The bottle broke at four in the morning on a Tuesday in March of 1925, and the smell of cheap rye whiskey filled the back room of the Green Mile Saloon like a confession. I was sitting at the card table, counting receipts, and the bottle flew across the room because I had just received a telegram from Milwaukee that told me my entire operation was about to become irrelevant. Someone was doing my job, but not the way anyone meant. Not with a gun or a rival gang or a corrupt cop on another man's salary. Someone was doing my job with a lottery ticket.

I hung up the phone call that the telegram had prompted, a long-distance conversation with my brother-in-law in Chicago who was telling me things I already knew but needed to hear from someone else's mouth to believe, and I stared at the wall. The wall of my back room was covered in a map of Chicago's distribution network, marked with colored pins that showed where our whiskey went and when and how much. The pins were arranged in patterns that made sense to me, patterns I had built over seven years of grinding work and broken knuckles and bribed officials. The map made sense. The telegram did not.

Someone is doing your distribution, my partner Sal had said on the phone. Someone is doing it better.

I had laughed. In bootlegging, there was only one distribution network in Chicago, and it was mine. I controlled the routes from Canada to the South Side to the Gold Coast. I had trucks, warehouses, and relationships with men who could move ten cases of Canadian rye across the border while the Coast Guards slept. There was no competition. There had never been competition. Until the telegram.

The telegram was from my nephew. My own nephew. Jimmy. He was twenty-three years old, bright-eyed and greedy and the kind of nephew any sensible man keeps at arm's length. He lived in a rooming house on State Street and sent me money sometimes, which I always spent on his bail when the cops caught him drinking in places where drinking was not permitted, which was everywhere, as everyone knew, except in the places where it was permitted, which were all owned by me.

Uncle Vincent, the telegram read. Do not worry. I have made arrangements. Everything is better now.

I read it three times. I read it in the back room of my saloon, surrounded by the smell of spilled beer and old tobacco and the quiet hum of a business that was about to learn it was not as permanent as its owner had assumed. Everything is better now. Better than whiskey. Better than bootlegging. Better than me.

I got up and poured myself a glass from the bottle that had just survived its journey across the room. It was good whiskey, better than the stuff I was selling on the Green Mile, and it tasted like oak and grain and the kind of confidence that comes from seven years of never being wrong about something important. I was right about a lot of things. The routes. The suppliers. The corrupt officials. The rival gangs. I was right about all of them. I was not right about my nephew. I was not right about the telegram. I was not right about anything, because everything was about to change, and the change was not coming from the rival gang in the West Side or the Feds in Washington. It was coming from Jimmy, my own blood, carrying a new kind of poison into the house.

I drove to Jimmy's rooming house at dawn, behind the wheel of my Packard, the tires humming on wet asphalt, the streetlamps flickering off one by one as the sky lightened from black to grey to the particular colour of Chicago sky at dawn, which is neither blue nor grey but something that exists only above the city that sits between the lake and the industrial slaughterhouses. I had never liked the colour of Chicago dawn. It always looked like the sky was apologizing for something.

Jimmy's room was above a barbershop on State Street, and the smell of talcum powder and aftershave seeped through the floorboards like the ghost of a profession. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, smoking a cigarette and smiling in the way that smiling men smile when they have done something either very brave or very stupid, usually both.

Uncle Vincent, he said. Come in. Sit down. I have something to show you.

I sat on the chair by the window, which was the only chair he had, and I looked at him. My nephew. My sister's son. He had her eyes and my mouth, and growing up, he had always been a combination of both, which made him impossible to discipline and impossible to ignore. He had been seventeen when the prohibition started, and he had been twenty-three now, and in those six years he had gone from a boy who stole cigarettes from the corner store to a man who had apparently decided to reorganize the entire Chicago underworld.

What did you do, I asked.

He stood up and went to his suitcase, which was sitting on the floor beside the bed, and he pulled out a stack of lottery tickets and a small metal box that he opened to reveal a rolling machine, a simple thing, a hand-cranked device that stamped numbers on paper slips and fed them into a tray. It looked like something a carnival might use. It looked like something that could destroy a man's entire career in a week.

It is a sweepstakes machine, Jimmy said. Local numbers. Small stakes. People love it.

I looked at the machine. I looked at the tickets. I looked at my nephew. What are you talking about?

He explained. The sweepstakes, as he called it, was a numbers game. A simple lottery. You pick three digits, from zero to nine, and if they match the last three digits of that day's stock market closing total, you win. Thirty to one. The odds were simple. The payouts were high. And the whole thing was completely legal because it was not gambling in the legal sense, it was a lottery, and there was no law against lotteries in Illinois, only against gambling, and the distinction, as Jimmy had quickly learned, was entirely a matter of terminology and legal interpretation.

But it was not the legality that struck me. It was the economics. The sweepstakes required no trucks. No warehouses. No Canadian suppliers. No Coast Guard bribes. No corrupt cops. It required a machine, a runner, and a list of stock market closing numbers, which were published in every newspaper in the country. The margins were extraordinary. The overhead was negligible. And the demand, according to Jimmy, was insatiable.

I have runners on the South Side, the West Side, and the Gold Coast, he said. Every day at four o'clock, they collect the numbers from the newspapers, and by five, the bets are in, and by six, I know who won and how much. The whole operation costs me forty dollars a month in rent and machine maintenance, and I take in eight thousand. Eight thousand dollars, Uncle Vincent. Eight thousand a month, from three digits.

I stared at him. Eight thousand. My entire operation, the trucks and the warehouses and the corrupt officials and the Canadian suppliers, made maybe twelve thousand a month after expenses. And my nephew was making eight thousand from a carnival machine and a newspaper. The math was simple. The math was devastating.

How long has this been going on? I asked.

Three months, he said. I started in January. I knew you were not going to like it, so I did not tell you until it was working.

I did not like it. I did not like it at all. But I was a businessman, and businessmen evaluate data, even when the data tells them they are obsolete. The data was clear. The sweepstakes was more efficient than bootlegging in every measurable way. Lower overhead. Higher margins. Less risk. No bottles breaking in back rooms. No Coast Guard intercepts. No rival gang shootouts. Just three digits and a rolling machine and the daily stock market numbers, published openly in the newspapers for everyone to see. The entire operation was transparent, legal, and more profitable than the criminal enterprise I had built from nothing.

The catalyst had been introduced into the reaction, and the reaction was accelerating. A missing shipment of copper still parts, which had forced me to source from a new supplier in Canada at higher cost, which had compressed my margins, which had made me vulnerable, and then the catalyst arrived: my own nephew, with his sweepstakes machine and his eight thousand dollars a month and his bright-eyed smile, and suddenly the chemistry of my entire operation was changed, permanently and irreversibly.

I went back to the Green Mile at dawn and sat at my card table and counted my receipts and realized that the numbers were wrong. The numbers had always been right. The numbers had always told me exactly how much money I was making. But the numbers were lying now, because the numbers did not include the sweepstakes. The numbers did not include the eight thousand dollars my nephew was making every month from a machine that cost less than a single truck. The numbers did not include the future, which was arriving in the form of three digits and a hand-cranked roller, and the numbers, for the first time in seven years, did not make sense.

I called Sal into my office and showed him the telegram and told him about Jimmy's operation. Sal was a solid man, a man who believed in the permanent things: whiskey, guns, cash, and the principle that if you controlled the distribution, you controlled the city. He listened to me in silence, his face expressionless, his eyes fixed on the wall map with the colored pins, and when I finished, he said two words that I would hear again and again in the weeks that followed.

What do we do?

I did not know. I did not know what we do, because for seven years I had never had to ask that question. We had always known what we do. We transported whiskey from Canada to Chicago and sold it to saloons and speakeasies and private customers, and we paid off the cops and the politicians and the rival gangs, and we made money, and we slept at night with one eye open, and we accepted the risk as the cost of doing business. But the risk had just been replaced by something else. Not less risk, but different risk. The sweepstakes carried legal risk, not criminal risk. It carried social risk, not physical risk. It carried the risk of becoming irrelevant, which is a risk that no amount of corrupt cops can protect you from.

The weeks that followed were a lesson in chemical acceleration. The kind of lesson that cannot be taught in a classroom and can only be learned through direct exposure to the reaction. A tiny variable, introduced into a stable system, accelerates the reaction until the system becomes something unrecognizable. The sweepstakes spread through Chicago like a catalyst through a compound. It started in the rooming houses and tenements of the South Side, where working men and women would buy a ticket for a nickel and dream of thirty dollars for the sacrifice of a nickel. It spread to the factories, where workers would pool their nickels and buy bulk tickets and dream of thirty dollars multiplied by twenty. It spread to the saloons, where the owners put up posters advertising the daily numbers and collected bets alongside their pints of beer.

And while it spread, my business shrunk. Not dramatically. Not immediately. But steadily. The saloons that had ordered whiskey from me started ordering less, because the customers who used to spend their Friday night paychecks on bottles of rye were spending their nickels on lottery tickets instead. The speakeasies that had been loyal for years started asking for credit, because their customers were lighter in the pockets. The corrupt cops who had been on my salary started looking the other way more often, because they had bought tickets too, and they wanted the numbers to work out for them, and if they arrested Jimmy, they might arrest themselves, because everyone was involved, everyone from the porters to the politicians had a ticket in the draw.

The reaction was self-accelerating. The more people who played, the more money that changed hands, the more visible the operation became, the more people who wanted a piece, and the more pieces there were, the faster the reaction spread, until the entire city was saturated, and the old chemistry, the whiskey chemistry, the distribution-network chemistry, the gangland chemistry, looked slow and expensive and obsolete next to the clean elegant efficiency of three digits and a rolling machine.

I sat in my office one evening in May and watched a loyal customer, a saloon owner named Frankie who had been buying from me since November of 1921, close his saloon and put up a sign that read SWEEPSTAKES NUMBERS OPEN DAILY. He had not told me he was changing businesses. He had simply done it, one morning, while I was sleeping, the way a man changes his mind about something without announcing the change. He had been buying whiskey from me for three years. Now he was selling luck.

I went to see Jimmy. He was in a new office now, above a pharmacy on Madison, with a sign on the door that read CHICAGO SWEEPSTAKES OFFICE and a new rolling machine that looked more professional than the carnival toy he had started with. He had two runners instead of one. He had a ledger book that was thicker than my entire distribution operation's paperwork. He was making twelve thousand dollars a month.

Uncle Vincent, he said, standing up and offering me a chair. Glad you could make it.

Sit down, I said. I want to talk about the business.

He sat. I sat. We talked. I told him I wanted in. Not as an investor. Not as a partner. As an owner. I had the distribution. I had the warehouses. I had the relationships with the saloon owners and the speakeasy operators. I had the trucks that could carry runners and tickets instead of bottles. I had the knowledge of how to move product through the city efficiently, and efficiency was what the sweepstakes needed, because demand was outstripping supply. People wanted to play, but the runners could not collect fast enough from the South Side to the Gold Coast. The operation needed a distribution network. And I had a distribution network.

Jimmy listened to my offer with the expression of a man listening to someone propose a merger between two companies that were already the same company wearing different hats. He understood immediately. The sweepstakes was the reaction. I was the catalyst. Together, we could make the city burn, not with fire but with numbers, three digits at a time, until every saloon in Chicago was selling luck instead of liquor, and every runner was carrying tickets instead of bottles, and every nickel in the city was dreaming of being thirty dollars.

Done, he said. When do we start?

Monday, I said.

And so the reaction accelerated. I put my trucks on the numbers routes. I converted my warehouses into sweepstakes offices. I turned my saloon owners into numbers clerks. I used the same distribution network that had moved whiskey across the city for seven years to move lottery tickets, and the trucks ran the same routes, through the same streets, past the same warehouses, carrying something entirely different. Whiskey had been a physical product. You could smell it. You could taste it. You could break it over someone's head if they did not pay. Lottery tickets were abstract. They were numbers on paper. They were dreams wrapped in three digits. They were invisible and weightless and more valuable than anything I had ever moved in my life.

The efficiency gains were extraordinary. The same trucks that had required drivers, fuel, insurance, and maintenance now carried paper tickets that weighed nothing and required no refrigeration. The same warehouses that had required security, climate control, and inventory management now held stacks of printed tickets in metal lockers. The same relationships with saloon owners that had required regular invoicing and credit management now required a weekly commission payout and a stack of daily results sheets. The overhead collapsed. The margins expanded. The reaction accelerated to a point where the word acceleration no longer described it accurately. It was combustion. It was phase transition. It was the moment when a liquid becomes a gas, when the molecules move so fast they escape their container entirely.

At lunch, I sat in the back room of the Green Mile, which was no longer a saloon but a sweepstakes headquarters, and I ate a sandwich that tasted like bread and regret and watched a runner come in with a stack of ticket receipts from the morning session. The receipts showed that twenty thousand tickets had been sold before noon. Twenty thousand nickels. Six hundred dollars in one morning, before the market even closed, before the numbers were even known, before anyone knew who won and who lost, just from the act of buying and selling and dreaming. Six hundred dollars from twenty thousand pieces of paper that cost half a cent each to print. The margin was almost perfect. Almost.

A man sat across from me at the card table. He was a runner for my old whiskey business, a solid guy named Tommy who had been driving my trucks for four years, and now he was running tickets instead. He did not speak. He did not smile. He just sat there, looking at the receipts, his face expressionless, his eyes fixed on the numbers in a way that I recognized. It was the look of a man staring at his own obsolescence reflected in a stack of paper.

I thought about the missing shipment of copper still parts. I thought about how that small catalyst, that delayed delivery from Canada, had compressed my margins and made me vulnerable to the sweepstakes. I thought about how the catalyst had been my nephew, introducing a variable that changed the entire chemistry of the city. I thought about how the reaction had accelerated uncontrollably, from one man in one room with a carnival machine to twenty thousand tickets a morning across the entire city, from the lakefront to the stockyards, from the Gold Coast to the Union Stock Yards.

I thought about how the sweepstakes would live my business better than I ever could. How the numbers would distribute more efficiently than bottles. How the dreams would sell more reliably than whiskey. How the abstraction of three digits would destroy the physicality of a broken bottle in a back room at four in the morning. And I laughed. Then I cried. Then I laughed again. The runner across from me looked up at me. His eyes were empty, but they were also full of something. Something that I could not name but recognized immediately. It was the look of a man who understood the joke.

The joke was this: the bootlegger who had conquered prohibition had been conquered by a lottery. The man who had outsmarted the law had been outsmarted by a newspaper. The distributor of physical contraband had been replaced by a distributor of abstract numbers. The gangster who had built an empire on bottles and bribes had been replaced by a carnival machine and a nephew who understood that the future was not in smuggling, but in statistics. The man who controlled the distribution of whiskey had been out-distributed by a man who controlled the distribution of luck.

And the terrible irony was that I was better at running a sweepstakes than I had been at running a whiskey operation. The trucks ran cleaner. The routes were tighter. The margins were higher. The risk was lower. The paperwork was simpler. I was a better businessman selling three digits than I had been a bootlegger selling rye. The market had selected the more efficient operator, and the operator was me, maintaining the very system that had replaced the system I had built. I was the catalyst for my own chemical replacement. The compound that had once been whiskey was now sweepstakes, and I was the man who mixed the new formula, watching the reaction accelerate with the detached satisfaction of a chemist who has just discovered that his life's work has been replaced by something better, and having the rare honesty to appreciate the improvement.

The catalyst does not survive the reaction. It is not consumed, exactly. It is transformed. It becomes part of the product in ways it cannot perceive, embedded in the molecular structure of whatever it has helped create. I was the catalyst. I was embedded in the sweepstakes. I was in every ticket, every nickel, every rolling machine, every street corner where a woman sold numbers to a factory worker who dreamed of thirty dollars. I was in it, unchanged but irrevocably altered, the same man who had built a whiskey empire now distributing lottery tickets with the same trucks on the same routes through the same city, and the city was better for it, richer for it, happier for it, and I was poorer for it only in the sense that the money was going to be divided among more people, including my nephew, including the runners, including the saloon owners who had switched businesses without asking, including the corrupt cops who had bought tickets and now had a vested interest in the sweepstakes continuing, which was a different kind of corruption, a softer kind, a kind that did not require guns or threats, just the shared hope that the numbers would work out.

I started managing the sweepstakes on a Monday in June. The work was simple. Monitor the routes. Adjust the distribution. Resolve conflicts between runners. Payout the weekly winners. Keep the rolling machines maintained and the ticket supply stocked and the results sheets distributed to every clerk and every saloon and every street corner. The operation was not perfect. It had glitches. Sometimes the runner from the West Side was late with the receipts, and the numbers got mixed up. Sometimes a clerk double-counted the takings, and there was a dispute that took an hour to resolve. Sometimes the rolling machine jammed, and a line of customers had to wait while Jimmy kicked it and it started working again. The machines were not perfect. The operators were not perfect. The system was not perfect. But it was more efficient than the whiskey operation had ever been. More efficient and cleaner and legal and more profitable and, in a way that I did not want to admit, more honest.

Whiskey was contraband. It was illegal. It was a tax on prohibition and a subsidy on corruption. The sweepstakes was legal. It was transparent. It was a tax on hope and a subsidy on mathematics. And the mathematics were honest. The odds were thirty to one. The payouts were thirty to one. The house took ten percent, which was overhead, which was fair, which was how a business was supposed to work. No bribes. No guns. No bottles breaking in back rooms. Just three digits and a rolling machine and the daily stock market numbers, published openly for everyone to see, calculated by exchanges that were more honest than any corrupt cop I had ever paid.

I fixed the glitches. I fixed them efficiently and without complaint. I was good at my job. Better than good. I was the best. Because I understood distribution. I had spent seven years understanding how to move things through a city efficiently, and things could be physical, like whiskey, or abstract, like numbers, but the principles of distribution were the same. Routes and timing and volume and overhead. The same principles that had made me a bootlegging kingpin made me a sweepstakes kingpin. The principles did not change. Only the product changed. And the product that won was always the one that was more efficient.

At the end of the summer, I sat in my office above the Green Mile, which was now the Chicago Sweepstakes Headquarters, and I watched the runners come and go with their stacks of receipts and their daily reports, and I thought about the joke. The great cosmic joke of the catalyst and the compound. I had been the catalyst. I had introduced the reaction. I had accelerated the chemistry of my own replacement. And now I was maintaining the compound, the new molecule, the product of the reaction, watching it form and grow and stabilize into something that was not what it had been and was better than what it had been and was irreversibly different from what it had been.

The reaction was complete. The whiskey business was gone. Not destroyed. Not conquered by a rival. Simply replaced by something more efficient. The catalyst had done its work. The compound had formed. And I, the catalyst, the man who had started the reaction, was now part of the compound, embedded in its structure, maintained by its efficiency, sustained by its profitability, and utterly, completely, irreversibly replaced by the thing I had helped create.

That is chemistry. That is the universe. That is the joke.

The catalyst does not argue with the compound. It does not demand to be recognized. It does not sue for damages or file complaints or hire lawyers. It simply becomes part of the product, unchanged in mass but transformed in function, the same man who distributed whiskey now distributing lottery tickets, on the same trucks, on the same routes, through the same city, selling a different kind of poison, the kind that is legal and transparent and mathematical, the kind that kills slowly through hope instead of quickly through ethanol, and the city drinks both, and the city is fine, and the city is better, and the only thing that is gone is the man who used to pour the whiskey, sitting in an office above a building that no longer smells of spilled beer but of paper and ink and the faint metallic scent of a rolling machine doing its work, three digits at a time, accelerating the reaction that replaced him, maintaining the compound that he created, finding in the maintenance of replacement the same purpose that had driven him to build the original empire, the purpose of distribution, of movement, of efficiency, of making things go from here to there faster and cheaper and cleaner than anyone else could make them go.

And the joke, the great cosmic joke, is that he is better at the new distribution than he was at the old. Better routes. Tighter schedules. Higher margins. Lower risk. The man who conquered prohibition has been conquered by mathematics, and mathematics is more efficient than prohibition ever was, and the man who understood distribution understands that the universe selects for efficiency, and efficiency has selected the sweepstakes over the whiskey, and the catalyst over the compound, and the man over the machine that rolls the numbers, because the man maintains the machine, and the man is the final catalyst, the one who keeps the reaction going, day after day, ticket after ticket, three digits at a time, until the city runs on numbers instead of liquor, and the man who used to pour the liquor runs the numbers, and the numbers pour back into his pockets, and the reaction completes itself, and the joke finishes laughing, and the silence that follows is the silence of a city that has moved on, from whiskey to numbers, from prohibition to lottery, from a man who controlled bottles to a man who controls dreams, and the man, the catalyst, the obsolete bootlegger, the indispensable sweepstakes operator, sits in his office and counts his receipts and laughs and cries and laughs again, understanding finally that the joke was never about being replaced. It was about being needed. The reaction needs the catalyst. The compound needs the catalyst. The city needs the sweepstakes. And the man who started the reaction is the man who keeps it going, not because he is the best at bootlegging, but because he is the best at distribution, and distribution is what the universe rewards, whether it distributes whiskey or lottery tickets or luck or three digits on a piece of paper that costs half a cent to print and sells for a nickel and dreams of being thirty dollars.

On Sunday mornings, when the building is quiet and the rolling machines are silent and the runners are sleeping off their shifts and the receipts are stacked in metal lockers waiting for Monday, I sometimes think about the bottle that broke in the back room, the cheap rye whiskey that filled the air like a confession, and I understand that the bottle breaking was the catalyst, the tiny variable that started the whole reaction, the delayed shipment, the compressed margin, the vulnerability, the telegram from my nephew, the sweepstakes machine, the eight thousand dollars a month, and I understand that every reaction has a catalyst, and every catalyst is a small thing, a missing shipment, a bright-eyed nephew, a carnival machine, a telegram that says everything is better now, and the now is irreversible, and the reaction accelerates, and the compound forms, and the catalyst becomes part of the product, and the man who was the product becomes the maintenance worker of the new product, and the joke is perfect, and the laughter is bitter and beautiful and endless, and the city runs on numbers, and the man who used to run whiskey runs the numbers, and the numbers run everything, and the universe selects for efficiency, and the efficient survive, and the obsolete are maintained by the efficient, and the catalyst maintains the compound, and the compound maintains the catalyst, and the joke maintains itself, generation after generation, reaction after reaction, catalyst after catalyst, until the last bottle breaks and the last number is rolled and the last man counts his receipts in a quiet office above a building that no one remembers was ever a saloon, and the joke echoes through the silence of a city that has moved on from whiskey to numbers to whatever comes next, because the universe is a chemical reaction, and it never stops reacting, and the catalyst is always somewhere, introducing the variable, accelerating the change, becoming part of the product, maintaining the compound, laughing and crying and laughing again at the luckiest joke in the book: the bootlegger who was replaced by a lottery ticket, and the lottery ticket could not have existed without the bootlegger's distribution network, and the bootlegger could not have existed without the prohibition that created the demand, and the prohibition could not have existed without the moral conviction that created the ban, and the conviction could not have existed without the human tendency toward contradiction, wanting something while forbidding it, and the forbidding creates the wanting, and the wanting creates the market, and the market selects for efficiency, and the efficient man survives by maintaining the thing that replaced him, and in that maintenance finds a purpose larger than whiskey or numbers or luck or three digits on a piece of paper.

The luckiest joke is not that he survived the reaction. It is that he was the reaction. He was the catalyst. He was the variable. He was the change. He was the man who poured the whiskey who became the man who rolled the numbers, and the numbers rolled better than the whiskey poured, and the rolling man was better at rolling than the pouring man had been at pouring, and the universe selected the roller, and the roller maintains the machine, and the machine rolls three digits at a time, and the digits contain the joke, and the joke contains the universe, and the universe contains the catalyst, and the catalyst contains the man, and the man contains the joke, and the circle completes itself, and the reaction runs forever, and the catalyst never ages, and the compound never destabilizes, and the city never stops running on numbers, and the man never stops counting his receipts, and the laughter never stops, and the tears never stop, and the joke is always new, and always old, and always exactly as funny as it was the first time, when the bottle broke and the whiskey smelled like a confession and the telegram arrived and the nephew smiled and the rolling machine hummed and the three digits rolled and the eight thousand dollars appeared and the distribution network changed and the catalyst became the compound and the man became the maintenance worker of his own replacement and the joke became the universe and the universe became the joke and the laughter became eternal and the tears became perpetual and the luckiest joke became the only joke that matters: being replaced by something better and then being needed to keep it running, because that is what the universe does. It replaces everything. And then it needs the replaced to maintain the replacement. And the cycle continues, and the reaction accelerates, and the catalyst smiles at the compound, and the compound smiles back, and the man smiles at the rolling machine, and the rolling machine smiles in its mechanical way, clicking and spinning and rolling three digits at a time, and the digits tell the joke, and the joke tells the universe, and the universe tells the man that he is exactly where he is supposed to be, in the office above the building that was once a saloon, counting receipts that smell of paper and ink and luck and three digits and the laughter of a catalyst who understands that he is not obsolete. He is essential. He is the reaction. He is the change. He is the joke.

He is the luckiest.