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Timothy stared at her. It was Katherine, most certainly was Katherine, the way her mimicry cut through his pretension like a scythe through wheat, but the voice, the throaty laugh, was Tricia's.

‘I'm having a hard time with this,' he said. But he was secretly thrilled. This was magic, the stuff of dreams.

‘Don't be crazy,' Tricia said. ‘Look at me. Look what I get to look like.' Then she added: ‘You found her attractive, didn't you?'

‘Yes,' he admitted.

‘Are you glad to have me back?'

‘Yes.'

She turned to him. ‘Then kiss me, Gimpy.'

He leaned over and kissed her. Her tongue found his, and moved into his mouth the way Katherine's always had, just the tip, softly. But it felt different, not at all like Katherine's mouth – the thin, freckled lips were now full and soft, and her breath was loud and hot, as it was that night at Tricia's apartment.

Tricia broke off the kiss and looked up at him. ‘Now that is strange,' she said. ‘To feel you through somebody else. What's it like for you?'

How typical of Katherine, he realized, to pull away from a passionate moment and ask a question about how he felt. She was always analyzing, always stepping back, always making mental
notes of things she might want to record later in her journal. She always kept her distance, from him and from the moment in which they lived. She wanted to package her life up and behold it, to understand it, like a piece of crystal in the light.

‘It feels,' he said, ‘different.'

She smiled. ‘Welcome to the new era,' she said. She might have been talking about this new chapter in their marriage, these days of strange kisses and glancing at the mirror in disbelief. Or maybe she was proclaiming a new epoch in the history of mankind, an age when technology had finally overcome mortality, and the nature of what it meant to live had radically changed. He wasn't sure what she meant. But then she pulled his face down to hers, and kissed him again.

She led him to the bed, to the expanse of sheets and duvets and pillows that had seemed empty for so long. And they made love, this couple that had been married for twenty years, as if it was the first time they had ever felt each other; and, in a way, it was.

After he made love to Tricia, she did what Katherine always did. She slid across the bed and put her head on his chest. She lay there quietly, stroking his brown and gray chest hair between her fingers, listening to his heartbeat.

‘Tell me everything,' he said. He knew she would understand what he meant.

‘It was like a dream,' she said. ‘Have you ever had a waking dream? One where you know you're dreaming, and can steer yourself in different directions, make yourself say things to the people you dream about? That's what it was like, talking to you in the machine. I could make myself say things, by thinking. Does that make sense?'

‘Yes.'

‘When I woke up this morning, it was different. I wasn't dreaming anymore. I felt fine. Like waking up after a long nap. I was … refreshed. And I feel like me. I am Katherine Van Bender. But when I pass a mirror, or look at my reflection in a window, then it's frightening. Like a nightmare.'

She lifted her head from her chest, looked at him. ‘But I would do it again. What was my choice? I was sick, Timothy, so sick. And dying. And so scared. So maybe this isn't so bad. Maybe it was all worth it.' She put her head down again on his chest and hugged him tightly. ‘It only seems strange because we're not used to it. Maybe in the future this will be common. Like waking up after anesthesia. That must have seemed frightening, when people first did it. You wake up with a scar and stitches and a leg missing, or an organ cut out from your belly.' She stroked his abdomen, the spot above his appendix, as if tenderly drawing an invisible scar line. ‘Isn't this the same thing? I guess we'll all get used to it, eventually.'

‘I'm just glad you're back. I don't care what you look like.'

She sat up and smiled. ‘Then why didn't you choose an old lady? Or a homeless man?'

‘I don't want to make love to an old lady.'

‘I'm not upset. I understand why you chose her. She's very pretty. I could get used to this quickly.'

When they rose, Tricia said she didn't want to dress like a slut, so she searched through Katherine's closet for something to wear. The outfits she chose – elegant silk twill blouses, pleated skirts – did not fit. Katherine was four inches taller than Tricia, and slimmer.

So Tricia put on again the clothes she had worn last night, the black sweater and tight jeans.

They agreed she would have to come to work with him. Now a Plan formed: that Timothy, devastated from the loss of his wife, would fall in love with his much-younger secretary, in a desperate and sad attempt to replace Katherine. Their burgeoning relationship would need to be visible for everyone to see. So they drove together to the University Avenue office of Osiris, and he parked in the underground lot. The parking lot attendant smiled at him, and nodded at Tricia; he had seen them both before, but never had they arrived together in the morning, in the same car.

They took the elevator to the twenty-third floor. When they reached the office it was ten-thirty, and the Kid was sitting at
Tricia's desk, looking harried, trying to work the phones. ‘Osiris,' he said frantically, as he answered an incoming call. And then he saw Timothy and Tricia walk in together, and Tricia wearing the same clothes as the previous day, and he couldn't help himself: he raised an eyebrow and smirked. ‘Yes,' the Kid said, into the phone. ‘I will have him return your call.' He scribbled something on a notepad, then tossed it aside.

‘You made it,' he said to Tricia.

‘I made it,' Tricia said.

The Kid rose from her chair and made a show of gesturing grandly at it with a sweep of his hand, welcoming Tricia back to her station. Tricia sat down at the front desk. She stared at the phones. She seemed uncertain.

The Kid said, ‘Timothy, I need to talk to you.'

Timothy understood Tricia's look; she had no idea how to use the PBX. Timothy said, ‘In a second, Kid. Do me a favor. Would you please run across the street and grab me a cup of coffee?'

For a moment the Kid looked shocked, and he glanced at Tricia, as if to say, Isn't that
her
job?

Timothy said quietly, his voice laden with innuendo, ‘Please. Just give us a minute.'

When put that way, as a secret man-to-man communication, the Kid understood, and he relented. He nodded, and then to Tricia said, ‘You want coffee too? Black, right?'

She smiled. ‘Little change of pace today. Cream and sugar.' The Kid seemed surprised, but Timothy understood right away. That was exactly how Katherine ordered it. With cream and sugar.

‘Okay,' the Kid said. ‘I'll be back.' As he headed to the elevator bank, he turned to Timothy over his shoulder. ‘But we need to talk when I get back. It's important.' He pushed open the glass door. In a moment the elevator appeared, and he was gone.

Timothy showed her how to use the phones. She sat at the front desk, and he leaned over her from behind, demonstrating which buttons to press, and describing the general fuck-you posture she would need to adopt when dealing with angry investors calling for Timothy. Standing behind her, reaching over her, he was
surprised by her smell. It was Katherine's smell, the smell of apples and honey. Tricia was wearing Katherine's perfume.

‘I think I understand,' she said, about the phones.

‘I love you,' he said. He bent down and kissed the flesh on the back of her neck.

‘Oh, Mr. Van Bender,' she said. She shivered. ‘How inappropriate.'

‘Sorry.'

He turned and walked away. ‘Hold all calls, Tricia.'

‘Yes, sir, Mr. Van Bender.'

When the Kid returned, they met in Timothy's office. The news during Timothy's day-and-a-half-long hooky game had not been good.

The yen had continued its relentless climb, reaching a high of eighty-two during the previous day. Bear Stearns had issued a margin call and unceremoniously closed out its portion of the yen trade, resulting in another loss of seven million dollars. Further, that morning, while Timothy was making love to Tricia, the Kid had fielded a phone call from Barclays, who had issued their own margin call and explained that they would begin liquidating their yen position within hours.

The total losses for the month were now nearing forty million dollars, and there was no end in sight. Each margin call resulted in another broker placing a frantic order to buy yen for Osiris' account, at whatever price the market was charging. This raised the price of the contracts further, as sellers smelled blood, which in turn caused further losses.

The rising yen and the margin calls were only one side of the problem, the Kid explained to Timothy. Squeezing Osiris at the other end were the investors, who were clamoring to withdraw their money. It was now more than the small matter of Pinky contacting his limited set of friends and casting doubt on Osiris. Now each investor in the fund was calling the others, and the doubt and anxiety were feeding off each other, as August statements had not yet been mailed, and Timothy Van Bender was not taking phone calls, and no one had any sense of exactly where
the fund stood, or how much money had been made or lost. The thing about rich people, Timothy understood – because he was one himself – is that they do not necessarily care about searching for the absolute highest returns available, and in fact, they do not even mind a slow dribbling loss, like a leak in an inner tube. What they dread more than anything else is losing a lot of money all at once – a ‘blow-up,' in industry parlance. Most rich people are not self-made men; they inherited their money from fathers and grandfathers past, and most are insecure and fearful that they will never be able to earn money on their own, as their ancestors have; and so the only thing they care about is to preserve the good fortune they have been handed, and not ruin it for the next generation. Now Timothy Van Bender, former star money manager, the man who had never returned to his investors less than ten percent per year and averaged more than seventeen percent, was clearly blowing up, and taking a lot of family nest eggs with him.

Even though Osiris had the legal right to hold onto investors' money for ninety days after redemption was requested – a right enshrined in the Partnership Agreement, to prevent the very run on assets and messy liquidations that were now taking place anyway – the Kid reminded Timothy that it was only a formality now, that the redemptions would happen in ninety days, no matter what, and then whatever was left in Osiris' coffers – and it might not be much – would be handed back to the investors, and Osiris would be left a desiccated corpse, like the shell of an insect in an old spider's web.

And then there was one other matter, which the Kid saved for last, as if he was carefully building a legal case, block by block, trying to establish beyond all reasonable doubt the utter hopelessness of their situation. He handed Timothy a single sheet of paper, a letter typed on thick vellum, from the CFTC – the government agency responsible for regulating companies like Osiris, and responsible, Timothy knew, for prosecuting fraudulent money managers and sending them to jail.

It said:

COMMODITY FUTURES TRADING COMMISSION

DIVISION OF ENFORCEMENT

VIA FEDERAL EXPRESS

Enclosed in a subpoena ad testificandum and duces tecum of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued in connection with the above-titled private investigation being conducted pursuant to Section 6(c) and 8(a)(1) of the Commodity Exchange Act, as amended, 7 U.S.C 15 and a12(a)(1)(1994).

This subpoena calls for your testimony on October 12, 1999.

Attached to the letter was a subpoena. It instructed Osiris to gather all relevant documents for the CFTC to study. These documents included internal profit and loss estimates, emails, memos, spreadsheets, brokerage statements, and phone message logs. The CFTC believed Timothy and Osiris had committed fraud, that it was hiding losses from investors, that it was telling them comforting stories while proceeding to lose money hand over fist. Which was, more or less, true.

‘I'm named in the subpoena, too,' the Kid said. He couldn't keep the anger out of his voice. It was bad enough that his resume would forever bear the mark of Cain, a stint at the soon-to-be infamous Osiris LP, which people would from now on mention with a shake of the head and a whistle of disbelief. In addition Timothy had somehow gotten the Kid involved in financial fraud. It was the kind of crime that landed people in prison at worst, and barred from the financial industry at best.

‘Don't worry, Kid,' Timothy said. ‘When things are going bad, everything looks worse than it is. When things are going well, everything looks better than it is.' It was a useful old saw, one that had gotten Timothy through many a depressing day. But of course none of those depressing days had ever started with a subpoena from the federal government.

‘I'm giving notice,' the Kid said. ‘I resign effective two weeks from today.'

It occurred to Timothy at that instant that, when the Kid testified to the CFTC, he would hang Timothy out to dry. He would describe how his boss had instructed him to commit fraud, how
he had been told to mislead investors. The Kid was going to hand them Timothy on a platter to save his own skin. But at least he was giving two weeks' notice. Nice kid.

‘You need anything else?' the Kid asked. And then he added meanly: ‘More coffee, maybe?'

‘No, Kid,' Timothy said, holding up his cup. ‘My coffee's fine.' Yes, the Kid was going to hang him out to dry.

Despite the fact that he was facing a twenty-million-dollar lawsuit against his personal assets, and despite the fact that the federal government was investigating him for suspected fraud, and despite the fact that he had lost over forty million dollars in less than a month and his career as a hedge fund operator was ending in ruin – despite all this, Timothy was happy.