"Adrian, good buddy, how are you?" Owen's voice had always possessed a knowing quality to it. It sounded a little nasal, just tight and bothered enough to sound important and self assured. For the second time in his life Adrian noticed something more in the notes. Owen's voice had a depth to it.

"I'm alright," he spoke evenly into his cordless phone. He wasn't. He left Lippensetter at noon after sleeping at his desk. Normal enough, as far as normal had mutated for Adrian. The subway ride was unwelcome, but necessary, since the noon day light reached a level of suffusion that left his retinas too tired to peer into his lcd screens and he planned to be back at his desk in a few hours. He only left to pick up his cellphone that connected him directly to a client in Barcelona who would be starting his evening trading and would be trying to reach him right about now. "I was just running home for a moment to grab a few things," it was obvious now. He didn't need to put things together. The reasons screamed from every corner of his apartment. "But I'm not feeling too great. I think I might stay here for a good bit."

"That sounds great. You've been working more than hard enough." There it was again. The depth he noticed, felt, that first time he spoke to Owen ten years ago. It wasn't a depth like reverberations, or a depth like the body behind the skin of a drum. It was a depth like a vertical lagoon. A vertical lagoon and an invitation to swim freely only to find that deep down beneath the soft blue warmth of the lagoon's edge were dark, cold, caves open to the deep sea. And frequenting those caves were sharks. Sharks that had been traveling for days for a good meal. He was not able to put the sensation to words then and had dismissed it as the sound of wisdom. Would haves and should haves flit through his mind, but the truth was he simply could not have ten years ago. "Why don't you take a few weeks off. I was calling because I wanted to tell you I'm going to move you down to lead assistant supervisor of our day time south western division. I just wanted you to hear it from me, because I know this kind of a move might be difficult for you. We really need some good leadership down there and I think you've got the experience to best help them get back on track..." Owen's voice trailed off in Adrian's ears.

The situation was difficult to comprehend in its plainess. The deadbolt to his apartment was gone. The aluminum frame was pitted and dented in. The KAC Masterkey the FBI used, a light shoulder stock shotgun, bit into it and ripped the bolt clean away hours before. Taped to the back of the door was a copy of the no-knock warrant, the search and siezure documentation, and the subpena. The cellphone he returned to pick up was long gone. As were his desktop tower, backup tape drive, two locked filing cabinets with thousands of pages of transaction details, contacts, and copies of contracts, all with his name on them. All of it was gone. "...and that's why we need you. So take some time off. You've absolutely earned it and I'll need you to hit the ground running. You won't need to relocate or anything like that. It's all going to be run out of the south west office wing a couple of floors down..." His contact in Barcelona would be calling soon. He thought it was under Owen's radar, but now he doubted even that. His other two cellphones were still untouched on the coffee table.

Ritchstand promised him it would be a sure way to get ahead and make some extra cash at Lippensetter. Ritchstand had given him the number, told him to get a seperate line so he wouldn't need to worry about Owen finding out and cherry picking the client. Ritchstand was always so helpful. So caring and precise with every detail. "...and you've been a huge help in securinig our contracts in Nippon. I can't really thank you enough for backing up our files here. Ritch promised me he'll be able to fill in for you, but honestly no one can replace your sense of humor here. Know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I get it." Adrian half chuckled and half choked on the dull edged smoldering rock of rage in the pit of his stomach. It was all there. All laid bare. Owen was waving his baton from the first handshake, orchestrating, planning, and working the levers of his money machine and all Adrian saw was the brightness of the lights, the beauty of the music, on the outside.But now he was on the inside. He was a major component of that wonderous, multi-national, machine and he was being sacrificed to ensure the machine would keep on running. He lost. The game was fixed. The refs were corrupt. The commisioner was stepping in and someone was going to take responsibility.

"Adrian, good buddy, I've always thought you had what it takes."

"I know. I totally understand. You don't shore up a failing bridge with second rate parts right?"

"Hah, that's the spirit. You're one of my most valuable men, and I know you'll be able to get that south west division turned around in no time." Official demotion after demotion. Lateral promotion after lateral promotion. He saw this coming. The pattern was too clear to ignore, but as long as he got something out of it he wasn't bothering himself with the 'why's. The 'why's finally made themselves known. He saw the picture in its entireity with a clarity that felt blade sharp. It was simply a matter of distance. He didn't have the protections Owen did. The army of lawyers. And now he didn't even have the internal connections to implicate anyone but himself in the inevitable fraud, laundering, trafficing, and conspiracy charges. He didn't know exactly what his clients did, but he also didn't need to know from that first meeting with Owen when he trumpeted the virtues and cashflow of operating Lippensetter FFI under a no questions asked internal policy. The FBI, SEC, and FTC wouldn't put the real pieces together. They would put together the pieces Owen had been carefully laying out for them to find and Adrian had been too goal oriented to see the trees his forest of wealth was composed of. "So I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Take care, good buddy."

"I will," Adrian turned off the cordless and hurled it at the dry wall corner once occupied by his black PC tower. "Fuck. Jesus fucking christ!" His voice reached a pitch foriegn to his own ears, but it felt damn good. He rose up from the couch and stumbled to his refrigerator, his limbs beginning to tremble with hate. He'd been had. Thoroughly screwed. He ripped the door open, rattling the jars on their neat little trays. Not a thing was edible. He'd been so busy trying to snatch up what he thought was his share of what he deserved he hadn't actually had a meal in his own apartment in years. "What the fuck is wrong with me," he shook his head, thrusting his arm into the cool box and swept it left, then violently right.

Cleaning out his fridge had never been this satisfying. As the jugs and cans and plastic canisters flew against the wall and alternated between splashing and shattering, Adrian experienced what he was sure was nirvana. Fuck you Kraft. Fuck you Richfood. Fuck Nestle and McDonalds. Fuck Campbells. Fuck! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

He sank back against the wall soaked with milk congealed in semi-sweet chocolate and felt the slow, slithering slug of a roasted red pepper crawl across the back of his neck. The American Dream. It's like dating a whore. You work your ass off for scraps of pussy that've been passed halfway around Brooklyn. Then you get dumped for the next doe-eyed chump, one who hasn't been bled dry yet. Well, Adrian chuckled, at least he wasn't Owen. Better to bleed to death than become a vampire.

Adrian lifted himself up, found his can of National Bohemian, which had turned to swill, and chugged it. He never drank Natty Boh before because it tasted like fermented garbage. Funny how shit changed. Of course, the taste of Natty Boh never changed. People start and stop drinking it all the time for other reasons. For Adrian, maybe after ten years of getting his face stuffed in shit, garbage started tasting like butter rolls.

Adrian waded through the swamp of scattered cans and bottle fragments, staggered a few steps and collapsed at the entrance to his bathroom. Jesus. He rolled onto his back and pulled a half inch shard of glass from his thigh. Life hits you with tragic ironies. You can have anything you want, but you'll never know what you want. Blood was welling up, oozing down his leg, splattering crimson droplets on the marble bathroom floor. He maintained the pressure on his thigh. You'll want things you don't need. Things that are bad for you. Things that will kill you. That will obliterate you. The bleeding slowed. Funny story. A man once told him that if life were a game, money was the only way to keep score. After he got the high score, he realized he was an autistic chump who had lost his wife and kids to a fucking game. The end. With blood still seeping between his tensed fingers, Adrian got on one knee and lifted himself up using the bathroom doorknob. The shower was only two feet away. He had to get to the shower.

Owen had fucked him, but that was expected. Adrian saw it coming two years ago, five miles away. What surprised him was the effete manner with which Owen handled the demotion, as if anything more brutal would have crumpled Adrian like a Prius getting t-boned by a Ford Excursion. As Adrian, broken and naked, crawled shivering into the shower stall, he realized that Owen thought he was a bitch. And honestly, who could blame him? Adrian had always taken the safe route, the deterministic one. Yale undergrad to Harvard MBA to Merrill Lynch associate and then Lippensetter senior trader. What a fucking joke. He looked up and let the hammering rain from the Danish high-pressure showerhead wash over him. Water sizzled across his back and chest, turned into a dull trickle by the time it reached his stomach and dribbled down to mix with half-dried blood into a pretty pink juice that went down the drain with a persistent slurping sound. He was expected to take the demotion, work his way back up, maybe wrangle a director's position out of the whole mess. Fuck that, Adrian thought. It takes a burst of irrationality to break the dismal cycle of the prisoner's dilemma.

Dressing with the focus of a sniper, Adrian pondered his choices. He settled on a clip-on tie, the one he wore to prom, the one that couldn't prevent him from getting laid, despite its best efforts. Adrian smiled at the thought of it. To fail at one thing so that it could serve another purpose. Another one of those tragic ironies.

The office was two subway stops away. The polished glass door squeaked shut behind him and Adrian, for the first time in his life, was uncertain of what to do. He scanned the room and locked his eyes on the receptionist. "Uh...pardon me. I have an appointment with Owen Lippensetter."

Out on his ass again. Getting thrown out of the office would have been hard to believe only a week earlier, but the pattern as of late had become more or less acceptable. He dusted some pelletized glass out of his lap before gingerly rolling off his butt, to his hip. Gathering legs that felt more sure of themselves than ever before he stood up and stretched. Kicking his foot through the stratified debris of his desk he found his brown and white clip on tie. He wrung out the odd smelling water from the now shattered Hawaiian snow globe before clipping it snuggly under his chin. It was not so much that he felt good about the way things had gone, it was that he felt liberated.

Granted he didn't know for sure the door to Owen's office would break the first time he swung that goddamned Ikea chair, and it was pretty convenient that Owen's set of putters were just inside the doorway, but all of that didn't mean a thing now that it was done. Sure Owen might try to press charges, but he was fairly certain he hadn't hurt him too badly.

"You fucking used me. This whole fucking time. The clients. The raises. The options. None of it is worth shit! You've been playing me since the day I was hired!" Lisa peeked over the wall of her cubicle to watch the whole thing. The look on Owens face when that chair first came through his glass front door was priceless. He thought he had him under his thumb. Boy, was he wrong. He chuckled to himself at how badly Owen, chairman and CEO of Lippensetter Funds and Foreign Interests, was shaken up. The first two swings of the cheap ass putter were deserved. So were the two minutes he used to catch his breath while Owen proceeded to piss his silk lined Avan'che tailored pants. Maybe the last five swings were for everyone else he would live on to fuck over. Maybe they were for each individual part of his American dream that were now dust in the wind.

He glanced up from his aimless wanderings around the parking garage, his tie still dripping. It took both of the rent a cops to muscle him to the frieght elevator and down forty one floors to the parking garage where they dumped him, ass first, out of a job. Out of the life he thought he wanted for himself all these years. He looked to his right and parked before him was the shinning cream colored and tasteless-from-every-angle Cadillac, plate number OWEN52H07. "Why the hell not?" He shouldered off his black suit jacket and balled it up tight, holding it up briefly like the head of some slain beast. With his free hand he fumbled for and found the golden lighter he was awarded six months ago with the promise that he would sit on the board by years ends. He made sure each nook got a good dousing of butane from the lighter's well before lighting it aflame and punting it underneath the tail of the white whale of a car. Pocketing the lighter he turned smartly on his heel and headed for the stairwell.

In the service alley behind Lippensetter FFI a pair of gulls fought ravenously over what looked like it might have once been half a sub. He couldn't remember the last time he'd bought his own lunch, but he wasn't hungry. He wasn't a lot of things. In a few quick strides he was out from between the shoulders of giants and back among the liliputs he would sooner have spat on 12 hours ago. He walked with them. Against them. Wherever his feet wandered he didn't care. They weren't really his feet in gator skinned boots with whale bone insoles, were they?

The city fell away block by block, followed in rhythm by factories and cannaries. The foreign pulse and air dribbled away like rocks rebounding off the walls of a stone well, falling into dark water. High above him, where once they were bracketed off, cut, bound, and prodded into tiny swatches of whatever hue the smog turned the sky, the heavens unfurled like a flag that bore the colors of truth. He walked on. Patches of oil and hulking container barges slowly began to turn into patches of yellow faced dandelions poking up through cracked cement and collapsed brick and mortar. He walked on as the sun made its descent with all the grace of a dragonfly come to rest on the surface of a lake; a descent he had not witnessed in years. He could feel it now. The rhythm of the sea washed over and through him. The shouting and sirens he couldn't sleep without became the caws of birds and the crush of waves upon the rocks of the low lying dikes and in that moment he could feel it. None of it was real to him. None of it mattered because being there was real.

He pulled out his black leather bill fold and, feeling its heft a moment, chucked it as hard as he could into the breakers. The lighter followed. The car, the condo, the summer cottage upstate, those he would leave for others to battle over. It wasn't and never should have been his fight.

He stared out across the harbor. The last rays of sunshine cascaded across the pulsing water, a flame that flickered slowly to the rhythm of approaching night. It scorched the surging cumulus clouds and wispy shards of stratus, turned them into an inferno that raged in the background of silhouetted monoliths. It was the Winamp visualization of an infinitely beautiful and unknowable song, layers upon layers of mysterious complexity embedded in the simple flicker of light across a wave.

Maybe there are no happy endings or sad endings or whimsical endings or dark endings, he thought. There are just endings.

After all, life isn't your story. You don't sit down and write the whole thing out and you sure as hell can't go back and revise it. It's at best the rambling tale of a madman, with no purpose or direction. The madman's always right so trying to write your own story can only lead to frustration. You might as well just shut the fuck up and listen and do your best to understand.

As the water went from rose to sienna to gray, he slowly stood up and began the trek back home.