ACT I: THE HIGH

The first time I made a thousand dollars in a week, I thought I'd won the lottery.

It was 1925, and New York was a city that had discovered pleasure and decided to indulge in it with the enthusiasm of someone who had been denied it for twenty years. Prohibition was the law of the land, which meant that alcohol was illegal, which meant that alcohol was more popular than ever. And I, Leonard Voss, was in a position to profit from both the illegality and the popularity.

I didn't run a bar. I didn't brew beer or distill whiskey. I was a salesman, and the product was a small, unremarkable-looking bottle that I'd bought from a man named Frankie Russo for two dollars a bottle and sold for ten. Frankie got the liquor from a boat that came in from the Caribbean every Thursday, and I got the customers from the speakeasies that proliferated throughout the city like mushrooms after rain.

I was twenty-three, wearing a suit that cost more than my father made in a year, and I was driving a car that I didn't own but had leased on a deal so favorable it felt like a gift from God. The city was mine, and everyone in it knew it, because everyone in it was trying to be me.

My apartment was on West 67th Street, overlooking Central Park, and the doorman called me Mr. Voss even though I told him not to. I had a dinner table that could seat twelve and a bar that could seat twenty, and on Friday and Saturday nights, the apartment was always full.

The money was the easy part. The hard part was keeping it.

ACT II: THE CURRENTS CLOSE

The people who surrounded me in those early months of wealth were not friends. I knew this, though I chose not to know it. They were drinkers, gamblers, and dreamers—people who wanted what I had and were willing to smile and laugh and buy me a drink to get it.

Among them was a woman named Virginia Chase, who was twenty-seven, divorced, and possessed of the kind of beauty that makes men stupid. She had blonde hair and blue eyes and a laugh that sounded like champagne, and she came to my apartment on a Tuesday and stayed for three days.

When she left, she took my heart with her, which I hadn't realized she'd planned to do until she was gone and the apartment was quiet and I realized that I hadn't spoken to anyone in seventy-two hours except Virginia, who hadn't spoken to me at all except in the language of touch and absence.

I tried to fill the silence with money. I bought more bottles, bigger bottles, bottles that cost more than my first car. I threw parties that lasted until dawn and woke up alone in rooms full of strangers who smiled at me like I was a wallet with legs.

Then Virginia came back.

She called from a hotel in Philadelphia, her voice slurred and warm and impossibly far away. "I'm sorry," she said. "I left because I thought you were hollow. But I came back because hollow things can be filled. I want to be your vessel."

I told her to come home. She came home. And for six months, I believed that the money and the parties and the constant, grinding noise of New York life were all just the prelude to something real.

Virginia was pregnant in January. I was happy—I remember the feeling clearly, like a bright flash of lightning in a dark sky. It was the first pure thing that had happened to me in years, and I clung to it with a desperation that frightened me.

The party in February was the last party. I don't remember much of it, except that there was music, and people, and Virginia sitting on the balcony with a glass of champagne, and a man named Harold Pemberton standing beside her in a way that suggested familiarity.

I confronted them. Harold was a lawyer, thirty-five, married, and as smooth as oil. He smiled at me and said, "Leonard, you don't understand. You're going to be a father. You're going to change. You're not the man you were six months ago, and she knows it."

I threw a glass at the wall. It shattered. Virginia didn't flinch.

ACT III: THE BREAKING POINT

Virginia miscarried in March. It was April technically, but the calendar doesn't measure grief the way the body does. The body measures it in heartbeats and breaths and the space between saying "I love you" and realizing that the person you said it to is gone.

Virginia lost the baby on a Thursday morning. I was at the apartment, drinking whiskey that cost more than most people's weekly wage, when the phone rang. It was the hospital. She'd been admitted with internal bleeding. The baby was gone.

I ran. I always run when something breaks. But this time, running wasn't an option. The hospital was ten blocks away, and I covered them in twelve minutes, my lungs burning and my heart pounding and the city rushing past me like a river I was trying to swim against.

When I reached her room, Virginia was sitting up in bed, looking out the window at a sky that was the color of dishwater. She looked at me and said, "It's gone."

"It's gone," I repeated, and the words felt like stones in my mouth.

She cried. I held her. And in the holding, something broke—not the way it breaks in movies, with dramatic music and falling rain, but quietly, like a bone snapping under your own weight when you're standing still.

After Virginia went home—back to her parents in Connecticut, back to a life that didn't include me, a life that she was returning to not because she wanted to but because she had nowhere else to go—I sat in my apartment and looked around at the things I'd bought to fill the void.

The bottles. The furniture. The art that I didn't understand but knew was expensive. The apartment that was too big for one person and too small for two.

I called the people who came to my parties. None of them answered. I called Harold Pemberton. He didn't answer either. I called Virginia. She told me that she was coming back, but not to me—to finish what we'd started, not to resume it. To close the chapter, not to open a new one.

She came back on a Sunday. She stayed for an hour. We didn't speak much. She held my hand. I held hers. And when she left, she took the last thing I had that was real and left me with everything I'd bought to replace it.

I drank for a month after that. I sold the car. I sold the furniture. I sold the art. I sold the bottles, even the good ones, even the ones Virginia liked. I sold everything except the apartment, which I couldn't sell because the lease was in my father's name and he wouldn't let me break it.

When the money ran out, I moved into a room in a boarding house on 14th Street that smelled like cabbage and boiled onions. I found work as a bookkeeper for a small import company that paid me fifteen dollars a week and asked no questions about where I'd been or what I'd done or who I'd been before.

ACT IV: THE ECHO

It's been forty years since that night in April. I'm sixty-three now, and I live in a small apartment in Queens, and I work as an accountant for a law firm that I joined because the partner who hired me had once been a client of Harold Pemberton's, and Harold had once been a client of mine.

The irony is not lost on me. The circle is complete. The man who took my woman and my baby and my confidence is now a memory that I visit once a year, on the anniversary of that night, when I sit alone in my kitchen and drink a glass of whiskey that costs less than two dollars.

I never married. I never had another child. The space where Virginia's baby should have been is a hole that I carry every day, and some days it feels like the only real thing I own.

Sometimes I think about the money. The thousand-dollar weeks, the apartment on West 67th, the parties and the bottles and the women who smiled at me like I was something worth smiling at. I think about it sometimes and feel a kind of longing that's almost physical—almost the ache of missing a limb.

But then I remember Virginia's face in that hospital room. I remember the way she looked at me when she said "It's gone." And I know that no amount of money could have prevented that moment, and no amount of money could have undone it.

The money was glitter. Beautiful, shiny, and utterly hollow. The only thing that was real was the loss, and the loss was everything.

There's a broom in my closet, handed down from a woman who lived in this room before me. Sometimes, late at night, I take it out and sweep the kitchen floor. The floor is always clean when I'm done, but that's not the point. The point is the sweeping—the rhythm, the motion, the sense that if I just keep sweeping, I can keep the darkness at bay for just one more night.

I sweep until my hands are tired, and then I go to bed, and I dream of a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes and a laugh like champagne, and a baby who never was, and a city that was bright and golden and bright and gone.