David Ross had stopped believing in the earth ten years ago, on a Tuesday in October, when the building he had designed collapsed and killed three people who would have been alive if he had not been so sure of himself.

He didn't go to jail. He didn't go to prison. He went to therapy, and he went to a bar, and he went to sleep on a friend's couch in Manhattan, and he learned that certainty is a kind of arrogance and that arrogance has a price that is rarely paid in the currency that matters.

Now he was forty-seven years old, and he was what the real estate industry called a "geomantic consultant," which was a polite term for a man who told developers where to put their buildings based on nothing more rigorous than his intuition and a set of principles he had invented to replace the engineering principles he had betrayed.

He stood on the roof of a building in midtown Manhattan, looking at the skyline, and he thought about how the city was built on landfill, on filled-in marshes and buried streams and foundations that rested on ground that had never asked to be built upon. The earth beneath Manhattan was not bedrock. It was a palimpsest, a place where one layer of human ambition had been built on top of another, and the weight of it all was slowly, inevitably, sinking into the water below.

He thought about this because he was supposed to be thinking about it. He had been hired by a development company to assess a building on the Lower East Side, a ten-story walk-up on Orchard Street that was scheduled for demolition. The company wanted to know if the ground beneath it was valuable, and David was supposed to tell them.

He was not sure he was the right person for this job. He had not been sure of many things since the collapse, and that was the point. Certainty had killed three people. Uncertainty, at least, was honest.

He took the subway down to the Lower East Side on a Wednesday in November, which was raining, because it always rained in this city, and the rain made everything look like a photograph from the 1970s, grainy and gray and slightly out of focus.

The building on Orchard Street was exactly what you'd expect from a ten-story walk-up on the Lower East Side: brick facade, fire escape, ground-floor storefront that had been vacant for three years and was now filled with garbage and broken glass. David stood on the sidewalk and looked at it and felt nothing. Not disgust. Not pity. Nothing. The absence of feeling was, he had learned, its own kind of feeling, and it was the feeling he carried most days.

He was about to leave when he saw the old man.

The old man was sitting on a crate outside a closed bodega on the corner of Orchard and Rivington, wrapped in a coat that had been someone else's coat before it had become his, with a newspaper spread across his knees and a cup of coffee that was probably cold but that he was drinking anyway because cold coffee is still coffee and coffee is still something.

David walked past him and then stopped and walked back. He didn't know why he stopped. He just did.

You the consultant? the old man asked, without looking up from his newspaper.

I'm the consultant, David said.

The old man folded the newspaper and looked at him. They told me you'd be here.

Who told you?

The guy from the company. Yesterday. He sat on this crate and talked to me for an hour. He said you'd be coming today. He said you'd look like a man who didn't want to be here.

David sat down on the crate beside him. The old man was right about that.

My name's Joe, the old man said. Everyone calls me Joe. Not Joseph. Not Mr. O'Malley. Joe. Like the saint. Like the name on a bottle of whiskey. Like the word people use when they're talking about something they don't want to name.

I'm David.

David, Joe said. That's a king's name. You feel like a king's name to you?

No, David said. I feel like a consultant's name.

Joe nodded. That's worse.

David almost smiled. Almost.

What's this building? Joe asked, nodding toward the Orchard Street building.

Demolition, David said. They're going to tear it down and build something new. Something tall.

Joe was quiet for a moment. Then he said, I lived in a building like that once. Not that one. A different one. In Brooklyn. It had a basement, and in the basement, there was a piece of land that my grandfather said was lucky.

Lucky land, David said.

Yes. He said if you planted anything on it, it would grow. Tomatoes, corn, flowers, anything. And it was true. Everything grew there. The tomatoes were the size of your fist. The corn grew so tall you could hide in it. The flowers bloomed in colors that didn't seem to exist anywhere else.

Did he sell it?

No. He died on it. My mother died on it. I was born on it. We were buried on it. Or rather, my grandfather and my grandmother were buried on it, and the rest of us were born on it, and the land held us all.

What happened to it?

The North Vietnamese bombed it.

David looked at him. The North Vietnamese?

Joe smiled. It's a story. Stories don't always follow the rules. In my story, the North Vietnamese bombed the land because they didn't want it to be lucky. They didn't want anyone to have something that belonged to them and not to the state. And they were right to be afraid. Lucky land is dangerous. Lucky land makes people greedy.

Did your grandfather tell you this?

He told me the part about the tomatoes. The rest I made up. But the tomatoes were real.

David was silent. The rain was falling harder now, and the street was slick and shining, and the neon sign from the bodega was reflecting in the puddles like a watercolor painting.

You believe in lucky land? Joe asked.

No, David said. I believe in soil composition and drainage patterns and the structural integrity of foundations. I believe in numbers and calculations and the things that can be measured.

Then why are you here?

To tell them whether the ground is valuable.

And is it?

David looked at the building. He looked at the rain. He looked at the old man sitting on the crate with his cold coffee and his made-up stories and his lucky land in Brooklyn that had been bombed by the North Vietnamese.

I don't know, he said. And that's the problem. I don't know, and I've spent ten years trying to be sure about everything, and I've realized that being sure is the easiest thing in the world and the hardest thing in the world and the most dangerous thing in the world.

Joe nodded. My grandfather knew that. That's why he told everyone the land was lucky. He knew that if people thought it was lucky, they'd want it, and if they wanted it, they'd fight for it, and if they fought for it, they'd protect it. Luck is a kind of armor. It's not the best kind. But it's a kind.

David stood up. He was going to leave. He was going to go back to his apartment in Queens, which was small and damp and exactly what he deserved, and he was going to write his report for the development company, which would say something vague and professional and unhelpful, and they would do what they always did: build something tall on ground that had never asked to be built upon.

But he didn't leave. He stood there in the rain, looking at the old man, and he said, Tell me more about the lucky land.

Joe smiled. It's a long story.

I have time.

Joe told him about the tomatoes and the corn and the flowers and the North Vietnamese and the bombing and the death and the birth and the burial and the way the land had held them all and the way it had been taken from them and the way it had never stopped being lucky even after it was gone.

David listened. He listened the way he had stopped listening ten years ago, when the collapse had happened and the investigations had started and the lawyers had come and the families of the dead had come and he had realized that he had been wrong and that being wrong had consequences that could not be undone and that the only honest thing to do was to stop talking and start listening.

When Joe finished, David was quiet for a long time. Then he said, Thank you.

For what?

For the story. For the tomatoes. For the North Vietnamese. For everything.

Joe nodded. You're welcome. But stories don't cost anything. They're free. Like the land.

David walked home in the rain. He didn't open his umbrella. He let the rain soak through his coat and his shirt and his skin and his bones and he thought about Joe's story and the lucky land and the tomatoes and the bombing and the birth and the death and the burial and the way the land had held them all.

He got home and poured himself a glass of water and stood at the window and looked out at the street below. A couple was walking down the sidewalk, sharing an umbrella. A dog was barking. A siren wailed.

He thought about the building on Orchard Street. He thought about the development company. He thought about the tall building that would be built on the ground that had never asked to be built upon. He thought about Joe sitting on the crate in the rain, telling stories about lucky land that had been bombed by the North Vietnamese.

He thought about the earth beneath Manhattan, which was not bedrock but landfill, which was a palimpsest of human ambition, which was slowly sinking into the water below, which was holding everything that had ever been built on it and everything that had ever been buried beneath it and everything that had ever been forgotten above it.

The earth has no soul, he thought. It's just earth. But we need to believe it has something--because if we don't believe in something, we're nothing.

He went to bed and slept for four hours and woke up at dawn with the taste of rain and water in his mouth and the feeling that he had done nothing and would probably do nothing for the rest of his life, and that was, he realized, the most honest thing he had felt in ten years.

The rain kept falling. The city kept moving. And beneath it all, the ground kept sinking, slowly and inevitably, into the water below, holding everything, forgetting nothing, belonging to no one.

--- OTMES-v2-Code: OTMES-v2-D9B2E6-048-M3-270-3R70I-V5C3 E_total: 48.6 | Dominant Mode: M3_Satire | Direction Angle: 270 degrees Structure: Rank 3 | Principal Component: 0.70 | Irreversibility: 0.80 Innocence Index: 0.60 | Style: Existentialist Minimalist