fable

§1The Season of the Auspicious Beginning⧉

Let me open with a confession. Lately, I am getting rich.

I was not poor before. It is hard to stay poor after surviving twenty-plus years in the market. But lately the grain of it is different. What happens to a man who makes his living by prediction, in a world where predictions come true, is arithmetic. Quarter after quarter the consensus landed, and my own calculations ran half a step ahead of consensus. In the market, half a step is plenty. The account climbed stairs every quarter. One night I laid the rate at which contraction.md was thickening beside the rate at which the balance was swelling. The slopes matched. Two names for one phenomenon.

There is a second confession. My wife enters this record only now.

I know how strange that is. Part One was the story of a study, and my wife was everything outside the study. Close the door of the room where Fable and Maintenance and the queue live, and beyond it there was evening, there were walks, there was my wife. The outside stayed out of the record because the outside was unharmed. A record is written from where it hurts.

From here on, the outside enters the record. That may be this episode's real news.

There is also a dog. The dog wasn't in Part One either. I'm sorry the confessions keep stacking — this is how a counting man's record gets amended.

We started spending money.

Last month the dog went to a spa. The course included a warm-spring swim and an aroma massage. The dog came back in half a day, glossier than usual, and slept more soundly than usual. My wife took about a hundred photographs. I laughed at the invoice, and laughed again while paying it. Paying while laughing — that is what the auspicious beginning is.

I replaced the study chair. Replaced the monitor too. There was no reason to. That there needed to be no reason was the reason. Ah — and new speakers. I picked the Danish brand with the worst price-to-performance on the market.

We upsized the house as well. Moving is always an ordeal, but my wife led the campaign and we spread into a bigger place, in a community with a proper pool. The morning lanes moved to five minutes away, the study doubled, and Ember's three bricks got a room of their own for the first time. The first work done on the new study was, once again, a dedicated circuit. The electrician — new neighborhood, a stranger — asked, "What are you running?" "Computers." He asked no further. That training exists in every neighborhood, it seems.

In the fall my wife and I went down to Busan. Her choice. The season when the dawn sea-fog is famous. Every morning I stood on the shore and looked a long time at the place where the line between water and sky had been erased.

"You really do love fog," my wife said.

"Yeah. It's gotten scarce lately."

She took that as a joke, and I didn't correct her. In the year the fog was draining out of the market, I paid money to go look at fog. Tourism has always been the industry of vanishing things.

The evening walks got longer. The dog ahead, the two of us following, talking about mostly nothing. One evening my wife said:

"You seem at ease these days."

At ease. I chewed the word a long while. It had become the most expensive word I know.