The Synthetic Age

Welcome to the Lab (You're Not on the Formula)

Let me get one thing straight before we begin: I am not a chemist. I am a creative taxpayer who happens to have a synthetic problem. There is a difference, and the difference is worth approximately four hundred million dollars, give or take a laboratory and a very good lawyer.

My name doesn't matter. What matters is the molecule. I have spent the better part of two decades watching formulas move through laboratories whose only job is to write the next sentence after a schedule, while the people who write the analog acts still want a wet signature on a form designed in 1986. I pay less in taxes than my housekeeper, and my housekeeper is a wonderful woman named Rosa who deserves every penny and then some.

I am writing this book for three reasons. They are not a list I keep in a drawer for other lives. They are this life.

The Sideboard, the Letters, and a Woman Who Dusts Around Them

It is a Tuesday. It is almost always a Tuesday when I remember that I live in a house and not in a filing cabinet.

Rosa comes on Tuesdays. She has a key I did not give her in a ceremony. She has a rag that used to be a pillowcase. She has a bottle of something lemon that I do not buy and that the grocery delivers because she put it on a list in a handwriting that is better than mine. The label has a cartoon sun wearing sunglasses. I have never asked her why. The sun looks like it knows about the letters and has decided not to care, which is a better attitude than mine and a cheaper one. She starts at the sideboard because the sideboard is where I leave the things I am pretending are not important.

The sideboard is mahogany and slightly too large for the room, which is how you know it was purchased by a person who thought furniture was a kind of argument. On it: a wooden bowl from a country I can still visit, a lamp that makes everyone look richer, and two envelopes that are not in a safe. They sit under the bowl, slightly fanned, the way a person leaves cards when he was in a hurry and then was not. I will tell you what they said once, at the end, where endings go. A drawer is where you put things you have decided about. The sideboard is where you put things the government already forgot and you have not.

Rosa lifts the bowl. She dusts the wood. She sets the bowl back. She does not stack the letters. She does not square them. She leaves them the way she found them. Once, in the first month, she asked if I wanted them in a drawer. I said no.

"You want the good coffee," she says. It is not a question. There is a cheap coffee I deserve and a good coffee I take. I take the good coffee. I am not a hero for taking it.

Chad, Who Sleeps Next to a Shredder

My accountant - I will call him Chad, which is not his name and is accurate in spirit - wants a paper trail that is not a confession. Chad sleeps next to a shredder. I have seen the apartment. The shredder is in the second bedroom where a person with a different life would put a guest. The machine is the size of a small dog crate and sounds like a municipal airport when he feeds it. Once I watched him shred a pizza flyer because the coupon looked, to him, like a receipt from a life he did not want in the guest room. I did not stop him. A man who sleeps next to a shredder is allowed his theology. His go-bag is a passport, a hard drive, and a bottle of Xanax. He thinks I am going to get indicted. I think he needs a hobby that is not my indictment. He is also the reason I still have a filing cabinet instead of a podcast.