Union Atlantic Page 0,19
get back."
DOWNSTAIRS, THE COCKTAIL lounge was deserted save for an elderly Latino man in a vest and bow tie reading a newspaper behind the bar. Basketball from the West Coast played in silence on the television mounted above his head. Henry ordered a ginger ale and walked out onto the terrace, taking a seat at a table by the steps to the lawn. Between the hotel and the ocean stood a row of shaded palms lit from beneath, their fronds perfectly still. Waves barely lapped at the shore. The big investment houses had made a killing on resorts like this, consolidating the industry, securitizing the mortgages, first in line to get paid when a chain went bankrupt, first in line to finance the entity when it reemerged.
The ginger ale had too much sweetener and not enough fizz. Another penny for Archer Daniels Midland and the corn-syrup giants.
Stop, he thought to himself. Enough.
He could never tell if exhaustion bred the automatic thought of production and consequence or whether the habit itself did the tiring. Either way, it had become incessant. As an undergraduate, studying philosophy, his first challenge had been skepticism, how the mind could know with certainty that objects existed. By the time he went to law school, he'd settled happily on a social, pragmatic answer: that to believe otherwise led to absurd results. These days much of the world seemed drained of presence to him, not by his doubt of anything's existence but because objects, even people sometimes, seemed to dissipate into their causes, their own being crowded out by what had made them so.
Over the gentle surf, he heard the hum from the air-conditioning vents high on the roof of the hotel, and his brain, once more, ran the stimulus to ground: the steel smelted from ore mined on some island of the Indonesian archipelago; forged into sheets on the hydraulic presses of a foundry outside Seoul; shipped across the Pacific to sit in a warehouse in Long Beach where it showed up in the Commerce Department's numbers on inventory; ordered, packaged, trucked over the plains to an Atlanta wholesaler; bought by a contractor in Miami, who stood with a foreman directing workers riveting the vents together, operating the crane that raised into place the engine, itself assembled with parts from ten countries or more at a Maytag plant out in Iowa or perhaps Mexico, calibrated to the precise wattage required to pump cooled air into the hundreds of sleeping chambers, where its faintly medicinal scent blanketed the slumbering travelers. And allowing each step from the miner's lowly wage to the construction buy: loans, lines of credit, borrowed money - the vast creationary incentive of compound interest, blind artificer of the modern world.
He wondered how it would be if the humming were just that to him: a sound.
Leaving his glass on the table, he wandered out onto the lawn. He wouldn't be able to sleep before he'd resolved Taconic's troubles but until their CEO and Holland were on the phone there was nothing more he could do.
On the far side of the pool area a footbridge led over the sand and the shallow water to a jetty that formed the outer edge of the marina. He crossed it and walked alongside the yachts and cigarette boats attached to their moorings with chains that glittered dimly beneath the dock lights.
In the summers, he and Betsy had always gone up to Maine, to Port Clyde. A night in the mainland cottage, a day getting the boat out of storage, two weeks on the island. The same every year. Just as he rode the same train to work that his father had ridden. His father who'd worked for Roosevelt's SEC, back in its early days, who had been a scourge to penny-stock fraudsters and pyramid schemers, arriving home each night with a briefcase full of pleadings and depositions, rarely back in time for dinner. He'd believed with fervor in the rules he'd enforced, in the idea of the government as the good leveler of the field. In 1944, he'd driven a Sherman tank through the streets of Paris to cheers. Back in the States, he'd spent his whole career going after securities fraud as if it were an insult to the country. How dare anyone think they were above the democratic rule of law that he had fought to defend. Fair procedure meant everything to him. He'd been delighted when Henry chose to go to law school, though he would never