Excerpt from a Novel About the Housing Bubble and Bands

Jesse Holcomb

And so it came to pass that I wound up in an office, an office next door to my father-in-law at the company that he owned. It was curious enough a turn of events in that I did not actually know anything about buying or selling houses, and indeed had always felt a disinterest tending toward disdain for the whole profession, which I associated with ugly, big-haired women in flashy cars. The duplicity and downright evil of real estate people was a matter I had heard my own father rave on and on about: a world where very high percentages were extracted by its practitioners for no other skill than being well-connected.

But all the clichés of the business seemed quite disconnected from what I daily observed in my father-in-law's office. The place teemed with life in a way I'd more often associated with volume retail outlets around Christmas. There were always people there, flooding through from about seven-thirty in the morning to I never really knew how late at night, as I adhered happily and unfailingly to a 5 o'clock quitting time. Not only was the office always full, but it was mad with commerce. It wasn't nickel-and-dime stuff either; routinely transactions would cross my desk with numbers of a half-million or more.

In the office I came to understand pretty quickly how much of a sucker I had been for much of my life, and also what suckers my friends had all been (and doubtless still were), and more than anything else I learned what complete and utter suckers my parents were, tottering around in that broken-down house, endlessly disappointed and hopeless when all the time there was a demonstrably wonderful world out there, albeit one that they were too cowardly and too clumsy to inhabit. Straight out of the gate I was now almost certainly making more than my own father ever had, and I could see everywhere all about me the evidence of an interesting and well-funded future.

What seemed odd to me about my job then, and grew worse as time was passing, was that I did not seem to be doing anything. At first my father-in-law explained this to me a mere side effect (“getting up to speed” was the phrase he always used) but soon enough I came to realize that maybe there just wasn't much there for me to do. I would walk out of my office and move between the desks where all the elements of the machine were busily at play, young working families with babies on their knees and old widowed women answering questions, signing papers, all finding themselves lost in the merry flow of money. I must admit some embarrassment at just how long it took for me to realize that the apparent never-ending frenzy and alertness was mostly brought about by my own presence. The employees of the company were cleverly appearing more busy in my presence, just as I had done myself when the boss came around at countless places I'd worked. It just took me a long time to realize that I was the boss now, or some extension thereof.

It felt odd coming home each night to Nina and realizing I had nothing to share or get across, no stories of shame or triumph to impart. My job was to look over what papers her father saw fit to give me, and though I gave it a thorough go at first, I quickly understood I wasn't really doing anything, and wasn't really expected to do anything, either. My true job was a stand at his side when he gave inspirational speeches to the staff, and to manage the grill when we fixed a picnic lunch for the workers every other Wednesday. I came to understand my role as something of a prop / spokes-model for the company at large, a mascot. Finally realizing this made everything easier, because while I was apparently not useful, I was still necessary, an object whose absence would have made the whole operation less comfortable and functional. My fundamental confusion I sank into Nina, who was skilled at accepting my myriad of strange moods. I cooled myself with her still-ardent caresses and of course the baby talk, which we could still spout back and forth to each other for hours at a time. Each weekend we indulged ourselves ridiculously in shopping and whatever other pleasures her father's money could buy us.

At work I finally discovered, acknowledged, that my office had a door on it, one that I had the right to shut whenever I saw fit. And so that is what I did, and no one seemed to mind, or to notice. I was alone with the computer then and soon enough my thoughts wandered to the last sixth months, back to the tour and all the people that had so abruptly appeared and disappeared from my life. I found myself searching. I expected to find them there, big personalities all, but for some reason I did not expect to find quite as much as what I did. The speed with which the world was continuing on was not dizzying for me, not exactly, but it did make me feel very far from that world.

I found a trove of pictures of Great at various parties and also pictures of him climbing a mountain someplace, a tall mountain with pine trees and snow and whatnot. At the top he and a whole squad of good-looking girls were eating fancy cheese and drinking red wine out of the bottle, with clouds and smoke and distant peaks stretching out behind them like they were all spending the weekend in Valhalla, or something. In the pictures of Great at parties there was one where he was sitting on some couch with his arm around the drummer of Ape Koala, and she was looking at him like she thought he was just the most wonderful thing ever. At least she looked like the drummer of Ape Koala to me, and after looking at some more photos of her in different places I decided that it actually was her. The thing is, it was just another picture among a ton of party pictures, and it wasn't something special or posed or anything. If the girl from Ape Koala was just another buddy of Great's, then who were all these other people in his pictures? Could they all be just as big, just not famous? And maybe Great was the biggest of all?

I found news of other friends as well. Judy and Vinnie were living together now, it looked like. That made me happy because it made good sense, and they were both such decent people. They'd set up their own site to advertise or distribute (or something) the music they were making together, but there weren't many details about them individually or what it was they were up to in their lives. There was a level of mystery that seemed, to me at least, very amateurish, but maybe it was they just that they didn't feel like being specific. Maybe they were going for amateur? The band didn't have a name, if it was a band,even. There were pictures of them living in what appeared to be a small farmhouse someplace. In the pictures they weren't too fond of turning on the lights or looking directly at the camera. Atmospheric, I guess. Elves at work among the streams and knotted root-balls of overturned trees. There were lots of photographs of nature, cracks in rocks and moss and dark shapes at the edges of pastures. It was all calming to me, and the music was too, even as strange as it was, mainly freeform duets of two instruments, a contrabass and a penny whistle, a squeezebox and Judy's wordless muttering. You could hear wind in the background, and sometimes a bird.

I played their music on my speakers very quietly because I knew how badly it would confuse my coworkers; perhaps it would even frighten them. I pulled up the blinds to watch the world outside while I listened to the songs. It was overcast outside, set to rain later, and traffic chugged along University, the silver ribbon joining Northtown Mall and the neat, cheerless bungalows of Fridley. I had no idea where I was.