The Eighth Day Read Free Page A

year, while he was four years out of the Art Institute and pulling down eighty bucks a day.
    A portfolio management intern at the John Galt Fund, Caleigh was a born workaholic who logged sixty-hour weeks without complaint. Even on vacation, she’d been up at seven every day to snag one of the four
Wall Street Journal
s at the town’s only newsstand. She’d checked her e-mail twice a day at the local library and had been caught, repeatedly, watching MSNBC with the sound turned off.
    For Caleigh, making money was an art and a game, as absorbing and nuanced as the ballet must be to a professional dancer. Not so for Danny, who liked to kid that he was “beyond money—an
artiste
.”
    Which was at least half-true—the beyond money part, that is. Most of what little money he made came from moonlighting—not from art. He worked part-time at a gallery, which gave him “exposure” but didn’t pay a whole lot more than minimum wage. The real bucks came from the twenty-five dollars an hour he made freelancing for Fellner Associates, a big investigative firmin the District. The investigative work was easy, if uninteresting: for the most part, he collected filings at the SEC, culled records at the courthouse, and interviewed third-tier sources in connection with mergers and acquisitions and litigation of various kinds. As near as Danny could tell, Fellner Associates was almost always on the wrong side—a circumstance in which the firm took pride. Because, of course, “the wrong side” was where the money was, and that was where Fellner Associates liked to put down roots.
    Still, his freelance work more or less paid the bills, though there were lots of things that Danny craved but couldn’t afford—not least of which was a nonlinear video-editing suite that would enable him to make the kind of art that, for now, he could only dream of.
    The system he wanted cost twenty thousand dollars—about twenty times as much as he had in his savings account. Which pretty much put it out of reach. He’d never save that much working for Fellner, and as for his art, that wasn’t moving at all.
Not at all, at all,
as Caleigh would say. In point of fact, he hadn’t sold any of his work in months—not since a Latino bank in Mount Pleasant bought a bronze that he’d made:
Forest and Threes.
    He leaned back, closed his eyes, and rested his head against the jittering window. Caleigh had the radio tuned to NPR’s
Morning Edition
—one of those whimsical first-person narratives that she liked and he didn’t. He tuned it out, thinking,
If a three fell in the forest, would anyone hear it?
    Caleigh must have seen him smile, because she broke the Meaningful Silence to ask, “So . . . what are you thinking about?”
    He shook his head slowly, pretending to be half-asleep.
What am I thinking about? I’m thinking about not selling anything, about not having money, about not getting married. I’m thinking about all the
knots
in my life.
    “Danny?”
    His eyelids fluttered. She could be relentless. “Wha?”
    “What are you
thinking
about?”
    The truth was, he was contemplating the mystery of how he and Caleigh, who had almost nothing in common, were nevertheless made for each other. Something had ignited when they met, and Danny believed the flame would never go out. When they were separated, even for just a few days, Danny began to languish, a shipwrecked man. It was the same for Caleigh, or so she said. They were magic together. Each of them lit up in the presence of the other. Despite their entirely different career tracks and backgrounds, they were so attuned that half of the time they could read each other’s minds.
Same brain,
they’d say when one spoke aloud the thought of the other.
    Of
course
they’d get married, someday when he felt a little more grounded, when he was getting somewhere, when he was at least making some kind of money.
Maybe I’ll have to get a
real
job
, he thought,
if something doesn’t break for me