When You Need a Miracle, Sometimes Fate—or a Failing Power Grid—Delivers
Thursday, august 14, late afternoon. I was at JPMorgan, lost in a spreadsheet that needed to model out the cash flows from prefab condominiums sprawling across America and yet did not, because the spreadsheet had been created by a succession of analysts whose many hands, Ouija-style, had conjured from within it a demon. It was a model of reality that seemed only to hiss and wank at reality, and there was a bank vice-president watching over my shoulder as I toggled across the condo units, no financial insights but … so many people in them, all paying a couple grand a month, however they managed, all summed into endless spreadsheet cells, a portrait of the vastness of money against the tininess of lives, and soon so many of them would default, they’d bring the economy crashing down. Maybe that’s what the demon was working?
In the moment, VP looming, I prayed for escape, my plea finding favor at exactly 4:10:39 p.m., as a cascading electric failure—the great blackout of 2003—reached the American Northeast and the Morgan banking floor. As the AC cut and halogen light was replaced by honeyed city dusk; as the staffer who’d lost friends at Cantor Fitzgerald made for the door, grimly saying “Good luck”; as the assistant from Staten Island who, each afternoon, sweetly, slowly, ate a pack of tropical-fruit Skittles while reading the Daily News zipped up her Sergio Tacchini tracksuit and, tucking the Skittles into her pocket, said, “I guess I’d better start walking,” which pretty soon is what we all did. Out onto Park Avenue, flowers happy in the medians, bathwater summer night, Nokias petering out; votive candles twinkling in the co-op lobbies, and on the Racquet & Tennis Club balcony, where there was wine, and in the windows of J.G. Melon, where there was wine; there was wine all over, and there were candles; up and down Park and Lexington, in windows high and low, celebration mixed with mourning, a sense of last and brief reprieve from all the gridding systems that would make the century their own.