To Aspen: Chapter 19 | CULLEN MCMAHON

girl’s shirt there’s a raw back. she shows me pink skin like baby hamster. mother hunger makes monster girl. she won’t leave my head even though I asked nicely. she is only a monster because her mother. her brother. her make believe. monsters are only monsters because we make them so. I said goodbye to my childhood bedroom. monster girl followed me out the door.

To Aspen: Chapter 19

CULLEN MCMAHON | VERMONT The urge to leave struck him one day in the bathroom on the forty-eighth floor of a Midtown office tower that is the headquarters of Kirkhoff Partners, LLP. Kirkhoff handled some of the world’s most complex merger transactions and this, the present deal Niles was working on, was the largest transaction of its kind. The merger, once consummated, would earn Niles’s bank a fee not less than four hundred and twenty-five million dollars. The fee owed its size to unusual terms, terms Niles negotiated, and which included preferred shares that massively ballooned the final payout.

He’d been in this bathroom often during the last six months because he’d mostly lived in this building during the last six months. Work was relentless, and he went home strictly to sleep, or to change before or after a flight; had his house been further from the airport he might have never gone home.

And so the bathroom at Kirkhoff became a refuge, like an airport lounge or the men’s grille at X-wich Lawn & Racquet. In the circles in which Niles moved, the space itself was unremarkable—large, quiet, clean, with accents in expensive woods and stones—but for one slightly discordant detail: it contained a library. Why put a library in a bathroom? On first seeing it—the custom shelving built into the walls opposite the latrines—Niles marveled at the idealism and whimsy of it all. A library in the bathroom of a law firm! What lawyer (or banker) had time to read? The best you could hope for was a Bloomberg article while taking a shit. The germaphobe in him suspected there was something deeply unsanitary about the whole arrangement. And the cynical side of him questioned the motive for such an expense, which seemed strategically akin to in-house “amenities” his own bank offered its employees: the espresso bar, the yoga studio, the gym, the showers, all of which drove productivity which drove profits, making them not really amenities but rather investments.

The collection was a hodge-podge of paperback thrillers (Turow and Grisham), popular histories, and old copies of the Harvard Law Journal and the Yale Law Review, back issues of the latter uniformly as pristine as the day they were printed. There was decent turnover, though, and occasionally a new title would pique his interest. He took home a book on crypto currency, another on fly fishing.

Two weeks before the deal was to be announced publicly, he entered

the bathroom feeling unwell. Perhaps it was something he ate? He snatched a book at random and brought it with him into the stall, sat and evacuated violently into the bowl. He cleaned himself and flushed and then, conscious of how unsanitary the library was, nevertheless lowered the toilet lid for a seat and picked up the book. It was Emerson’s Essential Writings.

Very little of what happened to Niles in the moments, hours, and days that followed was explicable to himself or to other people, including his wife or the senior bankers at Goldman. Something had tripped, like a fuse, or perhaps broken, like a gear. Metaphor wasn’t really useful, especially to bankers.

“I just need some time,” he told them.

“I’m still figuring this all out,” he told Charlene.

“Figuring what out?”

“Everything. All of it.”

“Is this a midlife crisis? Jesus, Niles, are you having a breakdown?”

“No,” he said. He was sure of that. This wasn’t a crisis. But he did feel some urgency, especially about the money. The houses and the art and the cars were physical and so harder to deal with, but the money—that was simple.

By Thursday of the following week he’d resigned, and by Friday he’d made the necessary liquidations and withdrawals (the accounts had long been in his own name, no co-signatures required), so that on Saturday morning, at approximately three-thirty, everything was ready. He lowered the duffel bags and the shredded newspaper and the kindling into the in-ground hot tub and soaked it all with kerosene. The tub was ceramic and could handle the heat. Or it couldn’t, which would be a bonus—one less possession. He dropped the match.

As he watched the fire grow, he remembered something his father once told him. They were standing at one of those machines that, for a quarter, will stretch your penny and stamp it with Big Ben or Mozart or the Statue of Liberty. Niles wanted a quarter and his father wouldn’t give it to him.

“These things should be illegal,” he said. “Destroying money. I can’t think of anything stupider, Niles.”

Standing above the hot tub, Niles didn’t smile at the irony of the memory. It brought him no pleasure to burn $19,843,325 in cash, only relief. He was setting himself free. And Charlene, and the kids.

He was setting them all free.