forward until they reached a wall. With this immovable surface to brace her, he was able to pleasure her with real force, sucking and licking and introducing his fingers at some point. She put her hands on his head and then his shoulders and made whinnying sounds and he once again thought she might be on the verge of coming but she didn’t. She finally pushed him away and quickly threw on the rest of her clothes and he chased her around the room and they were both laiughing and the most happy they had been in a long time and when he caught her he held her and told her she couldn’t leave, that he wouldn’t let her. The threat was made half-heartedly, the routine repeated so often by this point it was rote. They kissed slowly, languidly, as if in an effort to slow time. Eventually, with more than the usual reluctance, they headed out the door.

   When they were outside, he remembered that he had to drive her back to her car, a fact that she had also forgotten, and they laughed about this new predicament. All the way back she held his free hand with both of hers and every time he looked over at her she was staring at him, her eyes an infinite pool of inscrutable feelings. Neither wanted to profane the moment with words, or maybe they just couldn’t think of anything to say that hadn’t already been said, he didn’t know which it was.

   He pulled up alongside her car and she told him to get out. She opened the passenger’s side door of her car and told him to get in and she walked around and got in the driver’s seat. She started her car and fiddled with her phone and looked up at him and put her forefinger vertically across her lips. He heard a ringing sound signaling the bluetooth had connected to her phone and a call was being made. He heard a voice he recognized say Hey and he froze. She said in an elevated voice that she was done shopping and was heading home. The voice said okay see you soon. She said a man’s name with an unmistakable sternness. The voice said yeah what?

   “We need to talk when I get home,” Nicole said. “It’s over, it’s done. We are done. We both know it’s been over for a while, and I am calling it. I just can’t do this anymore. I want a divorce.”

   The voice was silent and then started making sounds of incredulity and protest, but she said they would talk when she got home and hung up, cutting off further response. She looked at Frank and said that she wanted him to hear that. He nodded slowly, unsure of what the proper response was supposed to be. She looked at her hands, and the sounds of her breathing filled the car. Their reactions were muted considering what had just transpired, but both were too wrapped up in their thoughts to become unstuck from the gravity of the night’s events. She attempted to snap out of it first, giving him an approximation of her usual smile, leaning over and kissing him lingeringly, whispering in his ear that he was amazing and that she loved him. He said he loved her too and that seemed the best exchange on which to part.

   He got out of her car and she rolled down her window and called out, unnecessarily, that she would call him as soon as she could. He watched her car go to the end of the parking lot and pull out into the street and drive away. He just stood there for a moment. His phone started ringing. It was her. She said this was the first opportunity she had to call him since she saw him last. He smiled. They both said they loved the other and they repeated it over and over until she said she had to hang up and clear her phone before she got home. They hung up after they each said I love you five more times.

   He got in his car and drove back to the house. He was still sleeping in his old apartment where there was an actual bed, but one last look at the place before the night ended seemed called for. He entered the house and was confronted by evidence of the memorable night that wouldn’t soon be forgotten. He was still not sure how he should react. Besides a couple tears here and there, he hadn’t seemed to process his good fortune or allow it some appropriate emotional outlet. There was unprocessed grief, but was there such a thing as unprocessed joy? It was ironic that he was such a goals-oriented person when he had acheived so little in life, and here we was faced with his biggest accomplishment by far and he didn’t know what to do. The kind of success he had attained he had only really seen in movies or on tv.

   He looked down at his hand. He brought it up in front of his face and balled it into a fist and clenched his teeth in a wild grimace and did one slow emphatic fist pump just like Jonah Hill in Moneyball when he and Brad Pitt got the approval to trade for Rincon. Then he put his hands in the air and gave out a great yell, a loud, prolonged celebratory howl—his best impression of KG after the 2008 Finals. And afterward he DID feel that anything was possible. A sense of euphoria began to overtake him. This was truly amazing, these things that were happening. The whole journey. Where he had been…and look at him now. Incredible.

   Very conscious of having a full circle moment, he closed his eyes and imagined himself as Leonardo DiCaprio, specifically his character doing that dance at the wedding in the movie he saw with his friend four years ago.  Those spastic, exuberant moves that had been memed and laughed at and made fun of, but did Leo care? No, because he was awesome. The movie was awesome. Money and bitcoin and love and life and the ability to make your dreams your reality were all awesome.

   As he jerked to and fro, this way and that, still cool in his mind, he felt something hit his foot and heard the shattering of glass. He opened his eyes and saw the wine glasses they had left on the floor. One was upright, still intact. The other was in shards strewn across the floor. He looked at it blankly, frozen in place. After a moment he went into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink and pulled out the paper towels and unused sponges he had left over from cleaning the bathroom. He made a mental note to buy a broom and dustpan—the first of many things he would need to have around the house, now that he had a house. He shook out the comforters and moved them to the corner of the room and got down on his hands and knees and used a dry sponge to gather all the broken glass together. He ripped off a sheet of paper towel and pushed the glass onto it, carefully balling it up and repeating the process with another sheet from the roll. The silver lining was that the clean-up was relatively easy in the unfurnished room. From this point on, all the messes he made would be much harder to fix.

“The Wholecoiner” is an excerpt from a novel in progress.