Market Corrections

The goldfish had been floating sideways for three days. Marcus watched it from his ergonomic chair, sixty-third floor, same view of Chicago's skyline that justified his corner office and the ulcer that had taken up permanent residence in his gut.

"Should we flush it?" Sarah asked from the doorway. She was twenty-four, wore blazers that cost more than his first car, and still believed in things like momentum and quarterly targets.

"It's a metaphor," Marcus said. "For the fund."

The water had grown cloudy. Just like the Alt-A tranches he'd been packaging since February, the ones that smelled wrong but nobody wanted to say it out loud. Not while the bonuses were flowing.

His dog waited at home, some rescue mutt that licked his face at 2 AM when he woke up sweating, dreaming about leverage ratios and the strange quiet that comes before markets crash. The dog didn't care about LIBOR spreads or whether he'd become the kind of man who'd signed off on loans he knew would default. The dog just wanted to be walked, fed, occasionally told he was a good boy.

Marcus had grown up around real bulls. His uncle's ranch in Texas, where the animals smelled of hay and shit and honest work, where the word meant something that could gore you, not some market projection you sold to pension fund managers who couldn't tell a subprime mortgage from a hole in the ground.

"It's just a fish, Marcus," Sarah said.

"Yeah." He stood up. "Everything's just something."

He dropped the goldfish—still in its cloudy water—down the chute. Then he walked out, past the analysts and associates and the whole carefully constructed architecture of plausible deniability. Down sixty-three floors. Into the Chicago afternoon.

The dog was waiting. Some things still were.