REKT - Chapter 16
Volcano
We are halfway up a volcano, sitting on the porch, watching it rain. Water gushes out of the porous black rock and channels itself into impromptu streams. So much water is falling from the sky. I've never seen rain like this. The rain flattens the giant blades of grass that grow here. It rushes down the twisty asphalt road that S curves down the valley. Somewhere down there is the Pacific Ocean, but we can't see it. The rain knocks everything down. There's only gray and water here.
“This is Hawaii?” Nikola sips a cup of pure Kona coffee. Steam rising from the rim of the mug.
“This is my favorite Hawaii, on the wet side of the volcano.”
“My first time here. You could have taken me to the beach.”
“We’ll get out when the rain breaks. Give it a couple of hours. Sun will come out, everything will dry up, and you’ll be thanking me for picking this spot.”
She rolls her eyes at me and goes back inside the little rental cottage. I pulled her away from her laptop, her trades, just to take a moment and drown in the rain with me. It’s lost on her. Her life is tunneling down to a series of candle charts, algorithmic stop loss orders, judgment calls about usernames and whether to follow them into a position. I’m losing her to the hunt, she’s answering to a number, a hunger growing inside of her as our balance creeps towards two million. We are in a unique moment in time, the inflation of a bubble. Cryptomania is in full force, and she’s been bitten by the bug. This is what we set her out to do, this is what she’s wanted to do her entire life. Shot caller, decision maker, risk taker.
The front window facing the porch is covered in sticky notes, annotated with dry erase markers. ETH, BTC, IOTA, XRP, BSTR. Prices, ratios, a new language being spoken. We now talk about the flippening, all-time highs, lambos and mooning as if they were common terms that existed our entire life. Real money is no longer cash, dollars, bucks. It is fiat, distinguishing it as government issued currency subject to the control and oversight of central banks. Coins are the future. They are permissionless, immutable, transparent. No third party can stand between you and another. Eliminate the gatekeepers, secure the chain, decentralize the future.
I toss the cold remnants of my coffee off the porch into the rain, walk inside and fiddle with the TV. Joe is on CNBC. I nearly forgot. There he is coming in live and direct from Miami Beach in his Crocodile Dundee costume. Crypto Jesus and Whale Ape are in the studio. Maria Bartiromo is moderating a discussion between the three. She’s used to serious CEOs, bankers like Jamie Dimon who speak with guarded words. This group is freewheeling, wild in their speculation, optimistic on an incomprehensible level. Nikola shoots me a dirty look, takes her laptop, and walks into the bedroom. She has no time for this. Markets are in motion. If any news breaks on the TV, she’ll get it morsel fed to her in Slack from some kid in Korea.
“Joe, if I hear you right, you’re saying that Blockstar will be more important than General Electric in three years.” Maria is trying hard not to break character.
“Maria, you’re not listening with your heart. I’ve been saying that Blockstar is already more important than General Electric. What is happening now is an elevation of consciousness. The public is waking up to what we are doing. The enthusiasm is transformational. What you are witnessing is an evolution that’s not just financial but also spiritual. We are elevating to a higher plane.”
“And the blockchain is allowing this?” She’s very good at her job, trying to ground this conversation in something her viewers can use. Her audience are middle-aged money managers, financial planners who are going to start answering calls asking about Bitcoin from retirees looking for a little excitement in their life. Guys hankering to get out of Amazon and into Ethereum.
“Blockchain, hyperledgers and tangles. All of these technologies allow for direct settlement between two parties in a manner where there’s no need to establish trust. That’s the brilliance here. The system is the trust,” Joe says.
“Whoa, whoa, hold on there. You talk as if all are created equal when we know that there’s Bitcoin and then there’s everything else…” That’s Crypto Jesus. He’s a maximalist. Another new term we throw about as if crypto maximalists were as common as conservatives.
A rush comes over me. Not déjà vu, not disassociation, something similar to both but neither. There’s an unreality to this as conversations we’ve had before transport themselves from corners in conferences to national cable networks. Joe, Jesus, Whale Ape, Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, Kelvin Cho. My friends, colleagues, clients are becoming celebrities, market movers, revolutionaries in the stodgy world of money. Is this thing really happening? For the first time, I feel like crypto is more than this odd thing we provide a service for. These fanatics, nut jobs, true believers might actually be right.
Their faith is being rewarded. I watch the BTC ticker locked to the right corner of the CNBC scrollbar. It’s gone up three hundred dollars since the interview started.
“Niko, are you seeing this?”
“Shhhh.” I’m being hissed at. She’s hunched over, swapping across screens, punching in orders. I watch her buy a hundred thousand bucks worth of PotCoin. Wait, there's a pot coin? The price jumps from $0.36 to $0.42 on the move. She drove that price spike. The bottom bar of her laptop is flashing with notifications. My friend and business partner is in a hospital four miles from here, alone, forgotten about. Nikola is trading up a storm. Her eyes are huge, she’s mainlining money, fake money. Deacon Joe is on CNBC arguing with Whale Ape. Somewhere in Serbia a batch of nightly transactions is being prepared for my approval.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I forgot about the Serbians. Did I approve the wires? Yes. I did, but did I review them? NO. Goddamn it, get your head on straight. You have one responsibility with the business right now. Make sure Icarus’ books balance. Stop rubbernecking on Niko. Stop watching Joe on TV. Stop worrying about Andy. Make sure no one is robbing the fund. Close the door on the past, let Nikola make our future.
My fingers drum the kitchen table as I boot up my laptop. Ninety-six hours have passed since I last audited our Frankfurt account. There was the thing in West Palm beach that stretched across the weekend, then there was the flight out here and Andy’s intake. All during that time there was the chats with Niko. Short staccato messages. Trading positions. Explanations of Andy’s state. Travel arrangements.
Airport pickups. I dropped the ball after dropping the ball. First Andy, then Serbia. What was the point of leaving Andy with Joe if I wasn’t going to do my job?
There were two hundred and forty million dollars in our Frankfurt account last Thursday. Today is Tuesday. Why is the internet so fucking slow? Goddamn this rain, this satellite connection. I should have picked a place in town with real bandwidth. Breathe in, breathe out. Count back from ten. Old McDonald Had a Farm. Two hundred twenty-eight million, that sounds right. Get into Google Drive, check the redemption schedule. Six million out Friday, six million out Monday. Okay, we are okay. Don’t ever fuck that up again Ryan. Set reminders now. Three times a day, every day. Reconcile. Trust but verify. This won’t be a problem if crypto wins out. I won’t need to be in the middle, but for now we are a bridge. This whole thing is a bridge between the present and the future.
The future. Could this really be a thing? Deacon Joe in his Crocodile Dundee hat on CNBC directing the future of money. Nikola raised the market cap of PotCoin by fifty million dollars based on one trade. She’s going to crash that fucking coin later on too. Make a nice profit in the process. Somewhere in the world, wherever these PotCoin jokers are based, they are watching the price spike and holding their breath. Their office is hoping, praying, that someone really believes in them, but there’s that voice in the back of their heads that knows exactly what is going on. They are getting pumped. That voice is saying sell, sell, sell. Cash in before it dumps. Flip your own shitty coin. Get in on the action. Sell yourself out before a shark chomps down on you.
I’m out of the house, stepping off the porch into the rain. It is raining so hard I need to open and close my eyes to clear the water off my eyelids. I have to move. I have to walk. My feet need to keep pace with my brain. My brain, my brain, my brain. What are we a part of? What have I gotten into? On the asphalt now, part of a rushing stream of water racing down the side of the volcano. So much water, so many thoughts. Am I crying? I can’t tell, I don’t care. No one can see me. Let it all out. Scream. Rush down the mountain, follow the yellow brick road down, down, down into the gray wall of water. Just disappear for a moment. Wind the engine down. Oh God, what is happening?
“Is this the real life or just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality. I’m just a poor boy…” I’m singing in the rain, singing Bohemian Rhapsody as I slide down the side of a mountain of fake money. Keep moving, singing, dancing. Let the rain wash over you. Drown in this. Accept how crazy things have become. If you try to fight it, if you try to make sense of it, you are going to lose your shit. Let go Ryan, just let go.
***
Dr. Wendy’s office is a small windowless affair in the middle of the hallway. It is filled with folders, overflowing with files. Paperwork, charts, and unopened sample boxes are what occupies this space, not Dr. Wendy. I’ve been here fifteen minutes waiting. She’s popped in three different times to assure me that I have not been forgotten. The pace of a hospital floor is staggering at times. When she is here, everyone vies for her attention. She is the source of approvals, signer of forms, decipherer of conflicting data. Interns and younger doctors seek her opinion on tricky matters, hoping for concurrence on a prognosis. How different the daytime rhythm is from the night. I’ve been on this floor at ten PM when there are two nurses working. One on rounds, the other holding down the desk. Ebbs and flows.
Dr. Wendy is quick, to the point, always in motion but never bothered by another disturbance. I don’t think she views them as interruptions, rather her duty. She is at home on this floor, not trying to be somewhere else. This is why I like her so much. Not that she’ll make time for me, but that she’ll make time for everyone. That this is where she’s supposed to be. Perhaps that’s more common than I realize, but in my experience doctors scuttle in, scuttle out, only operating on half the time and half the information needed to do the job.
She is in a maroon hospital coat, Maui Lutheran stitched in white on her chest. Small, birdlike, hair pulled back. Her face creased in pleasant wrinkles across a mixed platter of features familiar to old Hawaiian families.
“I’m sorry Ryan. This is how it is on a Monday morning. A weekend’s worth of stuff to catch up on. Let’s see, where is Andy’s chart?”
His manila folder is on top of her desk, she grabs at it without needing to look. Andy is a working case, active and promising, not stubborn and buried. These are the cues I look for as the doctor speak is a mystery to me.
“He’s getting there.” She opens the folder and runs her eyes up and down the length of it. “He had a lot of stimulants in him when he came in. It’s taken us a bit to flush that out and reduce his agitation. Serum levels are still off, so we are re-introducing his mood stabilizers. Ryan, I can go on with the diagnostics, but that’s my job not yours. Is Andy on a schedule? What’s his routine been like?”
“He’s had no routine. We’ve been going through some changes with our company. Closing it down, starting up a new opportunity. Our niche in finance is experiencing rapid growth at the moment.”
Wendy puts her pen down, looks up from her note taking.
“What niche is that?”
“Cryptocurrency.”
“You mean Bitcoin?” she asks.
“Among other things.”
She takes her reading glasses off, pauses, and processes my response. “My son talks about it over dinner all the time. He sold his Pokemon cards off to buy a fraction of a bitcoin. That’s not a healthy space to be in for someone like Andy. Cryptomania is what they call it. Mania is literally in the name.”
Another pause, “Ryan, we need some better judgment and life choices around Andy.”
She’s saying that to me in a rehearsed neutral tone. She’s speaking flat, keeping any emotion out of her voice. This is a doctor's trick. I know it from the last time we were here, and I know what she means.
She’s talking to me about my judgment, my life choices. She can’t say that, but I am his partner and his proxy. What do we owe each other? At the least, I should be keeping him out of the next tulip bubble. Why didn’t I say anything when we decided to pivot into being a hedge fund? Why did I send him out on the road alone to raise money after that Erskine party? I don’t think I even care that much about being rich. Why couldn’t I have put my foot down and been the adult in the room? Because Andy, because Niko both wanted this. Because that was the direction of things, the momentum of our lives. Here we are with such an opportunity, possibly a once in a lifetime opportunity. They say no risk, no reward. We took a risk. This is Andy’s reward.
“He had been managing so well for so long. A part of me thought maybe he was behind it or that he’d grown enough to handle things for himself,” I answer with the easiest response. The lie sounds better than the truth.
“Psychoeducation is an important component of what we do here. Andy has taken part in plenty of sessions, but anyone can get carried away. Ryan, I’m not about guilt. That’s not going to help anyone in this situation. I’m just reminding you how important it is to stay inbounds.”
So, this is what Dr. Wendy wanted to see me about. Staying inbounds. Getting out of crypto for Andy’s sake. If that’s the case, then we need to work together on this. It’s not happening with just me on the case.
“Dr. Wendy, how much do you know about Bitcoin or crypto?”
“Only what my son tells me at dinner and what I’ve Googled.”
“Andy and I aren’t your son, and we aren’t someone who stumbled into this thing because our friends at a party were talking about it. We are in the inner circle of this bubble. Andy’s here because we borrowed the private jet of a crypto billionaire who considers Andy among his nearest and dearest. When you turn on your TV and someone is being interviewed about Bitcoin, that’s someone we are on a first name basis with. This isn’t a typical scenario. I need you to understand how little distance there is between crypto and us.”
Dr. Wendy takes a moment. She puts her fingers together, turns thoughts in her head.
“That can be very problematic to Andy’s recovery.”
BINGO. I think we are getting on the same wavelength. Let’s see if we can tune this in a little tighter and get that frequency crystal clear.
“I have no idea how long this bubble is going to last, but our company will be closed in eight weeks. Once that’s over with, I’ll have a lot more resources to devote to Andy and chances are this Bitcoin thing will have peaked. Even if it hasn’t popped, it won’t be as new and exciting.”
She’s looking at me a bit sideways. Perhaps we aren’t getting on the same wavelength.
“Ryan, I’ve taken an oath. This isn’t a storage facility for the inconvenient.”
“Has Andy’s brother called? How about his sister? I doubt you’ve heard from his father Hank. He’s the most heartless son of a bitch I’ve ever met. Any chance you’ve heard from him? Does Andy get any calls, any visitors besides Nikola and myself? What about his insurance, any pressure from them yet?”
“No,” she answers.
“I’m his support system and I’m not in a great place myself. Anxiety, history of panic attacks, a highly sensitive ball of stress. As I’m sitting here, I realize that I don’t even know what I want in life. You know what I’ve wanted for the last five years?”
Dr. Wendy puts her pen down, gives me her full attention. “What?” she asks.
“Whatever Andy has wanted. He has more charisma, drive, and ambition in his pinky than I do in my entire body. I’ve been modeling myself on Andy. He’s the object of my desire, what I want to be. That’s so stupid, so shallow, and that’s something I am just realizing now. How can I help him if I want to be him?”
Holy shit. I do not think Wendy expected that out of me. I don’t think I expected that out of me. Maybe she’ll think twice before issuing her next neutral judgment. Maybe she’ll realize how little help I’m going to be if Andy gets let out in the middle of this bubble.
“Ryan, perhaps you should talk to someone.”
No shit, I should talk to someone. I’m talking to someone right now and it feels good. Maybe my old therapist is still accepting new patients. Are you a new patient if you haven’t visited in over five years? Is cognitive behavior therapy even right for me? Maybe I need something beyond that. Here I am admitting to Andy’s doctor that I am a blank slate, a puppy who followed the wrong dog around. I happily yapped while Andy chased the crypto car, bit onto the tire and got dragged down the block.
“I would love a referral,” I say.
“Of course. Andy may be here for a while. There’s someone on the island I can get you started with, Dr. Mayasaki. He’s a good fit for you.”
Yes, now you are getting it. Andy may be here for a while. Let’s see how long we can leave him in here while I clean up everything on the outside and start working on my inside.
There’s a light tapping on the door. A man in scrubs holding a stack of papers. Wendy gave me ten minutes she didn’t have to begin with. I wonder how much of that he heard. He probably walks in on dozens of slow-moving crises a week.
“I’ll go see Andy now. Thank you for your time doctor.”
“Make sure you see me before you leave, I’ll have that referral for you.”