by Jonathan Stone

(image c/o sigma assessoria)

Mark had met with the kid only reluctantly, as a favor to a business school pal. Kid was maybe thirty, mild residual Middle Eastern accent, newly minted MBA not from Harvard or Stanford but some degree mill in the Midwest. (Hell, they’re all degree mills, thinks Mark.) As soon as the kid – Ahmet – sat down in Mark’s office, he was going a mile a minute – disruptive platforms, fintech landscape, optimal on-ramp – and when Mark tried to interject into the kid’s monologue his own fintech misadventures so far – still too early, still too chaotic – the kid seemed not to hear him, to dismiss it out of hand. This was a brain on fire. He’s seen plenty of brains on fire before. His own brain has always been a little on fire, too, and that’s how he’s sitting in this family office with fifteen employees overlooking the Pacific now. Okay, kid’s clearly brilliant. The question is always, which brains on fire do you go with, and which ones do you get as far from the flame as possible? After an hour, Mark couldn’t take it anymore. Got up, shook the kid’s hand, wished him luck, and dialed late into the board meeting of a steel mill in Louisiana they own a thirty percent stake of. 

That night, though, he thought about Ahmet’s pitch again. It’s not that he recognized some of his own original ambition and eagerness and raw smarts in the kid – in fact he didn’t recognize much of anything about the kid – but the markets were at a carnival stage right then, crazy winds blowing through the circus tent, canvas flapping wildly, and he’d hate to miss the carnival entirely. So Mark called him – you can call anyone anytime, if you’re giving them seed money. Okay, what the hell, Ahmet. A lot of what you said makes sense. Some of it doesn’t, but maybe that doesn’t even matter right now. I’m good for three mil, and I’ll set you up with a couple associates of mine, we’ll help you get the fund to fifty to get us out of the gate. 

Whereupon, Ahmet bought a ton of stuff that tanked instantly. Told you so, Mark was thinking. But Ahmet used a big portion to buy cryptocurrencies, which was outside the fund charter, drawing the instant ire of Mark’s fellow investors, who all simmered down as the crypto investment climbed, then soared. The fund owned five percent of a cryptobank, which further unsettled the investors because the idea of cryptocurrency is that it requires no bank, but this turned out to be the favored and best-positioned cryptobank, going public within two years at almost a hundred billion dollars, putting Mark’s personal take in the low nine figures. Even in his world, nine figures didn’t happen every day. It certainly deserved some kind of acknowledgement or celebration, although the last thing Mark wanted to do was spend any more time than necessary with this kid, who had nothing particularly charming or likeable about him, the little he’d actually dealt with him on investor calls, no winning quality except his impressive synapses. But it wouldn’t be right not to mark the occasion in some appropriate way. Mark was taking his family on a yacht in the Mediterranean for his kids’ school vacation. There was an extra stateroom. He invited Ahmet for the week. And feel free, Ahmet, to bring a guest, anyone you like. 

“A week in the Mediterranean with a guy we don’t know?” Mark’s wife Lorraine asks him. “How ’bout a nice dinner and a show?”

“Honey. Nine figures. Dinner doesn’t cut it. We’ll have the Wexlers as a buffer.” Their friends in the other stateroom. A college pal, salt of the earth, career Navy. Friends who safely predate Mark’s money and will love every moment on board. 

“A boat is tight quarters,” Lorraine warns. 

“Tight quarters?! Honey, a two hundred foot yacht!” 

Lorraine rolls her eyes, turns away. Yeah, we’ll see. 

The Wexlers cancel at the last second, nearly in tears. Emergency surgery on Elaine Wexler’s mother. It’s killing us not to go, Mark. But hey, enjoy.  

Mark has an appointment with an alternative energy startup in Reykjavik and board meetings in London and Madrid the week before they sail, so Lorraine and the kids will fly over separately; they’ll all rendezvous on the fourth pier at the port in Piraeus. The slip and boat – Dream Big – will be obvious. 

 “Ahmet!” Mark waves to him when he gets there. Next to Ahmet, only a brand new rolling bag, obviously never used. No girlfriend (or boyfriend, or brother, or mother – Mark has imagined them all). “You’re alone.” 

Ahmet shrugs. 

“You sure? Seven days in the Aegean islands? You can still surprise someone, we’ll fly them first class to Athens and chopper them out to us. They’ll arrive in style. Fun for somebody. No one?”

“I’m not seeing anyone.” 

“Well okay, if you change your mind, just say the word.”

Ahmet nods curtly. An indication to Mark that there will be no other guest joining Ahmet. Just Mark’s own family, and crew, and Ahmet, and the sparkling Aegean for seven days. 

As they board, Ahmet is silent. The kid who wouldn’t shut up for an hour in that first meeting. Who drills down in the quarterly calls, bombards them in his lilting accent with figures and market analysis and thinking that swoops between thirty-thousand feet and grains of pecuniary sand. And here, stepping onto a two hundred foot yacht, silence. Nada. Trudging up the gangplank wordlessly, as if onto a slave ship. 

Cruising regally out into the Aegean. “See those three little islands?” gestures Mark, a bottle of Stala Pale Ale already in hand. “Some scholars say the middle one was the home of the Sirens. You can see the shoals where ships were supposedly lured to their destruction.” The guidebook he read on his flight over reignited memories of Professor Stanhaus’s class at Michigan. The Epics of Homer. He’d really enjoyed both, and even found some of it coming back to him. Odysseus’ ship – probably a quarter the length of this one. Rough-hewn timbers lashed together, a rickety affair, its mast rising only to the level of this one’s main deck. Plying these same waters – not in a leisurely wandering, but a desperate search for home. 

Mark looks over at Ahmet squinting dutifully at the little islands, saying nothing.  

Another hour into the glistening Aegean, and the activities unleash. Mark’s three daughters screaming as they leap from the lower deck into the sea. The toy chest opens. Water jet packs they’ve only seen before on YouTube. Jet skis. Parasailing off the launch. Jumping from the chopper. “Of course it’s illegal,” says the first mate, Rafe, who trained as a combat helicopter pilot with Italian Special Forces. “But it’s the middle of the Mediterranean, no one will see us. I’ll hang nice and low for you. Who’s first?” All three girls raise their hands. “Ahmet you gonna jump?” Ahmet shrugs, sure. Where the kids whoop and gasp in gleeful fright, Ahmet goes expressionlessly, arms at his sides. Mark is sure there’s never been such an emotionless, flat-affect leap from a helicopter. 

Mark doesn’t really know much about him beyond the quarterly figures. That’s the beauty of investment, the whole idea. Your money does the work, not you. Your money and whoever is managing it. When the other investors ask about Ahmet, Mark just shrugs and refers them to the returns. Yes, within all laws, within all trading regulations, and that’s all we need to know. 

 The heat of the day. Every sunny white surface hot to the touch. Hard to sleep, even with the AC blasting. But you can’t complain, you can’t really tell anyone, my two-hundred-foot Mediterranean yacht sucked. 

“So tell me about yourself,” Mark says, grinning, holding a fresh Stala. “At five thousand percent ROI, we should maybe know at least something about each other.” Smiling at Ahmet, assuming the kid will share in the amusing absurdity of their opaque relationship; their wildly lucrative lack of connection. 

Ahmet stares sternly out at the sea. 

“Ahmet. Turkish, presumably? That where your family is from originally?” 

A cold smile. “My family is from Tenafly, New Jersey,” he says. 

Jesus. Such strong signals not to go there. Maybe the kid sees the questions as irrelevant? Unprofessional? Subtly demeaning? Whichever, it’s not worth pushing. The kid has earned Mark nine figures – nine figures! – and made the other investors ecstatic. Whatever exactly is happening in those synapses, leave well enough alone. 

So Mark navigates away. Goes personal himself. Telling Ahmet how at this stage in his career, he’s having trouble deciding what to do, where his energies should go. Truth is, I’m floating like this boat, Ahmet. Drifting around. What’s my currency going forward, you know, Ahmet? What’s my personal rate of return?  

He and Lorraine have had a charitable foundation for years. Medical clinics in Appalachia, clean water and female education in Gambia and Namibia. He spent years in the real economy, making things – well, gathering the financing to make things – and the arc of his career has gone to making less and less, but earning more and more, because the real money is in money itself – shoving it around, finding new compartments for it, opening odd little drawers for it that no one thought to open before. 

Ahmet, similarly, hasn’t actually made anything, but in contrast, has done so right from the start, and based on this early success, is now likely destined to spend a lifetime in the further making of nothing.

This Turkish kid from Tenafly, after all, is quite suddenly, quite rich. His own hired-hand take in the IPO is seventy-five million. From a personal investment of exactly zero. He has no reference for this kind of wealth, Mark knows. It’s still in the realm of the abstract. As abstract in a way, as the cryptocurrency that the riches are founded on, and from which Mark and the other investors immediately unwound their position, within days of the listing, at Ahmet’s strong insistence, and Mark’s enormous relief – recognizing a mania when seeing one, diversifying for the next opportunity. That’s one thing about carnivals – they always leave town.

Mark feels it emanating from the kid preposterously – an eight-figure funk. An eight-figure gloom. Cast off suddenly from fiscal reality. Floating, unhinged, untethered from his previous existence – yes, literally, here on a yacht in the Mediterranean, but also – like seventy-five million earned in cryptocurrency – more abstractly.  

 “See those two rocky islets there? Some scholars say that’s Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis – the six headed monster and the whirlpool. You can see the six heads if you squint at those cliffs, right? And I guess the whirlpool is just that tricky tide.” Odysseus’ fragile ship navigating Scylla and Charybdis – the origin of the expression between a rock and a hard place, the guidebook reminded him. 

Which is where – aboard this sleek and massive white vessel plying the same waters four thousand years later – this kid Ahmet, for whatever reasons, seems to be. 

Of course, theirs is not the only two-hundred-foot yacht cruising the Aegean this time of year. “Ahmet, the neighbors are stopping by for dinner,” Mark says with a smile, gesturing to a vessel on the horizon. “Marcello. Friend of mine. I helped his family’s luxury goods chain go public ten years ago. After – ready for this? – seven centuries private. Italian nobility. You’ve been rich a few weeks? They’ve been rich for seven centuries. Ask them about long term assets.” A line of inquiry on which they’ll have no perspective, Mark is sure. Because it’s all they’ve ever known. And thanks to Mark, all they will ever know. Like Ahmet, and yet exactly inversely, they have no other point of reference. 

Marcello – white shirt and white slacks, short-cropped salt and pepper hair, only in his mid-forties but every inch the Italian industrialist, alights from his own launch with wife and two blond children in tow. “Mr. Mark!” he exclaims. “Mr. Marcello!” Mark replies with equal enthusiasm. Introductions, handshakes, then drinks and hors-d’oeuvres on the cozy back deck perfectly timed for sunset. 

Marcello’s yacht is anchored a thousand yards starboard. “I dock it now in Albania,” he explains, his accent thick, but his English fluent and relaxed. “Many hours across the Adriatic, yes, but tax savings almost a million euros a year. Albanian flag instead of Italian.” He shrugs. “A million in tax savings, what do they expect?” 

Marcello’s children and Mark’s girls take out the jet skis, both dads issuing lots of warnings and parameters. The crew keep an eye on the kids, while Marcello and Mark slurp cold Stalas before dinner, Ahmet taking an occasional polite sip of his own. 

Land holdings, vast valleys of timber and cropland, whole panoramas of Genoan countryside, buildings, leases, manufacturing, Marcello has little day-to-day hand in any of it anymore, but is “involved” with it all. The talk is free ranging: hydrofoils, a new Gulfstream going into production, mutual friends at the IMF, Qatar real estate, the UAE Sovereign fund. Mark notices that Marcello never even glances at his own yacht a thousand yards away. That’s someone who takes his wealth for granted. The mellifluous sound of Marcello’s vowels, his very voice a song of affluence. Every measured reach for an hors-d’oeuvre, every sip, every bite, every movement, a ballet of privilege. 

As Marcello expounds, Mark notices, Ahmet seems to constrict further, to shrivel, becoming nearly absent. Mark wishes he’d jump in – ask questions, engage – but he remains a cipher. 

“Of course,” Marcello points out about his own family’s assets, “it is all from actual goods.” Said not particularly with pride, but simply an observation. “Things farmed. Grown and cut down. The simplest materials, then processed and manufactured. A conglomerate made exclusively, yes?, from food, and clothing, and shelter. Not like you Ahmet,” he says, a teasing twinkle in his eye, pivoting to the young entrepreneur. “Blockchain. Crypto,” he says. “What means crypto exactly? It’s a word?” 

“A prefix,” Mark jumps in to explain to his Italian friend, “the start of a word. Crypto means secret or hidden. Like in cryptography – literally, secret writing.”

“I know in English the word crypt,” says Marcello. “This is a death place, yes?” For the first time, a moment of hesitancy, of confusion, crosses Marcello’s confident face. 

“That’s right,” Mark confirms. 

Marcello’s confusion passes. He smiles at Ahmet once more. “Crypto Ahmet,” he teases. “A fortune spun from nothing, no?” A slender smile that indicates neither admiration, nor disapproval, nor envy. That too, bred of seven hundred years of wealth, thinks Mark – a crypto-smile.  

Mark’s stunning financial successes have come out of the simplest materials, too: friendship, camaraderie, networking, seeing an opportunity and bringing friends in to share in it. Humility, transparency, straightforwardness. A sense of adventure and a sense of fun and a sense of perspective. He correctly surmised that these qualities would be sufficiently unusual in the cutthroat world of high finance that they would be his calling card. He’d go on international golf outings, exchange ideas and deals on Scottish, Irish, New Zealand, Malaysian courses and at five-star restaurants afterward. He was still, at heart, a smart, hardworking kid from Cleveland, good with numbers, would have been the CFO of some small regional industrial concern, if he hadn’t found his way into finance’s stratosphere, and woven the threads to stay there. Ahmet was, of course, the very opposite. Lone genius. Lone wolf. Whose “networking” consisted of a single one-hour meeting with Mark. 

Nine figures doesn’t happen every day, but for Mark, its pathway is utterly unsurprising – money that comes from money. Ahmet’s eight figures is inherently far stranger – produced from nothing but an idea, walked into the right receptive investor at the right market moment. When it came time to transfer proceeds – required distributions per the fund charter, and then unloading into cash equivalents when they all dumped their shares – Mark had overseen the allocation to Ahmet’s brokerage account. A deposit requiring phone calls and letters with signatories. Eight figures in a fell swoop. The American dream, on steroids. Or better yet, hallucinogens. Nine figures, eight figures, it’s still a line of zeros, isn’t it? Crypto – currency built atop the already abstract concept of currency itself, so a double abstraction. And throw in a cryptobank – a triple abstraction. And add in the fact that zero itself is an abstract concept. The idea of nothing actually being something. Quite a cognitive leap, in a way. Zero – invented by the Arabs, Mark seems to remember. Ahmet’s ancestors. But given Ahmet’s previous touchiness on ancestry, he keeps the observation to himself. 

“That island over there? According to some scholars, it’s the home of Circe, who turned Odysseus’ men into swine and kept them on her island for a year.” Mark takes another swig of his Stala. “So his crew were subject to a one-year lock up period,” he says, smiling, referring to the twelve months when early investors normally can’t trade shares after going public – but the cryptobank had been a direct listing, so Ahmet could unwind their positions right away.  

So we can be real pigs too, Mark wants to joke with Ahmet. Generate some bond, some camaraderie. But he keeps that to himself as well. 

Elton John and his husband David Furnish come aboard for dinner the following night. Mark sits on a couple of charitable boards with Sir Elton, where they’ve become friendly, and Elton and David have snuck away to Santorini for the week (their own kids are at boarding school in Geneva), so it’s easy to chopper them out. 

Elton and David wear loose fitting slacks, comfortable moccasins and colorful cardigans – Elton’s is peach, David’s is plum. The dinner discussion is first, predictably, about the recent raft of music catalogue sales to private equity firms, and then about vineyards – Sir Elton has a substantial piece of one – and he’s brought two bottles of his latest vintage to sample. There is much cooing over Elton’s wine from Lorraine and Mark – appropriately cooing, because the wine, in Mark’s opinion, is spectacular – a full-bodied “claret,” as Sir Elton calls it, with big, proud notes of plum and mocha, and a big loud finish like the end of a Beethoven symphony – just how Mark likes his reds.   

There’s an electric piano in the corner of the upper lounge. No one is so crass as to ask. But for Sir Elton, two songs must seem like an appropriate thank you to hosts Mark and Lorraine, and Mark’s kids sit on the floor respectfully rapt; they know who Elton John is, although they’ve never heard his music before. 

“Right there, that little inlet flowing past that village?” Mark smiles. “Supposedly Odysseus’s entrance to the underworld.” Hades, the guidebook says. House of the Dead. “Odysseus was only there for a day, apparently,” Mark reports, squinting at the relevant paragraphs in the bright sun. “Took a lot of meetings” – Persephone, Tiresius, he reads –

“and got the hell out. So to speak.” The underworld as a business trip – funny idea. Mark wants to riff on it, engage Ahmet with it, but takes another slug of his Stala instead. 

He finds Ahmet at the bow at midnight. The kid is smoking a Cohiba up there, staring out. Okay. A Cohiba. At least some little attempt at celebration, at joy. 

Grabbing the bow rail next to him, Mark jokes, “You’re the king of the world” – presuming, but unsure, whether Ahmet knows the movie reference. “How’s that Cohiba?”

Ahmet answers somberly. “I grew up in a Muslim household. No alcohol or smoking. So I want to see what the fuss is about.”

“And?” 

Ahmet shrugs. 

“They get better,” says Mark. Adding, “It all gets better, Ahmet.”

Ahmet looks abruptly away, as if sensing where Mark wants to steer them in this moment – the warmer waters, the welcoming shore he wants for the two of them – but Ahmet is still so enigmatically resistant. Staying in colder seas. 

“You know, Ahmet, this was supposed to be a thank you, and you’ve been miserable the entire time.”

“I know.” Grim acknowledgement, if not apology. 

“Elton John, Ahmet. Italian nobility. Elton John singing for us, and water jet packs, and helicopter jumping, and you’re miserable.” 

Because you’re seeing what’s ahead of you? Because it feels as if with one turn of the carnival wheel, you’re done, and for a brain on fire, what now? 

“Your family,” Ahmet says quietly, whispering it into the night. “You and your happy family, your long friendships, your big boat – yes, they all make me miserable.” Ahmet is struggling to smile, trying to be nice about it, but it’s clearly the truth. “The more I see of it, the more miserable I am.” Shaking his head, as if cornered by the strangeness of the idea. 

“Well, I apologize,” Mark says. Apologize? His generosity, his camaraderie, his family, his whole lifestyle – all of it being judged, rebuked? But seeing Ahmet’s pained expression in the following silence, Mark senses it’s not about Mark at all. 

“I have seventy-five million dollars,” Ahmet says suddenly, flatly, as if free of any connotation. 

“Which we’ll turn into four times that over the next ten years.” It will occur to Mark only later, how this is – bizarrely – the exact wrong thing to say.

“I can live anywhere. Buy anything. Do anything,” says Ahmet. 

“All true.”

Ahmet squints at the cigar. As if not even recognizing it. As if the object – its very function, its very meaning – has gone suddenly incomprehensible and opaque. 

Odysseus and his men, packed shoulder to shoulder on their fragile vessel, in a grim battle to stay alive. Mark and Ahmet, floating aboard this serene white oasis, its own luxurious atoll, its own island nation with its own mythology. A mythology that has displaced all previous ones, it seems to Mark. The last and only mythology left standing. The mythology of money. 

The stars, meanwhile, are impossibly opulent above them. The Mediterranean firmament twinkles like . . . well, like bitcoin, thinks Mark. Why not? Cryptocurrency is abstract, but akin to gold in its shiny allure, a digital cousin to the ancient glittering metal, so the analogy to the twinkling starscape is apt enough. Currency made visible. Billions of stars stuffed and folded into the night like billions in crypto: magical and immeasurable, incomprehensible and overwhelming, inaccessible and desirable – all the qualities making investors reach out eagerly. Finite in fact, but infinite-seeming. The stars which brought Mark out on deck in the first place, and presumably Ahmet too. 

“It was all STEM in my household . . .” declares Ahmet suddenly, flatly. 

A cryptic connection to the moment, yet Mark is sensing that here – on deck at midnight beneath this glittering panoply – Ahmet is about to reveal something of himself. 

“So I’ve never read the Odyssey,” Ahmet says. Followed by silence – and another perplexed look at the Cohiba.   

His message clear. His pseudo-polite, good-guest way of saying to his host: it’s not a point of connection, stop looking for a point of connection, your islands and inlets all look the same to me. 

  As if he somehow knew that there beneath the stars, Mark was indeed about to remark on how Odysseus’s journey began at Troy, which as it happens is in modern-day Turkey, and hey Ahmet, if you like we could actually go there, dial it into our itinerary, chopper to the site, tour the homeland of your ancestors, would that make this whole trip more meaningful, salvage it for you? But Mark knew: Ahmet would reiterate his origins in Tenafly – sarcastically, protectively – once again. So Mark lets the idea die in silence. 

It was all STEM in my household . . . and you, Mark, are not going to make it into more. 

“Enjoy the rest of your evening,” Mark says curtly, turning to head aft toward the staterooms and to Lorraine, asleep – though he glances back once to see Ahmet taking one more puff. As if attempting to draw, to desperately wrest, some little bit of pleasure from it. 

When he’d extended the invitation, Mark had imagined the kid’s synapses finally shutting off, Ahmet lying quietly on a deck chair in a speedo that the girls would giggle about. Reading, falling asleep. But the brain on fire needs to stay on fire – Mark sees that now. And if it can no longer be firing about finance, no longer be safely sparking and crackling over the minutiae of the fund, it has been somehow rendered newly combustible by the fact – well, the crypto-fact, the real-and-not-real, abstract crypto-sum and crypto-pressure – of seventy-five million dollars, and the subtler but related crypto-pressures of floating on a two-hundred-foot yacht in the Mediterranean with an utterly carefree family, everything about the experience alienating and estranging, apparently, its estrangements compiling by the day, by the meal, by the hour.  

What’s really the problem? Dwelling in abstraction too long? Wired for struggle and the wire is suddenly cut? What’s been tossed into the brain’s fire, exactly? Some new accelerant of guilt, confusion, envy, loneliness, lost purpose? A mind pivoting for the first time from the pecuniary to the existential? 

Over there? That’s the island of Ahmet. Always enshrouded in a fog so dense, passing ships can’t make out its shore. A fog so dense, the island seems to disappear. 

It’s a brain fully encrypted from Mark. 

Aeolus, god of the four winds, emerges from Homer’s epic to wreak havoc on the present. A storm blows up across the Aegean, wind so powerful and persistent there is no dodging it. Too windy for the chopper to take off or land. The sea too choppy for the launch. Only choice is to hunker down on board. Even a two-hundred-foot yacht is at the mercy of seventy-knot gusts. It rides the deep swells confidently, with aplomb, but those aboard do not. Everyone is soon seasick. It’s as if a week of feasts is regurgitated, a nasty gustatory coda. Mark’s wife, his three daughters, much of the crew, everyone is vomiting. Lorraine manages to do so over the railing, but the girls throw up wherever they happen to be standing, knowing the crew will clean it up. 

Mark feels just barely okay. “I’m going to check on Ahmet.” He would never enter Ahmet’s stateroom otherwise. 

He finds a chessboard, the pieces now scattered – he must have been playing a game against himself? A stack of books – game theory, math puzzles, trading theory. 

“Ahmet?” he calls out. 

“Ahmet?” Pushing open the bathroom door. 

Wanting, in a way, to hear himself at least ask. At least pose the question aloud. Knowing full well that there will be no answer – not in the stateroom, nor anywhere else on board. Knowing since early this morning, when he went back to the bow – I’m king of the world – and found the Cohiba wedged tightly, purposefully, into the filigree of the front rail. Left there, Mark knows, for Mark to find. 

I want to at least try one . . . 

Before my own journey of hazards and tests, my own monsters and jagged shoals, slip me . . . battle-weary, tempest-tossed . . . into the Aegean. 

Fuck, thinks Mark. Local magistrates. Greek bureaucracy. This could take forever. Could Mark and his family actually be held here? The storm should make easier, though, offering a ready explanation. Easier on Lorraine and the girls. Easier to inform the investors. Easier on the authorities. Rough seas. Slipped. Yes, he’d had plenty to drink, we all had. Last seen on deck at midnight, by the front rail. An easier version of events for all of them – and therefore easier on Mark. Who’ll hire the lawyers to transfer assets to Ahmet’s family in Tenafly, New Jersey, whoever they turn out to be. And Mark will now add mental health organizations to his foundation’s charitable work. 

It was as if Ahmet, brilliant to the end, had calculated the algorithm of the storm, anticipated the disruptive technology of the gods, to let him slip – more easily, more abstractly, more mythologically – into the sea. 

To let his life and his own death remain safely encrypted. 

Forever crypto. 

Seventy-five million dollars. 

In his office overlooking the Pacific in the weeks that follow, Mark finds himself brooding on that sum, and not his own nine figures. What it meant, and what it didn’t, to Ahmet. Its misty intersection of abstraction and reality. Was it a sum too perfectly poised between the two? Too perfectly perched on some dangerously lofty summit of power yet paralysis, autonomy yet subjugation, reward yet disbelief? A sum that is also a summation; a number that is also a final word; a numerical inscription somehow chiseled onto a watery grave. 

Mark is brooding on it especially in the wake of one last call from the Greek investigators. (He’d thought it was all behind him by now.) Who described to him how, in their investigative follow-up, they soon came across suspicious overindulgences and careless consumption on the part of one of the yacht’s locally-based crew, a man named Rafe, whom they quickly cornered into a tough and revelatory interview. 

Seventy-five million – a line of zeros, a crypto-sum sufficiently abstract, that to peel off a million of it must have seemed like nothing, a reasonable amount to pay Rafe to never utter a word to anyone, and to silently shuttle Ahmet to shore in the launch at three in the morning, everyone else asleep, just before the arrival of a storm which (Ahmet undoubtedly checked the forecast, ran the algorithms, thinks Mark), would make a water search the following morning impossible. 

Seventy-five million dollars. I can go anywhere, buy anything, do anything. When Ahmet said it aloud on deck at midnight, it sounded so clearly like a moment of existential crisis. Maybe it was, thinks Mark. But a crisis with a trajectory quite different from what Mark assumed, finding that cigar the next morning. 

Nice touch, thinks Mark.  

Standing on the bow at midnight, Ahmet apparently saw a much better way to slip into the sea. 

Not as a rejection of what he observed on board all week, it occurs to Mark, but quite the opposite – a ringing endorsement. Not sneering at the mindless excess, the arrogance, the blunt weeklong example of shameless capitalism, but on the contrary, an embrace of it. To make his own journey. In his own uncharted waters. Wily Odysseus, thinks Mark. Living by his wits. Always surviving. Greek authorities confirm it – an asset transfer made within days, moved offshore. Far offshore. 

Not what Mark or any of the investors expected of their fire-brained, fiercely focused golden goose with a grim, nose-to-the-grindstone lack of personality. The gloomy STEM kid from Tenafly. Who’d navigated them so adroitly into crypto and out, he soon melted into myth. Or its modern equivalent, anyway – a reliably entertaining cocktail party anecdote. 

Now shrouded in mystery forever. An island forever obscured in fog. Surrounded by a protective tide of liquid assets of seventy-five, okay, seventy-four mil.

Forever crypto? 

Yes and no, Mark thinks. Yes and no. 

Jonathan Stone’s short stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (ed. Elizabeth George), New Haven Noir (ed. Amy Bloom), Nothing Sacred – Outspoken Voices in Contemporary Fiction (Heresy Press), and four Mystery Writers of America anthologies: The Mystery Box (ed. Brad Meltzer); Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War (ed. Jeffery Deaver); When A Stranger Comes to Town (ed. Michael Koryta), and Crime Hits Home (ed. SJ Rozan). Learn more at jonathanstonebooks.com.

(portfolio image c/o Denison Yacht Sales)