Lake Success

by Gary Shteyngart

He found his way back to his own watch safe and dumped six of his beauties into a rollerboard along with a fistful of underwear and a bottle of Veraet watch spray. He couldn’t do this without the watches. He couldn’t live without their insistent ticking and the predictable spin of their balance wheels, that golden whir of motion and light inside the watch that gave it the appearance of having a soul. Each timepiece told a story of physics and craftsmanship and countless hours of someone else’s exacting toil. The watches would help Barry stay in control. Even as he fled from everyone he knew, he would retain control.

The asphalt crunched beneath Barry’s feet. So this was America. A cruel place where a man could be thrown off the street because of the color of his skin, the cut of his watch. It was disgraceful. He didn’t want any part of it. Maybe it wasn’t too late to turn back. He could picture it all. His office, Seema’s fine body, an endless stream of macchiatos and uni rolls. A Manhattan life for a Manhattan man. He could rejoin the winners’ circle.

A device that recorded time, not to mention showed its scarcity, would add order and rigor to their lives, as it had added order and rigor to his. That was the problem, right? These kids’ lives had no rigor. Sitting on a stoop on an empty street, trying to sell drugs that had gone out of style decades ago, no one to monitor them or set measurable goals. They didn’t mean to be inherently irresponsible people, but that’s what they were.

A man that rich couldn’t be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of twenty-first-century America?

Until that fateful meeting at Weill Cornell last September, a family had seemed a reasonable way to substitute for his failure as a titan of finance.

“You go around and you do things and you don’t know why you do them,” she said. “And that’s the story of your gender writ large.”