The fox was in a ditch on Long Island and Julian was drunk and he did not know why he was stopping.

His roadster was idling behind him, engine ticking as it cooled, and the party he had fled was still going on in the house behind him, all music and gin and people laughing in voices that were too loud and too bright and too empty. Julian had driven until the roads ran out and the houses disappeared and the only light came from the moon and the streetlamps that flickered like dying stars.

Then he saw the golden shape in the ditch.

It was a fox. Golden-furred, caught in a hunter's iron jaw, struggling weakly against the metal teeth. Julian got out of the car. He was wearing a tuxedo that cost more than most people's cars and he did not care that the mud was ruining the trousers. He knelt in the ditch and pried the trap open with his bare hands and the fox pulled its leg free and looked at him with golden eyes and Julian laughed because he was drunk and the fox was golden and his life was golden and nothing mattered and everything mattered and he did not know which was worse.

The fox disappeared into the trees. Julian got back in his car and drove home and went to bed and did not sleep.

A week later, a woman in a yellow silk dress appeared at his office on Fifth Avenue.

She did not look like anyone Julian had ever met in his circles. She was too real, too direct, too present. Her hair was dark and cut short and her eyes were dark and direct and she looked at him the way you look at a man you have been looking for and have finally found and are not entirely pleased about.

My name is Vivian, she said. I need someone to deliver a bottle of bourbon to me every day at noon.

Julian laughed. It was an involuntary sound, the laugh of a man whose brain refused to process what his ears had heard.

Vivian did not smile. She reached into her bag and produced a small bag of beans. They were ordinary-looking beans, except they had a faint golden sheen, like sunlight caught in water. Plant these, she said. Or sell them. Or eat them. I do not care. Just bring me the bourbon.

Julian took the beans to a botanist friend at Columbia. The friend was fascinated. They were a rare organic soy variant, virtually unknown in America. The friend offered to buy them. Julian sold. The money was staggering.

Julian started a business: Golden Harvest organic products. The beans became the talk of New York's upper class. Restaurants paid premium prices. Socialites hosted dinner parties featuring golden bean menus. Julian became the most sought-after young man in the city. He bought a yacht. He dated actresses. He threw parties that lasted until dawn.

But every day at noon, he delivered a bottle of bourbon to Vivian. And every time, she looked at him with that same unreadable expression, like she was watching someone fall into a deep pool and knowing he could not swim.

Three years passed. Julian was rich, famous, and hollow.

He woke up some mornings and did not remember who he was. The parties felt empty. The women felt interchangeable. The money felt like numbers on a screen. He had everything he had ever wanted and it was all meaningless and he knew it and he could not stop.

On the eve of the 1929 crash, Vivian disappeared.

Julian searched for her. No one knew who she was. Not even the doorman at the building where he last saw her remembered her name. He went to the address she had given him, a small apartment in the Village, and the woman who lived there said she had never heard of a Vivian and Julian stood on the sidewalk and stared at the building and felt something crack inside his chest, something he had been holding together for three years and had finally let go.

The crash came a month later. Julian lost everything. The money, the yacht, the parties, the fame, the hollow feeling that had been his constant companion. Everything went.

But what he really lost was not the money. What he really lost was the memory of those three years with Vivian, when he was at least alive, even if he did not know it.

In his empty apartment, years later, Julian kept a glass jar on his shelf. Inside: a single dried fox tail, golden. He did not know why he kept it. He did not know what it meant. He just knew that when he looked at it, for one brief moment, he remembered what it felt like to be real.

He opened the jar and held the golden tail in his palm. It was light, almost weightless, the way dead things are light.

He heard a fox's cry, faint, from somewhere in the city, and for one moment, he smiled.

Then he closed the jar and put it back on the shelf and sat down and stared at the wall and the wall stared back and neither of them said anything.

OTMES-v2-D9E5F6-043-M3-280-4R55I-V6C4 E_total: 4.3 | Dominant: M3_Satire | θ: 280° | Rank: 4 | Irreversibility: 0.60 | Innocence: 0.60