The champagne tasted like gold. Not metaphorically — I had my father's palate, and gold is what champagne tastes like when you can afford every bottle in the room and the room contains every bottle in New York.

It was 1926, and New York was a city that had decided, collectively, to stop pretending that restraint was a virtue. We built towers that scraped the sky like needles. We danced until our feet bled and called it aerobics. We drank liquor that had been smuggled across oceans by men who didn't care whether you lived or died as long as your money was green. I drank it all. I drank it all and more, and the more was the problem, because the more was the part of me that sat in the corner of every party like a guest who had not been invited but refused to leave, watching the laughter and the music and the bodies and thinking: this is everything I wanted. And why does it taste like nothing?

My name is Julian Ashworth. I am twenty-nine years old. I live in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue with windows that look over Central Park like a man looking over the ruins of a country he once ruled. I work on Wall Street, where I have what the newspapers call "an uncanny instinct" — a phrase that makes me smile because instinct implies something natural, and what I have is not natural. It is remembered.

I remember the future.

Not all of it. Not the way a prophet sees — clear, singular, directed. I remember in fragments, like a man remembering a dream he had five years ago. I remember that a stock called Radio Corporation will be worth forty dollars a share by 1929. I remember that a man named Lindbergh will fly across the Atlantic in 1927. I remember that in 1929 — specifically October 24, which the newspapers will call Black Thursday — the market will fall, and it will fall so hard that men will jump from the windows of the buildings I work in, and I will stand on the balcony of this penthouse and watch them fall and will not be able to stop it.

I remember all of this. And I have spent the last two years building a life that feels like winning, because winning is what you do when you know the score before the game begins.

I made my first fortune in 1924. I remembered a railway stock — reading at three dollars, would be worth twelve by Christmas. I put in everything I had — five thousand dollars, which was every cent my father had left me when he died of pneumonia three years ago, a death I remembered happening but could not remember mourning. I bought the stock. It went to twelve. I made twenty thousand dollars. I stood on the floor of the NYSE and watched my number go up and felt something that was not happiness but was close enough that I let it pass for happiness.

Then I did it again. And again. And again.

By 1926, I had enough money to buy a building. I bought a building on Fifth Avenue instead — not to live in, but to convert into a penthouse, because I had read — no, remembered — that penthouses were the future, and I wanted to be ahead of the future, which is the only way I know how to live.

The parties began almost by accident. I threw one for my twenty-seventh birthday — fifty people, jazz band, imported whiskey, women who looked like they'd been painted by someone who understood light. They were good. They were very good. But when the last guest left and I stood alone in the apartment with the sound of the band fading into the street below, I felt the cold thing settle in my chest, and I knew it would be there at every party from now on — the cold thing, the knowledge that this was everything I had asked for and the asking had ended and there was nothing left to do except feel the cold thing and wait for the next party to begin.

Vivian Rose changed nothing. And everything.

I found her in a Harlem speakeasy on 135th Street, the kind of place where the door has no sign and the bouncer has a gun and the music comes from a room that is smaller than my penthouse's master bedroom. She was singing a song I did not know, and her voice was the kind of voice that makes you believe in God and then immediately makes you doubt Him, because if God exists, why does He hide His beauty in places like this?

She was twenty-four, black, five feet two inches tall, with a voice like whiskey poured over ice — warm and sharp and dangerous in equal measure. She sang, and I sat in the back of the room, and for the first time in two years, I did not know what would happen next.

That was the extraordinary thing about Vivian Rose: I did not remember her.

Not because my memory failed. I remembered stocks and flights and market crashes. I remembered everything I could remember. But Vivian was not in my memory. She was a blank space — a hole in the fabric of my foresight where something should have been and wasn't. It was the most frightening and the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.

I went back the next night. And the next. And the next. I sat in the corner of the speakeasy and listened to her sing and drank whiskey that tasted like oak and regret and tried, unsuccessfully, to remember what would happen between us.

Nothing happened. That was the point. Nothing happened, and the not-happening was a kind of miracle.

" You always sit in the back," she said one night, after the set, when the room was thinning and the candles were burning low.

" I like to watch."

" Watch what?"

" You."

She smiled. It was a small smile, not the big smiles the party women wore like makeup. This was a real smile — tired, knowing, unimpressed. "There's not much to watch, Mr. Ashworth."

" How do you know my name?"

" You're the guy who throws the biggest parties in Manhattan. It's hard not to know your name." She poured me a glass of water. "You want to know something?"

" What?"

" You look sad."

I laughed. It was the first time anyone had said that to me and meant it. "I'm not sad."

" You are. You look like a man who's waiting for something, but you don't know what it is, and you know it's going to be bad, and you can't stop it from coming."

I stared at her. "That's—"

" Not your problem to carry alone." She set the glass in front of me. "Drink. The water. Not the whiskey."

I drank the water. It tasted like nothing. It was the most honest thing I had tasted in years.

I tried to change things. This was my addiction — not the whiskey, not the parties, not the women (though I had my share of those). My addiction was the belief that if I could just arrange the right set of variables, I could produce a different outcome. It was the gambler's fallacy elevated to a philosophy: next time, I'll do it differently. Next time, I'll save someone.

I warned my friend Slick Malone — Marcus Malone, a Wall Street fixer with a smile like a knife and a heart that was, against all evidence, soft. "Sell your coal shares," I told him over drinks at the Friar's Club. "All of them. Before November."

" Why? What's happening to coal?"

" Just do it."

He did. He sold everything. The coal market crashed in December. He made a fortune. He bought me a bottle of French cognac and said: "Julian, you're either the best trader in New York or the craziest. I haven't decided which."

I did not tell him that I was not trading. I was remembering. There is a difference. Trading is looking forward. Remembering is looking backward at a future that already happened. The distinction matters to nobody except the man making it.

I warned Uncle Theodore — my mother's brother, a man who had spent forty years in banking and who regarded my success with the skeptical affection of a man who has seen young men succeed and fail and succeed again and is waiting, patiently, for the punchline. "Julian," he said, sitting in his office on Broad Street with the walls covered in framed photographs of men who looked like him — stern, confident, wrong about everything that mattered. "You've had a run. Don't mistake luck for skill."

" It's not luck."

" Then what is it?"

" foresight."

He laughed. Not a cruel laugh. A tired laugh. The laugh of a man who has had this conversation a thousand times with a thousand young men who believed they were special. "Foresight," he repeated. "You know what the market needs more of, Julian? Not foresight. Humility."

I left his office feeling both condescended to and righteously annoyed, which is the emotional state I aimed for when I wanted to feel alive.

The crash came in October 1929, and it came exactly as I remembered, which is to say: exactly as I had tried, and failed, to prevent.

I had sold everything in August. I had made twelve million dollars — a sum so large it felt abstract, like a number on a page rather than money that could buy buildings and bottles and silence. I stood on the floor of the NYSE on Black Thursday and watched the panic unfold with the detachment of a man watching a film he had already seen. The numbers fell. The shouting began. Men ran. Men cried. Men jumped.

I watched a young trader — no older than twenty-two, the kind of boy who had come to Wall Street with a suitcase and a dream and a belief that the market was a meritocracy — climb onto the railing of the second floor and look down at the trading pit and jump. I wanted to catch him. I could have predicted his jump two weeks in advance. I could not have stopped it. Prediction is not prevention. Memory is not power. Knowing is not doing.

Slick Malone was found three days later, sleeping under the Brooklyn Bridge. He had drunk himself into a coma and the cold had finished what the whiskey started. I stood over his body in the morgue and felt nothing. Not grief. Not guilt. Nothing. The cold thing in my chest had become the only thing in my chest.

Vivian's father died in November. He had invested his life savings in stocks that became worthless, and the shock — combined with the alcohol he drank to forget — gave him a stroke that killed him in his sleep. Vivian called me at 3 a.m. I could hear her crying on the other end of the line, and for the first time in my life, my memory was useless. I had remembered this. I had remembered it clearly. And remembering had not changed it by a single, solitary degree.

" Julian," she said. "What do you do when you know something is going to hurt and you can't stop it?"

I thought about it. I thought about the journal I had not written, the warnings I had not delivered, the hands I had not held. I thought about the cold thing in my chest and the way it had become my permanent resident, my uninvited housemate, the man who sat in the corner of every room and watched me live my life the way a critic watches a play — with knowledge and without power.

" You hurt," I said. "And then you keep living. Because the alternative is worse."

" Is it?"

" I don't know."

Silence. Then: "Come see me."

I came. I sat in her apartment in Harlem — small, warm, full of books and records and the smell of food that someone had cooked with love. She made tea. We sat at a table that wobbled. We did not speak for a long time. The silence between us was not empty. It was full of everything we were not saying: I know the future and it is terrible. I don't know the future and it is beautiful. I remember everything and it is nothing. I remember nothing and it is everything.

Spring 1930. I sat in the penthouse and watched cherry blossoms open in Central Park. They were pink and white and fragile, the kind of beauty that exists precisely because it will not last. I knew, with the certainty of memory, that these trees would outlive me. I knew that New York would grow taller and richer and louder and emptier. I knew that in eleven years, a harbor in Hawaii would be attacked and a generation would go to war. I knew that in thirty-three years, two towers would rise in Lower Manhattan and would fall. I knew that in ninety-one years, a city on the Hudson would be flooded and the water would not go back.

I knew all of this. And I could do nothing about any of it.

Vivian sat across from me. She was not singing anymore. Her father's death had taken something from her that was not voice. She looked out the window at the cherry blossoms and said: "You'll be okay, Julian."

I looked at her. I looked at the blossoms. I looked at the city that was both everything and nothing. I looked at the future that was both certain and meaningless.

" I don't know," I said.

" You will."

" Maybe."

" You have to."

She was right. I had to. Not because I believed in optimism — I had seen too much history for that — but because the alternative was to sit in a penthouse and watch cherry blossoms and know that they would fall and do nothing but watch. And I had spent my entire life doing nothing but watching. It was time to do something else.

I did not know what. I only knew that watching was not enough.

The blossoms fell. They fell into the grass and the paths and the laps of old women feeding pigeons and young men kissing for the first time and old men sitting alone on benches and remembering things they could not change. I watched them fall. And then, for the first time in six years, I did something that my memory had not prepared me for.

I stood up. I walked to the window. I opened it. The spring air came in — warm, wet, full of the sound of a city that did not know it was dying and would not know until it was too late. I closed my eyes. I let the air touch my face.

I was Julian Ashworth. I remembered the future. And I was learning, slowly and imperfectly and without any foresight at all, how to live in the present.

--- OTMES-v2-PFX-05-8D113B-E1034-M4-T061-269A E_total: 10.35 | Dominant Mode: M4 (Poetic) | Angle: 61 deg | Rank: 8