The index of self destru.., p.32
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, page 32
Nash looked up at him with surprise.
“You have doubts?”
“It just seems so unlikely.”
“Was it likely that God should walk among us as a man? That He should give His life for us? That He should rise again after three days?”
He looked at Eddie as though he expected a response to these questions. Nash had never asked Eddie what he believed, but Eddie supposed Nash had taken the answer for granted after Eddie presented himself to be baptized.
“To be honest,” Eddie said, “I’m not sure I believe that either.”
Nash picked up the Bible from the table in front of them.
“If you don’t have faith, what have we been doing all this time?”
Eddie tried to answer as honestly as he could.
“I believe in the message,” Eddie said. “Love your enemy. Turn the other cheek. Blessed are the peacemakers.”
Nash let out a dismissive puff, like air leaving a tire.
“If He didn’t rise, the message means nothing. I am the truth, Jesus says. His message isn’t in His words, it’s in His Resurrection.”
It occurred suddenly to Eddie that Nash might throw him out of the apartment. He hadn’t secured the permit, he hadn’t understood Nash’s teachings, so what good was he to Nash?
“There are other ways to spread the Word,” he answered impulsively.
“Like what?”
Having spoken without thinking, Eddie now considered the question.
“We could put up a billboard. Maybe do something in the subway. I used to work in advertising. I know the people who sell the space, and I know how to design the spots. It can say anything you want it to say.”
“That all sounds expensive.”
“Don’t worry about the money.” Though Nash was still visibly anxious, Eddie allowed himself a smile. “The Lord will provide.”
For the next week, Eddie spent his lunch hours mapping out the Nash campaign. It would start with a billboard. He considered something on Broadway or Sixth, close to Washington Square, but he eventually settled on the space right outside their apartment. Nash would be able to see it from his bedroom window and know that his message was out in the world. The ad would include a photo of Nash, the date of his prediction, a quote of some kind, and the address of a website that Eddie would hire someone to build. The site would have videos of Nash, something more professional than the ones already floating around, which didn’t capture his power. That would probably be enough to placate him. If not, Eddie would expand out from this base.
It had been a long time since he’d done anything like this, but he guessed that ten grand would pay for a billboard for the month of October, with another twenty for production costs. That wasn’t much, but it was more than he had left in his army savings. For the first time since the trust had dissolved, he would have to tap his inheritance.
He called his money manager, a friendly middle-aged man named Doug Shapton, and told him to move fifty thousand dollars from his brokerage account into checking. Eddie had never asked for money from the account before, and he thought the request might worry Doug, as though it were his own savings being spent.
“Buying yourself a car?” Doug asked instead with a vicarious enthusiasm.
“Nothing like that. It’s actually a kind of charitable donation.”
“In that case, be sure to send me a receipt.”
“It won’t be deductible. It’s more of an informal thing.”
“Well, whatever it is, I’m glad you’re making some use of the money. That’s what it’s for.”
Eddie felt stupid asking the next question.
“How much have I actually got?”
“A little over three million. I can look up the exact number if you give me a second.”
“I don’t remember it being so much.”
“That’s better than the opposite,” Doug said with a laugh.
“Wasn’t it more like two something the last time we spoke?”
This time Doug’s laugh had an edge of anxiety to it.
“Your mother is an aggressive investor.”
Eddie hadn’t even known that Kit was investing the money, at least not in anything risky enough to return nearly fifty percent in just a few months. He should have realized that she couldn’t let so much capital just sit dormant.
The fifty thousand he was planning to spend on Nash seemed suddenly paltry. The man had changed his life, and Eddie was giving him one billboard in return? Once he’d designed an ad, he could put it up anywhere. Even a more ambitious plan—radio, local TV—could be done for a few hundred thousand, which would leave him well ahead of where he’d thought he was a few minutes before.
“In that case,” he told Doug, “I’d like a little more.”
When Nash saw the plan, he looked as happy as Eddie had ever seen him, which spurred Eddie on to more elaborate ideas. At each step, things cost slightly more than Eddie had remembered. The traditional outlets—the ones that would matter to Nash—were also the most expensive. In his old job, Eddie had put much effort into convincing clients that the splashiest buys were not necessarily the most effective, but in this case his only goal was giving Nash the feeling that he’d been heard, which meant he didn’t waste any time on the kinds of things he might have recommended to a professional client with a limited budget. He went back twice for more money. After his initial enthusiasm, Doug turned hesitant.
“Of course it’s yours to do what you want with, but the timing of these withdrawals is a bit odd. I mean, so soon after your investment windfall.”
Eddie didn’t know anything about a windfall. He only knew that he had more money than he’d thought, which seemed a point in favor of being generous with it.
“I never had anything I wanted to spend it on before.”
Over the next few weeks, Eddie gave every spare hour outside of class to the campaign. He had to move quickly to get everything in place for a launch at the beginning of October. When he enlisted old professional contacts for help, he was slightly embarrassed to admit what he was working on, but the videographer and the editor he hired had both shrugged at his half-hearted explanations. A client’s a client. He rented space on a dozen billboards throughout the city. The website would be ready to launch the day the billboards went up. Local TV and radio ads would run throughout the month. Finally, the high point: a thirty-second spot during the fourth game of the World Series, on the night of November 1, just hours before Nash’s deadline. This airtime had cost Eddie nearly as much as the rest of the campaign combined, but once he thought of it he couldn’t pass it up. He didn’t know what would happen to Nash the next day, but he could say for certain that people would be talking about the apocalypse that night.
“How is all this getting paid for?” Nash asked.
“I’m taking care of it,” Eddie said.
Nash thanked Eddie for his generosity and didn’t say anything more about the matter, but the next evening he read without comment from Mark’s Gospel: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Eddie stayed up late that night, turning over Nash’s words. He’d never told Nash how much money he had at his disposal, and he worried that this campaign had been a frivolous way to spend it. He thought that he’d been doing the right thing by leaving his inheritance untouched, but now he knew that it had been growing all this time through his mother’s work. What had seemed like selflessness looked more like thrift. Ultimately he was just saving the money for later. What if the real right thing was to spend it, get it out into the world, into the hands of people who needed it more than he did—not by way of investing and waiting for returns, but by way of sheer profligacy?
Suppose he actually believed that the world was coming to an end. How absurd it would seem that he had left all that money just sitting there, when it could have been helping people, alleviating suffering. Even in the absence of a looming cosmic deadline, it seemed absurd. What was he saving it for? He could hardly imagine needing more than he had now—a place to sleep, a full fridge, a way to occupy his days that had some purpose to it. He might feel differently when he had a family, but couldn’t he support one through honest labor, should that day ever come?
“What would you do if you had the kind of money I have?” he asked Nash over dinner the next night.
Nash smiled but shook his head.
“You cannot serve both God and mammon.”
Eddie had anticipated an answer like this.
“But wouldn’t it be easier for you to have just a little more, so you didn’t need to pass that hat? Didn’t need to worry over how the next month’s rent would get paid? It would allow you to concentrate your attention on things that really matter.”
Nash didn’t say anything for a moment. He got up from the table and retrieved his Bible, in which he’d quickly found the lines he was seeking.
“Behold the fowls of the air,” he read. “For they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?”
Eddie left the matter there that night, but a few days later he brought it up again.
“If you don’t want the money, you could give it away.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“I’m afraid I’ll lose my nerve. If I put it in your name, I can still make the decisions about where it goes, but I won’t be tempted to hold anything back.”
“You want to give away all of it?”
Eddie hadn’t gotten that far in his thinking, but once Nash said it, he knew this was right. If he kept some part back for himself as a safety net, the gesture would lose its meaning. He had to leap.
“All of it.”
Reluctantly, it seemed, Nash gave way to the plan. The next day, he met Eddie during his lunch break and they set up a joint account. When that was done, Eddie called Doug to say he wanted all of his money moved there. Now Doug seemed horrified.
“The timing couldn’t be worse from a tax perspective. You don’t want to cash out immediately after a huge gain like this. Wait until you’ve got some losses to offset it.”
Eddie told him to set aside enough to cover his tax liabilities, and Doug tried another tack.
“You haven’t shown any interest in this portfolio before, and now you want to zero it out? What happened?”
“It’s a long story,” Eddie said. “But I know what I’m doing.”
“I think you should talk with your mother first.”
They both knew his mother would talk him out of it. Failing that, she might take legal steps to stop him. Doug was probably counting on that.
“It’s none of my mother’s business,” Eddie said. “I don’t want you mentioning this to her.”
Doug acquiesced eventually, but the next steps took longer than Eddie had expected. The money was his, it should have been easy enough for him to take control of it, but countless administrative hurdles arose along the way. The transfer was finally set to go through on the day Eddie took his certification test. Even more than after the baptism, he felt unburdened that morning. At the same time, it was amazing how little difference the change would make in his day-to-day life. Soon he would have an EMT job, which would pay just enough to cover the rent and groceries, his primary expenses these days. He and Nash would continue on largely as they had before. Behold the fowls of the air.
During the test, he started to feel a little bit of a crash after all the excitement of the previous few days. For the first time it struck him that handing all of the money over at once might have been a mistake. Not that he wanted it for himself. He was still committed to giving it away, but this might not be the most effective means of doing that. Perhaps simply unloading all of it in one go was just as irresponsible as letting it sit there. It was another way to keep doing what he’d been doing all along—not thinking about how much he had. He ought instead to do what Justin was doing, all the hard work of figuring out where the money should go, whom it could help, work he knew perfectly well that Nash couldn’t do on his own. He could easily take a few weeks before starting his job and dedicate that time to thinking about where to direct the money.
His grandfather, whom he remembered but not particularly well, had been very proud of his philanthropy, and Kit had continued this work, but to Eddie it had always seemed an extension of their job, a way to spread the Quinn & Mulqueen name. Many of the institutions they supported—museums and the opera and the Catholic Church—didn’t strike him as charities so much as expensive hobbies. It was fine to spend money on them, but no one should expect to be congratulated for it. On the other hand, some of the work they’d done had made a real impact in the world. The Bootstrappers had changed Justin’s life and dozens of others like his, and now Justin was supporting it, changing more lives in his turn. Eddie wanted to change lives that way. He would explain to Nash when he got home that he’d decided to take responsibility, instead of loading Nash with a burden he clearly didn’t want. He imagined that Nash would be relieved.
But before the test was over, he was suffering through another round of doubts. Of course it wasn’t easy to part with this much money, even if it had existed only as an abstraction in his life up to that point. It was natural that some part of him would rebel against the separation, and natural too that this rebellion should take the form not of unapologetic greed but of a sense that he could do better with the money than anyone else. He’d done nothing good with it up to now. Why should he be so convinced that he could start? If he wanted to make the world a better place, he would do it in his small way, by working at a job that helped people.
The test lasted two hours, taken on a computer that told Eddie that he’d passed the moment he was finished. When he got out of the testing center, he felt like celebrating. He decided to take Nash out for an expensive lunch, his first real splurge on himself in as long as he could remember. Considering the circumstances, he thought that Nash would go along with it.
Usually Nash was reading the Bible on the couch when Eddie got home, but now the living room was empty, and there was no answer when Eddie knocked on Nash’s bedroom door. It was the early afternoon, an unusual time for Eddie to be there during the week. Nash was probably out preaching. Eddie was too restless to wait for him to come home, so he went out looking on the corners where Nash liked to set up shop. He spent most of the afternoon walking around the neighborhood, but there was no sign of the man.
Around five, Eddie went to the same grocery story he always stopped at on his way home. Part of him was beginning to panic a little, and he had to remind himself that he was the one who’d broken from their routine. In point of fact, he had no idea what Nash did on a typical weekday afternoon. O ye of little faith, he told himself.
Yet he wasn’t surprised to get home and find the apartment still empty. Everything now had an air of inevitability. He made dinner as always. Before this afternoon, it had seemed they’d been living this way for years, but now that he thought of it, he’d only cooked at this stove on a few dozen previous occasions.
When dinner was ready, Eddie ate alone, though he set Nash’s place beside him, as though he were a hidden prophet. He waited another hour before knocking again on Nash’s bedroom door, in case he’d slipped in while Eddie was gone and been asleep all this time. When there was no answer he pushed the door open. A quick check of the closet and the drawers showed that Nash’s few possessions were still in their usual place. Perhaps he was out thinking of ways to disburse the money. If Eddie was nervous about how it would get spent, how much more of a responsibility must it have seemed to Nash?
Eddie walked back into the living room and sat down on the couch. There on the table in front of him was the old leather-bound Bible from which they’d been reading each night. He picked it up with relief. If the Bible was still here, Nash would be returning eventually. A page in the book had been marked by a folded piece of paper. When Eddie turned there, he saw a verse underlined from Luke’s Gospel: Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?
4.
Margo expected to find Amy in their usual spot at the Pallas Athena. They’d had breakfast there several days a week throughout high school and returned often during college vacations, almost always to the same booth near the window. They hadn’t been together in the two years since Amy moved to Tribeca, but Amy had insisted on coming uptown before work that morning to give Margo notes for the day ahead. When Margo spotted her waiting outside, dressed in an outfit somewhere between pajamas and sweats—an outfit Amy would never wear to work—she thought that something must be wrong.
“Change of plans,” Amy explained after giving her a hug.
She grabbed Margo by the arm and began to lead her uptown. Almost immediately Margo knew where they were headed. Ever since their Melwood days, the Sunrise Spa and Salon, referred to exclusively as the Triple S, had been Amy’s preferred place to prepare for “special occasions,” a term that in Amy’s usage definitely applied to Margo’s plans for the afternoon. Margo had passed the frosted-glass storefront thousands of times, but she’d been inside no more than half a dozen, always at Amy’s instigation.
A woman at the front desk greeted them both like regulars and asked after Amy’s mother, who joined Amy there several times a year for family bonding sessions. (Kit had her hair cut twice a month at an expensive hairdresser, and she got a deep-tissue massage on her first day at Elbow Beach every winter, but she would never have stepped inside a place like the Triple S.)
“I have you both signed up for the full service,” the woman said, as though they were cars awaiting tune-up.
