35

Automotives. For thirty years the subject had been mired someplace between moon-boots and eight-track cassettes in its level of interest to AthCorp’s business brains, but now….

Ben shuffled through the stack of print-outs in the center of his desk, setting some on the pile to the left; the others getting shuffled to the right. The left-hand companies were tentative at best: You could buy them at bargain-basement prices, sure, but to ante in, you’d need to be either a flaming idiot on opiates or some bean-counter looking for a write-off on his corporate tax—That’s how abysmally bad they were.

The other pile of businesses for sale—the right-hand stack—looked somewhat better, a bit more solvent, a bit less toxic to the bottom line. They were available if you were inclined to take a chance, but you’d have to pony up a little extra cash.

Whew! Ben shook his head. This was the kind of high-risk foolishness that AthCorp had never even glanced at before; or if it had done so, it did it holding its corporate nose. Rust-belt industries, union woes, market share on the skids, stock valuation on the perpetual downslope—for thirty highly successful years this had never been Ben’s cup of tea. He’d avoided automotive stuff like anthrax—to Atherton’s infinite benefit and the rejected companies’ inevitable loss. ‘The Wizard of Wall Street’, he’d been called, not infrequently, and for the best of reasons; ahead of the curve all his working life: Out of IBM and into Apple just as it was starting its ascent. Then Intel weeks before the government anted in; into the dot-coms in the nick of time. Missed out on Facebook, true enough—that was a bummer—But all the other winners got purchased right on cue: eBay, Amazon, Google, Microsoft: He’d piled up a fortune just dabbling in their common stocks, getting in, getting out, then getting in again at precisely the optimal inflection point.

With invariably resulting profit, too—so immense an obscenity of profit that dumping all the stock and buying up the companies themselves had been his next inevitable step. And why not? If you knew the trends well enough to pick your equities better than the so-called experts did, you could figure out why the companies that were ailing were ailing, and come up with the perfect remedies to nurse them back to health. The buying up of which purported turkeys, the careful preening, the knowledgeable husbanding, then finally the selling-off once they got fatted up enough to justify the sale—That had turned Atherton’s multi-millions into multi-billions, then wound up with the multi-billions stacking up so fast you couldn’t hope to count them anymore.

Ben had loved the challenge way more than he loved the billions he earned. Buying up some dog-of-a-company and grooming it to be Best-in-Show, making some smart guy with a good idea the immoderate fortune he deserved, keeping a thousand workers from the unemployment rolls—Lots of fun—Getting paid lots of bucks for doing lots of good.

But the money was a worthwhile reward for the labor, no doubt. Millions at first, then billions, then tens of billions—And then, once you get so filthy rich you lose track of the multi-billions in your stash—well, wouldn’t you know it, but FaceMate comes along! Talk about your business windfalls! Talk about your golden goose, your money tree, that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow you’ve been looking for forever—Man-oh-man!—This little baby was the goddamn mother lode!

Ben set the papers in his hand down on the desk and went to his computer screen to check—just for fun, just out of curiosity. There was a direct line icon to and from Rajiv in Columbus right on the desktop, one click and you’re in, and he opened it up for the latest scoop: Which was terrific, as usual, as expected—Total enrollees in the site, as of this morning at—what did it say? Ten o’clock? Yes that was the latest tally, and it tallied someplace north of—Damn!—Five hundred million and change at twenty bucks a pop. Cash flow, with the twenty-buck surcharge figured in, now running something over two billion dollars a month, and growing by the minute. Thirty billion profit during the next full year at least, even without projected growth, plus the ad revenue which was just now starting to flow in. Alex and Rajiv were set to become the talk of the financial universe. And as for AthCorp itself, it was on the receiving end of twenty cents on the dollar, four hundred million a month, close to five billion a year all told. And when the website sold for cash or held out for an IPO offering on the exchange—The final tally was practically incalculable!

Fun. Ben had always had lots of fun with surplus money to play with, and now there was so much coming in so fast, so effortlessly, that you had to work hard to spend it before the tax man came knocking at your door. Lots of money—but who knew how much time? Well, isn’t that true of everyone on earth, though, once you think of it? Nobody knows how much time he’s got. Catch the wrong microbe, get hit by a truck, fall off a ladder screwing in a light bulb and bump your head—And there’s your final chapter, all said and done. What did it matter anyway? You live a great life, achieve more than you’d ever dreamed of achieving, survive triumph and tragedy—the summit of triumph and the nadir of tragedy—But you make it. And once you’ve made it, the final chapter isn’t all that daunting anymore.

Ben set down the sheaf of papers he hadn’t yet relegated to either side, opened the top right-hand drawer of his desk, and peered down in, probably for the dozenth time today.

How much his life had changed—it was incredible! First that picture! One look at it, the first quick startled look, and all the long-deleted memories of youth had flooded back—in an instant. And amazingly, unaccountably, it wasn’t just the bitter memories that he recalled after all these years; not just the anguish, not just the emptiness of loss. Now, looking at that gorgeous picture, he remembered a lot of the good things too, the optimistic days of being twenty, the feel of Lizzie in his arms. Those exquisite memories! He’d thought he’d scrubbed them from his mind forever. But one brief look at that photograph, and he’d discovered them again—And they were great!

Yes, amazing. Incredible: So incredible, he never would have guessed that thirty years of keeping all that locked inside had taken all the bitterness away, without him even knowing it was gone. And what was left, to his surprise, was contentment, almost a sense of gratitude: He had lost what he’d thought were all the greatest pleasures in the world forever. But now it came to him, with the first glance at that picture, that all the joyous moments in his early life were there alright, right there where he had filed them away, stored up in his latent memories with all the rest—if he only had the will to call them back. Yes, he’d lost his darling Lizzie, no denying that. But she’d been so inseparable a part of him, and he so intimate a part of her, for seven perfect years, that the good and bad in his former life were mixed so inextricably that they were impossible to tear apart. And in doing his best to tear them, in throwing all the good out with the bad, hadn’t he been faithless to both Lizzie and himself? Hadn’t he discarded memories he should have treasured—memories it was shameful to have lost? That picture brought the feelings back of Lizzie’s hand in his, her eyes, her face, the scent of her: The fact that she was taken from him should have never cost him that.

So there he was, back to where he’d been at twenty-two: Which was the first step in Ben’s recovery—delete the pain, delete the sorrow, add in the splendid stuff again….

Then right on its heels, barely a month after the amazing picture had come to light—Damn! How could even a fantasy-fiction writer have conceived it?— Right on its very heels had come … the amazing boy. Tommie Mulroy stepped into the room last Friday—My God! Had it only been a week—no more?—and half the picture came to life right smack-dab before his eyes! That young man’s face: Good God! but it was just like looking in some magician’s mirror and seeing yourself staring back at you again, but with thirty years excised. He’d blinked; he’d rubbed his eyelids; he’d squeezed them shut, but when he popped them open wide again, well there it was unchanged That face—his face, the exact same face in the picture in his upper right-hand drawer. Mind boggling! Ben was positively blown away!

And—think of it!—If some worn-out picture, all on its own, had brought back so many pungently exquisite memories: Well, what in the world would that young man’s face likely do! What it did, what Tommy Mulroy did, in fact, was beam him back to the absolutely grandest times of his life, his formative years, the years when Lizzie fused into his spirit, when she was gradually becoming half of him and he becoming half of her. He was a mere child when he met her, but seven years later on, by the time he lost her, he’d become the man he was today. Half the Ben Atherton that everybody thought they knew had Lizzie Sommers locked inside. And when Ben took that first disbelieving look at Thomas Mulroy, he could tell the half that came from Lizzie was somehow, by some extraordinary happenstance, already there.

You could see it; you could feel it, it was clear. Ben Atherton’s face, alright—that much of the picture was a given. But the rest of him—the voice, the manner, the poise—that was the Ben of twenty-two absolutely, incontrovertibly—the mature, fully realized Ben—with Lizzie’s spirit securely stowed inside.

With the ultimate result that: Ben’s heart went out to the boy—totally and devotedly and instantaneously—How could he have reacted any differently?—It was inherent in Ben’s nature to give: He gave to people he liked and gave to people he didn’t like enough to merit his generosity. He gave to rich and he gave to poor—what did it matter what social stratum they were in, just so long as they could use your dough—And nobody, but nobody, had much more extra dough to scatter liberally than Ben.

What else could he do with it, anyway? After all, without any fixed obligations, without even the most distant direct heirs, no kids, no brothers or sisters, and Carole’s family well provided for: where do you want your billions to go? To the government? Why the hell to them? So they can pass it discretely to their cronies, or use it to pay for votes, or wheedle themselves into lucrative positions once they finally get justly voted out? Hell, flushing it down the toilet would be more socially productive than postmortem government funding would be.

So where, then, should your money ultimately go when you’re no longer here? You’ve got to find somebody specific, someone you know, someone you can trust to spend the dollars wisely and well. And if you have the chance to give your cash away while you’re still alive—then great! That’s better still: you get the added fun of watching all the benefit the recipient accrues.

And therefore, as a consequence, Ben was a guy who habitually gave stuff to a variety of people. And there was no one—absolutely NO one—of all the people he knew, after last weekend, that he was more eager to give it to than Thomas J. Mulroy, his identical twin from another age, the kid who held the spirit and the soul he himself had held, with Lizzie’s essence superadded, at the age of twenty-two. One short weekend, two long days, had convinced him unquestionably that Tommy Mulroy was the guy he’d most like to pass some money to—Only problem being: The kid simply wouldn’t take the dough.

What he had offered last weekend, essentially, was this: Why not come out, Tom, relocate to Jersey, bring your family along if you like? We’ll get you and them a nice big house, or two, or three, put you on the corporate staff—Big bucks from the outset; all the perks you want or need. Then we can groom you to fit right in to the corporation, right away; let you handle—oh, let’s say we put you in charge of auto industry acquisitions and management. You’ve got the background for that, right? We don’t have much going in the auto business now, like minimal to none; but that can easily be amended. We can buy some little companies in distress—parts suppliers, say, design and engineering firms for the auto trade—get them turned around, integrate them vertically, horizontally, move on to the majors, maybe, heavy manufacturing: cars, trucks, busses, subway trains—Hell, there must be loads of opportunities out there, guys who are hurting that we can modernize, rationalize. You can take off a little time if you like, finish up your PhD, say at MIT if that suits your fancy—I know some folks who can get you in there right away; just need to make a couple calls: Hey, name your terms and we’ll meet them: So? What do you say, Tommy? Sound like something you might like to do?

It sounded great, sure—how could a deal like that not sound great?—But the damn kid wouldn’t bite. Ben might have known. Thinking back to what he himself would have done at that age, given such an offer, hell, smart as he was, cocky as he’d been about his prospects for the future, he wouldn’t have bitten either. From the time he came of economic sense, he had always had the compulsion to make it entirely on his own. If some eccentric billionaire had muscled in and offered him the same terms he was offering Tommy, he would have reacted in the exact same way.

But the kid had another reason too, one that Ben hadn’t thought of, in turning the gratuity down, a reason that was even more endearing and comprehensible than that blossoming of youthful gutsy pride: After the weekend they had spent together—truthfully, after the first few minutes they’d sat across from one another at his desk—Tommy and Ben had turned into the best of friends. And what Tommy reasoned, beyond the pride issue, was: Giving money to a friend incurs an obligation, and obligation is the quickest way to turn the warmest friendship cold. Besides, said Tommy, paying for a friendship cheapens it, makes it less spontaneous, less genuine. So ‘no’ to the offer, that was that: One caveat however—The kid would go partway. He’d agree to spend more time here in Red Bank—lots of time, actually—but he’d spend it willingly, as a friend and not some needy client on the take. Ben understood his reasoning right away, and the boy’s refusal only served to endear him to Ben all the more.

So in the end, when the kid had left on Sunday last, he took a generous share of Ben’s affections with him; and after four days absence, it now being Friday again, Ben could hardly wait to have Tommy Mulroy back again.

And now, at 2:00 p.m., Ben sat in his office waiting impatiently for the boy who was due there anytime, any minute, any second. He sat there eagerly watching the clock….

And while scanning through that sheaf of companies for sale in the automotive industry, Ben all of a sudden dropped the print-outs in his fingers on the desk, leaned back in his swivel chair, smiled bemusedly, and thought:

Hell: Why should he be the one to decide where to park the limitless amounts of money being socked away? What did he know about automotives? Let Tommy go through the list of available firms on the auction block. Let him pick what struck his fancy, whatever the hell struck his fancy: What difference did it make if Atherton lost a few billion here and there on businesses that were in the dumpster waiting for the garbage truck to come? No way to lose that newfound cash nearly as fast as FaceMate was pouring it in.