LIFE IS PINBALL

a novel

by
Charlie Dickinson
 COPYRIGHT PAGE

Copyright 2023 by Charlie Dickinson under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No

Derivatives license. Some rights reserved. This book may be reproduced in print and digital formats
when the author is acknowledged, the text of the book is unchanged, and copies are not used
commercially. The language of the applicable license deed is available in full at
http://www.creativecommons.org.
Published in the United States by Ch. Dickinson, Portland, Oregon
Publisher's Cataloguing-in-Publication
Dickinson, Charlie
Life Is Pinball--1st ed.--Portland
Or.:Ch. Dickinson, 2023.
eISBN: 978-1-7366893-5-6
1. Actuaries--Fiction. 2. Galveston (Tx.)--Fiction. 3. Young men--Fiction. 4. Fetal insurance--
Fiction. 5. Bildungsromans.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
FIRST EDITION
 Chapter One: The Ripe Fruit of Labor

The bulk of a Greyhound bus shimmered as it crawled through the morning light across the
Causeway. Cars in the other lanes sped past, and the dozen-odd passengers aboard included Alroy
Shanly, a recent college grad, who'd never been to Texas.
Alroy's journey was over. He had started in Ontario, California, stopped in Las Vegas, spent a
few days with his parents, and then resumed travel down the spine of the Great Southwest. The
Causeway, two miles of slab concrete on sizey stilts spanning West Bay, was the sole link of the
mainland to an offshore island lapped by waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Alroy studied again the bus ticket from his coat pocket. GALVESTON was it, the last stop
imprinted on the ticket, now little more than a souvenir of a 1,570-mile journey.
The Greyhound steadily gained on the incline of the West Bay Causeway, the driver working a
lower gear, letting everyone continue to speed past. Alroy felt anticipation, as though he'd prepared
for this day and its no second-chance launch into adulthood. He had his cap and gown weeks before
as a newly-minted bachelor of science in mathematics from Cyprus Polytechnic Institute in Upland,
California. Yes, from now on, he was a self-sufficient, responsible adult, working five days a week,
long hours possibly, and soon studying for an upcoming exam to keep his career on track.
Once they crested the Causeway, Alroy's head craned out in the aisle. He peered beyond the bus
windshield at the concrete lanes downsloping to the flats of an island city, Galveston. It crouched
before an open, marine sky that, lording over the mica-specked Gulf waters, was shot through with
milky arrows of Southwest 737 contrails from Houston Hobby aiming for Cancún, Belize City,
Havana--take your pick. Moreover, Alroy had read this same port city in 1900, as happenstance
would have it, was landfall for the worst hurricane on American soil, ever. Ten thousand dead, a toll
so devastating to life and property, many thought Galveston would never be rebuilt, if it should be
rebuilt at all.
Yet it came back, was still there, glistening in the Saturday morning light, and Alroy knew
where he'd be Monday morning, eight sharp.
The Greyhound dropped down another gear at the east end of the Causeway, and the driver
maneuvered to the off-ramp with an overhead sign, BROADWAY. Alroy's pulse quickened. He didn't
know the details, but the day after tomorrow would be a highlight of his life. Passing those first
exams for the Society of Actuaries while still at Cyprus Poly paid off. He took a deep breath. He was
ready to detach the ripe fruit of labor from his tree of life.
Before then, he had other things to do. Such as find the place where he'd live.
"This is Galveston," the bus driver said. "End of the line. We'll be in the terminal in a few
minutes, so please look around for your belongings. Don't want you to leave anything behind.
People always do." He chuckled. "We hold in lost-and-found for thirty days. After that, it goes to
charity. Thanks for choosing Greyhound and have your ticket stubs ready for baggage claim."
Alroy looked about him. A scattered dozen or so bus passengers. As the driver said: The island
was it. No more stops. He fingered the trip ticket in his hand with the one luggage claim stub stapled
to it. 7901. A prime number. Rare, he thought. Fancy that. Good luck? He wasn't sure.
Out the window, he saw they had left the Causeway and were driving down Broadway, aka
Texas Highway 87, for the central business district. Yes, they were on the island proper, the bridge
behind them, and everywhere he looked the landscape was as flat as the Gulf waters--no high
ground anywhere--no wonder the Great Storm in 1900 rolled through and gave no quarter. The
supine island had too much sky, Alroy thought, and with the sun out, as it was then, who could resist
Galveston's charm? The six lanes of Broadway were separated by a median strip with a long
procession of palm trees, their green and tan fronds seemingly beckoned welcome. He couldn't wait
to get off the bus.
Slipping into downtown, the bus lugged along in low. Alroy's eyes widened: the two- and three-
story buildings, brick, stone, that made up the commercial hub. Coming their way, another
Greyhound, westbound off the island, a HOUSTON/DALLAS headsign topping its panoramic
windshield. The drivers waved at each other.
Then the bus turned right, easing into a parking bay under the terminal canopy. "Welcome to
Galveston," the driver said, getting out of his seat--the front door opening with a hiss--and he
seemingly ready to count passengers.
Outside, the raw humidity hit Alroy. The surprise of the unseen. He knew a large body of water,
a salty neighbor to about half the United States, was nearby, a walk away, just beyond the Galveston
Seawall. The confused sensations. At once, he felt sauna-relaxed, but also as if only a shower would
take away the clammy feel. The relaxing part of the humidity he already liked, so his battle was half
won. Growing up in Las Vegas, college in Southern California, had he known anything other than
dry, desert weather? He was young and, he liked to think, adaptable.
He watched the bus driver unlock and lift the doors to the luggage compartment nestled
between the front wheel well and the rear one.
The bus driver lined up the luggage and held his hand out to look at passenger claim stubs.
Prime number 7901 the driver saw matched the same Samsonite Alroy took to college almost four
years earlier. Had all the clothes and personal items he'd need for a while. He had more stuff, but he
talked his mom into sending it later. For now, he only wanted to show up for work and make a good
first impression.
He took the suitcase, not too heavy, and headed inside the terminal to see if he could find a map
or get directions to the hotel where he'd stay for the night.
He planned to meet with the owner of a bed-and-breakfast Sunday afternoon about renting a
carriage house apartment. He made the arrangements online and talked with the owner, who lived in
Houston, only two days ago.
§
Sunday morning, Alroy checked out of the Briscoe Hotel on Post Office Street in the heart of
the business district. He had only a half-mile walk--no need for a cab--to the Hulsey Mansion,
restored as a bed-and-breakfast, where he'd meet the owner down from Houston for the final okay to
rent the efficiency apartment that sat over the mansion's garage. As Alroy suspected, a former horse
stable. He and Mr. Uribe had talked on the phone and emailed, so the application items were verified
and approved.
 The minutes before noon flicked by, and Alroy waited in front of the Hulsey Mansion on O
Avenue, which he'd seen pictured online. In person, impressive. The rosy brick two-story Colonial
had paired black wooden shutters on each double-hung window. A black front door with brass
touches had a portico with two white columns that supported an overhead porch jutting out from the
second-floor Palladian window. Alroy looked to the side of the house; at the end of the driveway
was the carriage house with the second-floor apartment he'd rent. He rubbed his forehead, I am
going to live here?
Turning around, Alroy saw an expensive white car--he wasn't sure the make, probably foreign--
slow to a stop at the curb. Out stepped Matt Uribe, a large man wearing a leather flight jacket, who
confidently strode as if this was only one of several "properties" he had on the island.
"You must be Alroy, got your suitcase with you too. Let me show you around," Mr. Uribe said,
walking down the driveway toward the carriage house and its side stairway.
Alroy fell in step. "I wanted a place I'd walk to work, Atlas Global Insurance," he said, nodding
toward the prominent headquarters building downtown.
"Oh, excellent, the walking's good for you."
"So I won't need a car. None at college, never got a driver's license."
"You'll do fine."
They went up the stairs to the small apartment. "This will be great," Alroy said. "I didn't want a
busy apartment house. I need a quiet place to study for my actuarial exams."
"You'll have that here," he said, "Oh, my guests over at the big house come and go, but
generally they're quiet as church mice."
Alroy thought it a matter of writing a check and Uribe giving him the keys. It was.
Walking back to his car, Uribe said there were no B & B guests that day, so when guests showed
up, Alroy would have to introduce himself to Tina, the B & B host, when she came by for the
arriving guests, "And she'll get going on another round of those breakfasts, the laundry, and
vacuuming. I have to pay her well," he chuckled.
"Oh, and one other thing before I forget," Uribe added. "Any mail you get won't be delivered to
the main house, which is on Avenue O. It's a peculiarity of Galveston, but alleys are taken seriously.
The carriage house you'll be in is considered a back building and sits on Avenue O 1/2, between
Avenues O and N. So your mail address is 934 Avenue O 1/2. Confusing, but you'll get the hang of
our alleyways before long."
"That makes sense, now I can give out my address, thanks."
"Anything else, just shoot me an email."
The two shook hands, and once Uribe left, Alroy went back to the place, opened his suitcase
and thought about Monday morning.
§
He stood on the sidewalk before the glass expanse of a seven-floor office building. His slight
frame, all of five-foot seven, was clothed in what he believed appropriate professional attire, it being
his first day on the job as an Actuarial Associate at Atlas Global Insurance. For the tropical clime--
palm trees lined the streets--Alroy wore his only summer suit, a blue and ivory-striped seersucker
with a white shirt, tie, and some low-key tan bucks to complete the crisp first impression he wanted
to make.
 A light breeze blew off the Gulf, and the temperature was climbing through the upper seventies,
the morning air heavy as hung wash.
Alroy looked upward at the glass panels of the sixties vintage headquarters Atlas Global
Insurance built after having outgrown its prior home, one of several that went back to the post-Civil
War year of 1867, when Galveston was the Texas port city on the Gulf, shipping out more cotton
than any port in the world. He stepped smartly forward and pushed through the energy-saving
revolving glass door and went to the reception and security desks.
The security guard--blonde, eyes geyser blue, seated on a rollie desk chair, her black uniform
jacket slung over its back--asked, "May I help you?"
He said he was Alroy Shanly and starting a new job in the department headed by Irvin Kellner,
with whom he's spoken by phone and Skype.
Her left forearm--bare of the short-sleeved, starched white uniform shirt--held the phone
handset aloft, her long right index finger quickly punching out an extension, and a few words later,
her blue eyes found his. "Here, let me prepare you a visitor pass. You'll get a permanent security
badge later today."
After some keystrokes at her computer workstation, she turned around and detached a pre-
laminated name badge the printer ejected. She slipped it in a neck strap holder and said, "Here, goes
around your neck. The permanent badge you get later has a clip you attach to your clothing
anywhere above the waist."
Alroy took the badge, putting the strap over his head. His temporary tag dangling on his chest,
he had the feeling, at last, I'm here, and I am employed.
The security guard stood, tall in her duck-whites shirt, fitted black uniform pants, gray stripe
running the leg, and pointed out where the elevator banks were--off to her right--and said, "Mr.
Kellner expects you, said he'll meet you by the elevator. Just punch six."
Alroy walked over to the elevators; this being close to the start of the day, he boarded a car with
three others, all getting off at lower floors, and from four to six he ascended alone.
At the sixth floor, the door of the elevator car opened, and a middle-aged man stood, slim of
build, wearing dressy slacks and a tieless white shirt. A touch of gray in his hair, his tan face
suggested he spent much time puttering about his garden or tending to his Victorian home's
gingerbread exterior.
"Hi, you must be Alroy Shanly. I'm Irv, and we'll work together."
Alroy's tense legs half stumbled out of the elevator, and he gave him his hand. "Glad to be here,
at last," he said, smiling relief he recognized the face he'd only known on his laptop screen.
"C'mon. This morning I want to introduce you to the rest of our crew. Then I'll give you the
quick tour of this and that, show you the cafeteria, and then march you down to HR. They've got
paperwork for you. I figure on 'bout eleven-thirty, you, me, and three others in our group will head
out for lunch. Sound like a plan?"
"Of course, I've been looking forward to this day for weeks," Alroy said, a-beaming.
§
It was lunch time already, and Alroy was back on the sixth floor after spending what seemed
like hours in Human Resources filling out too many forms and learning too much about his
employee benefits at Atlas, more than he could absorb in one sitting. Working for an insurance
company, every form of insurance--medical, dental, vision, life, disability--was a perk of the job,
and the ways to sock away one's money in investment plans were a long menu of choices.
Alroy had a lot to think over.
Back on the sixth floor, Alroy met others in the actuarial group. There was Irv, the boss. But
also Duncan Black, an amiable, wayward-hair, gangly guy, who stood up from rocking in his desk
chair and shook Alroy's hand. Duncan was an FSA, a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, and like Irv
had no more exams. He was fully certified.
Then there was Pavanjeet Ravel, an East Indian, whose ready smile suggested he could also sell
used cars to folks who had trouble with financing if he weren't a white-collar type. "Just call me
Van," he said.
Sitting at the workstation across from Van was slight Tuan Nguyen, Vietnamese-American,
"And born here," he added with a wry chuckle, though Alroy was sure Tuan's parents must have left
the home country precipitously.
Adding to the international flavor and the last of what Alroy would join, making for a six-
person work group, was the sole female--women like math? he often wondered--Olivia Chen,
Chinese-American by way of Sri Lanka.
Alroy did a double take when she offered her soft hand.
Something was right about her. He had seen enough of the intellectual prowess of Chinese-
Americans in college and figured Olivia could probably plow through a multi-decrement table with
the best of them. She could juggle d(x)'s and probabilities in an offhanded way, he was sure. And,
yes, he had seen more than his share of thin, rice and ramen-eating Asian women. But Olivia was
different. Differently right.
He indulged her intense hooded dark eyes, the right one having a momentary, involuntary
spasm, blinking at him; her languid hair dropping to her shoulders in anything but a disciplined
way--a wildness, even, to her thick, black tresses, which seemed otherwise acceptable in the context
of her tailored linen business suit, and got an undeniable impression.
Olivia Chen was built. Voluptuous was the first word to pop into his head. Yes, voluptuous. An
Asian-American woman in her mid-twenties, surely a few years older than he and the ripeness of her
body made him think beyond Excel spreadsheets, disability decrements, and reserve planning--all
that.
§
"I was thinking," Irv said, "Duncan's got a deadlined project and's awfully busy, but what about
the rest of us going out and grabbing some lunch?"
A quick exit, the five of them, and soon they were at Pelican's Scoop. Alroy studied a menu and
sat directly across from Olivia. He was unnervingly aware her hooded eyes might have gone off
menu once too often because he was the new face at the table. Nothing more than that.
"Seems we have most of Southeast Asia here," Alroy said, adding, "Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India--"
He chuckled at what he hoped wasn't seen as a feeble try to make small talk.
"Actually, Van and I are related," said Tuan, then pointing to the menu, looking up at the waiter,
"I'll have my usual, the scallops plate."
"How's that?" Alroy asked. Tuan gave a thumbs-up. "Same for me: scallops too," Alroy said,
turning to the waiter in a starched white apron with a large blue pelican logo.
 "There's something to it, listen," Pavanjeet interjected.
"Yes, my people were originally the nation of Cham in what is now South Vietnam. We came
over from the Indian subcontinent thousands of years ago ..."
"I think that's everything," Irv said to the waiter, "except I'll take the dressing on the side."
"Of course," said the waiter, and he left with brisk steps.
"Tuan's right," Irv added. "I've been to South Vietnam, explored the countryside. Hindu ruins
everywhere from the Cham ..."
"What happened," Tuan said, "the Sinic Vietnamese came down from the north and wiped out
the Cham, made my people pay tribute to their kings. They destroyed our culture, our religion."
"When did this happen?" Alroy asked.
"Oh, thousand years ago."
"Look at the two," Olivia said. "The people in North Vietnam, they're more like Chinese, like
me. But Tuan and Van, rounder eyes, darker skin, don't you think?"
Once she mentioned it, Alroy could see Tuan Nguyen was more like Pavanjeet than Olivia.
"And although they spared us genocide," Tuan added, "we had to accept their beliefs. All our
Hindu temples, sayonara."
"But in time, the South Vietnamese became Roman Catholics," Irv said. "One of the conflicts in
the Vietnamese War was the godless communists of the north fighting the Catholics of the south ..."
"Yeah, in time, we Vietnamese got out," Tuan added. "We came to America, and many here on
the Gulf Coast do shrimp fishing and stuff like that. This reminds us of home, the weather, the water,
the plants."
"And you weren't born in Vietnam?" asked Alroy.
"No, Holy Redeemer Medical Center, Houston. I was born there."
The plates of food began arriving, and Alroy was half-convinced Tuan and Van were blood
brothers.
Ready for his plate of scallops--a dab or so of Tartar sauce on each would make a perfect
mouthful--Alroy noticed Olivia busy squeezing a lemon slice into her iced tea and then glanced out
the glass wall showing the Gulf waters from which their meal originated. Seagulls hiked and glided
across a blue sky with distant friendly cumulus and incandescent sunlight. He heard the muffled gull
shrieks and turned back to the table, his fork selecting a first bite, and then he looked at Olivia and
smiled tentatively. She did too.
Irv glanced Alroy's way and nodded. "As I told you earlier, your colleagues here are at different
points on the path of actuarial exams--Olivia passed her seventh and is now a full-fledged Associate
of the Society of Actuaries, Van is close behind, having passed five, and Tuan's looking forward to
his fourth. So, tell us what interested you to take actuarial exams in college?" he asked.
"Oh, from the start I always knew I wanted the degree in mathematics. I looked around at what
the other math majors did once they graduated. I decided against grad school, getting a PhD,
teaching. It seemed like a cycle of staying in college."
"Sounds like a negative sum game," Van interjected. "Educate a person in math, so he can go
educate future students in math ... at some point you run out of new students if everyone wants to
teach ..."
"A paradox of benefit," Irv added.
"Something like that," Alroy concluded. "Anyway, I wanted to do something with a payoff in
the real world," he said, holding up finger quotes. "That's why I got excited when I found out my
probability course was perfect preparation for the first exam."
"How'd you do?" asked Tuan.
"A ten. I knew what I wanted from then on."
"You ever hear from your other math major classmates?" Irv asked.
"Yeah, a few. Email them, tell them what I'm doing. I gather some will be going to grad school,
aiming for a PhD, hoping to teach ..."
"Yeah?" Irv asked.
"But I guess some others are finding jobs writing software. You can get a job coding
somewhere, some place. Don't need the Comp Sci degree. Everybody codes, I even do my share of
HTML, learned how to build web pages in my spare time."
"Cool. Well, I think you'll find at AGI we value a bit of coding. You occasionally need to look
under the hood if the calcs seem off."
"What did we do before we had computers?" Olivia asked, giving Irv a look of sincere
puzzlement.
"Painstakingly created mortality tables ... and adding machines that might take up half your
desk. Things were slow back then, labor intensive."
The rest of lunch went that way, light banter, but still, for Alroy, hints of what work might be
like. They finished their scallops, shrimp salad, blackened swordfish, halibut fish and chips and
made it back to the office sometime after one.
"You better not think this is a typical lunch," Irv told Alroy before they started to go over
assignments. "When we get busy, you might eat at your desk. Or cut short your stay in the cafeteria.
But we have fun." He laughed.
§
The afternoon went by quickly, Alroy getting a bit of one-on-one instruction from Van about his
desktop, the passwords, and the different work modules once he got in his account.
It was a lot to take in, and Van pointed out he'd get the hang of it once he had assignments.
Which had to wait until the next day. Back at Van's desk, he gave Alroy a quick summary of what
he'd been working on. A reserve calculation for one of their whole life policies that needed to be
filed with the State Insurance Commissioner in a few weeks.
For the last hour of the day, Alroy stuck his head in the AGI life insurance policy compilation
online to soak up the language, the conventions of how the company did its work.
Five o'clock prompt, Irv came out of his office, glanced around and sauntered over to Alroy still
mousing around his desktop. "You've put in your work day, Alroy. I try to run this group so everyone
can leave at five--unless you're busy on a project, like Duncan over there."
Alroy could see Duncan was busy, only getting up from his desk to retrieve a print job at the far
end of the room.
 "I'll go over your first project tomorrow morning, so be ready to plunge into the nuts and bolts
of calcs. Any questions so far?"
"Not now. I'll be asking questions as I stumble along." He chuckled.
Olivia got up from her desk, shouldering her purse and walked past. Alroy had to admit she was
nice scenery in the work place. He saw Irv nod his head as she went by; Alroy smiled her way, but
he had a sense she didn't notice.
§
Alroy was ready to leave too.
He walked out the lobby doors onto Sealy, where Olivia stood curbside. His face flushed: She
was the unexpected extra in his first day and impossible to ignore. He had to say something--Have a
good evening--whatever--to engage, disengage, nothing more.
Just then, as he tried to catch her eye, her gaze searching down the street for something only she
knew; a car, throaty exhaust, pulled up. A convertible, a newish white Corvette, piloted by a tall,
wind-in-the-hair guy with GQ looks. He swung open the passenger door, and without so much as a
glance Alroy's way, Olivia dropped into the seat like the perfect curvaceous companion for top's
down Gareth Constable--"Just call me Gary"--who Alroy would learn came from a prominent
Houston family whose amassed wherewithal went way back to 1920s oil.
All of this--the Corvette with Olivia disappearing down Sealy, ga-lumb, ga-lumb, ga-lumb--took
place so quickly that Alroy looked in disbelief. She was too good to be true. His first-day, instant
lust for her was now best kept on ice.
§
Walking to his place, once he got over the revelation Olivia had a boyfriend, and they rode
about in a white Corvette convertible, Alroy started to take in the neighborhood scene along the
same blocks he so hurriedly walked past, getting to work at eight.
The business district of vintage brick and stone buildings two-, three-, even four-stories,
housing all manner of cafes, bars, convenience stores, and retail shops where money changed hands,
yielded to a colorful residential mix of squat apartment buildings, single-family houses, an
occasional duplex; all painted heliotropic, bleached-out shades of pink, aqua green, cream,
tangerine, and pale coral. Many old, at stages from freshly painted to peeling, some sitting on blocks
above crawl spaces, with prideful examples showing loving attention to gingerbread woodwork on
their façades. He was going past one of those shotgun, skinny clapboard houses, narrow as can be,
maybe twenty feet across, when ahead of him, a white guy with tousled dark hair, his short-sleeve
shirt hanging untucked over his blue jeans, was looking up the stoop at a woman. He guessed both
of them about thirty.
"Isn't that your pajama top?" he yelled. The guy had a look of defiance.
She shot him dagger eyes. "Don't you tell me how I look. Don't you start."
Alroy halted, ready to step off the sidewalk and skirt what seemed a physical fight in the
making, if more than a duel of words. He studied her to see what it was. The woman, hair pasted to
her perspiring face, didn't have much on, a couple of straps over her shoulders and a lightweight
cotton top that did nothing to hide she was braless--no support for a pair of grapefruit-heavy assets.
Chemise Cindi's casual attire, however, seemed reasonable in the face of the late June
afternoon's sweltering mugginess. Who was Alroy to say?
 "You don't think it insults me, your looking like I picked you up on the street?"
"Don't you say that, Jase." She turned around. Alroy had stepped off the curb and walked in the
street past a parked car, a beater of a dull white Cavalier with tan Bondo patches. She went in the
front door of the house and, with the door but slightly open, yelled, "You can try sleeping in the car
tonight, that's what this dead bolt's for."
The guy looked away from the house, disgust, defeat in his face.
Alroy got back on the sidewalk, the guy getting in the Cavalier, slamming the door behind him.
Where the guy was headed, Alroy had no idea. With any luck, given Alroy's penchant for seeing
risks, the guy better stay out of bars, though temptation to drink away his lockout was an easy
choice. No, if the guy had a friend or brother in town, he'd best head straight there and sleep it off on
a couch.
People problems. Advice. Alroy was working on an after-hours business. He could do it because
of the Internet. He'd been sketching out a website during those forty hours of bus travel.
Now that he had finished his first day at Atlas, it was time to act.
 Chapter Two: El Ultimisimo Restoreación

In the upstairs apartment of the carriage house, a laptop sat on the one table that came with the
furnishings. Alroy was connected to the Internet. He was executing his action plan for a little Web
business. He would dispense advice over the phone for a won't-break-the-bank rate of eighteen
dollars an hour.
He called the toll-free number for VISA International to set up a merchant account. He was on
hold for more than the estimated twelve minutes.
The off-putting hold music that sounded underwater suddenly stopped. He heard a phone
ringing.
"VISA Merchant line. This is Jim, how can I help?" Jim said in an East Indian accent.
"I'm starting a business and want to take credit cards. I need to set up an account."
"I see, what sort of business?"
"Oh, all online. People find my website and book a time--"
"Book a time? What's that?"
"A reservation system I set up on my website so they know when to phone me."
"Okay, you know you can set up account online. URL is visamerchantaccount dot com. Self-
service and you get confirmation number for your account in email."
"I'd just as soon do it now, give you the information."
"Okay, your name, please."
Alroy also gave Jim a current mailing address, and a phone number where he could be reached
during business hours and some more details.
"Okay, for the online business, I need the URL, please."
"That's life is pinball--one word--dot com."
"The website up?"
"Yes, a few days."
"Okay, few minutes, let me navigate."
A minute went by. Yet Alroy was confident his coding was bulletproof, his web pages
displaying properly on whatever browser Mr. VISA in Bangalore happened to have.
"Okay, I got it. The page. You ask for name, card number, expiry date and cee vee vee. But that
isn't enough for VISA transaction. That's why you better do this online--"
"But I thought we could do this over the phone."
"Yes, that's true, but it takes longer and you probably have to call back."
"Okay, what else do I need?"
"Some script code to embed in your web page for the customer to pick the time and pay--"
"No, I don't want to charge them until after I talk with them. If they quit talking after a few
minutes, I'm not going to charge them."
"I see, you don't want payments online?"
"Yeah, that's it. I just want the info I can phone in later."
"You know you're taking a risk?"
"How so?"
"You don't get real-time credit approval. With the embedded VISA code on a click-to-pay
button, it's only seconds."
"Sure, convenient, but I don't think it will work for my business--"
"Life is pinball dot com?"
"Yeah, I want to phone in the transaction later. I could even do it the next day. Doesn't matter."
"I see, then you're right, you talk to me."
After a few minutes, Alroy had the information he needed to take down VISA account details
off his website and phone it in later. But as Jim in Bangalore concluded, he still had to mail in his
application--the form he could download off the Internet, again at the same visamerchantaccount
website--and wait up to ten business days for a merchant account authorization number.
Alroy was happy to have the not-so-small detail of payment for services on its way.
It was almost nine Central Standard Time--and who knows what in Bangalore--when he hung
up the phone and contemplated where best to position his room fan to combat the Gulf humidity,
which like an unwelcome visitor was overstaying summer nights in the carriage house. Or would he
get used to it?
§
When Alroy rented the carriage house apartment over the garage used for nothing but storage,
he talked that first Sunday morning with the owner, who had driven over to the island for the check.
Then the guy was gone.
The next few days no guests showed up in the main house. Alroy figured the B & B as one way
to keep a grand old mansion on the National Historical Register—for an owner who didn't live
there--afloat by paying the mortgage and property taxes. Plus the inevitable rise in housing prices
would probably make the huge house pay off, eventually.
Soon, however, after guests showed up, the Hulsey Mansion B & B's hostess, cook, and maid,
Tina, met Alroy. She gave him more background on the place than Mr. Uribe volunteered. For
starters, Alroy was the first renter in the carriage house. Uribe recently decided with the competition
for tourist dollars, he needed more cash flow during the "slow times." The carriage house would be a
second source of income.
 That the carriage house was only recently cleaned up and for rent also explained, so Tina said
with a few sardonic asides, why Uribe hadn't got around to installing air-conditioning like the main
house. Tina, whose clipped blunt speech suggested she might be new to the island, was an energetic
woman in her forties, and her no-nonsense demeanor was such, Alroy wanted her to see him as
young, adaptable, and no whiner.
Alroy shrugged and said he'd put up with it.
The place was clammy and warmish in the evenings, an enclosed space that needed moving air
to be tolerable. Between opening windows, mercifully screened against mosquitoes, and having a
fan pointed at where he'd be sitting, he was okay. Around ten in the evenings the cool Gulf breezes
started to blow inland and things cooled off. And so Alroy made do. Besides, the place was so quiet.
§
Several days later, Irv wanted Alroy to sit down with Duncan and construct a spreadsheet
commutation table for insurable lives with the latest interest rate assumption.
Alroy walked his wheelie-chair over to Duncan's desk. "How's that?" Duncan asked, swivelling
the monitor toward Alroy.
"Yeah, I like the big screen."
Duncan, tall, unruly dark hair, and animated dark eyes, rocked back and forth in his desk chair.
Besides the chair rocking, Duncan also popped jelly beans from a large jar on his desk into his
mouth. One at a time.
"What I have here," he said, referring to the glowing Excel spreadsheet before them, "is the
commutation model for our new interest assumption."
"It's lower?" Alroy asked.
"It sucks. One point three seven. Can you believe it? Oh, you want some, great flavor,
watermelon, green outside, red inside. Cool, no?" he said, pointing at the jelly bean jar with his right
hand half full of candy yet to be planted in his mouth.
Alroy took a few, to give them a try.
"Brain food," Duncan exclaimed. "The primary reason I'm an FSA today is I always took jelly
beans to the exams. That's the only solid food I could sneak in proctored exams."
"No fortune cookies with hidden answers--"
"Right. Anyway this is your standard commutation table template."
The nine-column spreadsheet, rich with numbers out to ten digits filled the bright screen.
"On the far left and the far right, obviously the attained age for each row. Starts with zero, goes
to one hundred ten."
Duncan kept rocking in his chair, as if to summon up his next train of thought. He popped jelly
bean after jelly bean in synch with the desk chair.
"Where do you change the interest assumption?" Alroy asked, trying to make sense of the
spreadsheet, age issues aside.
"Right up here, at the header, where the identifiers on the template are filled out. See? One point
three seven five. Pathetic. I mean why don't we just make it zero interest, so the policyholder pays
full freight. Oh, the good ol' days of real interest. Three percent ... wow, I remember hearing about
seven percent. Can you believe that?"
"So you can change the interest rate and see it ripple out?" Alroy asked, knowing the theory of a
commutation table.
"Yeah, that's what Irv wanted me to go over, how this spreadsheet responds to different interest
rates. Here, go ahead and put in a different rate. Just for grins, make it seven percent even. See what
that does."
Alroy went ahead, mixing up the interest rate inputs to see the effect on premiums to justify a
given benefit payout. It was sobering how dependent AGI was on investment experience, which
Duncan noted was going nowhere, doing nothing.
Alroy's confidence perked up. He had arrived at the action after all his solitary study for those
first two actuarial exams. And he was sitting next to an FSA, one who had earned the ultimate
accreditation of professional competence, who could sign his name to a report and put those three
letters after his name and it would have value.
Yes, as Alroy studied the penultimate column of the spreadsheet he recognized he was sitting
next to a highly brilliant fellow, one who would have fit in with the more geekier types back at
Cyprus Poly. He felt at ease with another of the familiar tribe.
§
A bit after five, everyone getting their desk cleaned up to leave, including Duncan, but not Irv,
Duncan looked Alroy's way. "You up to a brew after work?"
"Sure, be great in this weather," Alroy replied.
"There's a little dive around the corner on Avenue N I like."
Outside they navigated a sidewalk crowd of many tourists wearing shorts and cutoffs with
sandals, all looking for one of the special eateries that kept summertime downtown hopping. That it
was humid seemed beside the point: Hunger came first. They got to Avenue N and went right.
Soon, they sat on padded barstools in a cavernous, narrow room, the low light only enough to
show the bar ran more or less the length of the room and had four two-person tables along a wall
hung with serapes and sombreros. "Welcome to the Alamo Cantina," Duncan said.
"Hey, que pasa, calabaza?" a stout bulldog of a cinnamon Tejano bartender asked, gruffly.
"Rosie, new guy in town, Alroy, works with me."
"Welcome to our island. Where you from?"
"California, but by way of Las Vegas. I was born there," Alroy replied, laughing.
"California, yeah, got something to say there un minuto, but first your drinks--"
"I'll have my usual long-neck Lone Star," Duncan said.
"I'll go with my colleague's choice, Lone Star too."
Rosie turned and went back to the ice chest, fished out two long brown beer bottles, snapped off
the caps with a church key hanging off his apron and came back, beer in each hand. "You want a
glass?" he said to Alroy, "Duncan always drinks out the borol, without the pour."
"No glass, fine by me too."
Rosie darted a look left and right and saw the other two customers in the bar seemed reasonably
content, nursing their drinks along. "Yeah, California, I was there March, a year ago. Went back to
this city near Los Angeles, near Riverside, Rialto, I think. A little bisnes to negotiate."
"Really?" Duncan said.
"Yes, un felo had this wrecked Porsche, un spaider. I want to say he had six months on recovery
from the accident. He wanted nothing to do with that car anymore. Said I could take it off his hands.
Fifteen thousand."
"Fifteen thousand? Rosie, a wrecked car, methinks you were seriously had."
"No, wait. Wait a minute."
Rosie reached in his pocket, took out his phone. Started swiping at the screen, then "Here, look
at this."
What he held up on the small lit screen in the dark was a crumple of metal, which could be
anything, maybe not even a car, except for the front wheel splayed out sideways in the heap. And
Alroy wouldn't know a Porsche from a Peugeot.
"Is this after you fixed it up?" Duncan laughed.
"No, fula. This is why I paid fifteen grand bolas. That's it sitting in Rialto, before I had it
trucked back to mi garaje here in Galveston."
"That must have cost a fortune too."
"Really no, my cousin in the bisnes, drives L.A. to Houston all the time."
"You with your wrenches and pliers--in your garage--are going to make this mess drivable?"
"Hey, this a year ago. You should see it now."
"You got a pic?"
"No. I'm superstitious. I only want before and after. Once I'm done I take a picture of el
ultimisimo restoreación."
"If I can interrupt you two," Alroy said, "but how did you decide to spend so much money for a
wrecked car that takes years to fix up. I mean a long-term project, getting parts and all."
"Oh, I can't think about what's el cincho. This sure thing, no, I took a loan guarantee on my
house, you see, for me that's something from nada."
"Still a lot of bar tending to repay fifteen, amortized at five percent over fifteen years. Wow,
that's an easy two hundred a month," Duncan said.
"It's good, it's good, it adds up. You see this is a 1955 Porsche 550 RS Spyder. Do you know
what that is? My fund to retire, believe me."
"I give up, why is this so special?" Duncan asked.
"That's the racin carro James Dean was driving to Salinas when he was killed. Exactly the
same."
Duncan's jaw hung slack. Then he took another sip of beer, evidently trying hard not to choke.
"Wasn't that James Dean car jinxed?” Alroy asked. “I mean what happened after they restored
that? Didn't someone else die?"
"No, no restoreación. Took out the motor, a few parts, the rest of the car, wadded paper. One
less of them. Only seventy-eight of this Porsche spaider were made. Only enough to get
homologated for racing."
"Homologated?" Duncan asked.
"Ready to race, yes. How many survive? I have no idea. I only know one thing. At this moment,
today, if I put a restored 1955 Porsche 550 to auction, the opening bid is $500,000 minimum and I
wouldn't be surprised if the winning bid cracked one millión, plus, plus, plus. That's my plano to
retire, pure and simple."
"Still," Duncan said, "in your garage, it will take years and years--"
"Doesn't matter. Big mula, okai? Every year the opening bid is up, up. Five hundred today. Next
year, more, comprende, amigo?"
They talked for another minute or so, then Rosie moved away for another customer who walked
through the door.
Duncan and Alroy finished their beer, left seven bucks, no change under the bottles for Rosie
and walked out.
"Don't you ever want to go see his car?" Alroy asked Duncan.
"Yeah, I thought of that, but with Rosendo, you never know for sure. A race car, exactly like
James Dean's, c'mon it might be made of whole cloth. I don't want to force it."
§
That night Alroy was back in his apartment. All was quiet on the mansion grounds. Cicadas
sawed away in the trees. No guests in the main house, no sight of Tina. The weather, as ever,
sweltered.
His room fan whirrrrrred away monotones to where he sat, pad of paper on the table in front of
him. He was noodling about, gathering thoughts about what needed doing next. He was settling into
his job. Things were going well, given this was the start of his career and what that implied. Yes,
AGI was a good launch, the personal dues to be paid were exceedingly simple: Pass exams. Pass all
of them, get an FSA and you were a card-carrying member of the profession and you had a job
anywhere. That was no harsh glare, mid-afternoon Texas-scorching-sun mirage. No, a fact.
Actuaries do math. Actuaries need math exams to get established in the profession. Everyone
taking those exams had intuitively figured out--and probably could show statistically--the profession
could only absorb so many new FSAs each year. Call the figure X. Well, X might skew the bell-
curve of applicant results on the actuarial exams. Those who passed the whole sequence of actuarial
exams always came out oddly close to X FSAs. Sure, the bell-curve could be shaped by the
difficulty of questions. Or more cynically, moving the axis of the bell curve distribution about to
yield the number of non-passing scores of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6s you wanted if you were on the
Society of Actuaries Board of Examination Governance.
In other words, the number of candidates passing every actuarial exam was rigged.
Alroy knew that was part of the game. He also knew the only way to pass was to study hard.
But not for too long.
The November exam was almost five months away. Why start working through all those
problems if in November he'd be fuzzy on what he studied in July? Cramming was, he felt, the
operative plan. In three months, he'd buckle down to intensive study with a fresh understanding of
the exam material handed him on his November date with destiny.
 Meanwhile, it was back to his personal project, how he'd help people.
Sure, he'd put a tiny classified ad for LIFEisPINBALL.com in the Galveston throwaway paper,
but being at the Alamo Cantina earlier with Duncan got him thinking. Thinking about the other two
customers in the bar. They were smoking and drinking. Bars were one of the few places left you
could smoke. So many places--AGI included--had gone smoke-free.
And people who smoked needed a light. That's why they always carried those pencil-thin butane
lighters. Was it because not enough free matches were around? You could go up to a stranger only so
many times and ask for a light before you broke down and bought a Bic.
And the other thing making this an interesting problem for Alroy was more often than not
people went to a bar with the idea they'd feel better afterwards.
Proposition One: People need to light cigarettes in bars. Add Proposition Two: People in bars
want to feel better equals the perfect place to give away books of matches advertising
LIFEisPINBALL.com—just another way to help people solve their problems, adjust their attitude.
That was it. Alroy would get a phone number off the Internet for an outfit in Houston that sold
custom business swag. He would call their number on his lunch hour tomorrow, put in his order.
§
"Hello, this Pasadena Business Specialty Products?"
"Yes, speaking. This is Jared, how can I help you today?"
"I'm looking to get some matchbooks, your website says you print to order. That true?"
"Sure thing. How many you need?"
"Oh, not sure, I want to distribute them in bars around town, here in Galveston. First, I need to
know the cost before I decide on that figure."
"Understandable. Okay, if you're looking at ten thousand, runs you a dime each, so it'll be a
thousand dollars, you pick up here. We don't ship that item, usually."
"Usually?"
"We're limited in carriers that take this and can't send it in the mail, ever. So we like will call on
this item.”
Alroy did a quick calculation in his head. The number of bars he saw downtown, seemed to be
nearly one a block. But each one would take a personal visit, drinking a beer, getting the barkeep to
agree to stock matches. He would start with ten bars. Drop off twenty-five matchbooks each place to
start. What was that? Two-fifty.
"What if I order one thousand, what will that run?"
"A bit more without a volume discount. Let's see. One hundred twenty-seven fifty. How does
that sound?"
Alroy was pleased. It was affordable. "Sure, I'll go with that."
"This is a custom order, you understand. Once we print, we can't sell it to anybody else,
understand?”
"Sure, and I need it delivered, can't get to Houston."
"Okay, can do, but it's costing you fifty bucks extra--that's the minimum for Duck Delivery."
 "Fine, if that's what I have to do."
"You got a credit card, VISA, Mastercard, American Express?"
"Yeah."
"Okay, I'll take your card info and we will bill you for the full amount once the order goes out
of our shop. If upon delivery, you discover a printer error or other manufacturing defect, we will re-
do the order or refund to your card: your choice. That clear?"
"Of course."
"Okay, what do you want printed on the matchbook. As you can see from our web page
samples, everything's in Helvetica type, sized by the printer to fit on the book cover with appropriate
margins. Spell out what you want and I'll repeat it back to you."
"I want it to say this: First, all capitals, p-r-o-b-l-e-m-s, question mark, Then below that I want
uppercase l-i-f-e, lowercase i-s, then uppercase p-i-n-b-a-l-l--all one word--dot c-o-m. Then under
that, all capitals, two words: r-o-y and l-i-s-t-e-n-s, period.."
Jared the repeated it back, letter by letter to be sure.
"Okay, got it. Your order confirmation number is 809."
Odd, Alroy thought, a prime.
"Thanks."
 Chapter Three: The Great Void

After his second week at Atlas Global, Alroy settled on a routine of going to work and getting to
his desk by eight sharp. He would leave at twenty after seven, walking the fifteen blocks or so past
all manner of clapboard houses, across wide streets, some like Bernardo De Galvez Avenue with
trolley tracks in both directions. Irv had told him the wide streets weren't just for trolleys, but
recognized the old Galveston that shipped out cotton. A wagon piled high with cotton pulled by a
six-mule team had to be able to turn around. Alroy always gave himself plenty of slack time getting
to work, to not only meander side streets and see more old houses, but to also stop for his morning
wake-up ritual.
Parked at the corner of 20th and Post Office, by the old brick Customhouse with its broad
sidewalk, was a coffee truck: JASMINE'S COFFEE--NEW ORLEANS STYLE! Jasmine was a
broad-faced Black woman with graying hair, who smiled and never seemed as if she stopped
working. Usually, helping out was her daughter, whose name Alroy hadn't caught, a woman in her
thirties, who might've driven the truck to the same spot every day.
"I'll have my usual," Alroy would say, now that he was seen as a regular.
"Let me see, you be wantin' it blond, that right?"
"Yes, ma'am," he replied.
"And you take two sugars, don't you?" she said, pulling sixteen ounces of his early morning
eye-opener beverage from one of two percolators. She fussed with two teaspoons of sugar from a jar
and then speedily stirred up the half-and-half in the paper cup she then slid toward him on the
counter.
He usually left any change in the tips jar and would be on his way with the perfect cup of
chicory-infused java in hand. It was how he'd start the day, the paper cup sitting on his desk. He'd
sip it for more than an hour, let it cool out.
If the paper cup of Jasmine's New Orleans-style drip coffee was how the Alroy got his day off
on the good foot, then the arrival of Irv Kellner at his side in the morning was its counterpart in
uncertainty and surprise. Alroy hadn't worked there long enough to know all Irv might bring his
way.
§
"More work?" Alroy asked Irv, who stepped out of his office and was walking straight at the
new hire's desk. He had on his white shirt and tie, which Alroy came to see as the signal of Irv's
meetings later in the day.
"I'm afraid what I have to present to you is a bit of ugliness, but something that needs doing.
Everyone else," he said, casting a perfunctory glance about the room, Tuan and Van being occupied
with their screens, "is busy."
"What's the ugliness?" Alroy said, steeling himself.
"Well, it's not ugly, just tedious, many calcs to make, and recheck. You're familiar with multi-
decrement tables, right?"
"Of course. Looked at them last year. I can get back into those pronto."
"Good. Let's get you in the right folder--"
He sat down beside Alroy, commandeering the mouse, clicking away across the desktop,
opening at last a folder titled MULTI-DECREMENT LIFE 2008 CSO. "This is it. This is the old
one. Okay, see the columns on the right? Those are what you update."
"You update to 2016 CSO?"
"Exactly. You might as well print this out ... then you take the 2016 CSO tables, those are in
another folder."
A few clicks and the 2016 CSO folder icon opened on the screen.
"I get the number of lives at each age and put them in the 2008 template and start recalculating
after I replace the updated decrements?" Alroy asked.
"Yes, but like everything else we do around here, we need to hand-calc the results, we don't
want some dodgy code embarrassing us."
"Which probably has happened."
"Not here and let's keep it that way. The hand-calc is the tedious part. You can update this table
in twenty minutes, tops, but for us to sign off on it, I want those figures verified. Got it?"
"Seems straightforward. And I'll ask if I've questions."
Alroy reached over and sipped some of his coffee, convinced he had Irv's morning jack-in-the-
box surprise unsprung and wagging before him.
The rest of his morning went well, Alroy nursed his chicory-flavored coffee along, taking all the
time he needed to punch those numbers into the H-P next to his keyboard. Then checked if the result
matched what showed on his spreadsheet. Always did.
Seemingly a pointless task, but there was a finite chance of error, usually when someone
fumble-fingered the data keystrokes. It was a two-pronged method to verification, the idea being the
mistake could not be repeated with two different calculation tools.
His attained age column went from 0 to 110 and with sixteen columns to enter or calculate, he
expected to spend the rest of the day at it, if not more.
He did.
§
Alroy's phone rang. "Good evening," he said. "This is Roy, and to whom do I speak?" He
glanced at the far wall in his room, at the sole window, dusk gloaming outside.
"Oh, hi, Roy. I'm Kim."
He heard breathy sounds: inhalation, exhalation. Kim was probably smoking.
"You sound tired, you okay?" he asked, ready to hear what she was calling about.
 "Well, yes and no. Don't know what to do. Why I'm calling."
"That's why I'm here," Alroy said in his most reassuring voice, while looking at his laptop
screen. She'd reserved half an hour. He had to keep the conversation moving. "Let me try to help,"
he added.
"Go ahead," she said, punctuating her words with another breathy exhalation.
"What I hear in your voice," he began, trying to sound empathetic, "is exhaustion, plain
tiredness at everyday life. Not your normal self that wants to be busy getting things done. That
you?" Inside, he laughed at his obvious conclusion: Anybody who would call a stranger to talk and
smoke like a chimney at the same time had to be saddled with heavy inertia.
"Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen. Why I called."
"And what you want seems out of reach, right?"
"Yeah," she said, another weary exhalation. "I'm thirty-five and life's a struggle. I should just
jump off the Causeway, end it all. A lot less trouble for everyone."
Alroy sat bolt-upright. Should Kim be calling the Suicide Line? It was too late for that. He had
to stay with her. "For everyone? Who's that?"
"Well, I don't know."
"Oh." A pause. "I hear in your voice loneliness and I want you to tell me who might be upset if
you jumped and ended it all."
"That's it. Not much of anybody. My parents are gone. I have a brother, but haven't seen him
except for a picture. He might still live in Europe."
"No family to speak of. But isn't there someone who would be upset?"
Another smoky exhalation, the weariness plain as a tire gone flat. "Oh, could be another man in
my life I’ve yet to meet--"
"You had a recent breakup?" Alroy felt he had an opening.
"Five months ago. Left after cleaning out my checking account. Must have got my password off
the computer, something."
"You never want to see him again.”
"I won’t. He skipped town. I had a hard time paying rent." She exhaled.
"You’ve no job?"
"None. Just looking and getting rejected."
"Let me tell you where you are."
"Okay.”
"You're in the great void. This is where everybody can go sometime. Except you're there now.
The great void. Ending it all is not how to be in the great void." Alroy was clicking around on his
laptop screen, trying to bring up the Suicide Hotline number. Kim was going to need that.
"The great void? Oh, you’re making this up."
"No, people’ve talked about great void for thousands of years."
"So what happens for me? That's why I call."
 "You wait. You smoke cigarettes, if you must. But just abide with the great void. Do you
understand?"
"No. You saying that doesn't make me feel better."
"Feeling better is not what you want right now. You're in the great void and you want to be with
it and--get this--wait patiently for the surprise life has for you."
"When?"
"When you’re ready."
"Well, all I'm hearing," Kim said, another sharp exhalation of smoke the other end of the line,
"is things won't keep getting worse. I should just think things will turn up?"
"Yes, in a way. But it's important for you to abide with the great void. Can you promise me you
will try? A week or more? Then we can talk again."
"Okay, I'll do that, see what happens."
"And one other thing, no, two other things."
"What?"
"Change your brand of cigarettes."
"Why?"
"Simple. Different cigarettes will remind you to change your way of thinking. No more self-
pity. You just stay with the great void and keep looking for a job, if you want."
"Okay, what's the other thing? You said two things."
"Oh, yeah. If you can't get me during my normal hours, Monday through Friday, seven to nine.
If you're feeling bad some other time, I want you to call this number. They will talk with you
anytime when you're feeling that way again. Got a pencil."
"Yeah."
He read the number to her.
"Thanks, Roy."
"You're always welcome."
He hung up the phone and got busy charging Kim's card nine dollars for the half-hour call. His
first call as a telephone counselor and he couldn't believe how easy it was. On the phone, somehow
he had instant credibility--so it seemed--or Kim was just desperate. He knew things were better for
her than if she hadn't called and instead had smoked through her pack of cigarettes faster.
§
Alroy wasn't sure where the interest in developing his intuitive prowess, his latent empathy gift
started. The idea of helping people, helping them see the answer to their problem was inside
themselves, an answer they'd easily accept if someone like Roy. creative listener, saw it and gave it
back to them so they might understand. Kim had to know--in some out-of-the-way channels of her
mind--what she was thinking--that baleful doom--would lead nowhere. And yet as Alroy pointed
out, she could simply change her thinking and see her supposed doom as merely the price of waiting
for the pleasant surprise of things going right.
Certainly, using his intuition to help people made more sense to Alroy than trying to chase
dollars with it. He'd seen enough of that growing up in Las Vegas. People had systems, true, but
mostly they saw signs, felt vibes, or had a personal ritual to invite Lady Luck by their side.
Alroy knew the games in Las Vegas were rigged early on. Losers had to outnumber winners,
always. It was math. Otherwise, the town would dry up and blow away across the desert sand like an
unloved tumbleweed.
The first inkling he had of this mathematical fact of life was when he was eight years old. As
usual, on Sunday mornings, his father would take the family--his sister, his mom, and him to lunch
after church services. They were in an International House of Pancakes, everyone ordering the full-
on breakfast his mom never had time to make. His parents had demanding jobs: His dad was an
always scrambling plumber, house call after house call, and often long days; his mom an
administrative assistant in a title insurance office, which with the booming local real estate market
meant long hours too. The Sunday restaurant lunch became a tradition, if only to give his parents,
Alroy later would think, the energy to tackle the work of the upcoming week.
Sundays, on a Naugahyde-covered booth seat, Alroy would sip water and look over the menu to
make a choice. The conversation of customers chowing down at other tables, the shouts of
waitresses to the kitchen staff, putting an order on the pass-through carousel; it all was punctuated
by the unceasing sounds of people playing slot machines: a half dozen were for hungry arrivals
waiting in the foyer for a table. Even if they only had five minutes to kill, how long would it take to
lose money on slots--or with luck at their side, win?
No time at all. Besides the foyer, there was a slot machine by the restrooms. Any free space in
the IHOP where people could stand in front of a slot machine had been staked out for the one-armed
bandits. Even a slot machine for those left-handeds, the sinistral lever mounted so!
Alroy sat still, fingering his laminated menu, mesmerized by people pulling on the easy-action
hefty lever that spun the three reels of fortune. When cherries, oranges, grapes, peaches,
watermelons, and other fruit matched up, a gusher of coins would spill out on the tray.
The sound of the spilling coins, the simultaneous ringing of bells on the machine let everyone in
the restaurant know, slot machines paid off. And so people kept going back to them, putting in one
coin at a time--after all, what was the harm in fishing one coin out of your pocket if it might trigger
an avalanche payoff?
Alroy, even at eight, knew in the most primal way the slot machine did not manufacture coins.
And its owners could not come around and always restock it. The machine made no sense if it paid
out more than it took in. And those who played must've known that.
But Alroy came to see the attraction of the slot machines--and of the rest of the gambling games
in Las Vegas--was simple. Everyone thought they were different from the run-of-the-mill loser.
They'd read special numbers from a Chinese fortune cookie, they'd have a suggestive dream with
numbers, they found a lucky silver dollar in the street begging to be played again ... the list of whys
people gambled were as varied as their faces.
Eight-year-old Alroy wasn't up to doing the combinatorial analysis for those spinning reels of
cherries and other fruits, but he knew instinctively the machine had to keep many single coin drops.
A lot. Which explained why so many people lost.
When Alroy got older, he learned some people took to recording surreptitiously when the
machines paid out, the idea being the machine could only hold so many coins--this although they
were emptied daily, if not more often. So, according to their system, if the machine had been cold
for two hours, the surreptitious observer would run up, figuring the machine was due and play
madly, and lose, lose, lose.
 Even Alroy knew the odds didn't change.
As the years went by and Alroy and his family kept up the Sunday restaurant ritual, resonant
with the sound of pulled arms on slot machines, he started to see the math behind it all. Pay out less
than you take in.
Not unlike where he worked: AGI.
§
It didn't take long, but after exploring a few lunch options outside, Alroy settled into being a
regular at the cafeteria in the building. Several advantages, less time pressure not leaving the
building and, unlike his college days, the cafeteria food was not bad.
Atlas Global, as an insurance company, evidently worked at offering its employees healthful
food, which was also tasty. Lunch hours were less prone to drag out. And the meals, as Alroy
quickly saw, were subsidized or under-priced compared to what he'd pay outside for the same thing.
One day, a hungry Alroy slid his tray down the food-service counter rails, asking for an entrée
of chicken meatballs, mashed potatoes on the side, a dollop of cranberries, picking out a salad,
vinegar and oil dressing, a roll and butter, and going for a glass of iced tea.
He paid, was holding his tray, ready to walk toward some empty space at a table.
Then wide-eyed, he saw Olivia sitting alone.
How often will this happen? So he walked over. "Mind if I join you?"
She motioned to the chair opposite her.
He sat the tray down, took a seat. He felt the Wheel of Fortune had spun his way. It was one
thing to see her in the office daily, the desk to his far left, where she stoically worked at keyboard
and screen, where she occasionally picked up the phone to talk with someone else in the building,
usually Compliance. But all in all, not the demonstrative type like Duncan.
And before him, he had her exclusive attention. He didn't know whether it was her pale skin,
her hooded eyes, or her squid-black hair. which framed a face of mystery that left him at a loss for
what she might be thinking. It might be cultural, but she gave no outward sign of what was going on
inside the brain housed in such a lovely casing.
She was wearing a plain white blouse under her rust-colored cashmere sweater. Alroy had the
impression she dressed with a bit more style--fitting to a professional actuary--than the typical
clerical employee at AGI. He, from day one, too, tried to uphold a professional image, dress-wise,
especially if he was meeting people from outside the office.
"You were born in Sri Lanka; you move here long ago?" he asked, wanting to build on what
little he knew of her, to see if she'd talk about herself.
She nodded at how her life had brought her to Galveston.
"Yes, I was born in a town smaller than here, Kandy."
Alroy couldn't help smiling at the obvious association with her curvaceous Asian allure.
"But no "c" like sweets; the town's spelled with a "K." Kandy, Sri Lanka...."
"Where you went to school?" Alroy asked.
"Yes, we had private schools set up by the British, a good rigorous education and my favorite
subject was mathematics. Always easy for me."
 "But no thoughts of actuarial work?"
"Of course not. I don't know if there was an actuary in the country. Sure, we had insurance
companies and they seemed affiliated with parent companies in the UK, but as a rule people didn't
trust them. They didn't understand why the insurance never seemed to pay out. They didn't read the
fine print and the companies weren't regulated enough and, I suppose, often shaky."
"You went to college there?"
"No, that's where things took a turn. I had an uncle who migrated years before and was living in
Vancouver. Canada. He was doing import-export of Sri Lankan handicraft. Gift items, that sort of
thing. Anyway, he was always coming back to firm up his suppliers and he noticed I was graduating
soon, I guess," she said, looking at Alroy with what seemed to be an uncharacteristic sharing of
emotion despite her stoicism, "he thought I should have a chance to leave Sri Lanka like he did."
"How so?"
"He said he'd sponsor me for a student visa, so I could study at UBC--the university there."
"Really? How'd it work?"
"He signed some papers, but I lived on campus and was independent in every sense. Still, it was
a comfort knowing he and my aunt, my cousins were across town in the Punjabi District of
Vancouver. I liked to go there on weekends for the good food." She flashed a smile.
"So," she continued, "a math degree, a couple of actuarial exams--like you--and I got on at
AGI."
"And here you are. I saw you sitting by yourself--" Alroy said, feeling a bit adventurous.
"Oh, I was okay. We all need moments to ourselves."
"I agree."
She turned her head sideways, enough so Alroy saw a distinct flatness to her Sinic face, a
sculptural plane he didn't expect, a difference from Caucasians, which might even be arousing. He
ignored the feeling.
"Yes, I don't have enough time by myself. I usually have lunch with Gary from the seventh
floor. But today he's in west Texas. Odessa. Something about a wind power operation out there."
Her eyes said she knew nothing more, and she took another bite of her penne rigate.
He toyed with his next chicken meatball, not sure what to say. The Gary Olivia mentioned had
to be the same guy who drove off with her in the white Corvette weeks ago. That was the name of
her boyfriend, the guy whose obvious money, his confidence, his work on the seventh floor, in
investments undoubtedly, was enough to avail himself of the singular combination of a brainy
actuarial mind housed in a voluptuous Asian bod. Alroy only hoped, one day, he could do as well.
But he didn't have or even want a car.
 Chapter Four: Jerry Can Conflagration

Alroy was pleased with how the LIFEisPINBALL business was shaping up, that it was going at
all. His regular "office hours" were seven to nine, Mondays through Fridays, which left time from
nine on to do other things, to make tweaks on the website coding, to read, or just putter around until
bedtime. In a few months, once he started studying for the exams, his office hours would have to be
cut back to one hour each night.
He'd get one or two calls a night, about what he expected. He figured people picked up one of
his matchbooks in a bar, or saw the newspaper ad.
All of his "clients," his callers, had been women. They all had relationship problems. Those
relationship problems with women tended to fall into one unvarying scenario: The woman couldn't
stand it anymore. The man was insufferable and she had to get out pronto.
Roy was there to hold their hand, telephonically, and guide them toward a decision.
One night, against the odds, he got a call from a man.
"Hi, Roy here. How'ya doing this evening?"
"Oh, not so good," the male voice answered.
"Sorry to hear that. Your name is?"
"Pat, yeah, most people call me Pat. Real name's Patrick, but nobody ever says that 'cept my
mom."
"Okay, Pat, what's bugging you?"
"My wife's trying to," he said, pausing, "trying to kill me."
Alroy's eyes flared. He took a long breath, down into his belly. The guy was not in front of him,
but on the phone, so he could stay calm, detached, and professional.
"Really?" he finally asked.
"Yep, suspicious things been happening last few months. I ask her about them, she says it's all
coincidence. She says it's in my head."
"Such as ..."
"Oh, last Tuesday, took the car to work, and traffic's light, so I'm moving pretty good along
Stewart out by the airport--"
"But not speeding?"
"No, sir, no speeding, but I come up to the light and go to put on the brakes and guess what?"
He didn't wait for Alroy to respond. "Car goes shooting off to the right, just missed a parked car
there, side of the road."
"No brakes, huh?"
"No, got towed to a garage and the mechanic, he finds a brake line disconnected." Pat said this
as if it was the smoking gun.
"And you think your wife did this?"
"Who else? She had motivation."
"Does your wife know a wrench from a hammer?" Alroy asked, skepticism plain in his voice.
"Doesn't matter. She could learn quick. She had motivation."
"Motivation? What sort?"
"Well, kinda complex. But I thought you could wrap it all up and tell me what my wife's up to."
"I'll try, Pat. But first what's her motivation you see?"
"Easy. Insurance money. This was a year ago, we bought this huge fixer-upper out on
Harborside. We barely qualified for the loan, but I figured with sweat equity, we'd be sitting pretty in
ten years or so, once I'm closer to retiring out. I'm now forty-two."
"You bought this huge house. What's this have to do with insurance?"
"Oh, Carrie--that's my wife--she like says, 'How I'm gonna pay the mortgage if you die?' This
before we even paint walls."
"That's reasonable, if she wants to stay in your house. Gotta have the bases covered that
contingency--I mean, if you're no longer around--"
"I think she just wants the insurance money, mail in the house keys, be set up for life," he said
dismissively.
"Or she was freaked out by the huge mortgage," Alroy said. "Tell me, anything else make you
suspicious about Carrie?"
"Sure, before the brake thing, this Saturday I've gotta take care of the lawn. I'm smoking a
cigarette; she only allows me to smoke cigarettes outside, so she knows surely when I go to mow,
it's with a cig dangling from my lips. If you get the picture?"
"Yeah, sure. You're going to get the mower--power or push?"
"Gas engine, a Honda, the best. I open the garage door and what's there? Gasoline spilled all
over the floor. The jerry can lying on its side, top off. I'm lucky I saw it there fast, didn't step in, 'cos
could have been whooooooosssssh and one big ball of fire, yours truly inside a conflagration."
"You don't think a neighborhood kid, or even a dog, might've knocked that jerry can over?"
"Nope, the door was closed."
"They could've opened and closed it."
"Not a dog."
"Okay, okay. Let's look at this motivation a bit more. How much is the insurance?"
"A ton. Five-hundred thousand dollars. I had to take a physical for that sort of money to see if I
could pass water." Pat gave a choked laugh. "A lot for that mortgage, but a tidy amount to live on
too, see?"
"You see Carrie walking away from the house better off without you?"
Pat chuckled. "Yeah, to me plain as day. And there's one incident, suspicious, haven't
mentioned."
"Shoot."
"That's funny. That's funny you say that," Pat said with a half-chuckle.
"Why?"
"What're ya going shoot with, right? See, I'm going through a chest of drawers, looking for
something I can't find, her stuff actually and there among her undergarments is--get this--a Glock. I
kid you not. The damn thing's fully loaded. I don't have guns, so what's with her? I went and asked
Carrie."
"What'd she say?" Alroy asked, his skepticism about Paranoid Pat starting to melt away.
"Oh, you know in her prissy woman's voice, she says, 'This house is so big, sometimes it makes
noises, and I can't be sure what it is, and here by myself, I get frightened.' She said the gun was for
protection, gave her peace of mind."
"From what? Ghosts?"
"No, she's always explaining. She said our big house will attract burglars and worse."
"You guess one of those bullets in the Glock has your name on it?"
"You're Answer Man. That's what you're supposed to know."
"Okay, let me tell you how I see your situation."
"Great."
"First, I think it's a good idea to get insurance. A big house is a big responsibility. You got term
life, right?'
"Yep, term. It's all I could afford."
"The insurance is okay, but all those incidents you see as threatening your life--"
"They've all happened in the last few months. We took out the insurance only six months ago,
so the timing is kinda suspicious."
"I think what's going on," Alroy said slowly, in his best expert, nearly sanctimonious voice, "is
part of your brain is always thinking you're suddenly worth big money dead, not alive. One-half
million dollars, more than you or Carrie have ever seen in your life. And you know the only person
to get the payoff is not you."
"But this stuff is all I think about. I can't help it. I look her in the eye and know she's laughing
inside. She thinks I'm disposable."
"Listen, you gotta do something. Here's what you do. Forget about the gas can, could've fallen
over when you closed the garage door, the cap not on tight or the seal broken. Who knows about that
one? And brake failure--those things happen. It's mechanical, assembled by human hands, somebody
might have showed up Monday morning with a hangover, okay? But the gun, that's a problem."
"You bet. I mean it's loaded, what if I come home and she thinks I'm the burglar."
 "Women get crazy about self-protection. I tell you what you do--"
"I'm listening."
"You take her out to dinner, the best restaurant you two enjoy, one of those seafood places on
Broadway or the Strand. Then you tell her the gun bothers you. A burglar might wrestle it away from
you and kill you and her right in your home. Happens all the time. Tell her you'll have an alarm
system professionally installed, one she can turn on when she's alone in the house. But you will get
rid of the gun."
"I don't know she'll go for it."
"She'll go for the dinner, she'll like that, be in a good mood. If she doesn't agree to part with the
gun--you can pawn it--then give me a call and we'll think of something else."
"I'll try that, but I'm not betting my life on it working out." Pat laughed and Alroy thought he
heard some relief in his voice.
§
Alroy sipped on the Lone Star longneck Rosie had just uncapped for him, seated on a bar stool,
where he had a good view of the bowl with LIFEisPINBALL.com matchbooks, he'd dropped off
several weeks ago. He could see he might be adding to the pile next time he was in.
"The way I see it," Rosie said to the Dickies uniformed guy sitting on a bar stool near Alroy.
The guy looked like an electrician or at least a tradesman and Alroy, white shirt, loose tie, looked
office. "ese fútbol de preseasón Sunday in New Orleans, the Cowboys will take it easy," Rosie
added.
"You feel the Saints going down, McHugh's injury keeping him out?" the Dickies tradesman
asked.
"Feel? I believe," Rosie shot back.
"But the bookies give the Saints three points. Face it, it's a tossup."
"No way, hombre. You know Olivas, right?"
"Who doesn't, Dallas starting tailback."
"Yeah, we talk every week--" Rosie said assertively.
"C'mon, Rosie, pepper me with bull pucky."
"No, I mean, see his older brother and I did a tour together in Iraq."
"Knew you were in the service, but?"
"Yes, Donny and I returned to the World and we stick together. Somos become vatos, Ty too."
Alroy swirled the beer around in the bottom third of his Lone Star. "And, Rosie, what does your
information pipeline say about McHugh this week?" he asked.
Rosie turned to Alroy, a smile on his face, his bona fides established, he having the scoop on
why the bookies were going to take a bath. "Directamente from the Dallas locker room, under
Cowboys Stadium, Ty tells me all week they've been practicing to defend against this backup
quarterback, the one's so-so passer, no recolecto ese llama."
"Chris Devlin," the Dickies tradesman said.
"Yes, that's the guy. Ty says el Dallas jefe knows McHugh is out, knee operación Monday. The
bookies didn't get todo el savi. No, see who suits up Sunday. Chris Devlin es el hombre."
"And he's no McHugh," the Dickies tradesman said.
"Rosie, you gonna bet on this one?" Alroy asked, finishing off the last of his beer.
"Easy money, campañero, easy money. When I bet on Cowboys, I always win. This game with
the Saints es mula para mi."
Alroy got up, said his goodbyes, thinking Sunday's game would prove Rosie had something on
the Cowboys or didn't or most likely when he came in next week to kick it around with Rosie, there
would be all sorts of ifs. The Saints might win. Their starter quarterback McHugh didn't have
surgery and might have made it into the game. Bad information Rosie would say. The second string
Saints quarterback Devlin might play, as Rosie predicted, but an important Cowboy player--maybe
even Ty Olivas himself--might be injured and the tide of the game might change. Whatever
happened, Alroy was sure Rosie would ferret it all out and expound at length about the dependencies
that kept the Cowboys from rolling over the Saints as he predicted.
§
The next morning Alroy was in Irv's office and behind Irv was a picture window offering a
commanding view of building roofs in downtown Galveston. The door to the office was open, so
Alroy assumed things were going okay between him and his boss.
"I wanted to talk with you first, Alroy, before I sit down with you and Tuan and go over a new
project I want the two of you on." Irv looked up from an open file folder before him and smiled.
Alroy sat up to show his full attention.
"This is a big undertaking, parts of it I might have Duncan and Olivia working on later. But
right now, we're in the design phase for a new product. You're, of course, familiar with term life--"
"Sure, straightforward application of the mortality table. Premiums increase with age," Alroy
said, knowing that was as basic as insurance gets. He played around with mortality tables back at
Cyprus, when he was studying for the second actuarial exam.
"Okay, and you know how the annuity contract works."
"In some respects, the reverse of insurance. The applicant pays us a lump sum upfront and then
gets a stream of monthly payments the rest of his life." He flashed a smile at what he thought was a
quick answer.
"Good. Now to your assignment. You and Tuan are going to do spadework on a new product in
Atlas Global's product lineup. We are tentatively calling this OneLife. Big O, big L, one word.
That's Marketing's idea." He pursed his lips and exhaled.
"What we do with this product is combine a level-premium insurance contract with an annuity
contract. The surplus over pure term creates the purchase price for an annuity starting at age sixty."
"Wait, am I missing something? This sounds like whole life insurance--" Alroy said, surprise in
his voice.
"No, it's not whole life--we don't pay death benefits at all ages. The cutoff for death benefits is
at age sixty. You can call it whole life lite."
Irv took a deep breath, "What I want from you and Tuan is a feasibility study. Here's how I want
you to structure it. Assume a premium payment of fifty dollars a month, see what level death benefit
you get across ages thirty-five through fifty-nine, for starters. That's our market anyway."
 "And apply the 2008 CSO mortality table?" Alroy asked.
"That's fine."
"What we haven't seen yet, because we haven't run numbers is how this product stands up in
this investment environment. If investment experience was better, like the heyday of eight-percent
returns, year after year, then this would be an easy sale." He looked up, big grin on his tanned face,
crew-cut gray hair topping it. "Yep, back then I'd half bet you could go in and show a forty-year-old
male, fifty-dollar-a-month premium gives you death benefit coverage up to age sixty--and those are
the prime earnings years where a guy needs coverage--and then you hit age sixty, death benefit goes
away and you start taking your annuity, which if my eight-percent feel for the numbers is not wrong
would give the guy fifty dollars a month going out of insurance."
"Not bad," Alroy said.
"Not bad at all. Where else can you pay fifty bucks a month for a duration and get fifty a month
back for the rest of your life? Okay, so we don't have eight percent anymore. Now, I need to sit
down with you and Tuan together and map out some specifications for OneLife," he said, adjusting
the alignment of papers in the manila folder. The one obviously the genesis of Alroy's first actuarial
project at AGI.
§
Later that afternoon, Irv sat down with Alroy and Tuan and reviewed all the variables he wanted
the two to build in their spreadsheet. He said he'd done some back-of-the-envelope calculations with
Marketing and he had the sense the product might work. The big if seemed to be investment
experience. If it got worse for AGI, then the product might have to be shelved. Low returns, as he
summed up, could make OneLife the worst combination of insurance and annuities.
§
Back in the apartment over the garage, Alroy took his first call:
"Hey, Roy, it's me, JoBecca, remember?"
"JoBecca, yeah, give me a few details--"
"You know, had to leave my husband."
"Oh, of course, it all comes back. You caught him buck-naked in your bed with a girl, almost
underaged."
"And he said they waited 'til she turned seventeen, so it was okay."
"That make what you saw any easier to take?"
"No, 'cept I tell you when he and I got together I was only seventeen myself?"
"You surprised he pulled a repeat? How old is he?"
"Twenty-six. He must have," she said, then sighed, "the wander eye for someone young."
"He probably wants to be worshipped," Alroy offered.
"Whatever." Another sigh.
"What're you doing now?"
"Me? Oh, what we talked about. Did my dear ex ever get one surprise," JoBecca said, triumph
plain in her voice.
 "How so?"
"I packed up the car and left town--"
"You left our dear island city? Why?"
"Too much reminded me of him." she said with disgust.
"Where're you? You calling long-distance?"
"Oh, not far away. Just across the Causeway."
"How you like it?"
"Well, it's away from him. I like that."
"You working?"
"No."
"But you like living there?"
"Yep, it isn't Galveston and Dickinson's kinda backward. Bunch of dirt farmers around here. I
call it Hickinson." She laughed, but still sounded relieved to be off the island.
"You're young. Maybe a fresh start is best."
"Hope so. I was just wondering. Now don't take this wrong, okay?"
"Okay, I'm open. What's up?"
"You know, I'm not too far away and I really, really need someone I can talk to about what I'm
going to do, you see?"
"I thought that's what we've been doing, these phone calls--"
"I guess what I'm saying is I need more, to see you in person's what I mean--"
"I'm busy with my job, this new assignment I've to wrack my brain about. I don't have much
free time--"
"What about weekends, when you're not working? You got some time there?"
"Oh, I'm busy with errands, buying food, cleaning up my place, hitting the books for my exam
coming up," Alroy said, an uptick on the truthometer for the latter.
"What about Sunday, your day of rest, what about Sunday afternoon? Don't worry, I'll pay
you--" she said, a plea in her voice.
Alroy took a moment to evaluate what he was risking if he agreed to see JoBecca in person,
across the Causeway in Dickinson, Texas. The idea of this telephone counselor business was a way
to spend some of his downtime doing something other than mindlessly surfing the Internet. Talking
with people, real voices on the phone, seemed a little more authentic than any online chat. He
thought it was a brilliant way to get to know people. But meeting them in person? What was the
risk?
His actuarial mind had to wrap around that one. He was a professional telephone counselor and
he took money with the understanding they'd share personal information, he'd advise and he would
not do anything to take advantage of them or act out of his self-interest. His clients' interest came
first.
But JoBecca wanted a personal consultation. She wanted him in the flesh.
 "Oh, you don't have to pay. I'll call it business development."
"So ... you will come see me?"
"Sure, why not?"
§
The Houston-bound Greyhound glided along on the Causeway, leaving Galveston at its
maximum permitted speed of forty-five miles an hour in what Alroy guessed was fourth of six gears.
He was making the twenty-minute trip from the Galveston bus station to a highway stop on the
mainland the driver said was just past the bridge in the town of Dickinson.
Apparently, a commercial bus went off a causeway somewhere in Texas years ago--Alroy had
heard it was the bridge to Padre Island out of Harlingen--and ever since commercial buses were
limited to forty-five miles an hour crossing water. Alroy knew the bus could make the trip in fifteen,
not twenty minutes, but for the speed limit.
The bus reached the end of the Causeway. Alroy was all eyes, glancing right--the flat gray
waters of Galveston Bay--then left, West Bay, and ahead the terra firma of his afternoon in waiting
appeared.
The bus picked up speed, but soon the driver downshifted, a gathering of fish bait shop, burger
drive-thru, flag-festooned car lot, and a short-stop food store alongside Highway 45 staggered by at
the thirty-five speed limit. A triangular red-and-white Conoco gas sign loomed, and the driver
downshifted and brought the bus to a stop, punctuated by the hiss of air shocks. The bus door
opened. "Dickinson," he said, looking right at Alroy, who stood beside him, then bounded down the
steps.
The door snapped close, and the bus left. Alroy turned to face the gas station, past a lanky guy
nearby wearing a gray Stetson gassing up his pickup, to a soda water vending machine by the open
door. He saw her.
She said nothing at first, only smiled like a winner.
She was a few inches shorter than he, say five-four or so, and wore well-fitted jeans and a
Stevie Ray Vaughan T-shirt, head bowed in his signature hat. Her long hair was auburn, her hazel
eyes doe-like.
Alroy thought, What have I got myself into? and smiled, saying, "JoBecca?"
 Chapter Five: Cargo Bike Craving

In a conference room down the hall from their department, Alroy and Tuan wrestled with the
variables they'd been given by Irv for the proposed OneLife insurance.
"I see no disability rider on this," Tuan said, swivelling neatly in one of the conference table
chairs, the comfy ones perfect for cogitation about how to unwrap contingencies.
"I thought it was left out on purpose," Alroy replied. "You think it should be in?"
"Or this has to be cheap with no extras?"
"Well, it is a value product."
"Whole life always has that rider."
Tuan leaned forward in his chair, his face topped by a head of short, thick, spiky hair, fingers
templed in front of his face. "With, without disability, let's think this through before we ask Irv."
Alroy dragged his pencil across the tablet in front of him, making a geometric doodle of sharp
lines. "All I can think is, a rider to pay premiums if the policyholder is disabled, he can't work, the
premiums go up. Would you say an eight percent jump for that feature?"
Tuan sighed. "Yes, that's why it's out. This product is so cheap, it squeaks. Okay, question for
Irv: Why no disability?"
"Another thing I was thinking about," Alroy added, "was how we put an upper limit on
applicant age. We can't sell this to someone fifty-eight. They pay premiums for one year and get an
annuity for life? That's whack."
"No," Tuan said, "maybe you didn't hear when I asked Irv that. The applicant can be any age up
to sixty. But if he pays for only a year, the annuity's based on total insurance premiums paid, so it's
nothing, pennies a month."
"Yeah, and it's not even worth our company's time to cut those annuity checks, we'd lose money
on every one in clerical time alone." Alroy laughed.
"Of course, we have electronic deposit. Or we could mail a paper check each year and be okay
on the contract."
"I'm glad I got that cleared up," Alroy said, hitting his doodle with some vigorous pencil
strokes. "The idea of paying premiums for term and then the clock strikes age sixty and you
magically get something even like the premium amount coming back to you. It seemed too good to
be true."
"In Marketing's dreams."
 "Yeah, if the annuity's gonna pay back anything like your premiums, it's if you sign up at age
twenty-four or under."
"You got it."
"Let me ask you something a bit off topic," Alroy ventured, seeing in Tuan's face suggestion of
a dead-end. "Do you think this product is going to go?"
"Not sure, have to do the numbers."
"I guess the other question is, Do you think this project is sort of low-priority, kinda a what-if
study? If this was urgent, a must-have, wouldn't Irv had put Duncan on it?"
"Well, not make-work. My guess is Marketing must have asked Irv for the study."
"Low-priority, but not no-priority." Alroy laughed.
"And we have questions for Irv." Tuan said.
§
Alroy left work something after five and began the fifteen-block trudge back to his place.
Trudging because he faced the unavoidable task of stopping at HEB and stocking up on groceries.
He'd run out of several things and later, not sooner, was fine for any walk from HEB with a bulky
paper sack full of food. Such was the ratcheting cost of his gambit to do without a car and walk
everywhere.
He hadn't walked two blocks when he saw something that shackled his ankles, left and right, in
situ on the sidewalk. A balloon-tire bicycle, which looked normal from the handlebars and back,
true. But locked there to a bike rack the other side of the parking lot, this bicycle had a front end
he'd seen only a few times in California. An out-there, extended front end. The front wheel mounted
the far side of a frame structure with a wooden box beyond the handlebars for carrying stuff. A cargo
bike was what it was called. The wooden sides of the box advertised TILLY'S CANTINA ON THE
STRAND.
A vision of incomparable loveliness, his gaze lingered, He already was imagining his hands
gripping the handlebars, navigating the island with that rig. Then he looked away, ready to cross
22nd Street, waited on the walk sign. He had to have one.
Across the street he picked up his steps, hurrying past N Avenue's eclectic mix of historical
Victorians and shotgun houses. Past a pair of prefab-looking houses elevated on two-foot concrete
blocks: That was their answer to the fact no casualty actuary would write flood insurance for them,
probably cheaper too. And past the Bondo'd Cavalier guy standing on the sidewalk, beer can in
hand, water hose in the other, watering the patch of grass in front of his skinny hovel. Alroy stared at
the remaining blocks to his place, knew he probably couldn't buy a used cargo bike around
Galveston, but he'd check craigslist when he got home, to be sure. No, he'd probably pay full retail
and order one online, some assembly needed. But to have something like that?
Yes, going to HEB would be a joy. He'd get two, three sacks of groceries at a time and then put
it all in the wooden box upfront and off he'd pedal. He could not believe his luck at seeing that bike,
bought more for its novelty and ability to display advertising than anything else. He was sure the
cantina did not use the bike for takeout!
A sprint up stairs to the carriage house abode and he went online, googling "cargo bike" and
found something that wouldn't take more than a month's pay, and what he knew would put off the
defeat of buying a car.
 §
Alroy was taking a shower one morning. He was soaping up with gusto, for it was the one time
during a Texas summer day he could shower and afterwards feel clean and cool. It was the part of
the day, just after sunrise, before ol' Sol got cooking.
While he made a special effort to rinse off completely, if only as an excuse to linger in the
temperature-perfect shower, his pocket radio was broadcasting news and weather on the nearby sink,
where he would soon shave.
"KGUL weather in just thirty seconds, but first a word from our sponsors over at West Lagoon
Chevrolet."
For Alroy, who had shut down the shower head, ready to grab a towel, what the weather in
Galveston would be in the summer was mostly a matter of ninety-what? Only the second digit
seemed to change. Always, the nineties.
"Okay, back again, Galveston weather for Tuesday, the second of August. Partly cloudy all day,
with our temperature climbing into the lower nineties. Weather Bureau Hobby International calls
for ninety-three in the greater Galveston area, so that's it, folks, just remember the sunscreen. Now
for an old favorite by Texas's native son, Kinky Friedman."
Alroy towelled off nonstop, not listening to the radio. It was always background noise, to help
him have a sense of company though living alone. He stood before the sink mirror, a Barbasol can in
hand, the towel wrapped and cinched around his middle. Why the latter? He thought it was about the
act of shaving with a razor and protection against accidental cuts. It was too Freudian.
He dabbed the ball of white foam on his budding morning whiskers and--
"Sorry to interrupt Kinky, but KGUL has exclusive coverage of live-breaking news in downtown
Galveston. We switch now to our reporter on the scene, Tracy Ballard. Take it away, Tracy--"
"Yes, Frank, I'm standing here in front of the headquarters building of Atlas Global Insurance
Company in downtown Galveston, where Texas Rangers, a convoy of several SUVs, have arrived on
the scene. I spoke with the lead officer in this deployment a few minutes ago.
"We don't have many details at this time, but briefly what is taking place is several Texas
Rangers entered Atlas Global Insurance at about three this morning and have secured the entire
seventh floor of the building. I understand the top-floor people handle all of AGI's investment
portfolio, which as we know, runs into the billions. Apparently, and this is from sketchy information
I got from the lead officer on the scene here, the State Insurance Commission has found investment
irregularities, inappropriate investments in the reports they have received and then audited in the
field.
"So in the interest of protecting insurance policyholders, the commission is empowered to step
in--as they will be doing later this morning and seize records for auditing and the possible filing of
charges, if that's what happens."
"Frank back here in the station, but why are the Rangers there?"
"A precautionary measure. I'm sure the Commission was nervous about anybody on their staff--
intentionally or unintentionally--getting word back to Atlas Global. They simply didn't want
shredding or disk erasure of records going on before they had a chance to do the auditing--"
"Wow. Well, keep us posted on what develops, Tracy. Yes, you heard it first on KGUL, Texas
Rangers in downtown Galveston. Now back to the music and stay tuned for new developments as
they happen."
 Alroy stood before the mirror, stunned, his face lathered up and unsure if his nerves were ready
for the delicate task of dragging a surgically sharp edge of metal across his face. He took a deep
breath and tried to decide what the news meant. What would he find when he left for work in thirty
minutes? The floor above him, the seventh floor, was sure to be pandemonium. The State auditors
there in charge. The Texas Rangers giving every Atlas employee on the floor a security check, if
they didn't cordon off the floor outright and send the investment crew somewhere else.
He looked again in the mirror and started those first few razor passes through his foamy face.
He had no idea how serious things would be on the seventh floor. Was it a conspiracy by the
investment team? Or was it only one rogue employee? No matter, the news media would love the
story. A big corporation taking away from the little guy, the policyholder who dutifully paid monthly
premiums. Radio Station KGUL, the Galveston Crier, and all the others, in Houston and elsewhere
in Texas would milk the story for all the attention it would naturally get.
He finished shaving, rinsed off his face in the sink. He would go to work and act as if he hadn't
heard the news. Didn't know what those Texas Ranger SUVs parked curbside were all about. He
would wait and see what Irv said. Which was the way to get along professionally. For sure, no
reckless remarks from Alroy.
§
When Alroy arrived at AGI, he couldn't miss the parked Texas Ranger SUVs. One Texas Ranger
sat in one of the black-and-whites, talking on his cell phone. It all confirmed what he had heard on
his portable radio while taking a shower that morning. He was even more determined to act as if he
had slept through the broadcast, though he was sure the airwaves were buzzing with news about AGI
from the island up to Houston and beyond.
Inside the lobby, he held up his employee pass to the security guard. She knew him by sight and
seemed busier than usual with several civilian types in suits needing to get visitor passes.
Alroy got inside an elevator car, the door held open by its sole occupant, a fellow with a visitor-
pass hanging like a dog tag around his neck. Two words were spoken: "Floor?" by the visitor. "Six"
by Alroy. Then the guy punched 6 and 7.
On the sixth floor, inside the Actuarial Department, Alroy saw his officemates in desk chairs, a
semi-circle about Irv, who sat on the corner edge of one desk. Obviously, an impromptu huddle.
"We're waiting for Van," Irv said, a weak smile for Alroy, "and then I have a few words to say
about what's going on upstairs in Investments."
The two or three minutes before an embarrassed Van arrived to see everyone awaiting him
seemed like an eternity to Alroy. Everyone already there seemed to appreciate the gravity of the
situation. The reputation of AGI was in jeopardy; a huge media firestorm seemed ready to go out of
control. Nobody wanted to voice the obvious thought, I wonder what's going on upstairs ... Irv had
to lay out a plan.
Once Van was seated in the semicircle too, Irv began.
Irv fiddled with a mechanical pencil he had in his hand, withdrawing the lead by punching on
the top button and pushing the other end against his thumbnail, and then slipped it in his shirt
pocket. "I guess I want to start by saying in my nineteen years here at AGI, I've never seen anything
like what's going on above us on the seventh floor. To say the reputation of AGI is at risk is not
overstating anything.
"As you know, our company has been in business, profitably so, since the nineteenth century,
and was chartered in the State of Texas right after the Civil War. Of course, in the beginning our
insurance business was primarily connected with shipping and maritime activity--that's the global in
our name. But starting in the nineteen twenties, AGI began issuing life insurance contracts--most of
our business today."
Irv paused and glanced at each of his seated associates, as if trying to verify each would honor
the obligation he was going to place on them.
"That said, I want to disclose right now, as I speak, an investigation of criminal wrongdoing is
under way by the State of Texas--I can't start to list the agencies at work now.
"The Insurance Commission, the State Attorney's office, those Texas Rangers you see outside
on the street. I wanted to meet with you this morning and tell you one thing. With an ongoing
investigation, it is important each of you say nothing about what you might hear to anybody outside
this building, or for that matter among yourselves and other employees. It is so easy to speculate and
so damaging to the reputation of our company when it's picked up and broadcast everywhere. Sure,
this development is stressful and you want to talk, but we, as fellow professionals, know we can't
have cheap sensationalism.
"I'm going to ask each of you to agree to a speech ban, okay?"
Going from his left to his right, Irv got an emphatic nod from each. Alroy could see a pall come
over the normally upbeat work group.
"Thanks," Irv said. "If you haven't heard radio or TV in the last few hours, I'll tell you exactly
what is known.
"This is a matter of public record--and you are by your agreement not to add one word to it--or
even repeat it, okay? At about two-thirty this morning, the State Attorney General's office issued a
search-and-seizure warrant against the Investments Department of AGI. The warrant authorizes an
investigation of any evidence supporting an allegation AGI invested in shelf corporations
supposedly installing and operating wind turbines in the counties of Pecos, Upton, and Crane, all out
in west Texas. That's it."
"What's a shelf corporation?" Alroy asked.
"Good question," Irv said jovially. "A shelf corporation is a DBA--doing business as--registered
with the State of Texas, but it's a company only on paper. It has no assets and the business address
can be the applicant's home address, the address of another business he might have, or even a post
office box. What you have with a shelf corporation is a worthless shell. The allegation as I
mentioned before is our company invested in worthless companies. I can't say anymore and neither
can you." He smiled.
§
The next few days Alroy felt he did as well as anyone humanly could compartmentalizing any
knowledge, any observation, and especially any talk about what was going on upstairs on the
seventh floor where a small army of accounting auditors and data forensic technicians had taken
over. Yes, anything he knew (or worse) speculated about the investigation under way might as well
have been encased in concrete and pushed overboard into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, say, two
hundred miles offshore.
Someone had to be fired; someone had to be sacrificed, if only to satisfy the media, and by
extension, the public's insatiable hunger to make sure nobody got away with what everybody
assumed was shady dealings.
 Three days after Irv's huddle Alroy's resolve to be tight-lipped got tested. He'd gone down to the
cafeteria to grab lunch, and he had his tray ready to sit down, when he saw Olivia smiling his way,
alone, a smile he took as inviting, so he went straight for her table.
"I haven't seen you at your desk all morning," he said, setting down his tray with the shrimp
salad.
"I was on the fourth floor. The State Attorney investigators have several offices there and are
interviewing apparently anybody who worked in Investments."
"Your connection is?" Alroy asked, trying to seem interested, but also naive.
"They know I've been dating Gary--actually we're engaged, but I didn't tell them that. But why
they insist on calling him by his legal name Gareth seems pompous and they keep boring in on what
I knew--" Her face seemed suddenly weary.
"But dating is different from working with Gary. Why would he discuss his work with you?"
"That's what I tell them. But they keep coming back, asking me exactly when did you see him?
They wanted to know what I had in my calendar on my phone around the times--three times--he
went to west Texas to check on those wind turbines--"
"They asked to see your phone?"
"It's crazy, they keep waving this accessory after the fact thing, as if I don't tell them everything
I can think of, then I could be charged with something criminal. It's beyond crazy. I mean, when
they don't let up on the questions, you start to wonder if what you're saying might be a bit confused.
I had to watch myself."
"You kept it simple," he said taking a shrimp in his hand and pulling off the tail.
"Yeah, I just said Gary cancelled dinner Thursday and said he had to go off to Odessa. "Due
diligence," he said, "wind power company, that was it."
"What did the investigator say then?"
"He asked if I talked with Gary while he was in Fort Stockton. I said I wasn't sure."
"Let me guess, the investigator then said, We can check that," Alroy said, smiling broadly.
"He made a note right there, took down my phone number."
"Well, you survived and now you've got lunch. Are you done with them?"
"No, they left it open about talking again. I dread it. I'm getting behind on work."
"Wow, how can you talk with Gary these days? I mean, if an investigator will then grab you and
ask you to rat on your fiancé."
"All I can say is I'll be glad when it's done."
"Gary must seem like one tar baby. Can't touch him without drawing suspicion to yourself."
That got a smile from Olivia and he felt he'd kept his professional distance, not speculating about
what was going on in Investments. He was only offering Olivia a simpatico ear, given the ordeal she
had to put up with.
But later that week, the investigators stopped questioning her. Olivia was at her desk the usual
hours, and Alroy was pleased to see she might have finally escaped being caught up in a dragnet.
And in Alroy's work group, nobody, but nobody, said a word about what was going on upstairs.
Partly it was the presence of Irv a few yards away, but it was also the professionalism Alroy saw
once again was his best suit of armor for coping with the tricky demands of work.
And not surprisingly, when Alroy left the office after five, he would see Olivia leaving alone.
No Gary. Apparently, he was to be avoided--perhaps an agreement between the two of them--no
more rides in the white Corvette.
§
If Alroy's office life had taken on a decided unsettledness, his life once he got back to his place
was also shaping up to be wildly unpredictable. The people who would pay to talk to someone on
the phone were all troubled. Paranoid Pat, Depressed Kim, and Betrayed JoBecca. Every night
around seven--if his website had taken reservations--the phone would ring, Alroy would answer:
"Hi, I'm Roy and I listen. With whom am I talking tonight?"
"No names needed."
Alroy was taken aback. "You're not Gaylee? That's your card info name."
"That's a burner card, made-up name, okay?"
"Yes, and--"
"Well, you help people, don't you." X on the other end of the line said this with a bit of a snarl.
Alroy was on guard.
"I try, What's bothering you these days?"
"Oh, that's easy. I'm lonely."
"You live by yourself, nobody to talk to?"
"No, got a little girl, but you know--"
"Uh, huh."
"Only goes so far. A lot she don't understand. I don't want her to understand that. Too young."
"I see."
"See, I'm lonely, especially now it's dark."
Alroy turned, looked Gulf-ward through the window at the lowering sky. "You could talk to
your daughter."
"No, put her to bed. She's in bed eight every night. My rules."
"Okay, so you're alone, your daughter's asleep and you want to talk. How might I use this time
to ease your loneliness?"
"That's simple," X said in a cooing tone.
"How's that?" Alroy replied, trusting as a cat napping on the couch, one eye peeping.
"You could see me now, you'd know."
"How's that?"
"Nothing on."
"What?"
 "You slow? I said nothing on. No clothes. I'm just holding this phone, talking to you and laid
out on my bed. Got the picture?"
"Sorta."
"What do you mean, sorta? You are slow. I tell you I don't have a stitch on and you don't get the
picture."
"Sorry, I meant I haven't seen you, seen your face. What's your hair color, for example?" Alroy
thought it a clever comeback, throwing some literalism, some I-can't-connect-the-dots back at her.
"Hair's black. Black as tar. Except down there--"
"Except what?" he asked, turning a shade of unbelieving about X.
"Yeah, except down there. I did that special, color of a Nehi strawberry soda water. Guys seem
to like that," she said, her words had the tone of a smirk.
"Seems like that would solve some of your loneliness problems."
"What? What you saying?"
"Your having a guy-friendly presentation--" Alroy's face reddened at his stiffled guffaw.
"Listen, Mr. Roy, I'm calling you and you must know what I want: Read between the lines, dim
bulb."
"I do?" Alroy replied innocently. "Seems a mite out of my domain knowledge." Again he held
back on the laugh begging to be released.
"Read between the lines and connect the dots, hon. I want you to talk dirty to me--" she said,
exasperation creeping into her voice.
"Talk dirty? That's not advice on my part."
"C'mon, hon," X said, back to cooing. "You've got a nice sensitive voice. Start talking your
special words to me ... c'mon."
"But what you want me to do could mean I'd lose my creative listener license from the Federal
Communications Commission," Alroy said, all but sure it would slip past her.
"You're a normal man, ain't you? You gotta know what a woman likes and I'm ready," X said
with the finality of an overturned dump truck.
"I could hang up," Alroy suggested.
"But you won't--" X teased back.
"Why?"
"'Cos it's like my black hair all over the white skin of my D cups, see? I'm your darkest mystery.
Something you'll never go through if you hang up."
"Darkest mystery, huh?"
"Yeah, 'cos you're gonna hear me talk dirty back to you; you're gonna hear me groan; you're
gonna hear me breathing like a race horse."
Alroy's pulse jumped, his carotid arteries the sides of his neck pumping like bellows. But who
was this woman? No name, how old? It could even be one of those entrapment deals bored police do
to shut down sketchy operations like non-credentialed telephone counselors. He hadn't thought
through the risk. Not really. "Telephone sex?" Alroy finally answered.
"Whatever you call it, hon. When you taste my dark mystery, why it's gonna be like you're a
new man, like you have incredible power to please any woman."
Yeah, he thought, even if it's a nameless stranger; she might be a bored detective down at
Galveston P.D. headquarters on Twenty-first Street. "You're paying for this. Got your card info right
here," he said, as if she needed to know that. What she didn't know was his saying next, "This one's
on me."
"What do you mean?"
"Means I'm not charging you one cent. Nada. And by the way, this conversation is over."
He punched the red button and turned off his phone.
In the days that followed, Alroy was a bit rattled and a bit energized by his conversation with X.
No, he didn't want to become a gigolo of the call-in variety, but yes, he was astounded to learn his
voice alone could have such apparently seductive qualities a woman--admittedly loose in the
clockworks--would beg him for what might be a preview of what she would freely offer in person,
not that he was desperate. He had other priorities.
He thought back to what X did. Did she call him on the phone, Mr. Roy-Who-Listens, with the
express idea of requesting phone sex before he said a word? Or was she merely lonely to talk with a
male voice, a Mr. Whatever, for whom he filled the bill and warmed up to his voice, so much so, she
pushed the nuclear button of asking him to talk dirty to her?
He was eighty percent sure it was the latter.
All of which meant women--and surely X, a random woman, okay, qualified as representative--
thought he had a sexy voice. His celibate days on the island might be numbered. One of these days
he might finally get laid. All he had to do was to keep looking around, ready to pounce when
opportunity knocked and have reasonable expectations and prudent selection. Aim neither too high:
Voluptuous Olivia, Chinese by way of Sri Lanka, was unattainable; or too low: X ready to roll the
sooner the better, which was out. He only had to look for a moderate, reasonable choice.
Alroy was off to work the next day, a spring in his step, the revelation he had a sexy voice fresh
in mind. The day was sure to be another one of high-tension off-stage--the seventh-floor
investigation, hard-drive forensics, and closed-door interviews in other parts of the building. Alroy
was convinced he had to play deaf, dumb, and blind and hope any fallout hitting AGI would miss
him.
That morning, he and Tuan started to build spreadsheets to show how the term life insurance
premiums for the proposed OneLife product would play off the annuity payout after attained age
sixty. The numbers weren't showing they had a winner and most of this Alroy attributed to the lousy
discount function Irv said was appropriate.
At eleven-thirty, he headed off for the cafeteria on the second floor, more than willing to break
from staring at his bright computer screen. His eyes needed rest, the stimulation of Real Life, and he
was hungry.
He picked out and paid for a plate of fettucini Alfredo, a green salad to balance out the carbs,
and an ice tea to chase it and was holding his tray, scoping out a place to park and eat. Then he saw
Duncan nearby, already eating. He asked to join him.
Duncan, Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, was where Alroy hoped to be someday, at least the
FSA designation part, if he managed to keep passing exams. What he didn't envy about Duncan,
however, was how the guy's normal demeanor was intense. If the guy wasn't talking someone's ear
off, he was invariably reading something. It was as if his brain, awake, had to continuously engage
or it would fly apart.
"What you reading?" Alroy asked, also looking at the mound of cod Duncan had on his plate.
"National Enquirer, got it this morning, getting coffee, see O. J. Simpson has sixty days to live.
I love it. How do they know that? Great. This has to be some of the cleverest writing done in
America. Listen."
Alroy wanted to know instead how Duncan scored such a huge plate of cod, but said, "Okay."
"See on the cover this headline," Duncan said, folding the paper so Alroy could see the
obviously Photoshopped picture of a haggard, gray-haired O. J. in an orange jumpsuit, unseen hands
behind him, handcuffed, as if it was a current picture, if not a trial shot updated with computer
imaging software. "Okay, open to the page with the story, they make you flip through the bloody
mess for that page, and then you read this: 'O. J. won't live sixty more days.' And then there's the
rehash of all the crimes Orenthal has been recognized for, including the theft in Las Vegas of his
sports memorabilia, which went on the auction block after his catastrophic fall from public acclaim,
all this just sucking the reader in for what they already know--clever, clever writing, I tell you--"
Alroy stared at the mound of cod, Duncan's motor-mouthing was keeping him from enjoying.
"And then this, the payoff, the sentence starts out with Eli Gilbert, a fellow inmate of O. J.
Simpson, died Saturday October twenty-ninth of complications from pneumonia. He was sixty-
seven years old. Eli was in the same prison block as Simpson, who has been looking especially weak
of late. Note, Alroy, the appropriate cover photo on this issue of this esteemed tabloid, clever, I tell
you. Insiders, unnamed, of course, have speculated Mr. Simpson might have contracted the same
virus that befell Eli only days ago.
"Okay, here's the show stopper. O. J. Simpson was born on July ninth, nineteen forty-seven, in
San Francisco, California. He is seventy-one years, three months, three weeks, and four days old at
the writing of this article. Okay, got that, Alroy, a killer virus is on the loose in Lovelock Corrections
Center in Nevada, one that might kill off The Juice, and get this, he's old, old at least by prison
standards. Here's what they write:"
The National Enquirer staff contacted the Federal Department of Correctional Institutions in
Washington, D. C. to get the most recent statistics for the average age of deceased inmates in
Lovelock Corrections in Lovelock, Nevada, where Mr. Simpson is confined. They said the average
age at death is seventy-one and five months.
"Now, Alroy, did they ask the median age, did they separate out death by violence, did they
consider deaths after release? Who knows, this is the National Enquirer after all, America's source
of the news that shakes you up at the checkout counter of your neighborhood 7-Eleven. That's it. Get
this, All this means Orenthal James Simpson cannot be expected to see his seventy-second birthday
and the statistical odds are he will be deceased in fewer than sixty days. Hallelujah and he joins
Nicole Simpson in the Great Beyond and what, apologizes?"
Alroy laughed, mostly because Duncan, once again, showed an incredulous talent for
puncturing the balloon of presumptuous authority. He personally would never read the National
Enquirer, but he suspected Duncan read it mostly to confirm P. T. Barnum's observations about
gullibility in the general population.
"Well, enough of this rag, back to fish, nutrients for my afternoon brain workout." He plunged
his fork into the stack of baked cod fillets, liberally coated with Tartar sauce.
 "How did you get so much fish?" Alroy asked.
"Oh, Alroy, such elementary questions you come up with. See, more fish, more money. I asked
for double portions. They charged me a dollar extra. Does it matter? I need nutrients from the sea,
omega-threes, fat-free protein to power me through the afternoon. If I were to indulge in your high-
carb fare," he said, pointing the tines of his fork at Alroy's fettuccine, "it would be droops-land for
me this afternoon. I need the high-performance option for my lunch."
Alroy wasn't about to apologize for what, at the moment, simply tasted better than a plateful of
fish. One man's plate is another's man's ... all that.
"Alroy, tell me what's vexing you these days in your work? You and Tuan, I see are busy with
some new product, as I gather from what Irv said a few days ago."
"It's called OneLife, a policy that wraps up a level term insurance to age sixty converting to a
level annuity payout for life after that. I suppose it was something Marketing came up with. They
thought the sales pitch to it was a return of premiums--with the annuity feature--back to the
policyholder once his need for life insurance was over."
Duncan nodded his head, sidling a forkful of fish in his mouth, his head bobbing to and fro ever
so slightly.
"The numbers Tuan and I have been coming up, all tied to some dismal investment returns of
the past ten years, are not giving much of a product Sales can run with, and we haven't even asked
for feedback." Alroy looked up from his food, his face confessing he might've been given a white
elephant of a project.
"I hear you, I hear you. AGI has been playing so conservative with interest assumptions ever
since I don't know when. I find it crazy to think I've been here so long. We at one time used six
percent, can you believe that? And, of course, what's up with Seventh is not going to make them less
conservative. But you know that is all so Old School--"
"What do you mean Old School?" Alroy was suddenly hooked on Duncan's opinion. He might
learn something from this FSA.
"Old School. Conservative. One constant discount function for all eternity. How silly can you
be? We're not in the age of hand calcs anymore. We have computers, spreadsheets, the whole nine of
tech toys. Are we going to have a depression in this country tomorrow? Wait a second, our
investment portfolio is spread all over the globe, I hope, but you never know with those guys on
Seventh--so the question is, Are we going to have a depression of global moment? You answer yes,
then one-year duration interest rate is in the toilet, but that doesn't apply for the twenty-plus years
your male applicant age forty who will take out a OneLife policy. See, looking at our sorry
investment experience today is no reason to push down the discount function until it's squealing. I
mean that's as whack as this article," he said, thumping the cover of the National Enquirer, "that
says O. J. cashes in sixty days out."
"Whoa, that way of seeing things has possibilities," Alroy said, taken back by Duncan's
intensity. "What do you think we should be looking at?" he asked, naiveté raw in his voice.
"You look at whatever you can defend actuarially, something I or Irv can sign off on. Think
about one simple example, What are the odds of hyperinflation in the sixty-year duration for your
forty-year-old applicant? Obviously, more than zero, but not a Ron Paul one-hundred percent," he
said with a wink. "If we give each of several economic futures a probability, we can build a discount
function that's defensible statistically. And that's not this near-sighted approach we're stuck with
now. We have a beautiful flexibility with computers. The problem is the deadwood around here still
have their feet in the We-Don't-Do-That era when mainframes did nothing more than mail out
premium notices. Actuaries were still doing it with tables and by hand--" He sighed, then forked in
another mouthful of fish.
They talked like that for the rest of their lunch hour. Duncan's enthusiasm, suggesting Alroy
could build a discount function that weighed the probability of various economic scenarios ten,
twenty, thirty, forty years out was catching. All of a sudden, in those minutes, Alroy realized how
some otherwise prosaic word problems he'd seen in Jordan's Life Contingencies might just save his
bacon on the assignment he and Tuan had. If nothing else, it would be an interesting learning
experience.
Part of Alroy wanted Duncan of FSA pedigree to say the project was doomed, at a dead end, but
surprisingly, Alroy noted, Duncan didn't go for the easy judgment, the excuse possibly Alroy was
looking for to slack off. Instead, Duncan saw an interesting problem and a pushback against the
conservative mindset in the company.
At the fifty-five minute mark on their lunch hour, the two got up and took their trays, plates, and
silverware to the plastic bins to be carted away and washed. "When we get ready to look at a
different discount function, Tuan and I will have to meet with you to get it right--" Alroy said.
"Oh, Irv should be in on it too, if we get that deep into modelling," Duncan replied, cheerily
tossing his silverware into one bin, trash into another, and otherwise being deliberate in his
discarding of lunch leavings.
 Chapter Six: Whirlpooling

That afternoon, leaving work, Alroy was in the mood for more of an amble to ponder things
than a brisk walk home. Because going straight to his place, steeling himself for the telephone
advice calls commencing at seven, would only distract from a new surge of optimism. Lunch with
Duncan in the cafeteria gave his project with Tuan, surprisingly, new life. With a bit of a smirk,
Duncan laid out the inherent power of an actuary: Model economic forces decades in the future with
a rigorous assertion of interest rate behavior where happenstance and randomness got their due.
Possessed by an inchoate, numerically rich power brewing inside him, he walked toward one
place in Galveston that might release his spirit so his fledgling hope might soar. The Gulf of Mexico
waters lapping the seaweed-strewn, gray grit beaches along Seawall Boulevard and fifteen piers that
staked the southern flank of the island.
Pier Four, close as a seagull glide from AGI, was a favorite for an ever-present small band of
surfers. Only by the piers did the waves break right for surfing. Everywhere else--the miles of
beach--worthless shore break. As Alroy learned from his California days, pier pilings create unseen
sand bars. Those barnacle-encrusted pilings would snag swells, swells that would jack up and begin
to topple, the wave peeling off to find depth beyond the sand bar.
That hour of the day, the sun about to set, the onshore wind invariably died away. A stillness in
the air the surfers called the evening glass-off, giving rise to the smoothest of wave faces.
The surfers were getting into position alongside the pier, trying to guess which swell lines
would jack up and spill forward. The biggest of a set, the one that would always feather whitecaps
first, was what they hoped to snag.
A series of one, two-foot spillers came through and then as Alroy settled down on the seawall,
letting his feet dangle, he saw what the surfers saw, the white of a proud swell peaking early,
outside. This was what they waited for.
Two paddled for it, but one was closer to the cascading peak, and the other pulled out. When the
remaining surfer glided across the glassy face, dropping down into the trough, Alroy's memory
turned to his first encounter with surfing culture, when he went off to California and college at
Cyprus Polytechnic.
California with its palm trees and ocean beaches was radically new. But he never bothered to try
surfing. College sixty miles inland, in Upland, didn't make beach trips easy, even on weekends.
What he knew about surfing came mostly from the few classmates who'd surfed in high school,
but gave it up for hitting the books at Cyprus. But once a surfer, always a surfer, and the coolness of
surfing in popular culture was such that being--or having been--a surfer was not something to hide.
He squinted. The wave played out, the surfer reflexively shook the water from his face and
paddled back to join the other three at the takeoff point. Alroy's memory drifted to early days at
college.
A lesson in humility. His first unspeakably intimate encounter with water.
Cyprus Polytechnic Institute aspired to be in the same league as the esteemed California
Institute of Technology to the west in Pasadena, if on a smaller scale, lacking any graduate
programs. Alroy knew the school must be a pressure cooker to survive; what he had no way of
knowing was how students blew off steam. He was to learn.
Cyprus Poly had a ritual not unlike fraternity hazing at other campuses. Whirlpooling.
Alroy heard about it, but never personally saw it.
One evening, in his dorm room, leafing through Professor Halmos' math textbook under his
fluorescent desk lamp, he heard boisterous voices outside. They weren't drunk, but they might as
well have been. They sounded pumped up.
The door opened. They made straight for Alroy and four of them grabbed him, arms, legs, his
middle, and carried him across the room toward the bathroom.
"Just to be sure," a fifth one yelled and he flushed the toilet as Alroy's alert ears heard. Next,
Alroy went vertical, his legs up, his head down, dangling precariously above the hard floor.
"You scheisskopfs, let me down!"
They all laughed, kept shuffling toward the bathroom, Alroy breathing hard, blood pulsing to
his head, his face flush with panic.
Just then roommate Nick walked in.
"Nick, tell them to stop!"
"Outta my hands--" He laughed. Alroy wanted down and squirmed. His feet, upside down,
couldn't kick and his elbows were clamped tight. Only his mouth was free.
"You soft cocks," he yelled, "why don't you pick on someone your size?"
More laughter. Alroy's upside-down-world hovered above the white ceramic toilet bowl with its
still water a foot away.
Then coup de gras, he was eased down, head first, into the bowl, his short hair, his forehead
wetted in the toilet. Then the clink of the flush lever. Swisssssh.
"You've been baptized," Scott, the burly dorm president, said, once they righted Alroy and set
him on his feet, water trickling down his face.
He felt humiliated, more so in front of Nick, who let it happen.
But as the days went by, Alroy's perspective on what had happened changed.
He had been whirlpooled and in a way welcomed to an exclusive coterie of students who stood
out enough they needed to be taken down a notch.
But nobody who weighed two-hundred fifty or stood six-three was ever whirlpooled. So, in
part, his selection wasn't only because he seemed a guy who was game, but also because he was a
skinny freshman, who stood five-seven and weighed one twenty.
His gaze off the four surfers bobbing next to the pier, Alroy saw in the distance where the Gulf
waters met the horizon, the gray, cigar silhouette of an oil tanker out in the shipping lanes, Houston-
bound. Yes, whirlpooling was the first serving of humble pie during his Cyprus years. Everyone
there had been brilliant in high school, easily acing the math section of the College Boards. The
average for his class was ninety-eighth percentile. With everybody a star in high school, the question
was, How would exams be graded now that they made it into Cyprus?
On a curve. His classmates were disillusioned, if not sarcastic, when the exam results in first-
semester chemistry, for example, were posted and there it was: a curve of scores from the 90s down
to the 60s. This was not pretty for those who had to make due with a C- on their first college exam.
Alroy was one. But he was also one to buckle down. He figured if he got into the competitive
school, that was huge. If he could survive--even with a gentleman's C average--he'd graduate, and
that's all he wanted to do. Graduate.
The place was cruelly competitive. Alroy would never ace a test. Too many of the best and
brightest got there first. Alroy wondered if the joyless competition had something to do with his
contrarian idea of a practical career once he had his bachelor's in math. Why follow that crowd to
grad school?
In his sophomore year, he recalled a late-night bull session in his room with two other math
majors: Vince and Doug. "What pray tell is an actuary?" Vince hissed.
"Actuaries quantify risk in insurance, finance, and strategic planning," Alroy replied, brochure-
language fresh from having just sent off his application to take the first actuarial exam, off campus,
in probability.
"But why? You graduate here, you get into any graduate program in the country. Get a PhD--the
union card--write your ticket," Vince said.
"But I want out of academia. I want dirty hands and the real world." Alroy smiled.
"Academia is the ultimate job security," Doug said.
"If you're willing to gamble on making tenure and if you fail, where are you?" Alroy shot back.
It went like that for an hour. Alroy accepted he was the black sheep, the only Cyprus student
around taking an actuarial exam, off-campus. He was satisfied, however, he'd not be competing with
the rest of his Cyprus classmates for a passing grade of C. He had the field to himself.
Alroy looked up, saw a surfer slipping across a smallish wave and realized his taking a different
path had paid off. Here he was at AGI doing interesting work. How many years away were Vince
and Doug from those PhDs? He smiled, got up, and walked home.
§
At work the next day, Alroy saw Irv outside his office, evidently waiting for everyone to arrive.
Olivia, Duncan, and Tuan looked ready for an impromptu meeting. Soon, Pavanjeet walked in,
glanced about and sat down too.
"Reason for this meeting is I want to tell you where things are with the State investigation of
Investments upstairs." Irv was wearing a long-sleeve pale blue shirt without a tie. He seemed
relaxed, as if he had no outside meetings scheduled. "The good news is the preliminary work has
identified the illegal activity as confined to several investments in west Texas in two supposed wind
power operations, which I mentioned before were valueless shelf corporations. That's the good
news, the damage to the portfolio and the reputation of AGI investment team limited to those
transactions." He paused.
"This has no effect on our work?" Alroy asked.
 "None whatsoever, the investment portfolio managed upstairs has not taken a hit in any
measurable way. No, the greater risk has always been damage to the reputation, confidence, and
trust our policyholders have. That's why we still cannot discuss this outside the office. If anything is
said, it will be said by State authorities, or authorized responses from our management. Is this
clear?"
He looked around to confirm everyone's perfunctory nod. "I said the good news was the suspect
transactions were few, but the not-so-good news is they still appear to be illegal, and the Company is
obligated to write off the value of those transactions--"
"But where did the money go?" Duncan asked. "Isn't it recoverable?"
"Probably no. I'm sure our legal staff is checking, but my guess is that, typical of these
shenanigans, the checks were hammered and the money sent directly to an offshore bank."
Duncan popped a couple of jelly beans in his mouth and nodded.
"I think the way AGI wants to present this to the outside world--which, as you know, seems to
be losing interest fast--is as a rogue incident from what otherwise is a first-class investment team. I
won't identify the person who made these transactions--his name will get enough ink later--but he's
been placed on administrative leave, while our legal staff decides what the next step should be,
including possible termination."
Alroy avoided glancing over at Olivia, though everyone in the room knew it was almost
certainly her boyfriend, Gary, who was responsible for the illegal deals. He knew she was suffering
enough by being linked to him. Alroy didn't want to add to her misery.
"That's about it," Irv said, "unless someone has questions." No one did.
§
The next week, it was unmistakably obvious Olivia had moved on. After work, Alroy saw her
walking with a new guy, one who didn't work at AGI. He seemed a tall, thin artistic type with a
well-trimmed beard. They made an interesting pair. Whatever hurts Olivia was nursing about
dropping Gary, she wasn't about to be share with Alroy in the lunchroom. She had this artist type to
share her feelings.
Alroy stood there for only the briefest of moments, watching Artist Man and Olivia walk away,
north toward the Strand, and he turned on his heel and headed straight to Alamo Cantina.
Once there, he found Rosie, not unexpectedly, engaged in a spirited exchange with a customer
at the bar.
"I got a Les Paul," Rosie said, looking the guy straight in the eye, pausing. "Signed by Freddy
Fender," he added.
"That's bull pucky. Rosie, c'mon," the customer shot back.
Rosie's face didn't flinch. Not one millimeter. "Got the valuaciòn con los papers de autenticò."
"From whom?"
"Took it to A and G Appraisals, downtown Houston. Got all the papers at home."
"All I can say, Rosie, if you're on the level, nobody around here better find out where you live.
You're burglar bait--"
"First, they have to get past my dog. Imposible.
 "Why's that?"
"Perro especial. German Shepherd y North American Wolf. Chuco es un bad cabròn."
"You have a wolf for a dog?" the guy upended the last of his beer. "Isn't that against the law,
protected species and all?"
"Yeah, I had to get a Federal permit for Chuco. He's mandatorio in el registrò."
Alroy raised his hand, tried to get Rosie's attention.
"Hey, Alroy, wasa?"
The fellow on the bar stool evidently was finished with one beer, stood up, and waved Rosie
bye.
"One of your ice-cold Shiner Bocks would be perfect," Alroy replied.
"On its way," Rosie said, reaching under the counter, snapping off the cap, positioning it on the
counter, and sliding it, as if he were dropping a two ball in the corner pocket, just in front of Alroy's
hand, opening and immediately wrapping fingers around the cold, wet glass.
Rosie followed the bottle to Alroy. "So nada mas with you?"
"Well, on the way over here, I saw something, made me realize I needed a drink to lighten my
mood."
"Like?"
"Oh, a woman at work I've been interested in," he said, trying to keep it as vague as possible.
"You see her, some other guy?"
"How'd you know?"
"Women like that attract men without trying. I assume she's got the sexapil," Rosie said, a
knowing lilt in his voice.
Alroy took a long pull on the Shiner. "Let's put it this way: fissionable, weapons-grade uranium,
okay?"
"Got the picture. Glows in the dark too--" He laughed. "Listen, ese, it's not todo el look. You
gotta set up some ongoing relationship, build on it."
Alroy took a deep breath, not wanting to tell Rosie he worked with Olivia. He decided to keep it
purposely vague. "I thought I had an opening," he finally said.
"Such as?"
"Such as, you ask? She was going to be married, okay? Engaged, had known the guy for years
and then boom he gets into hot water," Alroy said, certain he couldn't spill out more details, anything
that might get back to AGI. No, he had to be deliberately vague. "Let's just say her fiancé got in a
legal bind. Like he might end up in the pokey. No place for a marriage there." Alroy laughed. Rosie
did too.
"Hey, I appreciate these legal things need to be discreto, but is his legal difficulty such I
shouldn't ask?"
"No, he didn't do anything violent, start a fire, nothing like that. No, the problem was more--
ahem--financial. Financial difficulty brought on the legal actions. He might do some time. And she
probably feels betrayed he kept her from knowing about it."
 "She was blindsided?"
"Yeah, but I also think she realized it could happen again, even after he does the time he's gonna
get."
"So there she was, una chica caliente, you saw your opening and you wanted to pick the right
time to make your move and qué pasó, she's with someone else."
"Exactly, I'm standing there so slackjawed, wondering what to do, I decide Rosie has a beer for
me, and here I am," Alroy said brightly.
"So what you got on for tonight?"
"Oh, the usual, head back to the place, put together something to eat and seven rolls around, my
moonlighting hours, and I'll probably be on the phone, fixing someone else's life."
"And it won't be her calling. She's out having fun tonight."
"Yep, it won't be her. But someday, who knows?" Alroy said, the last of the Shiner Bock
fortifying him with possibility.
§
"This is Roy and I listen. Whom do I have the pleasure of talking with tonight?"
"Hi, Roy, glad to make your acquaintance. I'm Babs and I called to get your perspective."
"Shoot."
"Well, I've been dating this guy, call him Jess, his actual name. And I want to to say from the
start I thought I'd found the love of my life. I mean good looking, good job with finances tip-top
shape, and Methodist, same religion as me, though he went to a different church."
"Sounds as if you were lucky to find him."
"I thought so, at first. Thought he was the keeper."
"Well, what happened?"
"That's just it. Good looking, good job, right religion. One, two, three. Check all three boxes."
She sighed.
"It's not working for you?"
"Well, yeah. I mean it's like I got my three wishes, but boy did I ever pick the wrong ones."
Another sigh.
"I see, I see. You can't let one thing or two things or three things keep you from seeing the
whole man. From my perspective, that's where you went wrong. Your feelings are a much keener
intelligence when you meet someone for the first time. How did you feel when you saw him?
"Oh, I'd been through so many losers that when I first met Jess, it's like I started checking off
those boxes, one, two, three and said at last, I'm set."
"What happened?" Alroy asked, wondering why Babs didn't see this guy as only the latest in an
uninterrupted series of losers she apparently was only too willing to latch onto.
"Everything started going wrong. For starters, Jess has turned out to be a congenital liar. I kid
you not. The job he has, well, turns out to be a lot less than he said. He was on the verge of being
fired when we first started going out. Box number two was not there at all. He is always and I mean
always trying to borrow money for everything, gas for his car, food. I'm just sick."
 "Why have you stuck around?"
"Maybe my loneliness overrules my common sense. It's hard to find a guy where there's some
attraction--any attraction--and I thought he was worth a try. I hadn't had a boyfriend in what--six
months--" Sobs the other end of the line.
"Tell you what, you need to toss this guy like used Kleenex. He endangers your mental health.
Tell him to put you on his Do Not Call list. Say sorry ten times over, but be done with him. You give
me a call back afterwards and we'll review your situation, figure out some steps forward, okay? You
decide and the follow-up call is complimentary."
"No charge?"
"Yep, what I said, no charge, consider it part of this call. You going to do right by yourself?"
"I'll try."
"You will do it or I won't hear from you again. I want you to respect yourself."
"I will."
"Good."
§
He got a huge brown box containing the cargo bike dropped off by UPS on the driveway in
front of his carriage house abode. He ripped open the box and put it in the garage and listed out the
tools needed for assembly: an adjustable crescent wrench, a Phillips screwdriver, a set of Allen
wrenches, and a few other miscellany he would get at the hardware store.
The next morning, a Saturday, Alroy had assembled in the space of a few hours his cargo bike,
all ready to ride. He could not believe what he had. Fifteen hundred dollars sent off to a company
he'd never heard of in Portland, Oregon, and here through the miracle of commerce and some
nonprofessional bicycle mechanicking stood a technological marvel. A human-powered transport,
weighing roughly seventy pounds, but which the literature said, was capable of carrying twice its
weight in the wooden freight box, as described in the owner manual. Be sure to use bungee cords
was a warning.
He couldn't wait to try it out, to see more of Galveston than he had been able to walk.
Something more than the well-worn path between his place and the seven-story building downtown
he called work, with side meanders to buy groceries and other errands.
He wanted to explore the island on his bike, its breadth, its length, coasting along the flatness of
his home ground on the streets, over the avenues, and through the alleyways. He'd pedal down the
longest continuous sidewalk in the world--so wikipedia told him--more than ten miles without a
cross-street, and let the breeze of the Gulf waters to the east brace him with the invigorating tonic of
salt air.
But if he was going to do the entirety of the Seawall sidewalk as a round-trip, he'd need more
time and with the assembly of the bike done, more energy, preferably in the morning when it was
cooler. Instead, he decided to go some place closer by: a graveyard some ten blocks away.
Alroy pushed off, got under way, getting used to the long extension of the front wheel with the
wood box beyond his handlebars. The steering had a definite lag, not the immediate turn of a wheel
below the handlebars. In time, he would get the hang of it. He couldn't help smiling at how once
moving, the bike seemed to have, with its extra weight, a momentum of its own, coasting over the
island-flat streets.
 He got to the wrought-iron gates of Old City Cemetery and dismounted, pushing his bike inside.
Everywhere he looked, burial vaults and a few scattered palms with splayed fronds.
Some vaults were elevated on stilts just like so many houses in Galveston, as if another storm
surge of water would invade the island. He figured if families could afford it, their loved ones were
best not buried in the ground.
He walked toward one vault, read the inscription: KELLY BREAN 1848--1900. He looked at the
neighbors, others having the same year of death, 1900, when the great hurricane killed more than ten
thousand. It would take the Apocalypse to top that.
Yes, he could walk through this older part of the cemetery, the part well filled-in and always
find the date of 1900. Some had relatives with money to pay for an elevated repose of a send-off.
The rest? In-the-ground caskets or nonstop funeral pyres. Alroy winced. He'd heard in some places
the burials were three deep.
Alroy stopped looking at the vault before him, righting his bike to push out the gates, but first
he glanced around at the many vaults, all gray stones bearing mute witness to devastating death and
something he mused, ironically, no life insurance company could ever account for, in its rate
calculation, a once-in-a-thousand-years flood. No, in those days, AGI wasn't in life insurance. They
did mostly maritime insurance and the losses they took on hurricane damage to ships was no match
for the loss of life these vaults held.
Alroy again looked around, wondered if there was something he missed. If there was, it would
have to wait. Not that he didn't want to be caught in a graveyard after dark, but he was getting
hungry and he had a mind to go home, drop off the bike and then get over to Alamo Cantina and see
Rosie about a beer, a Polish dog and sauerkraut. The sort of hearty fare he'd like after putting
together the bike and riding it the last hour.
He walked over to the cargo bike--his non-polluting, environmentally-friendly wheels--which
stood ready to take him places as well as any ga-lumbing white Corvette steed. Hah! he thought,
rocking the bike forward off its twin-pronged kickstand, not the typical bike stand, but what you
would find on a motorcycle, the kickstand holding the bike straight-up vertical. Hah! The white
Corvette--where was Gary now?
The last few weeks, he'd learned, however, the perfect job he started at AGI in June had warts. It
was made up of flawed humans, like any other place he might find himself. If he hit it right, Gary's
apparent misdeeds with those west Texas investments might earn him a few thousand hours of
community service.
He put one leg over the bike frame and began pedalling down the gravel road to the gate. Yes,
Gary wouldn't be showing off his white Corvette in front of AGI, picking up Olivia for a night on
the town again soon. She'd ditched him for a bearded artist type.
He was sure Olivia was done with Gary. She'd been engaged to the guy, but was on to the next
guy, a steppingstone, perhaps, but still she'd moved on. He stopped pedalling, letting the weight of
the hefty cargo bike pull him forward down the flat asphalt shoulder by the curb, past the Dillard
Mansion, its ornate Victorian spired corners more than a bit gingerbready.
He couldn't shake the image of Olivia in the cafeteria, letting him know how she felt about the
loss that had hit her. A hurricane of deceit.
§
Alroy steered the cargo bike into the wide driveway fronting the garage and overhead carriage
house. He opened the garage and walked the bike inside. The garage was only for storage. Nobody
evidently had parked a car there in decades. He could have left the bike outside, locking it to a
railing, but he knew salt air, which drifted inland during the night, was not good for metal and his
cargo bike had plenty. After weighing his options, he knew the best thing was to get his new vehicle
inside.
The bike put away, Alroy got ready to head down to Alamo Cantina and another round of gab
with Rosie.
 Chapter Seven: Gnomic Oracle

Work at AGI Monday was back to normal, and the state regulators and investigators were back
in Austin filing papers. As Irv had summarized, the problem was an isolated instance of one
employee making investments in west Texas wind power operations, which only existed on paper.
Olivia's ex-fiancé retained legal representation and was barred from entering AGI. And Olivia
had a new boyfriend, an artist type.
It was with a sense of normalcy regained, with the media hounds barking after other stories, Irv
called in Alroy and Tuan to review progress on OneLife.
"Okay, you two have numbers for me," Irv said, positioning his coffee cup just so on his desk,
opposite of which sat Alroy and Tuan, clutching manila folders with their spreadsheets for OneLife.
"We ran numbers several ways," Tuan said. "We decided a policy with no disability benefits
might be feasible."
"No disability waiver?" Irv responded, "I'm not sure if that would fly with Compliance. Let me
make a note to check later. What's the upshot if you go that route?"
"Well, sticking with a discount function, two and a half percent," Tuan continued, "we see a so-
so annuity payout on applicant lives under forty. Then it gets unbalanced. Premiums on term going
up and the annuity payout going down. Distinctly asymmetrical the older the applicant."
"I see, let me see the spreadsheet, I need to mull over those figures.
"I was wondering about the discount factor, two and a half percent," Alroy interjected. Irv
looked at him with measured sternness.
"Two and a half percent, that's the spec I gave you. What's the question?" Irv's jaw seemed
resolute, as if this was not to be unnailed.
"I was talking with Duncan the other day over lunch and I thought he made a good point about
our paltry discount factor." Alroy paused, letting his comment hang in the air. Irv didn't seem
receptive to indulging his most junior associate. Still, Alroy pressed on.
"Basically, Duncan suggested this lousy investment environment is not going to last for
decades."
"But it's what we got, it could be better, it could be worse, but it's two and a half percent."
"I know, I know," Alroy said, wondering where to grab the rope out of the quicksand, "but
there's a probability, you know, things will improve. In twenty years, we might be at six percent,"
His forehead scrunched. What is Irv not getting?
"That could happen. But we know what we have, two and a half percent. What's Duncan's idea
that you agree with?"
"Simple. We do a probabilities model for changing interest rate that moves out over a forty-year
horizon or so." Alroy took a deep breath.
"And Duncan's gamble--which you appear to share--is doing that might improve our discount
factor?" Irv shot back.
"Yes, the upper boundary on such a probability function would be at least eight percent and the
lower boundary, as you know, can't be less than zero."
"All of which might be true," Irv said. "But you see, OneLife is not to the point where we need
to throw that actuarial complexity at it. I still have to sell it to Marketing, and those folks like simple
back-of-the-envelope calcs if they are going to sign on." He took a sip of his coffee and waited for
Alroy--or Tuan--to agree.
"You suggest go or no-go on two and a half percent?" Tuan asked. Alroy felt relieved his
coworker had deflected the argument. He was no spokesman for any other interest rate model. He
didn't know enough, so he let it go.
If Irv thinks anything other than two and a half is off-topic, so it is.
§
Alroy felt after meeting with Irv he and Tuan had a good idea of how to complete their part of
the OneLife feasibility study. Combining term life insurance with a follow-on annuity was bold, but
with Irv's modification--deferring forty-plus payouts--it could be made to work, and if it was salable,
then OneLife could lead to a big jump in business for AGI, and probably imitators from other life
insurance carriers.
It was with a sense of accomplishment, an optimistic Alroy left for home. He hadn't figured out
if he would be using the cargo bike for more than grocery shopping and weekend rides. The walk to
and from work was not bad and he didn't think riding a bike and shaving ten minutes off his time to
work was worth leaving his bike locked up outside in the weather.
When he got home, he made a quick dinner of spaghetti with some frozen meatballs he'd
thawed out the night before. Then he got on his laptop and checked his online banking to see how
his finances were shaping up. He'd figured if he kept socking away half his salary, living expenses
cut to the bone, he'd zero-out the college debt before he was thirty. Sure, when his dad had to co-
sign the loan, they didn't see eye-to-eye about Alroy's idea of a private college, Cyprus Poly, over a
state school. But then his dad was a plumber, didn't go to college. So Alroy was all the more
determined to be one-hundred percent responsible for what he chose and that school loan.
At seven, the phone rang. "Hi, Roy and I listen, whom do I have the pleasure of talking with
tonight?"
"JoBecca. Oh, Roy, I was so happy to see you last Sunday--"
Last Sunday came back to Alroy in a flash. Taking the bus over the Causeway to Dickinson,
getting out at the Conoco station by the highway and seeing JoBecca live for the first time. What a
treat for hungry eyes. Thin, shapely, long auburn hair. He had no idea why in the world her husband
betrayed her, forced her to leave. What sane man could take a woman like that for granted?
"Yes, it was nice," he said, mindful the afternoon with JoBecca serving up mac and cheese and
sending him home after a few beers was so reminiscent of nervous first dates.
"Reason I'm calling is I enjoyed seeing you so much, can you come by again this Sunday?
Please."
Alroy was caught off-guard. When he'd seen JoBecca there was no mention of doing it again.
The idea was she wanted to see him in person. "This doesn't sound like a consultation with Roy who
listens," he said, chuckling.
"Oh, don't worry, I'll pay for this call," she said, showing a mock hurt.
"JoBecca, you must understand, for the next two hours, Monday through Friday, I'm here to
help people. I help them get a needed perspective on their life problems, so they can go forward."
"I know, I know that. I just thought we hit it off so well, we would see more of each other.
Please."
Alroy was figuring in his head what he could do. One, he could think about it, call her back. No,
the stressful option, no solution. Two, he could just get rid of her ASAP. Would be hurtful. Three, he
could just say, Sure, and get on to his next call.
He asked her what time Sunday.
§
After JoBecca, Babs--always out for Mr. Right--called. She'd lost her new man, why she didn't
know. That was why she was calling Roy, who listens. Alroy was temporarily at a loss for what to
say. He had no idea how to respond.
"Why doesn't any guy--and I mean I've sampled more than a few--want to set me up, like for
life? I'm willing to give them my best years. I don't get it," Babs said in the self-pitying tone that left
Alroy wondering if he should be pursuing other interests outside work.
"Tell you what you do," Alroy said. "Just quit. You're only frustrating yourself, something about
how you meet men, how you find them interesting must be off, for you to have such consistently
bad outcomes."
"You haven't even seen me. Are you saying I'm a turn-off?"
"No, not at all, but it's the old saw about making the same mistake over and over. I don't know
what the mistake is, or at least it's not obvious. I can't be with you in every interaction you've had
with men and say this is it." Although Alroy felt strongly Babs' clingy personality would encourage
any man to sprint who didn't want hooks in him, but Alroy couldn't say that.
"Give yourself," he continued, "a six-month break. Take off some time."
"I don't know that will work, Roy. Six months. That's a lot of lonely evenings, I could be out
doing things."
"But then if you get a glimpse of how to solve your problem, it'll be worth it, right?"
"I don't know. I can try, but if I get to feeling bad, I can call you, can't I?"
"Sure, anytime, Monday through Friday, seven to nine. I'll be here."
"Thanks much," she said and Alroy got ready for the next call.
§
That Saturday, Alroy's lone sister, Vera, flew into Houston with her husband, Corey, a
psychiatrist. They'd come from Montpelier, Vermont, and had picked up a rental car at George Bush
Intercontinental and planned to take some time to see Texas by road, one-justice-of-the-peace-
county-seat town after another, driving on down to San Antonio, where Corey would attend a three-
day conference of psychiatrists.
But first, Galveston overnight and breakfast with Alroy.
Vera and Corey stayed at the Marshall Hotel, a cheerful, three-story sandstone landmark on the
Strand, an historic gem from the eighteen hundreds when the port of Galveston was rivalling New
Orleans. Alroy knew they could have stayed at the Hulsey Mansion B & B next door to him for
probably less, but arrangements were set when she first called.
They had a booth at the Reprise on the Strand, which served breakfast all day long. Although
the place was hopping and popular, they had plenty of seats so the wait was tolerable. At his
recommendation, everyone went for the eggs Benedict.
"How's the job?" Vera asked Alroy, who was mid-bite into his cottage fries.
He paused, swallowed, "Better. Much better than I expected. I like who I work with, my boss,
Irv, is great, helpful and the work is interesting."
"I know what you do is fairly technical," Corey said, a woodsman's beard on his preternaturally
pale face and blue eyes, "but are you working on something right now?"
"Sure, there's plenty of math detail doing actuarial work, but right now my coworker and I are
testing the feasibility of a new insurance policy, one that converts to an annuity payable at age sixty.
As I said, a feasibility study." He let the last part hang as comment of the iffy-ness of it all.
"They're not sure this is viable?" Corey asked.
"We've been doing spreadsheet after spreadsheet and, yes, it's not looking like something we
want to rush to the market, the interest rate environment these days is so lousy."
"Still, it must feel great," Vera said, "to be working on something meaningful. And not doing
some make-work project ‘til they decide whether to keep you. Happens."
"Well, it’s serious actuarial work, even if low-priority. So you two are off to San Antonio?"
Alroy said, wanting to change the subject.
"Oh, yes, his convention of shrinks," she said, giving Corey a smile. He stroked his black beard,
as if to confirm his membership in the Freudian brotherhood. "We stay on the Riverwalk and
Corey's meetings are right nearby. I'll have two days to get out and explore, see the Alamo and visit,
I'm sure, those neat gift shops around there."
"I've never been there," Alroy said.
"Neither have we," Corey said, "but I was excited when I got the email announcement to
register. I went online and looked at where we're staying. Incredible. It's like being in Venice, the
riverboats going up and down the little river. We're looking forward to it."
"Well, what do psychiatrists talk about when they go to these conventions?" Alroy asked, trying
not to seem too open-ended with his question, even if it unavoidably was.
"Oh, a fair amount of it is organized by diagnosis categories. Practitioners who specialize in
depression will present what's working best for them. Bipolar disorders. Anxiety, another big
category. But it's more. Discussion panels will be on practice management, figuring out how to grow
a practice, a panel, of course, on what to do if you want to retire and sell a practice ..."
"Don't forget to add the pharmaceutical companies will be there," Vera interjected.
"Yes, it's probably inevitable, most people in the field rely on prescriptions to give their patients
the crutch they usually need. I know it's true for me, but I try to keep my patients aware medicine is
not a permanent solution. That's the point of improvement."
"Boy, do those pharmaceuticals ever spread the goodies around," Vera said.
"Yeah, they're always ready to sign you up for a rep to come by with free samples. But I think
Vera is talking about giveaways they heap on tables. All sorts of souvenirs, calendars, advertiser's
ballpoint pens, that sort of thing. They even give you a plastic bag to take it all home. I'd avoid it if
everybody else didn't dive in."
"Do you psychiatrists ever talk about psychic gifts?" Alroy ventured, thinking of insurance
contingencies and especially what some of his callers at LIFEisPINBALL.com seemed to expect.
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, I was thinking of people who might have a gift to telling how things are going to work out,
you know, in the future, ESP, that stuff."
"This is a tough one. I know what you're talking about. There has been anecdotal accounts
throughout human history--Jacob, his dream in the Bible, one example. But ESP through dreamwork
or whatever is not something we can easily reproduce in the lab and show scientifically. Still, as you
know Freud made dream analysis part of therapy," Corey said, warming up to the subject. "So my
tentative answer to you today would be, yes, for some I think ESP techniques, which I define
loosely, might work to enable a person to get in touch with his subconscious. Now is the
subconscious capable of knowing more, apprehending more than our conscious minds know through
our five senses? That question I can't answer. You know the Russians have done plenty of work on
the paranormal. But the short answer is I go back to Freud and say dreamwork--or a similar
technique--puts one in touch with the subconscious, which might be suppressed."
"Why do you ask?" Corey concluded.
"Oh, it's the work I do," Alroy said, stumbling around for an answer, knowing his telephone
moonlighting was too much to explain. "We're always trying to outguess the future, rationally
impossible, so we do the next best thing and allow for multiple outcomes and assign probabilities to
each, which in a way is an equally impossible task, that is, to get the probabilities exactly right--"
"You're saying if an insurance company came up with a way to predict the future, it would
always make money?"
"Sure, unless the applicants had access to the same predictions--"
Alroy looked over at Vera and could see she was getting a bit bored by the turn the conversation
had taken, slowly buttering the last half of her toast. "Well, I'm sure you'll enjoy your drive down to
San Antonio today. Great weather for driving. Lots of sunshine."
With those words spoken, Vera rejoined the conversation and Alroy felt relieved he was
wrapping up the visit from his sister and brother-in-law on a positive note. After some obligatory
negotiation, Alroy picked up the check--he had a job, at last, he told Vera and Corey, and they had
spent the bucks coming to see him rather than flying straight to San Antonio.
He walked them back to the rosy edifice of the Marshall Hotel and said his good-bye there on
the sidewalk. When he slowly walked away, he realized for maybe the first time he was a bona fide
resident of Galveston, Texas's island city. His flesh and blood had verified this and could report her
live sighting to the rest of his family.
§
When he got back to his place, Alroy didn't know what to do. He'd keyed his Saturday around
seeing Vera and Corey for breakfast and letting what happened happen. He sat at his desk chair for
ten minutes or so, flipping a pencil around on his desk. The only thing for sure was Monday
morning, he'd be back at work. As for Sunday, the day in between his loose-ends Saturday and work,
it was already sketched out: a second visit to JoBecca across the Causeway in Dickinson. He was
anticipating that, but then didn't feel right about it.
Her pursuing him, not vice versa, seemed to short-circuit how he'd earn the prize. It might be
too easy, if that's what happened. Still, he couldn't fault her assertiveness. He might applaud,
especially after what she'd been through with the ex. It was just he didn't know where it would go,
this seeing her. What did they have in common? She probably couldn't spell actuary. He thought she
might have a high school diploma, but he wasn't sure.
Would he take advantage of her, or would she take advantage of him to forget her ex? That, in
the offing, gave tomorrow the possibility of an unexpected surprise, maybe of the downed-power-
line sort.
A wry look on his face, Alroy picked up the pencil again, laid it down. He had to get out of the
apartment, Get some fresh air. Outside, he opened the garage door, rolled out his cargo bike and
pushed off, He was pedalling down his alleyway, Avenue O 1/2, one of so many passageways across
the island with old, historical back buildings, like his carriage house abode. In past times, many of
these back buildings housed the "help"--slave quarters--before the state of Texas freed slaves on
Juneteeth. Mostly small, modest homes, not the larger, main houses on the avenues. But over time,
as Galveston's medical school kept growing, a lot of its students sought out these back buildings for
affordable housing. Much of what Alroy was pedalling past even looked gentrified.
His cargo bike front wheel bumped over trolley tracks crossing Bernardo de Galvez Boulevard
and two quick blocks later, he stood on the sidewalk that fronted the Seawall. Before him he had
miles to pedal, not a car in his way.
The salt air gusting off the Gulf helped clear his mind. He'd discharged his obligatory visit with
Sis and her husband Corey, had stopped thinking about Sunday and JoBecca, and was simply
pedalling as if it was all he had to do. And he could not run out of sidewalk; it was far longer than
his legs would last.
He kept pedalling, passing other bicyclists coming his way, or weaving around late-summer
tourists in shorts and tennis shoes, seagulls shrieking overhead in the breezes, waves crashing below
him on the sandy beach with wet, ropy seaweed glinting from the overhead sun. Alroy had no
hunger, the good breakfast saw to that. His legs seemed tireless, up and down unceasingly, and most
of all he wanted nothing more than to enjoy the warmth of the noon sun.
He was navigating a perfect present wide open before him, stretching out as an unbroken lane of
concrete to the end, where he could simply turn around, if he made it that far.
But he turned around--at the five-mile mark--and started pedalling for home. He decided it was
all a metaphor for his life: He would go back and forth in the present, making one round trip after
another. The past didn't matter, neither did the future. Could he explain this to any of his telephone
advice callers? Probably not.
§
Several weeks after the storm over the Investment Department, primary suspect Gareth
Constable was on indefinite administrative leave until his lawyer negotiated a pass out of jail. The
normalcy Alroy thought existed at AGI when he first arrived had returned, so he was willing to
chalk up the Gary fiasco to a rogue anomaly not to be repeated by the professionals, who worked in
the home office.
 One lunch hour, when Alroy had gone down to the cafeteria at eleven-thirty, he saw Olivia
sitting at a table, alone, eating and he felt it okay to join her. Gary was out of the picture, so the topic
of his misdeeds mercifully would not come up. Besides she had a new beau, the artist type. He only
lacked a beret.
She was taking a bite of her steaming manicotti Florentine, when he sat down, taking note she'd
been scanning the newest Scientific American open beside her. Not everyone wanted to talk or be
alone with their thoughts in the cafeteria, so a small company perk was a well-stocked rack of
current magazines. "I read that issue, cover to cover," he said.
"I just started on this: a computerized spectrum analysis of carbon dating. This is a great
refinement for estimated dates." She looked at him, the dark, hooded eyes framed by the ample
black hair. A quicksilver smile, then she frowned.
Without thinking, Alroy asked, "How've you been?" not that he was the sort to make those
empathetic queries straightaway.
"Oh, I'm fine. Just feel a bit flat, enervated I supposed is the word."
"But not at work, you seem to be pretty busy at your desk."
She separated the remaining manicotti tubes on her plate and forked off a segment from one and
put it in her mouth, chewing slowly, almost thoughtfully. Alroy did the same with the fish he had on
his plate.
A swallow and, "This business with Gary left my life in shambles. I don't know if you've ever
had a relationship end so abruptly, or maybe most of them do," she said, chuckling.
"No, I've avoided that, you know studying for those actuarial exams leaves me with a non-
existent social life," he said, ignoring for the moment his moonlighting had taken him to a twenty-
two year-old auburn-haired discovery across the Causeway on the mainland. "But I thought I saw
you with someone new, or was that something else?" he asked.
"Oh, Will, yeah, he's sort of a follow-on, keeps me distracted from what I went through. He has
an art gallery down on the Strand, but it's really his parents'. They're travelling and he's sort of the
caretaker for six months. He doesn't have a real job."
"Well, how does he get by?"
"I don't know. He's living at home, again caretaking while they go off and tour Europe, a
supposed buying trip so most of it's tax deductible."
"Must be nice,"
"Well not caretaking your parents' house and art gallery. I think it's stultifying. Will is a year
older than me and what does he have going for him?"
"He must have gone to college and studied something--"
"Oh, sure, he went to this school for photography out in Santa Barbara, I think, but he dropped
out after less than a year. It was a two-year program, minimum, so here he is, sitting around, waiting
for his parents to tell him what to do next."
"You must be kidding, no plans?"
"No plans. No Plan A, no Plan B. Nada. He says he's an artist and hasn't found his medium."
"Well, it sounds as if he doesn't want to get away from his parents," Alroy said.
 "Maybe I'm missing something, but too often when I've dated an American white boy, it's like
this. Duds. Failure to launch. Want to be an adolescent living on a trust fund, the parents' money as
long as possible. Maybe starts when the parents pick up the tab for an expensive college. That might
promote ingratitude, don't know."
"I know that school in Santa Barbara is pricey," Alroy said, having heard of it in California.
"Most expensive in the country, I bet. And hasn't picked up a camera since the day he left."
It was obvious from the rest of their lunch conversation Olivia held out little promise for Will.
Alroy was preoccupied with making sense of JoBecca and where that might lead, or if it would fail.
He wasn't what JoBecca needed, but with Olivia, a different question, and it was looking more and
more like Alroy might have an opening. What gambit to play? The question would plague him in the
days ahead.
§
The question of how to fire things up with Olivia began to possess Alroy's waking hours. Even
though another Sunday also included a visit to JoBecca over in Dickinson. The latter was okay, he
rationalized as giving him momentum to mount an ascent up the Mt. Everest of seductions, which
was surely Olivia, Chinese-American by way of Sri Lanka.
He didn't know where to start.
If as an appeal to an alternative model of reality, Alroy embraced the randomness, the
happenstance, the fortuity of where his life might go. He gave up trying to figure out what stratagem
would win Olivia and instead did something a telephone counselor would quickly understand,
having nightly calls from people he never met: He asked a stranger.
After locking his two-wheeled transport to a bicycle rack, a reflective Alroy walked through
Alvin Park, across from the airport and overlooking Offatts Bayou, taking in the beds of begonias,
carnations, and roses, all flowers past their prime on a September afternoon. Bright sun everywhere
lifted his spirits, enough so, seeing a man seated on a bench ahead, he walked there straightaway.
He approached the bench with the man's back to him, and he appeared to do so leisurely, as if
perusing the flowers, but also noting the raggedness of the St. Augustine grass lapping at the feet of
the bench ahead. A worker sitting on a power mower was criss-crossing the grounds, the whine of a
gasoline engine obliterating whatever tranquility the park otherwise offered. Alroy saw the stubborn
shoots of grass in his path, having enjoyed a month or more of freedom to grow, would be shorn of
their pride once the day was out, if the gardener ever made his way east across the lawn expanse and
gave the grass trod by Alroy a once-over.
Alroy circled the bench, then paused facing the old man, grizzled, a salt-and-pepper beard
anchoring a face, brown with the tan of decades out on the water. Alroy guessed the man an old salt.
The man looked up briefly, smiling at the intruder into his solitude. "Lovely day," Alroy said.
Alroy had stopped walking, sure he stood before the Delphi Oracle, if he would only pose his
question correctly.
"Here have a seat," the old man said, slapping the empty space on the bench beside him.
"Nothing one wants more in life to be content than this: a sunny day, fresh air, a bench to rest your
weary bones. That's enough." He chortled oddly, as if to signal to Alroy he had found out anything
more was not in the cosmic joke life was shown to be.
Alroy sat down on the bench and it was fine, the two of them looking outward past a bed of
white begonias and grassy walkways to the gray flatness of Offatts Bayou across the road. Nothing
moved in the bayou waters except for a lone red-canvassed sailboat, trailing a frothy streamer as it
slipped off to the right.
"My body is rested enough, it's my mind that needs to calm down," Alroy said, getting right to
his query. The old man turned away from his bayou gaze and looked Alroy in the eye.
"The body rests, the mind follows," he said gnomically.
"Makes sense, but I have a problem I can't solve, even if I thought about it for six months, I'd be
no closer to knowing what to do--" Alroy sat up straight, giving his thighs emphatic hand slaps.
"It's a woman, isn't it?" Alroy's grizzled companion asked.
Alroy's eyes opened shock-wide, a tightness seizing his back. "Yes," he said quietly, in awe of
the man's all-knowingness.
"Too much said it could not be otherwise," the man continued. "What is there for you to
decide?"
"How to--" Alroy paused, "get close to her."
"That's your problem?"
"We work together, same department, if things go bad, how will it affect our work lives and then
the other colleagues and my boss? It's too complicated."
The old man nodded and put his hand on the bench arm. "You need to look at your desire for
this woman, see if it's something other than just her, do you follow?"
"No, she seems to fire me up more than any woman I've been around," Alroy said with
exasperation at his difficulty.
"The woman in the office is the true desire of your heart, who you want?"
"I's sure, but what a price if I mess up."
"You afraid she'll reject you?"
"Entered my mind. How would I like getting the fisheye from her all the time?"
"I tell you what to do."
"Okay."
"Wait, be patient."
"In other words, do nothing, you're saying."
"Not yet. You simply wait and let her signal the opening, then you ask her out. But not before
then. No point in taking the initiative, you'd just set yourself up for rejection."
"That's where I was going, but hearing this from you, I suppose I can stop thrashing about in my
head what to do."
The gardener with the power mower appeared headed their way. Alroy was sure in minutes the
two of them might--with approaching noise and fumes--scatter like spooked sparrows off the bench.
 Chapter Eight: The Reduction Calculator Engine

Saturday afternoon, Alroy headed down to Alamo Cantina to have a beer and shoot the breeze
with Rosie.
When he turned the corner at Fourteenth, the sight of his familiar bar left him momentarily
aphasic and locked up his legs. A Dumpster, more the size of a semi-tractor trailer, was parked at the
curb, workmen ferrying out shards of wood and drywall in heavy-duty wheelbarrows they rolled
into its dropped, rear door. A STILL OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign sat forlornly out of the way. Alroy
decided, if he couldn't get a beer, at least he could find out what was going on.
He made for the front door, propped open. The dim light inside showed an interior about to be
taken down to the studs. The walls had been crowbarred, stripped of drywall, and fixtures were in
broken heaps everywhere. The ant-like army of workers had plenty to do.
Alone amid the chaos of the imploding bar stood Rosie, his thin island of a bar with a row of
stools isolated and intact in a sea of debris. The tables and chairs by the wall were no more.
"Rosie, what's this about?" Alroy slid on a Naugahyde-topped stool, expecting to hear a tearful
story of losing his job, seeing the bar taken down in the name of sprucing up this part of town with
another Pottery Barn, a Ben & Jerry's, or worse.
"Oh, this," he said, waving at the shambles, white dust of broken drywall floating through the
fluorescent light over the bar. "New owner, Vietnamese, es rico, full of money from shrimping and
now he buys this. Hien havea un bisnesplan."
Alroy stared in disbelief at what it would take to ever make the place inviting again. "What's the
plan?"
"Hien's talking about a brew pob, artisanal beer. This is what's happening in Houston. Make it
here," he said, pointing his outstretched index finger at the floor. "New equipment, steitofdeart, new
interior--"
"You gonna lose your job?"
"No, I have a job. You think Hien can do this?" he said, pointing at the bar. "His English, sabe?
No, he's the man makes el cashflo."
Alroy ordered a Lone Star longneck. At least the beer cooler stayed put.
Rosie uncapped the beer, slid it down the bar, stopping an inch before Alroy's open hand. He
took a quick sip, studied Rosie, saw puffy eyes. "So, Rosie, you're not losing sleep over this, are
you? You've looked better."
"You don't need to be preoccupado about that. I'll go for all the sleep I want after I'm dead."
 Alroy wondered what else to talk about. More talk with Rosie about the Olivia quandary wasn't
conducive to the jabbering workmen wheelbarrowing so much out the open door. "They'll probably
hire more people. You can't do it all--" Alroy said brightly.
"Yeah, brewing up beer's an art. They need a brewmeister. Someone con el savi y el expertiz.
I'm only un barman to take customer money." He laughed loudly, a rib rattler over the
deconstruction noise.
Alroy wondered by the bottom half of his beer if he should order a second to commiserate with
Rosie, who despite the sidewalk sign had no other customers. "But did they have to go down to the
studs like this? Couldn't've brought in brew tanks and a cooker and left it at that."
"No, Hien says this is obsolescente, he even said dumpy. They say craft beer is an exclusive
thing so we need estylo inside."
"It could work, money's moving into town these days."
"It will work, I've gotta keep my job for the spaider--"
A workman wheeled out another load of drywall. Alroy wondered if the new owner might see
Rosie as another disposable. Was that why Rosie was losing sleep? "This gonna be done soon?"
Alroy said, upending his beer.
"No, three months. This is Alamo Cantina for now. Eight stools, a bar, and a beer cooler and
me."
"Looks like people can come, drink a beer and watch workmen."
"Some work they do when we're closed, but for the rest, it's my mess too."
"They gonna keep the name, Alamo Cantina?"
"Hien can call it what he wants."
"Okay."
"You think he spends this mula completely re-doing the interior and not change the outside?"
Rosie asked.
"You've gotta a point."
Alroy passed on a second beer, left Rosie at his lonely island of a bar, and stepped around a
workman outside on the sidewalk. What he had seen left him suddenly feeling like Rosie had
become a brave-faced jack-o-lantern, no candle and hollow inside.
§
It was Monday night, and Alroy was ready for his first phone call. Anyone calling before seven
got voicemail, which pleased Alroy when he listened to their embarrassment on voicemail, saying
they had the wrong time or their watch was broken or some other silly excuse.
"Good evening, this is Roy and I listen, how can I help you?"
"Hi, Roy, this is Kim, remember me?" Then an exhalation of what must've been cigarette smoke
on the other end. Alroy remembered Kim smoked. Compulsively. He asked her to switch brands, so
she'd be more aware of what she was doing, not only with smoking, but in her life.
"Sure, you were feeling down, were gonna throw yourself off the Causeway the middle of the
night, right?"
 "Yeah. But I'm feeling better." The sound of another cigarette exhalation. "Say, I wanted to
check with you about something new I found."
"Okay, what's up?"
"Well, a week ago I was in a used bookstore, and somehow, one book kinda popped up at me,
got me interested and I brought it home. The I Ching, Book of Changes, you ever hear of that one?"
"Yeah, an ancient book of fortune-telling, Chinese--"
"Exactly what I need. My problem in life--I keep getting blindsided."
"Which is why you need to talk, right?"
"Yeah, Roy, it's not you haven't been a help--you have--but I'm in a bad patch in my life, things
seem to be falling apart faster."
"Okay, what can I do for you?"
"Well, I've been consulting the oracle--this book, you know, and was throwing the three pennies
to get my lines, broken or unbroken--"
"Sixty-four possibilities, as I recall."
"Yeah, sixty-four, but some lines are moving and that leads to another sixty-four possibilities for
each of the sixty-four--"
"Many possible fortunes."
"Yeah, but I came up with mine." A pause for inhalation, exhalation of smoke. "I was relaxed
and quiet and slow in doing the coin toss and wrote down the results. Know what it said?"
"No, what?"
"Said I was to walk across a bridge and meet a great man. Can you believe it? Here I was, ready
to throw myself off the bridge and this oracle knows this and tells me, no, keep walking to the other
end and meet a great man. Wow, left me breathless. What do you think?"
Alroy wanted to say bridges are everywhere and the bridge in the fortune could also be
anywhere in the world for Kim, or nowhere. But that wouldn't help her, was not why she was calling
him. "Well, you probably can't walk across the Causeway all the way, that's Interstate 45 and
pedestrians are supposed to stay off. You might get stopped. But there are other bridges, you know.
Maybe it's the one to Pelican Island--Fifty-first--"
"I'm sure it's the same Causeway I was planning to jump off," she said, heavy punctuation with
cigarette exhalation.
Alroy wanted to say the bridge might be a metaphor. He knew the Book of Changes relied
heavily on metaphors for its power, but where did it say in that fortune the Causeway bridge going
out of Galveston? But Kim was so upbeat about the great man. He needed to work on that, fan the
flames of her positivity. "I'm sure getting arrested for walking on an Interstate bridge would give
your fortune an unusual twist," he said, trying to get the discussion on to something else.
"Okay, walking across that bridge might not work, but I still think I would try one of those other
bridges, see what happens, see who I run into--"
"Fine, what about the short bridge over the bayou, the one on Sixty-first?"
"Yeah, even near where I live," she said, a perk of confidence in her voice.
 "There you go. Maybe the fortune meant for you to cross the bridge nearest where you live."
"I think you're right, Roy. It's the bridge I can see a block from my front door. That has to be the
one. I'm sure." A drag, a rapid exhalation of cigarette smoke.
Alroy felt relieved. "And who knows? There might be a great man the other side of the bridge.
You understand, he might not be standing there guaranteed. He might be someone you meet shortly
afterwards, but when you see him, you'll know he's the one."
"I hope so. I can't wait, I'll go out the first thing tomorrow and walk across that bridge."
§
Alroy had come to see his moonlighting as a counterweight to his actuarial work. An extra
dimension to keep his life from becoming so unbalanced, he saw too much of reality as probability
of failure--the actuarial jargon for death--in populations defined by nonpersonal descriptors like
"health history disqualified" or "very obese."
He had an intuition that spending too much time in that Cartesian world of cause-and-effect,
with the inevitable arrogance of the supreme rationalist, might lead to what he saw enough of during
his college years at Cyprus Polytechnic Institute: some brilliant people with minds that buzz-sawed
through arcanum hidden in such exclusive pursuits as physical chemistry, computer algorithms, and
quantum mechanics. True, they were self-accepting geeks, as Alroy was to an extent, and no one
expected them to be socially adroit and bond over non-techy interests with others outside of Cyprus.
They tended to seek out their kind, but more likely were loners.
Alroy tried to avoid that self-isolation to which his classmates were prone, if they wanted to
stay on top of their courses and graduate. Alroy was aware his college education had to support his
development as an adult, not dictate it. An obvious example being, unlike other math majors, he
alone decided to take actuary exams.
So in his move to Galveston, he had vaguely in his mind, he wanted to keep on doing things in
his free time besides study. He had been doing the phone counseling for almost three months. Some
people even called back. They either thought he was a good counselor or they were so messed up
they had to talk with anybody, more than once, and would pay for it. Personally, Alroy knew he was
a better actuary than a counselor, but he was working on the latter, trying to develop his intuition. He
looked for intuitive meanings whenever he was out.
The last Saturday he'd been out, bicycling up Seawall, the wooden cargo box on his bike was
buffeted enough by the Gulf breezes, he could only pedal along slowly. Out to his left, between Pier
Twenty-one and Thirty-two, a work gang of orange-suited inmates picked up trash on the beach
lapped by small, metronomic waves. A thankless task, trash sure to reappear a few weeks later. The
trashcans on the sidewalk weren't overflowing. Some people apparently were above properly
throwing away candy wrappers, thinking what, waves during the night would take them out and
bury them deep in the Gulf?
Then he saw something the inmates would not pick up with their claw-grabber sticks: spots of
black tar. They needed a shovel, and the supervisor was headed back up the beach to evidently get
one from the work van.
But black tar on those gray sands? Obviously, what it meant was an oil tanker inbound on the
Houston sea lanes had bled out into the water. But what, at an intuitive level, did it mean?
Alroy saw symbolism in those black patches on the gritty grayness of the sand. His intuition
saw it so. Possibly a warning. How could anybody not see some conflict between man and nature in
that black patch? If man had his way, tar would keep washing up on beaches everywhere. And soon
the cleaning up could fall behind.
Alroy didn't know the answer. Stop using petroleum? Was that why he didn't want a car?
Or was it put more inmates to work cleaning up the beach, sorta like raking those sand gardens
in Japan. It would become a ritual purification to get something out of reach: A time when man was
not dependent on extracting the remains of animals that lived millenniums before on the planet,
animals who vanished because they were brain-short with hungry bodies. Nature could no longer
give them what their unbalanced lives demanded. Not, Alroy intuitively saw, unlike man.
§
At work, Alroy and Tuan struggled with the spreadsheets they'd built for OneLife. The
insurance-annuity combo didn't make sense numerically. Sure, it conceptually appealed to why
people did business with an insurance company. The policy answered the two life contingencies:
dying too soon or living too long. It would pay off a lump sum death benefit in the first instance and
offered a monthly income for life in the second.
Alroy saw immediately the beautiful symmetry of the product, but as he and Tuan painfully
discovered, the investment environment kept it from making sense.
Alroy conceded Duncan, with his more sophisticated way of forecasting an interest rate, might
be able to pull OneLife out of its Less-Than-Ready-To-Run status. But, as he understood it, the
interest-rate model with its probabilistic scenarios and defensible justifications would take way more
time than what Irv had allotted them. They had to present the feasibility study to the Marketing staff
in ten days.
Still, if anybody could pull the rabbit out for OneLife, it was Duncan. He'd seen him in action: It
was an afternoon, and Irv had gone to a meeting and the five of them were taking an impromptu
break, cracking jokes when apropos of nothing, Olivia tossed out the opinion AGI could move its
home office somewhere else, "What about St. Paul, Minnesota?" she said, laughing.
Duncan, rocking in his desk chair, popped a couple of jelly beans into his mouth. "Let me tell
you about St. Paul," he said. He reached up to a line of binders on the shelf over his desk. "St. Paul,
considered one of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis being the more recognized member of that dynamic
urban dyad, stealing the limelight so St. Paul, the inferior twin can quietly do its governance as the
state capitol. Okay?" he said, flipping the pages of the binder rapidly, then pausing, popping a few
more jelly beans.
"Headwaters of the great Mississippi River," he said, flipping a few more pages. "Here it is,
these data left an indelible stain on my memory, so soon as you said St. Paul, I remembered, I had to
see it again in ink. Unbelievable. Okay, are you ready?" He looked up, eyeing Olivia, Van, Tuan, and
Alroy for reactions. Alroy was bemused.
"The mortality stats for degenerative diseases in the Twin Cities MSA are all below national
averages. Heart disease, cancers, kidney disease, you name it. I mean a CHD at age eighty of fifteen
a thousand. Incredibly good. Even when you rule out ethnicity, no simple exercise, but I've done it,
you still end up substantially below the national figures, so what is it? I asked myself this question
and was I ever chasing the goose, but look where this went."
He put down the first binder, pulled down another. Started flipping pages, again pausing for a
few more jelly beans. "I'm going to save you the suspense, I won't bring up comparable data for
Davenport, Iowa, for Kansas City, Missouri, and on and on, down the length of the mighty
Mississip. No, straight to the outlet and its queen city of New Orleans, Louisiana, a bit of New
France on the Gulf where those cold waters of the Mississippi beginning their journey in the cold
reaches of Minnesota are finally blended with the warm Gulf waters. Okay, ready?"
Van leaned forward. Duncan ran his finger across the page. "Listen, CHD in New Orleans at age
eighty is forty-two a thousand, almost three times the Twin Cities figure. That's significant. Okay,
again scraping the data for ethnicity bias can be done, but even adjusting there only brings the figure
down into the low thirties. Still twice the figure up north. Why? Any ideas?"
"Mosquitoes," Tuan said, laughing.
"No, seriously, rule out diet, weather, everything you can reasonably do and you end up with
one unalterable fact with a direct bearing on these mortality statistics. Which is, ta-dah, the river.
Yes, the river.
"I don't have the figures here, but I got them online. The chemical composition of river water in
the Twin Cities compared to similar samplings in New Orleans knocks you off your chair. You want
to tell those people in New Orleans, Just drink bottled water. If you don't you're drinking all the
effluents, all the fert runoff, all dissolved cow pucky for fifteen hundred miles of riverway brought
to you in a mere sixteen days of river flow, if someone in St. Paul tossed some car antifreeze in the
river because they don't care-- Get my drift? All the toxins upstream are delivered to the doorstep of
New Orleans, and we wonder why their mortality stats are in the toilet. They are!"
He popped more jelly beans in his mouth, one by one, satisfied by his QED.
"But what does this have to do with us not moving to St. Paul?" Olivia asked.
"Well, aside from the fact I don't like cold weather, it might be a better location for the
company, we'd get less sub-par insurance applicants and more of those healthy Norwegians, but then
AGI would have to change all its stationary and forms, so we can't do it." He laughed.
§
It was Sunday again, and once more Alroy walked downtown to the Greyhound station and
caught the outbound bus with its highway stop in Dickinson, the other side of the Causeway.
He walked over to her place, a dump of a place, a beater Nissan sedan sitting on the gravel
driveway with a BALL HIGH SCHOOL decal in the rear window. Far more yard than house, so
typical of that neighborhood in Dickinson, a clapboard house of two rooms, kitchen and a
bathroom--the latter added in back it appeared--and missing a coat of paint for forty years,
minimum. He saw her push open the front screen door at his approach once he arrived. The sight of
her was worth a four-shot espresso: The trim, but not skinny body, the long auburn hair, the light
eyes, she stood there wearing faded jeans and a white tee, untucked, its front a headshot of Selena
tented out from her bosom. She smiled a welcome.
"I'm working on supper, cornbread and chili today, c'mon in, I want to show you something."
They went inside. The aroma of something good simmering in the Dutch oven hit Alroy when
he stepped into the kitchen to see what was on. "This has to cook for another forty-five, I've already
gone that long on it, so I was thinking--"
Alroy smiled.
"I was thinking, whoever lived here last didn't do much with the backyard, mowing it I mean,
and I found this push mower slid under the back porch. I tried it and it works, just needs a little
pushing to get it looser."
Alroy stared at her in disbelief: She wanted him to work before he ate? "I've never cut grass," he
said softly.
 "Oh, Roy, please, I'm too busy with the food and I figure you could go out there, cut it all in half
the time as me, you're so much stronger." She stepped over and started stroking his arm, as if a little
of that would coax his muscles to want to start working.
He resisted the temptation to step away.
"Let's see the mower," he said, figuring if he came across the bridge, he might at least be a
decent guest.
Out the back screen door, off the stoop, leaning against the peeled-paint clapboards, the handles
of a push mower. Alroy looked skeptical, seeing signs of rust on the blades. How long has it been
since it was last used? He wrinkled his brow.
She faced the grassy yard, pointing toward strands of barbed wire, fencing the back boundary.
"See how it's grown. Some of it you might not be able to mow through. Found a scythe for that."
Alroy surveyed the situation, two-thousand square feet minimum, he calculated, and most of it
taller than the mower blades. What is she thinking? He took a deep breath and picked up the handles
of the mower, wheeling it into launch position for a first pass to his right.
The screen door spring stretched and--boinnnng--snapped to, JoBecca's lithe body disappearing
inside, leaving Alroy to struggle.
He pushed; the mower balked. He pulled the mower back from the half-foot of turf he had cut,
or more properly torn loose. He gritted his teeth. This is not happening for me.
He pulled the mower back and gave it a running start to see if that made a difference. Sounds of
a country song drifted out the back screen door, JoBecca evidently content to listen to the radio
while waiting on the cooking, Alroy having been assigned his chore.
He looked at the grass. He'd mowed a patch two feet long. He mentally computed the
infinitesimal percentage of the yard and realized this was no forty-five minute job.
"You doing okay out there?" JoBecca yelled from inside. He grunted a reply and gave the
mower a hard push, then let it go.
He scrunched up his face. He stared at the lawn mower handle on the ground. Maybe, just
maybe, she drove her ex-husband into the arms of a seventeen-year-old? Is there another side to her
story?
He looked at the screen door, hearing strains of "I Don't Know How to Love You." He picked up
the lawn mower's handle, flipped it around, and wheeled it over to rest against the house by the
stoop and went back inside.
JoBecca was paddling cornbread mix and stopped, glancing at Alroy. "What's wrong?"
He didn't know what to say. He couldn't say she was using him, though he then suspected a
demanding side of JoBecca for any man in her life. Then he didn't know if she was aware of how
she came across. He kept it simple: "Let me put it this way, JoBecca. You got a wheat field out there.
That push mower is not up to the job. You're gonna have to get someone with a gas mower to work
it over."
"Well, I thought it worth a try, you doing that while I finish supper here," she said, seemingly
without guile. "We won't eat for another twenty minutes."
"It's fine. I can keep you company."
A few wordless minutes passed, then: "You must've worried a guy with a gas mower might
charge too much," Alroy said. "That why you asked me to give the push mower a try?" He thought
he was being conciliatory, trying to see what she was up against.
"No, didn't enter my mind. I knew you'd be here before I had supper ready, and it was
something you could do. Thought you were a different kinda guy. I never got my ex to do anything,
any little thing needed doing like that."
Alroy stood up straighter against the kitchen door frame on which he leaned. The
Reduction Calculator Engine in his mind sprung into action, pinions meshing, shafts turning.
So a push mower taking on overgrown grass is now "any little thing that needs doing"? Can
this seeing her anymore go anywhere good? "If you could borrow a neighbor's gas mower, I
might give it a shot next time I'm here," he said disingenuously.
"Don't know any neighbors yet." She lifted the lid on the Dutch oven with a towel, giving the
chili a stir. The cooking aroma picked up his appetite, even though he might not have earned his
supper on JoBecca's scorecard.
Soon enough, she had ladled out the chili into two bowls and cut up the cornbread, ready on a
plate they shared at the bare kitchen table with four chairs. Alroy guessed it was why the place was
rented as "furnished," though a sofa and bed seemed to be it for the rest of the place.
"Sorry there's not more butter. Missed that shopping."
"Oh, that's okay," he said, blowing on a steaming spoonful of chili. "This is good."
"This and mac and cheese are my ol' go-to's." She smiled, her light eyes showing some evident
delight she might be going places now with her male guest, who unlike her was college-educated
and employed.
Does she see me as a step up from evil ex? "You find any possible jobs around here?" he said,
slipping back into the premise of his visits: Help her get back on her feet and slough off the financial
embarrassment once the savings runs out, which Alroy calculated was probably weeks away.
They talked about who might hire her in Dickinson, but Alroy quickly sized up reading the
weekly throwaway newspaper for job openings wouldn't do: She had to start knocking on doors.
"Want more chili?"
"Sure, great stuff."
"Oh, forgot to offer you a beer, I've gotta a coupla Coors in the fridge."
"I'm fine, a glass of water's okay."
"You had a beer last time you were here,"
He looked at her dishing out more chili into his bowl, appreciated her finely calibrated body, the
long auburn hair, and yet the pinions turning on shafts of the Reduction Calculator Engine in his
mind told him again where things must go.
"I hate to bug out on you too soon, but I have a meeting with my boss tomorrow, a review of my
work, and I need to get back so I can prepare for what's he's going to ask."
"Oh," she said, setting down his bowl of chili. "But, Roy, how you gonna get home? The bus
won't come by 'til six or so, like last time."
This had escaped him. But it need not slow down his early exit. He held out an upright thumb.
"Hitchhike."
 He finished off the chili and his third piece of cornbread, then stood. "Sorry to eat and run, but
I'm getting panicked about tomorrow and it's important to keeping my job," he said, warming up to
his deception.
"Oh, Roy, I thought we could just sit around and spend a nice Sunday afternoon together. I hate
see you leave like this."
I could tell her she's expecting me to carve out one of my two free days for these visits and
despite her body of plenty-o-promise, I don't see anywhere for either of us. Who knows what
handyman chore she'll have for me next time.
"As I said, just go out and knock on doors, and you'll get something going."
"But, Roy, can't you just stay a bit longer, until four-thirty?"
"No, gotta get ready for tomorrow and Irv." His mental Reduction Calculator Engine said a
decision is a decision.
He backed out the front screen door, facing JoBecca who followed his every step, as if she
could convince him they would be something more than a meal exchanged for some fast counsel and
comfort. Out on the porch, he let the spring of the screen door slam it shut.
He was off the porch, walking for the road, when he heard the screen door slam a second time.
He resisted the temptation to turn around. He kept walking as far away from 408 Seguin Road
as he could manage, a narrow paved road, with a dusty shoulder giving way to overgrown weeds.
From behind, a piercing scream hit him in the back. "Why doesn't anything ever work out for
me?" Her sobbing mangled the words. He kept walking, eyes on the main highway ahead. She was
desperate. He shrugged his shoulders and took a deep breath, the salty air from the Gulf delivering
him from his disillusionment stupor.
 Chapter Nine: First Brain Waves

He hitchhiked.
Alroy stood at the on-ramp to Interstate 45, well in front of a NO HITCHHIKING sign, his right
thumb out. His left hand held a cardboard sign he found by the road--possibly providence he
thought--because someone had written on it with a Sharpie, GALVESTON. He had, in a matter of
minutes, a ride nearly to his front door.
His chauffeur was a Black man, graying at the temples, evidently a handyman, given the ladder
and miscellany of carpentry tools thrown in back of his Ford pickup. An aging truck, but as Alroy
noted a Texas safety sticker affixed to the lower left of the windshield, so he relaxed about his well-
worn ride into Galveston.
He thanked the man for picking him up and explained he didn't normally hitchhike, but this was
an emergency. He had some woman trouble back in Dickinson and left way before he would catch
the bus into town.
The man said, "Women set you up and knock you down like bowling pins. I think they kinda
like that."
Alroy explained how she expected him to mow a backyard of nearly knee-high grass with a
push mower. The man hmmm'd and hunn'd. "She be needing a professional lawn cut, that so?"
"Yeah."
"She have money?"
"I don't know. She might be on food stamps."
"Well, I just be in Galveston helping my brother, project we're doing. But I get back home,
maybe I call on her soon, see if she needs yard work, got a fine gas mower back at the place."
"Yes. She needs a pro to take care of all that grass gone to seed."
"What's her address? See, write it here." He pointed to a clipboard of a memo pad on his
dashboard, with a ballpoint hanging off a metal-ball chain. 408 Seguin Road Alroy wrote neatly.
Above the dash, out the windshield was Galveston Bay, odd boats sliding over the steel water,
white-winged, graphite seagulls kiting in the wind. And from their elevation on the four inbound
lanes of the Causeway, he saw the somnolent skyline of downtown. Alroy also saw a symmetry with
this man beside him, delivering him from the clutches of JoBecca and who would later call on her
and offer to finish the job Alroy had boldly walked away from.
§
It was Monday and Alroy spent most of the morning with Tuan going over the presentation they
would make to Marketing in the afternoon about OneLife. They had reached the make-or-break
stage with this product and, in a sense, it was out of their hands.
At eleven-thirty, the two headed out for the cafeteria. Tuan carried a backgammon set. Of late,
he'd been teaching Alroy the game, but Alroy was unsure if it was a game he'd regularly play at
lunch. Although backgammon moved fast, it also had much rote memorization of combinatorial
probabilities. As Tuan might point out--a six and one on the dice gives you these moves, but moving
here has a fifty percent chance of being hit ... Alroy much preferred the strategies of chess, but it was
not the best cafeteria pastime--the lunch hour was too short.
They walked over to the banks of elevators and took the first one down. Alroy stood there, Tuan
beside him, looking for all the world like he was carrying a business case full of hundred-dollar
bills, not a backgammon set. The overhead display showed FLOOR FIVE in LED green dots and
the doors slid apart. In stepped one young woman--Alroy guessed her a recent hire--he hadn't seen
her before--and she had a paper sack in one hand, a water bottle in the other. The memory of seedy
JoBecca fresh in his mind, Alroy was impressed by the young woman's modesty and quick smile for
the two of them. Alroy figured she must work in Claims, what they mostly did on the fifth floor
anyway, handle claims.
Alroy's quick impression of the young woman: attractive, but in a girl-next-door, not self-
conscious sort of way. She wasn't one to flaunt it like JoBecca with tight T-shirts. He knew he
looked at this new arrival in the elevator car a few seconds too long; he felt obligated to say
something to defuse any misunderstanding about his attention to her presence.
"You must be having lunch outside, al fresco," he said.
"Sure, sunny out, I like to eat my lunch in the fresh air."
"And you can see the ships out in the Gulf," Tuan volunteered, his backgammon set swinging
ever so slightly from his right arm.
The elevator then went straight to the second floor with no more stops. The doors opened on
second, and Alroy stepped out, not looking to his side for one more glance at the young woman from
Claims. Tuan followed.
§
That afternoon, the two sat in a conference room opposite Don, Marketing Executive VP, and
Jim, Marketing Analyst; and Alroy and Tuan presented the case for OneLife.
"OneLife works best with a long duration," Alroy said. "A male, aged twenty, takes out a
$100,000 policy and by age sixty, his accumulated premiums with our interest assumption totals
$24,000, after expenses of less than one percent--"
Don had a legal pad in front of him and evidently wrote down the number.
"So, the annuity kicks in," Alroy continued, "and our male life age sixty has twenty-eight years
life expectancy and a monthly payout of eighty bucks and change. Not bad."
"But the premiums for those forty years," Jim asked, "where are those on these spreadsheets?"
Alroy and Tuan had printed out extra copies of every spreadsheet they'd refer to and set them
out for Don and Jim before the meeting started.
"Page two," Tuan said. "See, third column, an increasing function in the third column."
"This is the best possible outcome for OneLife, an attained age twenty applicant? Where does it
go for the other ages?" Don asked, flipping through the pages, as if the answer would immediately
pop out.
"This is frankly the part we weren't looking forward to," Tuan offered. "It doesn't get better."
"Only worse," Alroy added.
"Like?" Don asked.
"Page seven," Alroy said, "a summary of applicant ages, twenty through fifty-nine, though Irv
said we would have to cut it off at age fifty if we wanted a respectable payout to the future
annuitant, and could delay annuity payout past sixty."
"See what you mean, see what you mean," Don said somberly. "What'd you think, Jim?"
"When I first heard of the concept behind OneLife, I thought it was innovative, even brilliant.
How could you not sell this product? It had a one-two punch. People afraid of dying too young or
living too long. Put the insurance and annuity together. Why not? But how to do a bit of magic. It's a
serious question."
"Are these all the analyses you've done for the product?" Don asked. "Page seven here, the
summary, is how it all shakes out?"
"Yep," Alroy said, tapping his mechanical pencil on the printout in front of him. "This is what
we've done the last six weeks. All of it."
"Well, I agree with Jim, great concept, our sales force would be gung-ho about selling it, but the
law calls for fair disclosure, so we need some summary of how the product will perform, numbers
like this in black and white, right in front of the applicant." Don paused, looked at Alroy and Tuan
directly, then continued. "And before the applicant signs on the dotted line, our agent must explain
these figures and see that the applicant understands them. You know what I think?"
Alroy blinked, sure Don wasn't giving them good news.
"I think OneLife is a dog. We can't sell this. Simple as that."
Alroy was stunned, couldn't find the words to respond. He and Tuan had been working on those
pages and pages of spreadsheets for weeks, trying to find the best possible understanding of how to
design OneLife. Sure, it had been sketchy getting the kinks sorted out, but Alroy felt with an
investment environment closer to the historical trends, it might have been possible, not the dog Don
was throwing it out as.
"We'll give Irv a summary of how this meeting went," Tuan finally said.
Alroy kept busy stacking all his spreadsheets to fit inside his manila folder, and eyed the similar
piles of spreadsheets across the table in front of Don and Jim, sure, with the informational-only
status of their copies, they would probably be tossed in the nearest blue recycling bin once he and
Tuan left the room. He wouldn't exactly say the marketing guys were heartless, they were just doing
their job of passing or rejecting the feasibility study. They were Marketing and had to bring in the
premium dollars keeping AGI afloat; more than one insurance company had submarined of late in
well-publicized downsizings, capsizings, and sell-offs
It was Don and Jim's prerogative to tell actuaries no. Alroy only wanted recognition of his and
Tuan's contribution other than the label "dog" stuck on six weeks of work.
Later that day, when Alroy was going outside to the sidewalk on his way home, he saw at last
Duncan's girlfriend. Nora, whom he mentioned by name more than once a day, stood beside a silver
Outback, ready to get in the passenger side, letting Duncan drive. She had a quirkiness to
compliment Duncan's slapdash, dishevelled appearance. Nora might have been in a black-and-white
movie from the forties--that's how she dressed, the long flowing dark brown rayon dress, the padded
shoulders of her matching short jacket and above all, the pillbox hat on her pinned-up hair.
Obviously, yin to his yang as they pulled away from the curb and trundled down Second.
For a moment, seeing Duncan out of the office got Alroy to thinking about his predictable
setback for the day: Marketing shooting down OneLife. He knew going into the meeting they might
balk.
But seeing Duncan took him back to the one out that could save OneLife, Duncan's idea of a
probabilistic modelling of future interest rates. With any sort of recognition of historical data,
OneLife would be much more appealing on numbers. But Irv already said he didn't buy Duncan's
overthinking. And Marketing would never go for it. Between the two factions, Irv and Marketing,
Alroy conceded OneLife was dead. It was politics triumphing over intellectual curiosity, perhaps,
but he and Tuan would be on to a new project in a day or so.
§
When Alroy got home, he had voicemail. JoBecca, her message being, Call me.
He had as much intention of calling her as he had of walking across the Causeway, backwards.
No, this Just-Want-To-See-You-In-Person thing was getting out of hand. He had to stop it.
He called phone support, 711. After ten minutes holding, someone came on. A chipper woman,
who asked how she could make his day better.
"I want to block a phone number. Someone is harassing me."
"Okay, we can do that. You know there is a fifty-cent a month charge for each number blocked.
We mention this upfront so there is no misunderstanding about your monthly phone bill."
"I'm sure she'll quit after a month or so of being blocked. Can I unblock later?"
"No problem. What is the number?"
He gave her the number, one still written at the front of his date book in what he now saw as
misplaced importance.
JoBecca was history, gone, and with any luck, purged from his memory. He could do better, up
the stakes. Somebody like the voluptuous Olivia, whom he saw every day at AGI, but whom he
couldn't ever accept as just another actuary, especially now knowing she was between boyfriends
and probably taking her time.
But did he have a chance with Olivia? Maybe. He had put a stop to the distraction of JoBecca,
for starters.
The operator said the block was in effect immediately and then asked if there was anything else
she could help him with. "No, you've taken one big pebble out of my shoe," he said, laughing.
§
As Alroy expected, after the meeting with Marketing, Irv told him and Tuan they were off
OneLife, but it could be picked up again if the investment environment changed. Still, as Irv pointed
out, "If returns stay at this level, the product's on the shelf."
Alroy's new assignment was the most mundane actuarial work: filling out state insurance
department compliance forms, which had the intrinsic make-work quality of quarterly filings.
Traditionally these forms were left to the most junior actuary--like Alroy--and a senior actuary,
Duncan, would review the entries and sign off.
 A few days later, while he was plodding through one such form, he was surprised, but then not
surprised, by a young visitor to the actuarial department:
"Who's this?" Irv, stepping out of his office, asked of the short, dark-skinned woman, who held
an infant. Alroy knew she must be Pavanjeet's wife. Van had gotten up out of his desk chair, said a
few quick words of greeting, then proudly announced, "This is Rahul, our first-born." He bent over
stroking the infant's underchin with his forefinger.
"Looks just like Dad," Irv said to the beaming Pavanjeet. "Rahul, have you met everyone? Tuan,
Duncan, Alroy, Olivia. I'm Irv."
The infant resolutely nibbled on his pacifier. "The appointment's at twelve-thirty?" Pavanjeet
asked his wife Maya. She nodded, saying it seemed like a convenient time to bring little Rahul by
for everyone to see.
"Well, we're glad you stopped by. I know Van is glad too, look at the proud father," Irv said,
chuckling.
Maya glanced at her wristwatch, hiking her arm supporting the infant, "Yes, we must be on our
way. Fortunately, it's not too far, just several blocks over to the Medical Center and they have plenty
of parking."
Pavanjeet walked the two into the hall and came back with a proud smile seemingly epoxied to
his face.
§
Whether it was the sight of a fellow actuary's newborn or not, Alroy would never know. But a
few days later, he and Duncan were outside AGI chatting, while Duncan waited for Nora and the car,
when they hit upon an idea irrevocably changing the course of Alroy's actuarial work at AGI.
"Great seeing little Rahul the other day," Alroy said.
"I can imagine the feeling, how proud Van must feel," Duncan said, slowly rocking his head to
and fro as if he were some Indian snake charmer, whose flute could tame a cobra. "I mean, right
there in the solid flesh of an infant is living proof of your manhood, how great is that?"
"A living testament--" Alroy added.
"To Van the Man, who does not shoot blanks!" Duncan doubled over in laughter.
"Can you imagine, little Rahul, three weeks old," Alroy said, "and he's going over to the
Medical Center for a check-up? I don't see the doctor that often. He must be in and out of the
doctor's every month."
"Or more," Duncan added. "Hey, you have no idea how much the doctors did even before he
was born."
"Do you think Van is going to take out an insurance policy on Rahul?"
"Sure, juvenile policy, people buy those, but--"
"But what?"
"Well, what are you insuring against? Certainly not loss of future income, a kid is no
breadwinner, he's a mouth to feed," Duncan said."
"Yeah, I see insurance might be questionable, but people might think an insurance policy wards
off early death."
 "It's a life contingency, why we have juvenile policies."
Duncan looked down the street for a sign of Nora, but evidently she was running late.
"Wherever there's life, there's a contingency of death, and you can insure that?" Alroy asked.
"Oh, yeah, even plants, you can insure against crop failure, locusts, bad hail storm, you name
it."
"But getting back to Rahul, what about before he was born?" Alroy asked trying to get at the
limits of the concept. "Was he insurable in utero?"
"No insurance company does that. They wait two weeks, minimum, to issue a juvenile policy."
"But why not in utero, if you can prove life?"
"If you can prove life? Brain waves. Beating heart. Seems a durable legal test. Why not?"
"That would be something, I can see it now: fetal life insurance."
"You know, people might go for that. They might buy it. It's limited term, nine months max,
wrap in unlimited medical care--possible preemie care's a big selling point and because the company
wants the fetus to live, wow, this might have legs--"
"Probably more than the dog OneLife Irv had me studying."
"I'll give you credit, but we should go talk with Irv first chance we get. Let's each put together
our thoughts tonight, but I think the concept has merit--"
Alroy glanced sideways, at something in his peripheral vision: Nora had arrived with the car.
"Tomorrow, for sure," Duncan yelled, walking around to the driver's side, while Nora came to
the passenger door.
§
The next morning, Duncan scheduled an afternoon meeting with Irv. At two, they were in his
office.
"What do you two fellows have on your minds?" Irv asked, elbows planted on his desk, fingers
steepled.
As agreed, Duncan led off: "Alroy and I were talking about Van's baby yesterday and we came
up with the idea of life insurance for the unborn. It is a neat life contingency to insure and I don't
know of anybody out there doing it--",
"You don't think there's a reason nobody, including us, does this insurance?" Irv asked.
"Probably because it's a proxy for a polarized political debate," Duncan said.
"Yeah, might be a stopper, but fetal life insurance, c'mon, persuade me," Irv said.
"Okay, medical technology advances all the time," Alroy said, "the test of when life ceases
medically is no brain waves, no heartbeat, so the obverse has to be true."
"Brain waves, heartbeat," Duncan added, "equals life, a life that could end, so QED, insurable
contingency."
"Hmmmm. This is an interesting way to put it. I wonder what the legal department would say
on your definition of life."
Duncan's head was rocking back and forth, as it always did when he was pondering something,
a trait Alroy picked up from almost Day One at AGI. "And another thing, for this to work we need a
mortality table. I doubt there is one."
"Birth certificates are everywhere," Irv said. "but they follow how many pregnancies?"
"Or miscarriages," Alroy added.
"Wait a second," Irv said, "this is getting complex. As I said before, let's see what Legal says
about defining life. Then we can talk about going somewhere with this, okay?"
Alroy and Duncan nodded. Irv hadn't rejected the idea outright. He admitted its possibility.
§
The weeks to follow seemed a blur to Alroy. So much happened quickly, he wondered if he'd
stepped on a rocket ship for an actuarial lunar orbit. It felt novel.
First, there was a meeting with Branson of the in-house legal department, Irv, Duncan, and he
present.
"I've asked Branson to summarize precedent on insurable life, as it applies to our proposed
policy for a life in utero," Irv said. his ever-present legal pad before him, Alroy was half-convinced
Irv didn't get to be the manager he was by trusting his memory. He, the writer-down, the filer-away,
for sure.
Branson, a dark-haired, strapping young associate of the legal staff, the type assigned to pore
over volumes of documents, had before him an impressive collection of papers he pulled from his
leather briefcase, sitting on the deskchair beside him. "This has been an interesting assignment,"
Branson said, easing into the subject. "We can start by giving some definitions of death in the legal
literature. Death has been repeatedly defined as the absence of a beating heart, feeling for a pulse in
the more accessible places on the body like the wrist or in the neck at the carotid artery is well-
established in the coroner's practice. I can cite precedents back to the sixteen hundreds, and
undoubtedly the test existed before then.
"Test number one is a beating heart. Test number two is well-established, too, and citations go
back almost as far. Presence of breathing. Is the subject breathing? Here the traditional tests include
holding one's hand, sometimes with a mirror, up to the subject's mouth--exhaled breath will fog over
the mirror. Or placing the palm on the person's chest to detect any rise and fall of the lungs."
"But wait," Irv interjected. "breathing for a fetus doesn't exist, not by any test for the presence
of exhalation. That test is stopper for the unborn." Irv seemed bothered, possibly thinking he should
have thought of it earlier. He wrote a note on his legal pad.
"This is true," Branson said. "The fetus gets its oxygen from the mother's blood stream and
exchanging air in the lungs won't happen until birth, until the familiar cry of life. But breathing is
not so easy to use as a test anymore."
"Why?" Duncan asked. "It's been a test for hundreds of years, as you say." He popped a jelly
bean in his mouth, chewed softly, contentedly.
"Modern medicine, simple as that. We have advanced the art of saving people's lives in the last
few decades. This is what emergency medical services and life support intervention is all about. And
the first two tests I mentioned: beating heart, breathing lungs are not the rigid definitions of life they
once were. Specifically, a heart can often be restarted with a defibrillator any EMT can quickly grab.
They are that common. Another intervention is the artificial heart used until the patient gets a heart
transplant--"
 "You're saying the beating heart definition is a bit shaky?" Alroy said.
"More than that. It's almost obsolete with medical technology. Then the secondary definition of
clinical death kicks in. Namely, cannot be revived. If medical intervention can't restart the beating
heart, then an absence of a beating heart fulfills the reasonable test of clinical death."
"What about breathing?" Irv asked. "A gray area too?"
"Definitely, it all falls under the category of life support and it can go on for months, even years.
Assisted breathing, oxygen tents, all well-established. Once again, if medical intervention is
impractical, and the subject is out of reach of a hospital, then a reasonable test, coupled with a lack
of a beating heart, is no breathing."
"What about brain waves?" Alroy asked. "I thought they are a test."
"Gold standard these days. No medical intervention procedures, yet, can bootstrap a brain once
it flat-lines. None."
"And fetuses show brain waves," Duncan said. "I read that somewhere."
"Yes, and more generally, hospital staff routinely measure brain waves to definitively determine
death of the patient. And more to Duncan's point, hospitals also measure brain waves in fetal
complications, miscarriage instances, to make sure the right procedures are taken, and, of course, to
protect the mother's life.
"How long has this been the gold standard?" Irv asked.
"As long as they've been measuring brain waves. This goes back to the nineteen forties, I'm
sure. And it has been accepted as definitive from the start. Without brain activity, nothing else
happens, no heart beat, no lungs breathing--"
"And how well established is measuring brain waves in fetuses?" Alroy asked.
"Glad you asked. I looked up the literature. One of the first things on my check list," he said
with a smile. "Specifically, in nineteen forty-three the brain research pioneer Donald B. Lindsley
used brain wave measuring equipment from the Grass Instrument Company in Iowa to record the
first fetal brain waves on his son, yet to be born, Robert. That was hree quarters of a century ago."
"Wow," Irv said. "The standard has been around for eons."
"Not so fast," Branson replied. "I've checked and no good body of case law establishes this
definition in the courts."
"But, wait, is that the right question?" Duncan asked. "The question is, Is there an insurable
life? If you grant brain waves confirms life--and a life I might add surviving ex utero with the latest
medical technology--happens all the time with preemies--then I think we have a life contingency to
insure."
"I'll concede that," Branson said. "I'll also grant you in the homicide of a pregnant woman, the
charge is always murder of two lives. Always."
"Where are we?" Irv asked. "Can we go forward with this product design, get with Marketing?"
"I don't see why not," Branson said. "We've got precedents defining life going back to the
Middle Ages with the beating heart and brain waves in utero going back seventy-five years, so it's an
entirely prima facie case for an insurable life, so my legal opinion is you have firm grounds to go for
it--" he said with a chuckle. "But--"
"But what?" Irv shot back.
 "You know announcing this product will have incendiary effects in the culture wars at large. I
have no problem imagining law suits on each side of the abortion debate challenging or defending
the validity of fetal life and its insurability. Let them fight it out. Our company, if it's challenged,
will have no shortage of independent outside resources to accept in its defense. Yes, AGI's name
might be spread far and wide, not a bad thing, or a good thing. All publicity is an opportunity."
With the legal okay, Irv looked over at Alroy and Duncan and without saying a word implied
they had another project on their plate, one that might get top priority before long.
§
Once Branson left, Irv met with Alroy and Duncan
"How can we get started?" Irv asked rhetorically.
"Well, to price the policy," Duncan said, "we need a mortality table, age minus three-quarters to
attained age zero." He chuckled at his obscure actuarial pun
"Data, we need data. Medical records?" Alroy asked.
"Well, we have the University of Texas Medical Branch, UTMB, right up the street. Let me
make some calls." He smiled as if he was the sort who had more than a few contacts at the medical
school, especially among the public health types who accumulated data by the ream, almost like a
state-side version of the CDC in Atlanta.
He went to noodling with his Cross ballpoint on the legal pad in front of him, as if trying to pull
the proposal into some sort of manageable context. "A brilliant idea. This is my first impression, but
you two know how politically charged this might be--"
"Still, as Duncan and I agree," Alroy said, "the benefits for the buyer are medical benefits
wrapped into this policy. We'll pay almost anything to keep the fetus alive and not pay out a death
benefit--"
"Good point," Irv said. "But then the politics of abortion." He steepled his fingers. "Induced
miscarriage is not insurable. No death benefit."
"Sort of like our two-year suicide exclusion on all life insurance," Alroy said.
"Say it's an assisted suicide exclusion for nine months," Irv said. "Ooh, a bad joke. We'll have to
work to get the tone on all this right, but that's for Marketing. We do numbers here."
"I'll say one thing," Duncan interjected, "if this goes political, everyone in the country will
know us. You can't buy the publicity. It could be a marketer's dream."
"Or nightmare," Irv laconically added.
"I'll make some phone calls," Irv said. "Get people for the two of you to interview next week at
UTMB. Before then, Alroy, you might scour the Internet and see if anybody has done this. Look at
Lloyd's. Who knows, maybe they gave it a try in Europe. And, Duncan, you might sketch out how to
build the mortality table. What are the covariables, the independent variables, the hazard function,
shock value, all those? Whoa," he took a deep breath, "we're starting from a different perspective
here."
 Chapter Ten: Tontines

One night, Alroy was back in his place and done with dinner, some takeout BBQ and cole slaw
from down the street. He stared at his phone, knowing it might ring in minutes. His counselor phone
booth opened at seven. He then looked around the room and saw the copy of Derivatives Markets,
one book he needed to start cracking soon. Very soon. He'd put off exam prep for weeks, believing
in his cram strategy, maximum study, minimum duration equals maximum retention.
Minutes passed.
"Oh, hi, Roy, this is Pat. Remember me?"
"Sure, several weeks ago, something about your wife sticks in my mind," Alroy said, not
wanting to get anything wrong about the conversation of Paranoid Pat he remembered only too well.
"Yeah, she was trying to kill me. Remember?"
"So you and she are getting along now?"
"I did what you said, got rid of her gun--"
"Yes, you were going to put in an alarm system to calm her down in the big house and take that
gun and sell it to a pawn shop or turn it into the police, just get it out of the house."
"I just took it and threw it in Offatts Bayou off the bridge. Didn't tell her."
"And you didn't put in an alarm system?"
"Nope."
"She might get another gun to replace it."
"Maybe. Except now I got bigger problems."
"You've got bigger problems than a wife out to murder you?"
"Yeah, you hear about this e. coli stuff in Houston?"
"Vaguely," Alroy said, remembering something about closing down a swimming area in a small
park lake where too many kids were relieving themselves in unchlorinated water, The public health
officials had no choice.
"Well, it's proof."
"Proof of what?"
"Proof they are executing the plot to wipe us all out." Pat sounded worked up.
"But who are they, Pat? Who's doing this e. coli?"
 "Government agents, they're out to take over, make us zombies. I see it coming, really can."
"Government agents out to kill us, you sure?"
"Look at what they did in Waco. 'Member? They just took out those Branch Davidians with all
the firepower they could get. Leveled the place."
"But e. coli?"
"Yeah, they're sneaky. Going after little children too."
"You think they'll come after you?"
"They'll come after all of us. E. coli in our food. They will stop at nothing until they start
stacking corpses."
"You sound apocalyptic, Pat."
"No, I'm a survivalist, gotta fight back."
Paranoid Pat was easily beyond any counseling and comfort he might offer. This guy needed
some professional mental health intervention. "Tell you what, Pat, I've got a number for you to call,
a number where you can report what's going on and see if they can stop it. Okay?"
"Sure, we gotta act on this."
Alroy gave him the name of the Galveston County Mental Health Hotline. "Resources at your
fingertips. Open all days, all the time. Call these people and see what they say."
After they hung up, Alroy sighed, feeling sure Paranoid Pat would be in better hands. Any
competent mental health pro on the hotline would want to send a team of loony catchers in an
emergency van ASAP.
Alroy got another call.
It was clingy Babs, always on the lookout for Mr. Right, the dream soulmate who would feel
privileged to be her meal ticket. She didn't seem to get why Mr. Right would always morph into Mr.
Wrong. Alroy recalled all this effortlessly soon as she said her name, Babs.
"How are things going?" he asked.
"Well, I took a break from the scene, you know, what you suggested last time, trying to make
some sense of why this keeps happening over and over to me, I mean other women get what they
want."
Oh, yes, Alroy thought. The Cry-Me-Niagara lament begins. The only break in her unrelenting
tale of woe was remembered infatuations with Mr. Right before she wised up.
"You've taken a break and thought about what changes you might make, right?"
"Oh, yeah. I decided what I need to do is join a gym, work out a few times every week. Get tone
back in my body."
Alroy wasn't surprised. He wanted to tell her the answer was changes between her ears, not
thinner thighs, but he'd let her stick to her path of discovery. "You think doing this will attract better
men?" Say, I don't know, he wanted her to say.
"Oh, I'm sure. Those women down there, they're all so sweaty and sexy. And besides there's
these adorable men working out right next to you. It's perfect. What I want."
And Alroy wanted to add, Those men are probably all as superficial as you and don't know
there's more to any person worth your while than flat abs and most likely a puny brain upstairs.
"Those gym memberships aren't cheap, dues every month ... "
"I know, but I sign up and get the first two months free."
Alroy calculated an eight percent haircut upfront, a reasonable discount to get someone to sign a
two-year contract. "Well, they should give you some incentive to sign up."
"It's great. I don't like it after a month or so, I'll just stop going."
Wait, he thought. Stop going? What about the monthly dues? "They want you to pay on the
contract, don't they?"
"No, I'll tell them I don't have the money. I'll tell them how much blood you gonna squeeze off a
shrimp?"
"Well, you might offer to pay them for the time you used the gym, the month you got for free.
Try some accommodation." He knew she didn't understand the concept, her outlook being
everything in the world was a gimme, Babs being the anointed recipient from every Mr. Right out
there, flush with cash.
"Pay them? They said try for free."
Did he need to explain to Babs what a contract is? He gave up. "Besides the gym possibility,
have you come up with any other ideas how you might find the love of your life?"
"No. Just saw this sign in their window, two months free, and went inside and picked up the
application. Filling it out now. No money out of my pocket."
How do you spell garnished wages? he wanted to say. "I tell you what I recommend--"
"Sure, Roy, I'm open to all suggestions. I need something, I'm thirty-four and running out of
time--"
"Before you take the signed application into the health club, talk to a few women coming out,
ask them for a few minutes of their time, and see how they like it. I bet not one of them will tell you
they met some guy special there." Alroy knew he might be misspeaking himself on the latter point,
but Unreasonable Babs had to be reined in, she couldn't just go ahead and sign up, not if she didn't
plan to honor the contract ... but then maybe she'd meet Mr. Right right off the bat and lose him
before the two months were up and bingo, back to drop the gym.
They talked back and forth about how Babs didn't want to impose on some unsuspecting woman
leaving the gym for an interview, as if she wasn't about to impose on some hapless fellow she might
snag later. What Babs had to interest any man was something Alroy was not picking up. No, Babs--
self-pitying, clingy--would bombard every man's radar with a blast alert to turn and flee.
"I tell you what," Babs said. "I'll take the signed contract down to the gym, and stand with it in
my hand down there on Strand, outside their main door. I'll look at my watch and wait exactly five
minutes and see if a woman who comes out might let me interview her. If nobody says yes, then I'll
march right in and plop down that application in the business office and become a member. Simple."
"You're going to let chance decide for you?" he asked.
"Don't we all?"
"Sometimes," Alroy replied. "But you also have agency to influence the outcome, free will and
all." He knew the last idea went in and out her ears faster than a sneeze. He resisted asking her to
call him back and tell him how it went.
 §
At work, Alroy had his three-month review with Irv. Everything seemed to meet expectations
for his work at Atlas--at least that's what Alroy heard Irv say. He and Tuan had done a reasonable job
evaluating OneLife as a possible product, and Alroy and Duncan would soon tackle a much more
challenging project with fetal life insurance. "All in all, you've done more than the typical new
actuarial associate who starts in with a home office. At Atlas Global, we like to see new hires dive
into the tough questions.
"Although we don't have probation here, we want normal progress in your career development."
Alroy was momentarily puzzled, unsure what that meant. But when Irv added, "When do you take
your next exam?" Alroy instantly understood staying on track at AGI was contingent upon getting
past exam after exam on the way toward an FSA.
"Next exam's November, three months away," he said. Alroy knew the unspoken message from
Irv was, Three strikes and you're out, not working here anymore. And not flunking the same exam
three times in a row, but blowing any three exams. Normal progress let you blow one, two at the
max, but eventually pass all ten. So far, courtesy of the Cyprus Poly headstart, he had two down and
eight to go. It was no cinch.
"Well, let me know if we can help. Everyone else here has taken and passed this exam, and on
the first try, if I'm not mistaken. If you need help, say so and I'll schedule time for you and one of us
to go over what might be on the exam." Alroy felt relieved, as if the sword of Damocles wasn't
directly over his head.
§
He went straight home after work, not bothering with Alamo Cantina--or whatever it was
called--and saying hi to Rosie, instead an increasingly familiar stop at Langdon's Meats to pick up
some BBQ and cole slaw for dinner. Once home, he saw the main house had paying guests, car
license plates read KANSAS. He opened up a Shiner Bock and settled down to eat.
An hour or more went by and the clock had turned seven and his phone rang.
"We don't need names," the woman's voice said, the chewing and snapping of gum on the other
end of the line. This was her. His mind flipped back several weeks, remembering that call. "I
enjoyed your voice last time with you, but you didn't want to give me what I wanted--" Was she
crazy, why did she think he'd playact and go along with her idea of phone sex? Was he so desperate
to hear her on the other end of the line, moaning her head off? But the gum chewing was the tipoff
X, who refused to give her name, was on the line.
He said nothing, not wanting to validate her fantasy.
Another smacking of gum. "I was just wondering," she continued, "you having any reluctance,
maybe I should up the ante?"
"What do you mean?" Up the ante beyond phone sex? He was nonplussed at the idea.
"Oh, I was thinking of you in the flesh, how you'd come by here and do me--you get some Nehi
strawberry, hon--"
Alroy's jaw dropped. He saw it all falling into place, all of these calls, Kim, JoBecca, Paranoid
Pat, Babs, and now X. Nobody was interested in his advice, as it was, educated intuition mostly. No,
they were all needy people and they were out to suck him dry. Not enough to talk on the phone.
They had to see him in person eventually. He was half-sure Paranoid Pat would call back with some
new delusion Alroy had to go over to his place and stand guard until Pat could go out and take
delivery of a mastiff sentry dog for the home, his canine defense against the world and his wife.
Something whack.
And here was the neediest of all begging him to meet her in person and give her the poke she
felt she'd earned. How whack was that?
"I'm busy," he said, thinking of nothing else to say.
"I'll make it worth your while," she cooed. "Ain't nothing like what I got, you'll see." More gum
smacks.
"Well the thing is, my girlfriend has moved in. We're busy."
"Really? You won't be joshing me, will you?"
"No."
"Well, put her on the line, I'm calling your bluff, Roy. Put her on the line."
Alroy looked around the room. He was alone, for sure. Then he thought of Tina, the hostess at
the B & B in the main house. She was there. She had a woman's voice. But she couldn't fake what
was needed. "She can't come to the phone, she's busy in the main house with the guests." He left it
there.
"Aw, you're just making it up. You ain't got no girlfriend. No way, get your horny little body
over here," she said with the commanding finality of a dominatrix.
Alroy squeezed his phone.
"Guess what?" he said. "This conversation is over. And don't call back."
"Why not?"
He hung up and turned the phone off.
He was done. Sure, he had been planning to cut back to one hour a night and study more. But
this decision was even easier. The telephone advice business was finished. Done. He had the next
exam in three months. Models for Life Contingencies. This phone business, engaging, even
entertaining at first, had become a drain. With the likes of prime exhibit X on display, it had to go.
He'd take down the website and shut down the phone account number for the business. Tomorrow,
Roy, telephone creative listener and counselor, would be no more.
The Telephone-Roy-Who-Listens had stopped entertaining Telephone-Callers-Who-Whine-and-
Blame-Without-Shame.
§
With his moonlighting out of the way, Alroy was free to concentrate on the two most important
things in his life: studying hard for the Society of Actuaries Exam Three and working on the fetal
insurance model. He felt he'd never be at a loss about what to do, or what to think about. His plate
was full.
It was with, perhaps, some thought of great timing one Wednesday morning he had gone to the
cafeteria, picked up the penne insalada with a pomodoro sauce they had every Wednesday, and his
tray paid, ready to sit down, he saw Olivia.
He joined her.
They exchanged pleasantries, commented on each other's food choices, favorably, and then a
pause in the conversation.
 "I happened to overhear you and Duncan are talking about a new insurance product for the
unborn," she said. Alroy drank in the sight of her beautiful face in a way he obviously could not do
in the office upstairs. The hooded eyes, the ink-jet hair framing her skin, smooth as alabaster.
"And it's not appropriate for me to comment, especially while you two work on it." She gave
him a winsome look suggesting she had something in mind, an opening from evident curiosity.
Alroy was intrigued.
"I'm surprised no one else has thought about it before," he finally said.
"It interests me, possibly because I might have children one day. With modern medicine, I have
plenty of time." She smiled broadly, and then took a forkful of her shrimp salad. "But it would be
awkward if I had a discussion with you or Duncan in the workplace. I can just see Irv coming out
and saying, How is the compliance report going?"
"I see what you're saying. So this insurance possibility strikes a chord with you?"
"Exactly. Fetal insurance is such a rich concept to work through, so I'd like to talk about it with
you, but obviously not in our work group--" She paused. "And not even here," she said looking
around the cafeteria. "Someone might overhear and wonder what are they doing in Actuarial?"
The thought of talking with Olivia on the phone zipped through his head, but something stifled
the thought. He had his fill of phone conversations at night. He was cracking books.
"Well, I don't know, I suppose so long as we don't talk specifics, we could talk general
concepts--"
"I was also thinking of some ethical implications, the values offering such a product might
represent. What about getting together for coffee some time?"
She had said the words. Alroy was speechless. She was asking him out for coffee? He circled
his fork in the penne, then said, head down, "How's your weekend look?"
"My Sundays tend to be open, especially now I don't go to temple after moving here," she said,
Alroy wondering what kind of temple she meant. "What about two in the afternoon. Anything near
you you like?"
"Me, oh, I'm more likely to stop in Alamo Cantina for a beer than go to a coffee shop. But, yeah,
there's a nice bakery down on Twelfth, they have croissants they bake fresh every day. Antoine's,
know the place?"
"I think I've driven by, but I'm sure I'll find it. But give me your number if I get lost." She
chuckled, while taking out her phone.
Alroy sat there, afloat on a raft of undreamed possibility. He had a date with Olivia, but
everything would be kosher. It was a professional discussion offsite, much as if he and Duncan got
together again over a beer. No, it could work out well. He'd get to know Olivia more as a person, not
as this unattainable, sexy coworker.
§
Alroy went home that evening, elated. He had no idea Olivia thought well enough of him to see
him outside the workplace.
He sat in his chair in front of his desk and the laptop no longer commanding
www.lifeispinball.com. Beside it, the textbook for Exam Three, sitting atop the study materials he'd
ordered months before. He had ninety days to work his way through it all, if he was to pass the
exam, which Irv expected.
 To buck himself up, Alroy had to keep in mind he'd already passed two actuarial exams and
while carrying a full academic load at college. But now he was working forty hours a week as an
actuary, so demands on his time were about the same. He had to squeeze out time for study. Another
reason lifeispinball.com had to go.
He picked up Ward's tome, Actuarial Model Design Principles, and opened it to a random page:
Tontines, named after the Italian banker, Lorenzo Tonti, who in 1653 came up with a scheme where
a group of investors would contribute a specified amount into a common pool and the last one living
from the group would collect the entire pool plus any interest earned to such survival date. The
mathematics to model a tontine are as follows ...
Alroy closed the book flat, deciding he'd start at the beginning, keep his learning organized and
in step with the study guide. That's what he'd done before at college. Just work through all the
problems.
He remembered the first exam in probability. Remembered everything about it because it was
one of those defining experiences where he felt he'd latched onto what he would do as an adult. He
was going to be an actuary.
The exam was scheduled for ten a.m. on a crisp November Saturday morning at a
classroom on the Pomona College campus in Claremont. He got an early breakfast in the
Cyprus Student Commons, his usual oatmeal and fruit, and walked briskly south to catch the
Metro bus on Foothill, which only ran once an hour, at seven ten, to be precise, and rode it
down to the bus terminal, which handled both Metro and Greyhound. Then he had to grab a
cab, they were parked there invariably at all hours and shell out eighteen dollars for the trip
to the eucalyptus-lined streets of Claremont and Pomona College.
It was fitting in a way the exam was proctored at Pomona. He gathered by talking with a few
guys before the exam they were also students there. The classroom reeked wood-molding tradition
and had a well-used look about it, compared to most of his acoustic-tiled, painted drywall
classrooms at Cyprus Poly. He sat at a standard issue student desk. He felt the desk chairs were
spread out more than usual because only twelve students were taking the exam and it gave the
proctor more room to rove around during the one-hour exam.
To prevent even the possibility of cheating or collaboration, extraordinary measures were taken,
including keeping all personal items in a bin at the front of the room. The proctor gave out check
numbers.
"I'll remind you applicants, Exam P is multiple-choice and has one hundred questions. You will
have ninety minutes to finish the exam and I will give you a warning when ten minutes are left." The
proctor's stern demeanor suggested he taught at the school. "When I say, 'Time's up,' you are to
immediately close your exam booklet with the answer sheet inside. You are not allowed to finish any
question. Is this clear?"
He went on to explain only four-function calculators were permitted in the exam room, no
financial calculators. The thinking, Alroy reasoned, was to insure the test taker understood the
principles behind the calculations and wouldn't have a sleeper calculator programmed for actuarial
calcs.
But the calculator was a help. Doing the calcs by hand consumed precious minutes. And the
way the exam was written, invariably many multiple-choice answers were only decimals apart--in
the second or even third decimal place. You had to have the right answer. Guessing was no strategy.
Once the proctor said, "Begin," Alroy plunged into it. He recognized the probability questions
as similar to ones he'd studied. He breezed through the exam, finishing early. He looked about and
saw others laboring away, punching out calculations on their plastic four-function calculators. He
tried not to look smug, or catch the proctor's eye to let him know, at least, he wasn't struggling with
the exam. He went back and spent his time checking every answer.
He didn't change any.
He had to wait until time was up. He was not arrogant. Considering the other students still
working away, punching out numbers on their calculators, pencilling ovals on the answer sheet, and
mostly looking tense, he could've stood up and dropped the answer sheet, test booklet off with the
eagle-eyed proctor. But, no, he did not want to stand out. He just wanted to get back to school, have
some lunch, and in several weeks' time, sign up for the next exam, six months away.
 Chapter Eleven: Natural Life Support

Because he didn't get his scores right away, Alroy largely forgot about that first actuarial exam
over at Pomona College, the old-school classroom, and those ninety minutes zipping through
questions. He had other things to occupy his time, including a full load of upper-division math
courses; topology, especially, was a challenge.
It was with no expectations, the feeling more often than not it would be empty, Alroy
approached his mailbox one Saturday morning, downstairs in the Student Commons, where he took
out his key and unlocked the mail slot, and saw one envelope.
He noticed the return address: Society of Actuaries, Chicago, Illinois. Inside, a slip of paper,
machine-generated Alroy Shanly, 305 N Campus Ave Cyprus Polytechnic Institute, Upland, CA
91786 and to the right 04/12/20 EXAM P grade 10.
That was all, it was enough. He had a perfect score on the first exam.
He looked around, wanting to tell someone what this meant: He was on his way to becoming a
practicing mathematician, an actuary. But if any of his classmates would hear out his career plans,
they'd be unimpressed. He'd gotten nowhere sharing his dream of becoming an actuary. He knew, in
his gut, if he told anybody he got a 10 on his first actuarial exam, they'd react with no more
enthusiasm than if he said he passed the first test for a correspondence course he was taking on the
side.
He held out the slip of paper with its envelope. Only he needed to be impressed by the score. He
knew he'd done well, finishing early. He kept thinking as he worked through the exam, I've seen this
before. The combinatorial function gets the probability of a multiple outcome.
He sleeved the slip of paper back inside the envelope, folded it neatly in thirds and slipped it in
the back pocket of his jeans. He was ready to go upstairs and get lunch. He'd earned an extra dessert.
And he made a mental note to call his parents after dinner. They would be impressed.
§
Alroy and Duncan sat in the outer office of the Director of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the
University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. They cabbed over from AGI to the east end of
downtown and a thick complex of buildings there separated by little more than pedestrian walkways.
This was the original medical school in Texas--by now medical school campuses had popped up
around the state--but in many respects, the most established programs were at UTMB.
Dr. Henry Ortega came out to greet them. The Director. They shook hands and then went into
his office.
"Would either of you like some coffee, tea, water--any takers?" They declined. "I talked briefly
with Irv about the project you two have and we agreed if I gave you an introduction to our resources
here at UTMB I might steer you in the right direction for putting together data for your project. And,
of course, answer any questions that might come up," he said, pursing his lips as if trying to think of
what else to add.
"Yes, this is a study to see if fetal life insurance will work," Duncan said, his head leaning
forward. "Coming over here, Alroy mentioned we're talking about deaths with no death certificates,
no attending physician's statement, no coroner's report, not to mention any estate to be probated and
on and on."
"What I meant," Alroy interjected, "is if the fetus has no legal status, then we might not have
much data collected on those who don't make it into this world--"
"A good point. Maybe we can start by identifying causes for why every fetus doesn't go to term
and become a live birth." Ortega pushed up the bifocals on the bridge of his narrow nose, his brown
eyes twinkling with the obvious joy he took from his work. "Where do things go wrong. You guys
like to hear about risk, measure it, correct?"
They nodded. "So," he continued, "it seems reasonable to look at the identifiable causes of
failure to go to term, then see what data we have on each condition. Then we might get somewhere
on the fetal mortality data you want, right?"
"I think it's the best way," Duncan replied. "What can go wrong has everything to do with why
we're issuing an insurance contract. Yes, that's the key."
"You understand in the medicine we do here daily, we're doing everything we can to keep life
going well. We're not like a coroner's office taken up with causes of death or the raw statistical end
of things. I'll just say one thing as a preliminary."
Alroy's eyes widened at Ortega's smile.
"If you look around here, you'll see millions of dollars' worth of equipment, much of it devoted
to life-support functions. I don't need to detail the amazing things we can do. Heart transplants, it's
all been done here. And yet, all this capital investment in equipment and the personnel to run it pales
in the face of what one unborn child has inside the womb with its mother's natural life support
ability. Nothing is so sensitive, so cost-effective. We have no idea, as much as we study it, how it
works so incredibly well--" He wagged his head.
"But back to what you're trying to do: Build a mortality table for the unborn. Where to start?"
Ortega drummed his fingers on the table. "We do have a population data section here at UTMB,
which has the stats for every patient admitted and the final status upon release. And, most
importantly, all pregnancies and every pregnancy that fails is recorded. I'll call down there and get
back to you with names of persons to talk with. These people would be our best source of local
data."
"But you were saying earlier we need to identify the causes of mortality in the unborn," Alroy
said.
"Yes, some more legwork on your part, I'll also have you speak with a few associates in Ob/Gyn
who do more of the daily practice. They know those variables--"
"And you have a great library, I imagine," Duncan said.
"I was about to get to that, Duncan. Holdings more than a million, the oldest and largest medical
library in the State. Here, I'll give you my business card, just show it to any of the information staff
down there and they will get you to what you need, if we have it, ASAP. And they're also skilled at
finding documents archived on the Web."
 "There is, of course, one gremlin on the loose in all this," Duncan said. "You know, abortion.
We need to account for that."
"Ah, yes, the possibility induced pregnancy failures are off the record? Okay, to my knowledge,
we've never performed an intentional abortion here. As you know abortions in the state are typically
handled by private clinics. An attending physician in all cases. Records kept: date, time, place,
mother's name, physician name. The library folks can connect you with the data. But how does
abortion affect your idea of life insurance for the unborn? The question comes up for me."
"We thought early on, and to be crass, 'What's to keep a woman from aborting her fetus and
collecting the insurance money?'" Duncan said. "In all cases, no insurance claim will be paid unless
a physician signs off. So for possible fraudulent claims, physicians would be strongly motivated to
stay away or risk losing their license."
"Good point. So what else do you need?" Ortega asked. "I think with the Population Data
people, my associates here in Ob/Gyn and our library, there's plenty for you to start on." He glanced
at his wristwatch as if calculating time to get to his next meeting.
Alroy felt as if he and Duncan had gotten the keys to the Mother Lode of mortality data--at least
for fetal life--and could see field trips away from the home office on the horizon, probably starting
tomorrow.
§
Sunday morning rolled around, and Alroy awoke to his alarm radio, but being his day to sleep
in, he lay there on his bed, more comfortable than an unborn with weeks to go before he slid out into
a world of air, noise, and movement everywhere with a scream of Why this? No, he was as
comfortable as an unborn fetus, who willingly would stay where he was for an eternity, except he
kept growing, needed to upsize his domicile. Then, eyes opening, Alroy realized it was Sunday.
Olivia. Two p.m. at Antoine's.
How did this happen? He accepted the luxury a few hours remained before he had to get to the
bakery down the street, and surrendered to pleasant contemplation the Wheel of Fortune took a
favorable spin for him. This with Olivia was surely Platonic. As coworkers, unanticipated
complications would follow if they were anything other than friends. Still, he saw it as a tick of the
ratchet, a step up, an opening--just possibly--in what might be a long-term strategy.
Alroy pondered calling Olivia about ten, to confirm they're on, but he eventually rejected such
idea as needy and planned to just show up.
§
They paid separate checks, Olivia declining his offer to pick up the tab. Her insistence gave
Alroy the unspoken message it had not been a "date," no need for him to pay. Other than that
momentary bobble, possible mischaracterization, he felt it had gone well. When he offhandedly
suggested they might do it again, she said it sounded like fun.
Desirable as voluptuous Olivia was, a Matka silk jacket over her cream blouse, tweed slacks--all
on the curvaceous body--he knew she wanted to be known for her mind.
She was challenging. She said juvenile life insurance was controversial. Minors seldom have
income, so what was the insurable interest, what loss of income could there possibly be, unless the
minor happened to be someone like Home Alone Macaulay Culkin, or Justin Bieber before he turned
eighteen? But people bought juvenile insurance, Alroy replied. But what do they get for the
insurance proceeds? she asked.
 "Money to pay for a big funeral. Possibly a donation to a childhood disease charity," he replied.
"Well, then," she said, "what is there to say about fetal insurance? It's an even more specious
need."
She was as pro-life as the next person, she added. Part of her religion as a Theravada Buddhist,
but she felt fetal life insurance was obvious red meat, easily construed as a guerrilla tactic in cultural
warfare, pitting pro-lifers against abortionists. And soon a flag planted on the battle field.
Alroy conceded she might have a point, a focus group was in the works on the proposal. But he
said life insurance was always paid for by individuals and it was for one life, not fetuses
everywhere. It could only be one vote, but it would always be a vote for a single unborn fetus, not
the general population of unborn, even if some wanted to see it that way.
She said her croissant was special and she was surprised in the two years she'd been in
Galveston, she hadn't found the place before.
Then she did something unexpected, something endearing her to Alroy. She apologized for her
questions. He was taken aback. She said it was not her place to question the validity of a project he'd
been assigned by Irv. It was his job. She said in the same situation, she also would have plowed
ahead on the project, putting aside her personal feelings about the value or lack thereof fetal life
insurance had.
She then said she wanted to offer constructive help if she could. He said it was okay and added
money often changed hands in the world of commerce out of artifice and created demand, not
solutions to problems. She agreed unlimited medical benefits for a fetal life insurance policy holder
would, in some way, be seen as a justification for taking out the insurance. Nothing would be spared
in expense to avoid a death claim.
They started talking about other things. About things they did away from work, besides study
for actuarial exams. Alroy went so far as to confess to having a telephone advice business for several
months. He said the needy people, or those who pressed for more than a telephone chat, finally got
to him. He told her about Paranoid Pat, as one example, deciding others were better left
unmentioned. She asked why he did it.
The thinking was he might help people, he said. And claiming to be an empathetic listener had
instant appeal. You didn't need a graduate degree in psychology or any other credential. He only
connected the dots on what people told him. They were too worked up to be skeptical.
She asked him his greatest reward.
He had choices. The names--X, Kim, Babs--the highlights and lowlights of his moonlighting,
came back. Finally, he said, when he gave Paranoid Pat the mental health number to call, anytime,
he was relieved to hand off the guy. He was in over his head and had to put a live paranoid in better
hands.
Olivia agreed it was a good call. She also confessed she'd thought about doing some women's
crisis line counseling, but had resisted, thinking she didn't have enough of the right sort of life
experience for it.
He said she should still try. He laughed and said, Just don't try doing it with no training.
§
Alroy and Duncan had settled into the fifth-floor conference room, a walk down the carpeted
hallway, a right turn past the elevator bank and they were early, five minutes or so.
 "Where do they get these focus groups?" Alroy asked his colleague.
Duncan sat in a chair next to Alroy, leaving the Marketing types a choice of four other places
around the oblong, high-gloss walnut conference table. Beside him, Duncan had a palm-sized
Tupperware topped off with jelly beans. He popped a few in his mouth, lolling them around on his
tongue for a satisfyingly slow sugar drip. His candy addiction did not, however, hinder his ability to
express himself.
"Oh, I'm sure Marketing could put together a test group on their own, but for a possible product
launch like this, I'm sure they went to one of the independent marketing research groups in Houston.
Probably where the focus group met: Houston. Fetal life insurance--" He paused, letting the phrase
hang in the air between them.
Alroy tapped his metallic blue mechanical pencil on his yellow legal pad. He'd taken to favoring
mechanical pencils, seeing that Irv used nothing but them. Did they make for better written notes?
"Whatever else you can say about the product concept," Duncan continued, "it sure as flip is
one polarizing idea." He chortled, catching himself before he choked on a sugary shard loose in his
throat.
"But the focus group in Houston?" Alroy asked, drumming his pencil on the pad for a scatter of
barely visible pencillings. "How can anything they come up with represent our market throughout
the United States, the fifty states where AGI is licensed?
"Alroy, two facts. One, we have an ongoing relationship with a marketing research firm in
Houston. They know what we need to decide, no learning curve there. Two, and it's Pareto's Law. Of
all the policies we write--all of them--eighty percent come from a population-weighted area spread
over twenty percent of the continental United States and Houston more or less sits at ground zero of
this geographic slice of the pie."
"Really, how can we have an agent off in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as one random
example?"
"Easy, he doesn't sell just Atlas Global; he sells other lines."
"Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas--this is where the action is?"
"You're sitting in it." He popped another jelly bean in his mouth.
"You think fetal life insurance might play well this part of the country?" Alroy asked, getting the
drift of what Duncan must have felt was a foregone conclusion from the focus group.
"Might I suggest the Pope is Catholic?" He nodded his head in a rocking motion.
"We're part of the Bible Belt?"
"Bible Belt is usually considered Southern Baptist--yes, we catch a bit of the western edge, true,
but don't forget the biggest and growing religious denomination in these parts--"
"Which is?"
"Catholic and they're no pro-abortion fanatics, believe you me. They'll be receptive to this
insurance just like your traditional, close-business-on-Sundays Bible Belt group."
"You think what we'll hear from Marketing is a foregone conclusion?"
"The decision, yes, but the focus group feedback to support this conclusion is something we
need to have set down in writing to pick it up from here."
 "But what if the focus group report doesn't say it's a slam dunk?" Alroy tapped his blue pencil
again, reluctant to start doodling and spoil a good sheet of skullcap.
"They can't say it's a slam dunk. Look, if it were, someone else would have done it before. It's
not like we have a monopoly of new ideas. I'm sure others have thought up fetal insurance and
tossed it. No, what will happen next is Marketing has to figure out how to get the word out, how to
persuade the sales force--even the guy off in New Hampshire, to bring it up when they meet with
people."
Alroy nodded.
"It's like you're mining and you see this vein of auric beauty, this stripe of the world's most
valuable yellow metal, staring at you off a face of bland gray shale. What do you do, but take out
your pick and start swinging, chipping away, levering out rock chunks and, lo and behold, a thin
stripe of golden wonder might widen into something like an incredible vein, then a pocket of
unimaginable wealth for you, sweating brow, swinging your pick. That's what this product will be
like. Hard work, but something might be hidden in our market to uncover."
§
Trish and Jeremy from Marketing came into the conference room a few minutes past ten. They'd
prepared handouts. The focus group findings were surprisingly easy to get. They estimated
something like a thirty percentage of the population had a favorable impression of fetal life
insurance, seventy percent opposed or indifferent. Of the interested thirty percent, they were
surprisingly high on the enthusiasm scale, especially for recommending to others.
Trish said the thirty percent seemed low for a new product, but the group's high interest was a
huge offsetting plus.
They said Marketing would meet later in the week and give a final recommendation if this
product was a go.
Alroy looked over at Duncan, who popped yet more jelly beans in his mouth as he riffled
through the handout summarizing the focus group work. Duncan had a sly smile on his face as if he
had seen it all coming. The product was one they'd continue to work on for weeks.
Alroy took his pencil and wrote the day's date at the top of the handout, a practice he'd long
adopted for anything given to him without a date. He knew there'd be revisions of handouts and he
wanted to keep track of what was when.
§
After work, wanting a break from thinking about the workload led Alroy over to the Alamo
Cantina. He walked briskly along Tenth Street, noting late October was bringing the threat of cold
weather, and somehow it sapped people's energy, trash accumulating in the streets and gutters like so
many fallen leaves. Or was it because the tourist season was tapering off and people didn't care how
the town looked?
The remodel might be complete--it had been too long since he dropped in.
Turning the corner at Sixth and Broadway, he did a double take: The familiar ALAMO
CANTINA sign, no more. Hanging off the side of the door, midblock was something new. GALVEZ
GRILL & PUB.
Inside, what he saw was even more unexpected. The place was happening. Tables filled with
people eating, drinking. And no doubt the word was out to the tourists--easily identifiable by how
they dressed--seated in groups at tables. A kitchen in back, a peek of a top-hatted chef, and then
there was Rosie. Was this the same Rosie?
Alroy grabbed an empty stool at the bar, watching busy Rosie like a hawk to get his attention.
What was with the starched, white shirt, the plaid bow tie and the Brylcreem-slicked hair? Had it
been that long since he popped in and saw the shambolic mess of a remodel under way? Alroy ran
time backwards in his head and figured it must have been about the time of the JoBecca lawnmower
fiasco--
"Before I forgueteo, I need un bonche those matchbooks from you," Rosie said, sidling over to
him. "We're out. See all these people in here, I probably can take five hundred pronto. Good
impacto for you--" Rosie smiled, apparently ignorant the last time Alroy saw him, the barkeep was
wearing a loud red, white, and orange Hawaiian shirt, a few sizes too large, and sporting a mustache
and shaggy hair over his ears.
Alroy wanted to ask about the changes, but instead said. "I'm out of that business. People who
called were crazy, and I wasn't the one to help them, or they were so needy, I was better off without
their money. I quit. Roy the telephone counselor is hasta la vista, señor."
"Well, as I say, we could use un bonche of your obsolescente mechas. See back there, door off
the kitchen, haveamos un separate room for people to take their beers and smoke, cigarros too. We
like the affluente now." Alroy detected something of a forced smile in Rosie, the slicked-back hair
seemed too much like clown makeup. Was this forced liveliness for when the novelty of a new
drinking hole in Galveston wore off?
Alroy decided to let go asking Rosie how he was coping. Obviously, the place was making
money hand over fist, and Rosie seemed busy as a squirrel, so he kept it businesslike. "A Shiner
Bock in the bottle, please."
"You sure you don't want to try one of our IPAs?" Rosie asked.
"Next time, I'm still taking in all the ch-ch-changes. A Shiner lets me hang on to a bit of what
was--"
"Ándale, one Shiner Bock boroleado coming up."
Rosie pulled one from the ice chest--that, at least, had stayed through the remodel--and levered
off the cap, then in a well-practiced move, he slid the bottle the twelve feet, past two gaping stool
sitters, nursing their brews, to stop right in front of Alroy, as if he were the world's premier lawn
bowler who'd just hit the pin.
Alroy gave him a thumb's up, and Rosie shot off down the bar to a fellow who'd just taken a
seat.
Alroy tried to take it all in, but couldn't. There was a waitress, a shapely Asian woman, dressed
in all black with a white collar poking out from her jacket, scurrying around with an order book,
delivering plates to tables and fetching pitchers of fresh draft beer.
Alroy decided the owner must have known what people wanted. He couldn't argue with how
Alamo Cantina had changed. But he wondered about Rosie. Where was the carefree barkeep, who
was satisfied to deal with six or so drop-in drinkers at a time? Now he was hopping about, harried as
the Asian waitress, jumping every which way as if tips were in the balance.
Alroy gathered the former owner had been hands-off and absentee about the business, letting
Rosie run the show. But this new guy, the Vietnamese, he was sure the guy was a micromanager par
excellence.
What did it mean for Rosie? The goofy slicked-back hair said it all. He decided making any
comments about the changes wouldn't cheer up Rosie, so he decided to keep it light.
He waved his empty at Rosie. "Another," he said. What he was seeing called for a bit more
relaxing succor of the fermented mash. When Rosie stopped by, for a pause, Alroy asked, "How's
the car project coming along. Got that Speedster ready?"
"Ready?" Rosie shot back. "I'm gonna race it this spring. Going down to Harlingen, they got a
carro racin there on the old Air Force base runways--"
"You crazy, you'll wreck it again, start over."
"Hey, this es no stock carro racin, mi hombre. Everybody has un restoreación classico, we give
everybody elbow room. You ever been to Harlingen?"
"No."
"You should, see me next May, I'll get you un tiquete."
Alroy didn't know if it was more of Rosie's fabulism; he just might take him up on the offer.
 Chapter Twelve: Three Conditions for a Pass

The next morning, when Alroy got to work, Irv called him into his office and shut the door.
Duncan was already there, looking vaguely apprehensive. Alroy had no idea what was up, and he sat
down slowly almost expecting the Whoopee Cushion surprise.
"I apologize for not giving you advance notice," Irv began, "but we've been blindsided by a call
from a reporter with the Houston Sentinel--you know, the alternative weekly? You can get it here on
the street."
"What did he want?" Duncan asked, ever logical.
"He called Public Relations, said he was working on a story about AGI and its plans to offer
fetal life insurance, said he had well-placed, but unnamed sources for his tip. He wanted the
Company to confirm this, which PR rightfully refused to do--"
"Yeah, why give away competitive information?" Duncan said.
"Well, it's more. The reporter said his editor promised a cover story if he got enough details,
which is not how we do business.
"When we roll out a new policy like this, and as you know everything points to eventual launch,
we have to get the story out in a controlled way with our sales agents. We can't have some hack from
an alternative weekly trying his best to fan the fires of controversy, which we all know this policy
could generate."
"Any idea where this reporter got his tip?" Alroy asked.
"None at all. I'm sure it didn't come from anybody in this room." He smiled and began
drumming his mechanical pencil on the ever-present legal pad. "Who knows, it could have been
somebody in the Houston focus group. Those participants are chosen randomly and asked to sign a
nondisclosure agreement, one of the reasons they get paid, but maybe the reporter got to one of
them."
"But those professional focus groups, they never tell who their client is, do they?" Alroy asked.
"Not usually, not unless they're looking at something like brand recognition, reputation. But I'm
almost sure Atlas Global wasn't mentioned in the focus group. Who knows, there might have been a
piece of paper in the facilitator's briefcase, a participant caught sight of, put two and two together.
Whatever, the reporter has his lead, and he's working on it. We have to be prepared."
"If it goes for a cover story," Duncan said, "we might be better off for the publicity. Sometimes
you can't buy that ink."
"Sure, even if it's negative?" Irv shot back.
 "Well, yeah, negative publicity might not be good. People want to trust us. But what I'm saying,
Atlas has fetal insurance, and with all this brouhaha, anybody interested in the policy would know
we're the ones to go to if it's what they want." Duncan settled back in his chair, his head doing a
slow circle, evidently working out kinks in his shoulder muscles.
"If anything, I don't think this reporter can go to print because of one lead," Irv said, "which I
suspect came from the focus group. A cover story might be weeks away, if not months. My guess is
any launch is at least six months out, probably more. But given a story might get out before then, I'm
asking you two to redouble your efforts to keep this under wraps. I know when you went over to the
Medical Center, I made the arrangements with Ortega and told him any discussion was proprietary.
He's a professional and I value he and anybody you talk with over there understands that.
"But just to cover all possible bases," he said, looking up, pulling out a side drawer in his desk
and taking out a manila folder, "I have this nondisclosure I'd like you two to photocopy and hand out
freely to whomever you talk. Understood?"
They each nodded and took a copy from Irv.
The huddle over, Alroy left for his desk, unsettled at the prospect of another media storm
brewing off in the urban jungle of Houston to the north. It had shades of the media frenzy that
brought down Olivia's dear Gary. Alroy smiled at the memory.
He laid the nondisclosure agreement on his desk and read its legalese, word by word. He
wanted a good understanding, so he could in layman's language, give the two-sentence explanation
to the next person he interviewed.
He looked up and saw Duncan had already gone over to the copy machine and was running off
a batch. He slipped them into a manila folder and Alroy smiled at what he had to do next.
That afternoon, he was going back to the Medical Center, where he had an interview with a Dr.
Linda Ross, whose primary responsibility was managing the preemie ward.
She'd be the first to get his form.
§
"What do you think of how Irv runs our department?" Olivia asked Alroy, a question she would
never think to ask inside Atlas, but after they left work and were walking over to the new Galvez
Grill & Pub, for some happy hour food and drink, she thought it was okay. Alroy had been with
them more than six months. He had time to form an opinion.
They walked briskly down the sidewalk, dodging the after-work nightlife crowd. It had been
Alroy's idea they could get together after work. He'd told her about Rosie and the transformation the
place had undergone, how it had become popular with the locals and tourists all of a sudden: His
hole in the wall was different.
"I don't know I'm the right person to ask," Alroy replied. "I haven't had any other boss to
compare him with. First job out of college."
"Mine too," she replied. She stopped talking. Galvez Grill was in front of them, and Alroy went
to open the door.
They took a table for two inside, Alroy raising his hand to say hi to Rosie across the way at the
bar.
Olivia ordered a fizzy water--didn't drink she said, her religion; Alroy ordered his old standby, a
Shiner Bock.
 "Okay, fair question, Alroy said. "I'd say he strikes me as open on what he's thinking. I give him
points for laying out his expectations about what I have to do. But what you expect of an actuary--"
"Or any professional--" Olivia interjected.
"Yeah, he's straightforward, nothing manipulative about how he operates--"
"Well, I was just wondering what your opinion was, how it meshed with what I saw--"
"Why do you ask then?"
"I just had my review last week. He marked me down on a few things, some petty, I thought. I
don't know if you noticed, but I got into the habit of coming to work late--ten minutes or so, day
after day. He had a log. My key card when I came in the building, he showed me the log. Then he
said a few picky things about the project I was working on, why I might have made more
progress--"
"Sounds like a lukewarm review--"
"Sounded on the fence about my standing in the department. I don't know. I've been at Atlas
more than two years--"
"You see any reason?"
"Good question. I got along fine with Irv for the longest time, but this summer, something
changed in how he acted toward me. A little more coolness."
"About the time of the blowup on the seventh floor, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, what I've been thinking. He associated me too much with Gary and that mess. I know it
embarrassed the company, but I had no part, didn't know about wind power investments."
"So your engagement to Gary had sort of an anti-halo effect--"
"Exactly. Guilt by association."
"That's not fair. You made a clean break, didn't you?"
"Sent him the engagement ring, though legally I could have kept it."
"What's Gary doing?"
"Glad you asked. I was driving a couple of weeks ago, and accidentally, more than anything
else, went past his place over on Mechanic Street."
"And?"
"Crazy, a moving van. The packers were taking out his stuff."
"Nothing left for him in Galveston," Alroy said, taking a first sip of the Shiner Bock the
waitress had just brought over.
"I expect he'll retreat to the comfort of his parents' in Houston. They have a mansion there, no
idea how many rooms. Gary probably can have his room back. I'm sure it was untouched, not
needed, since he left the first time. But with his conviction--and only his family money keeps him
from serving time--he won't have a company job any time soon."
She sipped the clear club soda she had and started to look over the bar menu of appetizers. "You
up for some shrimp cocktails?" she asked.
He nodded and they continued to talk. Things other than Olivia's uncertainty about Irv's review.
Alroy was glad he'd not waited too long to ask her out. He could see she needed to get out socially
and put aside what happened with Gary, who was off in Houston licking his wounds.
At some point, Rosie came over from the bar to be introduced. Alroy said Olivia was a
colleague, an actuary like him. To his credit, Rosie took it in without rolling his eyes at her obvious
appeal for any red-blooded male. Alroy felt fine about the new place, thinking it marked a positive
start to seeing Olivia away from work.
They finished up the shrimp appetizers, Alroy ordered a second Shiner Bock after Olivia went
for her second fizzy water. "I'm so thirsty," she said. But then it might have been the stuffed olives
they took for a second appetizer. When they left, an hour or so later, the sun had set on the island,
and Alroy dutifully walked Olivia back to her car in the parking structure next to Atlas. She said it
was fun. Not one to let anything slip, Alroy said they had to do it again. She smiled a smile to burn
in Alroy's memory and kept him happy for days afterward.
§
Alroy and Duncan began their interviews at UTMB, trying to assemble basics they'd need to
construct a mortality table, which they took to calling Minus Nine Plus, meaning it would start at
nine months before birth--at conception--and go forward until birth. Any interruption in the voyage
to the land of the living was a contingent event, one they had to pin down for cause and frequency.
Only by close examination of all the possible failures of a pregnancy could they come up with a
mortality table to let Atlas Global write a fetal life insurance policy with appropriate premiums to
cover claims and make money.
Proof of a death claim was no simple proposition Alroy knew. This was brought home to him
one lunch hour in the cafeteria when he happened to be sitting with the same young woman he'd
seen earlier going outside to eat her lunch on the plaza overlooking the Gulf. He was impressed after
the elevator encounter weeks ago, how she was saving money bringing her lunch from home, and
took advantage of what was free: fresh salt air and a priceless view.
When he saw her in the cafeteria, he made a point of introducing himself: "Alroy, sixth floor,
I'm an actuary." Her name was Emma and she worked in Claims.
"So how do you handle a death claim?" he asked her.
"A death certificate is the key. I have to look at every one we get with a claim, go over it line by
line to make sure it's all filled out, no mistakes, like wrong date, that sort of thing." She frowned at
what must have been the unceasing attention to detail, which made her job of chasing down
corrections or additions time consuming, and probably tedious with telephone tag.
"What about the signature, an attending physician--"
"Or sometimes the coroner if the body is taken to the morgue."
"How do you know the signature's valid?"
"Well, usually I see a photocopy, unless the claimant comes in our office with an original, a few
do, and you're right, the signature has to be validated. If a photocopy, then we need to have it
notarized. The original would, of course, have the embossed seal of the doctor."
"What else do you check for?"
"Everything. Look at the date, compare it with what's on the claim. Sometimes the death
certificate has the wrong date, the year can be off, even in the future. Happens. I always check. Then
place of death, important to have it right."
 "Like place exclusions in our policies?"
"Sure our policies exclude anyone from being covered who is a participant in a declared state of
war. Oh, a policyholder is called up in reserves, goes to a war zone and is killed. The family assumes
they can make a death claim, but that's an exclusion."
"What else needs close attention?"
"The big one is cause of death. Usually the physician just puts down a few words. Nothing
much is needed. There might be more if it's an auto accident with multiple injuries, but usually if he
writes 'fatal stroke,' it's enough."
"Is there sometimes no obvious cause?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean if nothing apparent caused the decedent to die."
"The elderly might have something like 'old age' and that's okay. If someone is ninety-nine years
old, the true cause of death is harder to get at, so old age will do. But not if the person is fifty."
"So date, time, place, cause, medical witness, anything else on a death certificate would cause
you to flag the claim?"
"Not really, just seeing everything's filled out and makes sense, as I said. It might help if you
came by the fifth floor and I'd show you a cert on file. Why are you so interested in all these
details?" She looked up from her pasta salad, which given Alroy's inquisitiveness, she hadn't made
much progress eating.
"Well, I'm working on a new policy, me and another fellow in our department, and the thing is
hush-hush, not supposed to discuss it outside our group. But we're having to define some unusual
procedures for paying off a death claim."
"If I don't need to know, I won't ask."
"I'm asking about the details of death certificates because with our proposed policy, we're in this
gray area where the death certificate might or might not be filled out." His face contorted at the idea
he couldn't explain to her so many fetal deaths amounted to no more than a disposal problem and the
only medical records were along the lines of 'miscarriage' for the mother. No name for the fetus, no
identity, nothing more than discarded fetal flesh for the basis of a death claim. He and Duncan had
some legwork to do on the legality there.
He made a mental note to go visit Emma and review how a death certificate looked. Only then
could they meet with Legal and stake out some requirements for the fetal life insurance contract.
Emma gave him a compliant smile, as if she understood he was working on something, which
might or might not come to pass, and details were best kept undercover.
He said, yes, he would drop by the next week or so to go over how she reviewed a death claim,
having been satisfied she understood his need to be close-mouthed about what he was working on.
He asked for her extension, said he'd let her know before he dropped by.
§
Alroy went home that evening, thinking about Emma, about her girl-next-door attractiveness.
She didn't have Olivia's obvious sexiness and brainy discourse, but there was something calming
about her. If he had to sum her up, it would be confident and earnest. He looked forward to visiting
her in Claims and finding out more about what constituted an acceptable death certificate.
 What he had to do was obvious--forget about fetal life insurance--he'd left the office--and
buckle down to the task at hand: study for his third SOA exam, coming up in only five weeks. He
thought his working through the problems was on schedule to cover all the material and do some
quick review for a few days, but he also knew the unexpected could happen: He'd hit a roadblock of
a concept he didn't get. Then he'd have to go to someone like Duncan and plead for help.
He went over to his refrigerator and grabbed the jar of mayo. A few slices of bread and he was
soon eating his dinner: a ham and cheese sandwich, chased with iced tea. He found it helped his
studies if he ate light in the evening.
Earlier in the week, Duncan had asked how the studies were going, he having the luxury of no
more actuarial exams. They were standing outside AGI after work, Duncan waiting for girlfriend
Nora to come by with the car.
"So it's Exam Three, hedging, derivatives, all that fun stuff?" Duncan asked, a knowing smile on
his face, his arms wrapped around the business case held against his chest--whatever else one could
say about Duncan, he took his job responsibilities seriously, Alroy knowing he had to be taking
home some work papers on fetal life insurance.
"Yeah, I'm plodding through the work problems that came with the course syllabus. So far,
nothing's brought me a cropper, but something might. I haven't seen much of this before--" He
paused, a momentary loss of his customary confident smile, replaced with an unknowing
apprehension, almost fear.
"If you do, let me know and I'll see if I can get you back on track. You think you have enough
time to cover everything?" He lifted his eyes, evidently scanning downstreet for Nora in the
Outlook, but no Nora.
"Yeah, I'll probably solve all the problems. What worries me, though, is how I'll feel when I
take the exam. My state of mind. So much more rides on it now with a job, not like college, where if
I didn't pass, I could try something else. Now, I'm committed. I have to pass," he said, possibly
inklings of desperation creeping into his eyes.
Something Duncan must have picked up.
"I know, I know," he said. "Something in the balance and you can't think about if you can pull
off the trick. Tell you what I do--"
"What? You've got a secret?"
"First of all, just keep reviewing those problems in your head, all your waking hours outside
work, and get in the right frame of mind: You will be working on solving the problems like a
machine, you won't pause, you will have options, hedging, and derivatives in your mantra, okay?"
"Yeah, I'm trying to keep in that mindset."
"But it's not enough," Duncan said, "You've got to be sure your brain's working optimally,
hitting on all cylinders. You have to solve problems fast, so you get through the exam and get it right
and check your answers."
"What's your way of getting there?"
"Three things. Three important conditions to satisfy. First, you absolutely have to carb load. Eat
all the spaghetti you can get down the night before. Carbs are quick energy glucose. Glucose makes
the synapses fire in your brain. You don't want to be low on glucose when you're in the exam. I took
my jelly beans into the exam for exactly that reason. Quick sugar bombs help--"
 "What about breakfast?"
"Easy. Oatmeal, cut with plenty of milk, maybe a topping of yogurt and fruit and a glass of
orange juice. You'll walk into the exam with your brain singing."
"You said three conditions, what else?"
"Condition two and important. No sex for a week, seven days, okay?"
Alroy laughed. "Not much of a sacrifice."
"You never know, I had to mention it. Sex saps your mental energy, makes you want to lounge
around and not solve any problems. Who has problems after sex?"
"Condition three?"
"Easy, well not so easy. But you seem in fairly good shape. You have to push yourself and go
out and run. Run for five miles two days before the exam, okay? You can along the Seawall. Just
start at Twenty-first and run up to Sixty-first and back and you've got five miles. Even a slow jog is
okay, just don't crawl," he laughed. "Then no exercise the day before the exam. All the running will
build up lactic acid in your muscles and your body will work to get rid of it and bingo you're highly
receptive to carb loading the next day and your brain will thank you endlessly when you are taking
the exam two days after your run. Got it?"
"You make it sound simple. Whoa, there's your ride."
"Write it out, so you don't forget--" Duncan shouted, stepping off the curb to get in the car with
Nora.
§
Alroy did not follow Duncan's advice in the days before he took the exam. Or at least none of it
voluntarily. The sexual abstinence was involuntary, given his sketchy social life. Not that the
commandments did not work for Duncan, but Duncan was Duncan, not Alroy. Duncan had a pre-
diabetic diagnosis in his future too. Alroy would let the roulette wheel spin as it must.
Besides, Alroy found he had other logistics to handle besides a carb-loaded breakfast and candy
at hand in the exam room. He spent the night before in a Houston hotel because he did not have a
car to drive the hour to Rice University. He stayed in the Houston hotel overnight because the bus
schedules did not work well, might leave him stranded and late, which would not do.
No, he awoke in comfort of fresh sheets on a bed in the Starlighter Motel, a mere six blocks
from the entrance to the renowned Rice University. He was up, shaved, dressed, ready to go at eight
and sauntered downstairs to see what their advertised "Continental breakfast" buffet-style had on
offer.
He avoided the pancakes with maple syrup Duncan would, if he were by his side, have urged on
him. No, he tucked into three eggs and sausage, some bread and butter to mop things up and a good
cup of coffee and a refill. He'd keep going until noon, when the exam paper was handed in.
He looked around the motel dining room at the scrum of freshly showered overnight guests,
many businessmen on the road, and wondered if any of them were facing a jump across a chasm,
which, if he failed, would bring to an abrupt halt a career Alroy had felt was all he ever dreamt of
being: a professional mathematician. He gave up easily on finding anybody there who could identify
with his challenge that morning. He had to find support elsewhere.
As it was, he left the hotel after turning in his key and confirming his bill was paid on arrival the
night before. He left the business office of the motel, another person checking out right behind him.
Outside down Handell Street to the broad sidewalks of Rice Boulevard, where he took in the dazzle
of the low morning Houston sunlight and soon turned left, the map of the Rice campus printed out in
hand, for a walk of some four hundred yards to 116 Herman Brown Hall and his appointment with
actuarial destiny.
But ahead, on the sidewalk, he saw a seated figure. A middle-aged man wearing indifferent,
loose clothes in dirty colors. The man had only one leg, his crutches laid out to the side, a cigar box
with worn edges sitting before him.
"Nice day, isn't it?" Alroy said, approaching the man.
"The ol' sun keeps shining on me, no matter where my money went." The seated man laughed.
Alroy chuckled too, noting how the man, reduced to begging, subtly referred to money.
"Well, I thank you for your service," Alroy said, noting the man's Sharpie-lettered cardboard
sign about being an Iraq veteran, as if the stump leg was not bona fides enough.
Alroy reached into his left pant pocket, felt around for his handful of change, what with the
buying the bus ticket, paying the motel bill in cash, and the dinner last night at the Italian pizza joint,
had accumulated to the point it almost clank in his pocket and something he was better off without,
sitting in the exam room, concentrating. He took out all the change and dropped it in the cigar box.
He figured on at least four-fifty, many quarters. He then pulled out his wallet and fished out a
George W. and laid it on top of the coin mound. He smiled at the grime-faced man's wide eyes.
"Holy smokes, you're my angel! The good Lord's gonna bless you!" the man said.
Alroy lowered his head, as if to say, You're welcome. He looked at his wristwatch and said, "In
forty-five minutes, I will be taking an examination, over there." He pointed to the Rice campus
beside them. "I need all the blessings I can get." He laughed, as did the veteran too.
"You student there?"
"No, just taking an exam, a building on the campus."
"Then I'll be pulling for you--make myself useful."
"Thanks, I'll try."
Alroy left the stump-legged man on the sidewalk and walked briskly to an entrance by a parking
lot and onto the quiet, manicured campus grounds of Rice University. He checked his map again and
crossed Campanile Road toward Herman Brown Hall. He was there at room 116 a quarter to ten. He
read a notice on the door that the room was reserved for the Society of Actuaries Investments and
Financial Markets Examination being given Saturday, November 17 from ten until noon. He saw the
door would open at nine-fifty. Alroy waited a few minutes with a half dozen other applicants.
Soon, Alroy entered the room, was checked for papers or anything suggesting a cheat-sheet, his
four-function minimalist calculator was inspected. He was assigned a desk and Alroy noticed all
assigned desks for the test takers were separated by one or more desks on all sides.
While he waited for the countdown to open the exam booklet, he thought of the Iraq War
veteran without a leg and hoped the pittance he left in the cigar box might give him a karmic bounce
for a minimum 7 and a pass on Exam Three.
 Chapter Thirteen: μ

Alroy soon called Emma's extension to find when she might show him a death certificate.
Apparently, she had loads to choose from, being a review clerk in Claims.
"This," she said laying a photocopy on her desk, beside which Alroy took a seat, "is a copy of a
recent death certificate." She edged it closer to him. He picked it up.
His eyes went involuntarily, it seemed, to the name at the top of the form. No name he
recognized, but a man's name. A name once given a new life. Alroy felt as if he was looking back
over his shoulder with sadness: The vector of time never reverses for someone who once was alive.
"It's like you said, all the details are here. Time of injury one fifty-nine in the morning--"
"And place of death forty-three forty South Padre Island Drive," Emma said, well-clipped
fingernail under the line.
"Oh," Alroy said, "age, thirty-five--way too young. I see here what happened."
"Cause of death, traumatic injuries of the head, chest, and abdomen--car accident."
"Driving in the wrong direction on a divided highway down in Corpus, drunk driving."
"Blood alcohol level was zero point three three percent," she said. "He must've seen oncoming
headlights, then swerved and there was a utility pole."
"Oh, such a waste."
"But look at what he did. See here, says he was a manager at a local manufacturer. I looked up
online his residence address, saw he had a nice home down in Corpus, a swimming pool in back.
And because I handled the claim, I also know from the other things in the folder he was married, had
two small children. Lost it all. For what?"
He saw her left hand beside his on the cert, noticed her hand, smaller than his, had no ring, not
that he usually looked for one on a woman's hand, but this time he did. He glanced at her face, a thin
well-shaped nose, hazel eyes. She was not unattractive. "For a BAC of," he paused, "three times the
limit for DUI--"
"Obviously, couldn't stop," she said as if she'd seen too many alcohol-related deaths, but it was
her job. Her eyes connected with his. She was different from Olivia, and he felt calm with Emma.
"I don't know, many guys drink to excess when they're young. I'm sure you've seen it, I've seen
it, even did some binge drinking at college. But we get older, get a job, go to work in the morning,
and we drop the habit. Even at thirty-five, he hadn't aged out."
"Maybe he never would," she said. "See here, he was in Afghanistan." Her delicate finger
pointed at the question on the fifth line: Was deceased ever in the U. S. Armed Forces? and If
yes, give war or dates of service.
"You know why they ask this?" she added.
"No."
"The government pays for any funeral. Veteran's benefit, for life."
"At death," Alroy said morosely.
"Let's see, what else is here? Obviously, the physician signs and writes a reason for death. I
check it and the physician's business address in our database."
"You have a database of all physicians in the U.S.?" Alroy asked.
"Yes, up-to-date too. Let's see, next of kin, usually why there's a claim, if it's not a trust. What
else? Autopsy, yes, no. Here there was one," she said running her index finger, with its well-clipped
nail, down the paper. "Nothing much else here. Is this enough for you to understand the death
certificate?"
"Yes, all this helps. Would it be possible to get a copy of this, so I can refer to it later?"
"Sure, I don't see why not. I'll make you a photocopy and because it's a document leaving this
department, I like to black out the name of the deceased. A privacy thing, you know, should the
paper accidentally fall into the wrong hands--"
"And shred it, not recycle--"
"That's best."
"But aren't death certificates in the public record?"
"Yes and no. If you want vital statistics from the state, birth, marriage, death, you fill out a
form, have valid reasons, and pay a fee."
"Oh, I see. Okay, after I'm done, it will be the first thing I shred, just to be sure."
She smiled and he didn't know what had come over him. Was it just her physical nearness
beckoning his weary soul?
Olivia, Emma, he began to wonder what it was with him. Emma, beside him, was
enough, much more than enough. He could talk to her. They meshed minds. He was
sure. But then there was Olivia, but he worked with her.
§
Despite the attraction he had for Emma, Alroy began to sort it out and knew his true yearning
was to see Olivia again after work. He and Duncan had been so busy constructing a fetal mortality
table--they were almost there--he couldn't, in his waking moments, think of much more than work.
Several weeks went by after he saw Emma in her office. He'd only glimpse her in the cafeteria,
so the incipient desire for her began to sputter away. He knew he was choosy.
And it was with purpose, he did what he couldn't put off any longer. He asked Olivia in the
hallway about grabbing a drink after work. She said it was her week night for grocery shopping, but
she'd be glad to do it the next day. Her words left him willing to savor the wait of twenty-four hours.
§
Thursday, quarter past five, Alroy walked out of the home office with Olivia, chatting away
about nothing more than the clear winter weather, the chances for a blue norther, pausing to say
good-night to Duncan, who waited for the Subaru’s headlights Nora would be driving his way. Alroy
smiled at the idea Duncan, not slow to pick up things, knew he and Olivia were seeing each other
after work. But he also figured Duncan was savvy enough not to recklessly surmise and report them
out as an item. Still, he felt warmly victorious, just by standing there as they walked past, Duncan
had approved their friendship. Yes, seeing someone of the opposite sex in one's department would
forever be tricky, but he thought with caution he had so far navigated cleanly.
"Galvez Grill?" Alroy asked. Rosie in the remodelled bar would be fine. It was last time--it had
led to this.
"Sure," she said. "Nice ambiance, no honky-tonk. I like that for some down-time after work."
They strolled along, enjoying the bustle of Galveston after dark in its get-home-to-dinner hour.
Cars, taxis, parked delivery trucks--twilight was upon them.
They stepped around several pigeons at odds over broken bread on the sidewalk and passed a
bakery. Alroy wondered what might happen next with Olivia. Outside the office--it might be okay--
to touch her shoulder, help her, as it were, when they crossed Mechanic. But he didn't want to do
anything ineptly forced, or set himself up for a slap of a reply.
Her five-six stature was but an inch shorter than his. And despite her voluptuous curves, he
knew she must weigh less. An optical illusion--women's bodies. When built to perfection, as
Olivia's, a woman's body seemed to be the hips, the breasts, diverting a man's eye away from those
thin calves, a thin waist, the thin neck, all an artful assemblage utterly unlike the blocky hulk of a
man.
Weaker sex? Well, smaller bodies. Smaller bones. A woman's chest, absent her breasts, never
the barrel chest of a man. Any guy knew that when he took a woman in his arms. And the waist? A
woman with a flat abdomen--like Olivia--was a wonder of compactness. A beer belly like too many
men, unthinkable. So, top to bottom for Olivia, if you concatenated the plus segments with the thin
segments of her body, her corporal profile was less than Alroy's. He knew she weighed at least ten
pounds less than his one thirty-five.
"Around the corner," Alroy said, they being almost upon Sixth Street. A few steps and he gave a
ventriloquist touch to the back of her red down parka. He'd done it, but wondered if she noticed. He
took a deep breath. Ahead, the vibratory neon yellow of GALVEZ BAR & GRILL dangled free of its
brick edifice mid-block.
He opened the door for Olivia and inside saw something immediately wrong. No Rosie. Instead,
at Rosie's customary post, this bartender he'd never seen rocked on his heels, ready to pounce on a
drink order. Alroy gave Olivia a puzzled look.
"Just a min," he said and went over to get the guy's attention.
"Where's Rosie?"
"Quit. Opened up his place on Fourth, two blocks over and one block up. Can't miss it. Rosie's
Roost."
The bartender, white shirt, red bow tie, obviously had the same question asked over and over.
He had a ready answer.
"We've got a problem," he told Olivia sotto voce. "Rosie's not here anymore. He's got a place on
Fourth. We could stay here. I don't know what the new place would be like."
He felt it better for her to decide. After all, he wasn't out to see Rosie, it was about seeing her.
 "I like to be open to new experiences. Let's go there," she said, words tinged with enthusiasm,
which seemed suggestive everything might fall into place.
§
ROSIE'S ROOST. They found it right where the bartender said it would be. A hole-in-the-wall a
few blocks past Bernardo de Galvez Avenue. Inside in low light, Alroy saw Rosie wearing a bright
Hawaiian shirt, no bow tie, animated.
"We missed you at the old place, glad to find you here," Alroy said.
"Oh, that place wore me down, not the bisi part, but esto Vietnamismó should keep to his profit-
teiken, not tell me how to serve drinks. And no Hawaiian shirts--"
"No Hawaiian shirts!" shrieked a large, Technicolor parrot atop a perch by the beer cooler.
"You have a friend here too." Olivia nodded at the parrot. "What's its name?"
"Zaky, comes with the job."
"Must liven things up," Alroy said, glancing around the dim interior: one couple at a table, a
lone fellow sitting on a stool the end of the bar. The place looked like Alamo Cantina before its
irrevocable, upscale makeover. The place was not about to make it into any Galveston tour guide.
He hoped Rosie's Roost wasn't doomed, would make a go of it.
"All the time. Zaky repeats drink orders, keeps me olrait. Take a seat, or I've a table ayí."
"The bar's fine," Alroy said, seeing Olivia insouciantly sliding her bum onto a bar stool.
"What's it por la dama?"
"The usual, fizzy water."
"Un twist del limón?"
"Please."
"Y un Shiner Bock boroleado por mi amigo?"
"You got that right."
After Rosie brought the drinks, the two settled into leaning on the bar and going from taking in
the unapologetically downbeat interior of Rosie's Roost to the drinks in front of them and then,
shyly perhaps, what was in each other's eyes. Rosie was fetching another drink for the other counter
customer.
"I need to ask him how he got his name on the sign outside," Alroy said. Olivia removed the
lime wedge clamped to the glass rim and gave it a squeeze, then offhandedly dropped it into the
effervescent water.
"He must have put in money," she said, a wry smile.
"No, I don't think so. This bar was probably hanging on for years, and Rosie shows up from
Galvez and persuades the owner he can turn it around. I bet he only has sweat equity in here, if
that."
"We could ask."
"I don't know. Rosie has been known to play the truth bent," he said sotto voce. "Did I tell you
in May I'm going to a sports car race down in Harlingen. Rosie will be racing a Porsche he rebuilt."
 Rosie wandered back up toward them. "So wasa con you two, still making el mundo better with
life insurance?"
"We try," Alroy said, not wanting to breathe a word of what he was working on.
"I'm glad you faundea me. Been here two weeks, no es malo. Like I said el otro placete was too
much formula, so I shopped around. I've known Jack for years. He said, come over, I'll put your
name al frente. Took him up on it." Rosie beamed at his self-serving summary of his worth to the
owner.
They talked for a few more minutes, getting Rosie's opinion about Galvez: The brew pub might
only be a fad, but he'd been proved wrong before. When Olivia said she liked Rosie's Hawaiian
shirt, Zaky suddenly shrieked, "No Hawaiian shirts!"
They finished their drinks, Olivia declined another, as did Alroy. He figured the date had been
mostly to hang out a while, talk about non-work stuff. They said good-bye to Rosie and went out,
Alroy ready to walk Olivia to her car.
A clear winter night, a full moon hung in the sky. Olivia pensively tugged on the collar of her
parka as if acknowledging the chilly air. "You know, something I've always wanted to do--"
"Which is?"
"It's such a clear night and this full moon. I've never been in the graveyard under a full moon, I
think it would be unforgettable."
"Oh, it's not far away," he said, eyeing Broadway ahead, which ran by Old City Cemetery.
"Then, c'mon."
She reached out to take his hand. Her soft hand in his thrilled, the feel of the Erotic Other, what
he had known for months was there and now it was his, given freely. She laughed, too ready for
what they were about to do. They quickly walked the remaining blocks, Alroy unwillingly to let her
hand go, it giving him such uncorked pleasure.
§
A smattering of traffic went by, the light to cross about to go green. The ironwork gate's
imposing skeletal form hypnotically beckoned them closer, as if the hulking masses of elevated
vaults in the moonlight, all the color of dry, peeling alluvium, wanted visitors.
They walked under the gate arch, Olivia's dark eyes restlessly scanning the burial grounds,
which seemed standing-room-only crowded. Gravel walkways separated the mix of gravestones and
elevated vaults in discrete sections. Otherwise all was as flat and barren as the island itself: Only
silhouettes of palms with frond crowns here and there broke the visual monotony.
"I would never do this myself," she said flatly. Her dark hair framed her face, the fairness of
which only full moonlight could unambiguously illuminate, her dark hooded eyes sparkling at
possible surprise in the afterdark outing.
"Yes, but don't you like more of the jump-out-of-your-skin fear?"
"Maybe, but I'm more okay, you here to protect me."
"Or you protecting me." He laughed. She moved closer, but not close enough for a hug. He
dropped any impulse and walked up to a burial vault before them. The marble box, sitting on five
columns, reached overhead with incised letters in moon shadow. "Let's go around."
"Well, no surprise. Died in nineteen hundred," Olivia said loudly, as if to keep the chilly air at
bay. "Too many lost in that year."
"They say ten thousand dead."
"They can't all be buried here. How could they be?" she said blowing on cupped hands.
They looked around at the assemblage of vaults glinting with lunar polish, sentinels for so many
other gravestones flat on the ground, dirt Alroy knew must have been easy to dig after the storm.
"I bet if we walked around," Olivia said, "and took a census of death dates, the peak year would
be nineteen hundred."
"How could it be otherwise?"
They walked to another vault, read the dates, the name, then onto the next one, then another
before they found one with a death date not 1900.
"Many, many people died. Galveston must've been as big as it is now," Olivia said, plunging her
hands into her parka pockets, contemplatively still, it seemed, as the surrounding vaults, leaving
Alroy to wonder if she was ready to turn around and go home.
"I gather Galveston civic leaders were conservative in their thinking about rebuilding," Alroy
said.
"Yeah, the city came back slowly." She shrugged.
"But let's look at a few more vaults and then call it a night," she added.
"Sure," Alroy said. It had been enough, being together under the moonlight, and this wasn't the
time to catalog vaults or this wasn't the time to go beyond the first blush of hand-holding, Alroy
knew one thing about women: The mood had to be exactly right to get anywhere with a woman as
desirable as Olivia.
She stood there, her hands firmly planted in the pockets of her parka, looking at the next vault,
yet another casualty of the Great Storm.
She turned and said, "Oh, we can head out, if it's okay with you."
He saw there on her lips a ripeness he knew would hold him in a kiss for out-of-breath
durations. He felt stiffness below his belt and took a deeper breath. They needed to start walking as
she suggested.
"This was a great idea," Alroy said. "I hadn't thought to come here when it's a full moon."
"I've been here two years, and have poked around during daylight, but always dreamed about
coming back when the moon was out and full. Thanks."
She took a hand out of her pocket and reached for his.
§
"What do you guys have?" It was Irv in his office asking Duncan and Alroy, fresh from a two-
month dig into the contingency of fetal life. In their summary page for Irv, the two had come up with
the figure: the force of mortality µ, mu. That number let the insurance company confidently issue a
life insurance contract on an identified fetus, paying a death benefit if it didn't survive to live birth.
"Well, before we get to the value of mu, we wanted to say something about how it was derived,"
Duncan said, giving his junior actuarial colleague a hurried glance. "Alroy and I spent most of our
time at the Medical Center interviewing before hitting the library, then the statistics department, and
then online at the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the Texas Department of Health."
 "What was your model for this mortality table, how did you approach it?" Irv asked.
"We identified all the co-variants and morbidity factors we could turn up. We've a list of some
two dozen, right, Alroy?"
"Twenty-six, to be exact."
"Yeah, in our long report," Duncan continued, "we break out each morbidity factor and specify
incidence in fetal life. We built the model by coming up with every evidenced cause of failure,
adjusting for the co-variance, and then seeing how it matched experience. Most of our data are
drawn from this region, but it computes fine with data from other parts of the country."
"I'm just wondering how mu changes with duration," Irv said. "You give me the number Atlas
Global is going to bet on a nine-month duration, but what is happening at a finer granularity, say the
first trimester--any thoughts?"
Alroy jumped in. "Great point you bring up, Irv. Duncan saw it first, but it's so intuitive, I'm
surprised we didn't realize this from day one. You look at the ordinary life mortality table, okay.
Select and ultimate, mu goes up over attained ages. Okay, it accelerates. What you expect when a
life ages. Death at age twenty is way less frequent than age ninety. No argument there--"
"But, aha," Duncan said, getting excited, his head rocking. "What Alroy said got it so right:
'Fetal life is anti-entropic.' Whoa, can you see that?"
"You two are saying mu decelerates over the nine months?" Irv asked.
"And how," Alroy said.
"Or putting it another way," Duncan said, "we have to model the first three months with hyper-
confidence 'cause that'll be most of our claims. The fetus can only gather steam after those first
ninety days. Of course, historically many deaths were in childbirth, but modern medical procedures
make it closer to zip."
'Okay, okay, I'm convinced you two have a robust model, so mu for the nine months is?"
"Two point five three," Duncan said. "Your mu to calculate premiums."
"You're saying Atlas takes in two dollars fifty-three cents, neglecting expenses, overhead, and
blah blah blah, we pay out one hundred dollars on a claim?"
"Exactly. A premium of two hundred fifty-three dollars buys ten thousand in coverage, not too
bad.
"How does it compare with our typical policies, a twenty-year-old, a fifty-year-old and so
forth?" Irv asked.
"Not as good as the twenty-year-old," Alroy said. "There you're looking at mu of one point eight
nine, but it easily beats the fifty-year-old. That's three point seven two."
"This is good, very good." Irv said, sounding as if he was ready to close up another project
folder for the day. "We'll have a good illustrative benefit for our sales agents. They can justifiably
compare this insurance to what people pay for more traditional products. I thank you, they'll thank
you.
"Okay, where do we go from here?" Irv continued. "I've got this design template you've seen
before, Duncan. Complete it and you and I will sign off and send it on to the President's office for
review. That's the process, so we'll give it a few months before we see any launch."
Duncan took the form, scanning it to see if he had questions, but apparently not, then stood up,
Irv saying, "Excellent work, you two, and in the midst of it all, Alroy took his third exam. Thanks
again."
They left Irv with the one-page summary, he putting a sticky note on it to call over to the
President's office to schedule a presentation of the form Duncan would complete in a day or so.
 Chapter Fourteen: Thirteen Black Paintings

Whatever else Alroy could say about Olivia, she was discreet. As far as Duncan, Van, Tuan, and
Irv knew, Olivia had nothing special going on with Alroy outside the office. True, Duncan had seen
them walking together, but he, too, had an innate discretion about him, professional to the core,
talking actuarial concepts, not gossip.
When they left Irv's office, the preliminary phase of the fetal life insurance policy well under
way, Alroy glanced over at Olivia to see if she had a smile for him, she and the others in the room
must've had an inkling what the meeting was about. He thought a quick smile from her would not be
unappreciated, a recognition of all the work he and Duncan had done; but no, Olivia had her eyes on
the computer screen and notes she was writing at her desk. He knew it would be for stretches of
time, so complete was her concentration.
Back at his desk, Alroy began the next phase of the project: The policy would run for nine
months, not the customary year duration of every other life insurance policy. Because of the
fractional duration of the fetal life insurance policy under consideration, Alroy had the soporific task
of building a spreadsheet for adjusted mortality to normalize the model to an annualized basis. He
thought it unnecessary, but as Irv explained, it was how Atlas compared the performance of its
products and decided whether to continue offering a product.
Like Olivia, Alroy was soon swimming in spreadsheets, clutching formulae to normalize his
fractional year data into something the maw of AGI accounting information systems could accept.
Sometime after eleven-thirty, the first pangs of hunger starting to hit, Alroy looked across the
room, to the corner workstation where Olivia sat, wondering if he could catch her eye, maybe time
his lunch break to when she left.
She was gone. He knew enough not to ask anybody where she'd gone. The question would
sound daft, as if he were infatuated with her--even if true--so he went back to building what he
labelled RESERVES FOR FRACTIONAL DURATION LIVES, FETAL LIFE INSURANCE POLICY
[PROPOSED]. Maybe she would be back soon, maybe not.
He unwillingly stared at the orange numbers on his spreadsheet, standing out from the black
background and wondered what would happen if he were to see Olivia again on the weekend. The
numbers seemed blurry and missing the urgent meaning of a few minutes ago. His blood sugar must
have dropped. He felt lightheaded.
§
They stood opposite the Moody Mansion under a bright Texas sun on a Saturday. Olivia, beside
him, pointed out the vegetation around the three-story wooden structure with elaborate ironwork.
"So many of these plants, see the short palm over there, the one looks like a beer keg, they
remind me of what we have back home."
"Sri Lanka has the same climate as here?" Alroy said.
She nodded. "Absolutely, same temperatures, same humidity, same ocean waters." She pointed
to the Gulf, whose moisture slid under the paint on the mansion's clapboards, baked in the summer
sun, blistered out, and peeled away before September winds, leaving exposed wood until money was
found to repaint the place. The mansion being unoccupied, any shame of living in such beautiful
decay wasn't motivation for securing money to contract a painting crew.
"Yes, my favorite palm tree, Hyophorbe lagenicaulus, the Bottle Palm Tree, see I memorized its
Latin name even as a girl. I suppose I liked it better than the towering palms. More my size. I was
always afraid when the big winds blew, an overhead frond would fall and hit me."
Alroy walked beside her to the stubby palm, she waving her hand at its stiff pointy fronds
stubbornly not unlike a pineapple crown. "What other plants do we have in common with Sri
Lanka?" he asked.
"Oh, plenty. The ground covers even. But especially the oleander, the bougainvillea, the orange
ones, the red ones, I sometimes feel like I'm home. In Kandy, we even have the same old, peeling
paint houses the rich British used to live in." She laughed.
They aimlessly rambled about the historical homes, but the eventual destination was Antoine's.
Olivia wanted a French lunch: strong coffee with a croissant. Alroy complied with her minimalist
fare.
All this happened after Alroy asked her about going for a walk Saturday. He looked up from his
spreadsheet, shot a glance across the room, saw she'd returned.
§
It had been three months since Alroy took the the third actuarial exam and the results were
expected any day. He checked his mail religiously when he got home from work, slowly levering up
the flap on his mailbox beside bottom of the outside stairs.
On one Saturday, he had the luxury of being home and being able to wait for the letter carrier. He knew
she came about eleven, so he was sitting out on the stairs in the morning light, studying for the next exam,
Exam Four, when he heard the characteristic steps of one who pushes a three-wheeled cart loaded with
saddlebags full of mail. It was Lidia coming down the alley.
Lidia, dressed in U.S. Post Office grays, was a large woman, and from another era, her powerful
muscular figure recalled the great Althea Gibson, tennis player extraordinaire, who followed up
Forest Hills triumphs with a successful career as a golfing pro. Yes, Lidia was an imposing Black
woman with the commanding hardiness to make it through whatever was expected of a uniformed
representative of the United States Postal Service, heeding the words of Herodotus: neither snow,
nor rain, nor heat, nor anything.
Alroy put down his copy of Actuarial Mathematics for Life Contingent Risks. "You got my letter, Miss
Lidia," he called out.
She beamed, holding a thin envelope in her hand, well aware of what her customer at 934 Avenue O 1/2
was ready to pounce on.
"What you be thinking I got for you?" she asked, keeping the envelope face turned toward her. A
mischievous grin gave away those dancing whites of her eyes in the ebony dark face. She was why Alroy
waited for the mail. She could leave everything she was ever to deliver to his mailbox back at the station
except for this one envelope from SOCIETY OF ACTUARIES, CHICAGO, IL addressed to one Alroy Shanly.
 "You got it, don't you, Miss Lidia?" he asked, his voice rising.
She flashed him a smile of the whitest teeth and said, "Here. Take this, I don't want you in suspense
anymore." She thrust out the envelope, window pane side up, and Alroy took it, fast as a Gulf pelican fish-
dives, then looked up. She towered over him and Juno-like handed down an envelope which had to have one
machine-generated slip of paper with a number deciding much of where the rest of his life would go.
"Say, Alroy, why this be so important to you?"
"Exam results, I gotta pass this test, or else."
"Well, how you do?"
Alroy fumbled with the envelope, not having a letter opener to slip under the flap. Lidia had to
get going on her mail delivery and he was keeping her.
He did a quick calculation, looking at the front of the envelope, figuring the computer print out would
not have the exam score on the left side of the paper--he'd never seen an exam result there, so he simply
squeezed the SOCIETY OF ACTUARIES, CHICAGO IL return address between his thumbs and index fingers
and ripped it top to bottom and opened and pulled out the slip of paper, most of it anyway.
Sure enough, there on the thin slip of paper, probably a triplicate copy, were two digits on the
right side.
"What you got?" Lidia asked, her voice coming from somewhere far away, Alroy so transfixed
at what he saw.
He brought it closer to his face to be sure.
Spontaneously, tears welled in his eyes. Here he was, crying in front of a woman. What was he?
"Says ten," he said, a catch in his voice. He was overwhelmed. "Says I got a perfect score on the
exam," he said softly, no energy to say more.
"I'm always happy to deliver good news," Lidia said. "You did say perfect, not ten out of a
hundred, huh?"
Alroy looked up, a tear on his right cheek having broken loose. "Ten of ten, will my boss ever
be happy," he said, thinking of his last review with Irv in which the importance of passing exams to
keep his job didn't need underlining, the monk-like devotion to passing actuarial hurdles being
understood to be a condition of employment.
"Well, I gotta go," she said pointing down the alleyway.
"It'll be another six months before you deliver an envelope like this," Alroy said. "I'm studying
for an exam right now," he said pointing to the book on the stairs.
"Next time, you have a letter opener," she said, laughing, pushing her cart along the concrete of
Avenue O 1/2.
"Thanks again," he said, waving.
Once Lidia left, Alroy floated, the arcana for construction and selection of parametric models in
the textbook lying on the stairs suddenly losing its urgency in the moment. He could pick it up later.
The rest of Saturday was his free time to exult in his new triumph.
He didn't have anyone to tell, so the joy stayed bottled up inside him. He wanted, most of all, to
tell Olivia, but he knew she was busy, so he'd wait until Monday, when he could tell all his
coworkers.
 §
As it was, Monday Alroy had lunch with Olivia in the cafeteria.
The idea had been his; he wanted to tell her about passing his third exam, find out if she'd heard
on her exam and generally get in a positive frame of mind about the next exam he was studying for.
One Olivia had already passed. She had passed seven, was an ASA.
They sat there in the cafeteria, eating one of Friday's standard offerings: baked salmon bedded
on a plate of rice, dill sauce on the side.
"What did you think when saw the score?" she asked.
"I was in mild shock, checked to see if it was my name on the slip. I expected to pass, but the
10 didn't seem me. That exam had hard problems, though now I think about it, I finished early and
checked the answers."
"You re-do any?"
"No, not a one."
"That's usually a good sign."
She flaked off a bite of salmon, dipping it in the paper cup of sauce.
"I suppose part of my uncertainty about how it went was staying in a hotel overnight, then
walking over to the Rice campus--yes, some new-place feeling must have been been hanging
around."
"Was it your first time in Houston?" She eyed him, her right eye--a lazy eye--blinking
involuntarily.
"First time in my life, even when I came by bus to Galveston from California, we didn't go
through Houston."
"Oh, you should go more often, on weekends, there's a lot there." She went back to flaking off
another bite of fish, turning it in the sauce.
"Sure, by the time I bus there and back, I've only a few hours to look around."
"You need a car."
"I need a car ... to go to Houston," he said, nodding his head in irony.
"There's a lot to see--"
"Oh, things to see I can't see on my bike here on the island?"
"Culture, some of the best in the country. Seriously. There's money in Houston to support the
arts."
Alroy slid a forkful of rice into his mouth, paused. "Well, what's been memorable for you?"
"Oh, easy. Seeing the Menil Art Collection. Unbelievable. A half dozen buildings, galleries,
some are dedicated to just one artist. Twombly, Flavin, but the knockout for me was the Rothko
Chapel."
"What, a church?"
"No, but might as well be. There's a holiness, if I can use that word about the place--"
"Who's Rothko?"
 "He was a twentieth-century painter of modern abstract art, Mark Rothko. Anyway, at the
chapel, you go into a small domed space, almost like being in a sanctuary and you sit on these long,
leather-covered benches in the middle of this circular space and you meditate on what's on the
wall--"
"The paintings?"
"Yes, thirteen of them and they all seem exactly alike. At first, you see black paint on these
identical canvases, five feet high, three and a half feet wide or so."
"Sounds abstract, I probably wouldn't get it." Alroy poked at his side salad.
"Well, as you sit there, something starts to happen as you look from one black painting to
another, they surround you in the circle of the wall around you. You start to notice the paintings are
not solid black, but Rothko has put in some touches of dark, dark purple, or dark, dark blue on these
black surfaces and you start to notice the brush strokes he made on the canvas applying the paint--"
"You sit there trying to puzzle out what he meant?"
"No, there's nothing to figure out. The idea is you sit there and have these paintings before you
and what I felt brought tears to my eyes." She looked at him again, and once again he noticed her
right eye blinking spasmodically.
"Okay, I'm not there, but is it he couldn't think of anything to paint--sorry, but I'm lost, not
having those paintings in front of me." Alroy said with sincerity, not sarcasm, but added, "I would
like to know."
She sighed, as if weighed down with the memory. "You know, you're partly right. I think
Rothko was saying once he saw reality a certain way, there's nothing to paint. Exactly what I felt.
The emptiness. What we call sunyata in my religion. We know underneath all these sense
impressions we bind ourselves to and call reality is the great ground of the void, the emptiness, the
blackness Rothko painted is the greater reality we want to pretend doesn't exist, so we madly rush
about creating sense impressions to escape the sunyata. The emptiness."
Alroy thought about the Great Void he'd come up with for Depressed Kim on the phone, then
said, "So your feeling there in the chapel was a mix of joy and sadness?"
"Yes, possibly a bittersweet mix of emotions. You know Rothko took his life after he learned he
had an incurable medical condition."
"I'm sure it was on top of the suffering he must've endured to produce his art. Everyone
remembers that looking at a Van Gogh."
"Exactly. But unlike Van Gogh's brilliant primary colors, with Rothko, he got darker at the end,
until he did the thirteen black paintings. He'd reached his last glimpse of reality, though he lived
several years after those."
They finished up their lunch, Olivia talking a bit more about Buddhist sunyata, the absence of
anything, which she said surprisingly has been credited with the invention of zero in mathematics.
The first depiction of zero, a round circle of brush strokes has been traced back to medieval
Cambodia where Buddhist monks incorporated it into their arithmetic knowledge.
Alroy realized he hadn't asked Olivia if she'd heard about her exam results.
§
It was March already and Alroy had barely two months left until he took his next actuarial
hurdle: Exam Four, which explored actuarial modelling sui generis, Long-Term Actuarial
Mathematics, but going well beyond theory into different real-world situations involving insurance
and other kinds of risk. A paper-and-pencil affair: It promised to be a gut-wrencher of an exam to
grind through.
Alroy had no choice: He had to keep passing exams in sequence or else his professional
standing as an actuary would collapse. He started studying earlier to get a grounding in the concepts
of mathematical modelling.
March was, however, also the beginning of Lent and its predecessor, Mardi Gras, or Fat
Tuesday, the pigout to precede the week of traditional fasting, joyously celebrated in Galveston, as it
was in its more famous Gulf port cousin, New Orleans.
Music, parades, wild costumes, the crews of celebrants everywhere on the island. Everyone, it
seemed, became a token Catholic for the festival and joined in. Crowds made up of people who'd
never set foot in a sanctuary, who never dreamed of any fasting, symbolic or real. No, they were out
Tuesday night in force and as Alroy finished up his modest dinner of spaghetti pomodoro in his
upstairs apartment, he walked over to a window overlooking the alley and did a double take: They're
coming up this alley! Yes, to his left the lights, the sounds, the chaos of a parade headed his way.
He knew this procession of outlandish costumed celebrants would go on all night, fuelled by an
unstoppable flow of booze. It didn't matter if the music was out of tune, what mattered was the
noisemaking. He knew they would be parading past his place; the leaders were passing below. How
long he wondered would the endless noise go by his place?
He looked away from the window, over to his desk and the waiting book, and the papers where
he had to start pencilling away at answers. He would study until eleven-thirty. He had a schedule.
He looked at his wristwatch: He had to start in twenty minutes.
He decided, What the hey, and opened his door and went out to sit on the steps and watch the
celebrants.
They were shuffling past, dressed in silky, balloony outfits, grotesque masks, and held horns
and drums and tambourines and any other noisemaker to wake the night. One celebrant spied Alroy
on the stairs and yelled: "C'mon, join us!"
Alroy dropped his head, ignoring the invitation. He glanced at his wristwatch. He had to go up
and study. But with this noise?
Upstairs in his room, he still could hear them and looking out another window saw the snake of
celebrants marching down Twenty-second Street and making the turn at Avenue O 1/2. This would
go on for at least forty-five minutes. What was he to do? Put off study until they were gone? No,
they would be walking, straggling, shooting off fireworks, everything, for the rest of the night, until
the early hours, and they would be on nearby streets anyway. That was a Mardi Gras parade, weave
up and down the streets, the avenues, the alleys and leave the town reverbing with a good feeling.
Much as he would have liked, in a different set of circumstances, to join the revelers, to, say,
walk drunkenly with Olivia, it wasn't in the cards. He had to study; Olivia had to study. He had no
choice and looked at the textbook on his desk. He had to open it to his bookmark and get to the work
problems for Chapter Seven.
He sat down, and start pencilling out how he'd approach the first problem. Blam, honnnnk, dum,
dum, aiyeeee--the sound did not let up, going past his place.
He read the problem: You observe the following five ground-up claims from a data set truncated
from--Blam, honnnk, dum, dum, aiyeeee--he put down his pencil. He couldn't concentrate. He
needed to muffle the sound.
 What to do?
He'd happened upon the perfect earstops when he needed one-hundred percent quiet study time
at Cyprus Polytechnic Institute. He went over to the bathroom. Better than a minus 30 dB hunter's
foam earplugs, his lo-tech, cheap ear plugs were so effective, all he could hear was his beating heart,
it silenced all outside noise.
He reached down and took two sheets of toilet paper. He ran each under a bit of water, wadding
them up. With one stuck in each ear, he moved them around until the water-soft tissue wad had
sealed perfectly. Voila! no more parade. He wanted to walk over to the window to see if it was still
there, but instead he sat down to tackle problems.
§
It had to happen. The Houston alternative weekly Sentinel got enough information about Atlas
Global's plans to market fetal life insurance to run an issue with AGI on the cover. The headline was
Atlas Global Redefines Life (Insurance). Only a few places in Galveston distributed the Sentinel, but
that didn't matter. Everybody--radio, TV, the Galveston Crier--picked up the story and ran with it. A
media frenzy in the making, Alroy thought, a la the seventh-floor scandal six months earlier.
But what caught Alroy unawares was showing up for work one Tuesday morning, a bright
spring morning, and turning the corner, walking toward the monumental Atlas Global headquarters
front doors, and seeing many people standing around on the sidewalk, walking back and forth,
carrying picket signs he couldn't read and some half-hearted chanting he couldn't make out.
He picked up his steps, curious to see what was happening. Obviously, an obscure union of
electricians or plumbers somewhere might protest if Atlas went with a nonunion shop, but as was
plain, these seemed to be all women. What sort of picketing women would be after Atlas?
When he was a block away, it made sense to Alroy. WOMEN'S RIGHTS TOO, one picket sign
read. WHO DOES ATLAS THINK THEY ARE TO DEFINE LIFE? read another. He took a deep
breath, ready to pass by the pickets, who seemed orderly, with one sole member of Galveston PD
standing in the midst of them, waving them to keep passage on the sidewalk open.
"No air, no life, no air, no life, no air, no life," Alroy heard from those he passed, hurrying to the
front door to get inside and collect his wits. The band of two dozen or so boisterous women,
brandishing picket signs had no idea he worked inside as an actuary, one of those responsible for
FETAL LIFE INSURANCE IS A JOKE! as one sign put it.
Inside, a gathering of AGI employees looked out at the protesters, unsure where it would all
lead. Alroy figured if they kept at it enough, more police would show up and say they were blocking
pedestrians on the sidewalk and send them packing.
Alroy hoped so, but he knew the way those things went, the same pickets would be back the
next day, and the next, happy to finally have a cause to draw attention. Alroy caught the elevator up
to the sixth floor, not surprised to see Irv standing in his office looking out over the commotion
below on the sidewalk.
"I had to run a gauntlet," Alroy said, stepping into his boss's office.
"Oh, we saw this coming, had an inkling that newspaper got a leak from the focus group, but
this, these pickets down there, we don't need this. The product isn't even launched."
"What do they want? Do they want us not to offer life insurance for the unborn?" Alroy asked.
"Of course, that's what they want. Or have a judge declare the contract illegal. We've checked
with our legal department: The insurance flies--"
 "They probably will keep at it indefinitely, they look like housewives with nothing better to do,"
Alroy said, spicing his words with sarcasm.
"I know the concept polarizes,” Irv said, “but what's the harm to anybody if a fetus is insured?
How are they harmed?"
"Oh, they think abortion rights will be pushed back." Alroy had guessed as much from the
outset, when he and Duncan first proposed insurance for the unborn. It might open up a long,
sustained debate, but from an actuarial standpoint, it was a cut and dried definition of life, rooted in
centuries of legal precedent, a point lost on those picketers.
"Well, I'm afraid," Irv said, turning away from the window and facing Alroy, and Duncan who
had just arrived, too, and stood outside the office door, "those pickets are not going to get what they
want if it's stopping us from selling life insurance, but they will get what they want to publicize their
cause. I'm all for free speech, but at some point, it can get out of control."
Irv sat down at his desk, looking up at Alroy and Duncan as if he had no more to say.
Duncan stepped away from the door; Alroy followed and headed back to his desk to get started
on the day's work.
"Those sorts won't be happy until we cancel plans for FirstLife," Duncan said, referring to what
Marketing was then proposing to be the name of the insurance policy. "But they can't have their
way, not if there's a market for this insurance and legal precedents back up the contract terms."
"You know, I think those pickets were bussed in from Houston, I don't think people who live on
the island would be so up in arms against Atlas; they know we're an important employer."
"Figures. I saw a private bus parked on Fifth, when I got to work today," Duncan said. "And it
was that Houston rag got this going--"
"Next the TV crews will show up with cameras on the sidewalks," Alroy said.
§
And Alroy was right.
The pickets were back, bussed in as Alroy surmised, from off the island. Many of the same
faces. The dour-looking, many short-haired women, who looked as if they were free of children at
home, or didn't want to have children in the first place. Back and forth they marched, holding their
signs aloft: WOMEN'S RIGHTS TOO, WHO SAYS AGI DEFINES LIFE?, NO LIFE, NO
INSURANCE and a few others Alroy missed, as once again he ran the gauntlet of getting in the
front door to start his day on time.
None of the women would look Alroy in the eye; he figured they were playing for a larger
audience than one and they were. The TV crew vans had arrived from two local stations: KGAL and
KHOU and had gone to the cement apron to set up their mobile broadcast units. They'd been told Al
Galoorie, President of Atlas Global Insurance would be making an announcement at nine o'clock in
front of the headquarters and would briefly answer questions.
The countdown, as Alroy went up the elevator to his office, had begun. There would be a face-
off of pickets and the official spokesman for Alroy's employer.
When he got to the sixth floor, Irv called a quick huddle and explained Galoorie would be
addressing members of the press at nine, making a brief statement. He said, as distracting as were
pickets and media coverage, the work of the department had to go on.
Alroy wondered what would happen.
 §
A portable lectern was wheeled out on a dolly in front of the lobby, just opposite the TV crews,
who had set up their cameras and microphones to record the event. A few minutes after nine, after a
technician confirmed the mike had power and tapped it, Jeremy Miles from PR stepped up to the
mike. "Ladies and gentlemen of the press, Mr. Galoorie, President of Atlas Global Insurance will
have a brief statement to make and he will take your questions."
Jeremy stepped back and Al Galoorie, a few cards in his right hand stepped to the lectern and
swiftly scanned left to right, but pausing to see the pickets walking silently, apparently willing to
save the chants for later.
"As you know, Atlas Global Insurance has been providing insurance for families in our region
and across the United States for more than one hundred fifty years. We're proud of this longevity in
a competitive business environment, in which if we don't deliver value our policy holders can
always go elsewhere."
He paused, taking a sip of water. "But the last week or so, several parties have taken to
disputing publicly an insurance product Atlas Global does not offer. And it is not our policy to
confirm products we have under development, that's proprietary information we won't divulge in
advance.
"But still, we have before us on the sidewalk, as you all can see, pickets, people protesting a life
insurance product Atlas Global might some day offer, or might never offer. We've yet to decide.
Still, I would like to say a few words about fetal life insurance, irrespective of insurance products
offered by Atlas Global on this date."
He again paused, sipping water, scanning the pickets on the sidewalk, who had started chanting,
restrained, but audibly: Women have rights too, women have rights too, women have rights too. "Our
company cannot be about culture wars--the endless debate about abortion and under what
circumstances it is legal and the moral consequences. Our company will not be dragged into the mud
over factional politics. When we issue a life insurance policy here at Atlas Global, there is nothing
on the form asking applicants to self-identify their political, religious, or gender preferences.
Nothing. Bringing the polarizing sides of the abortion debate to our doorsteps simply distracts from
what our business is.
"And what is our business, you ask?
"To state it succinctly, Atlas Global Insurance is in the life contingency business and we offer
actuarial solutions. As you all know, death is a life contingency. Life fails, we pay the beneficiaries a
policy amount, the premiums having been paid in advance of death.
"Some," he said raising his index finger to point at the picketers, "will say a fetus does not have
life until it is born. Again, I will stress we have not decided to offer fetal life insurance, but I will
say, if we do, we will offer such a product based upon a rigorous definition of life in utero legally
defensible and contractually binding under the laws of the state of Texas and federal law. We have
been advised by internal legal staff and outside consultants a definition of life has precedents going
back centuries to the Middle Ages, and we will apply the legal precedents to any fetal life insurance
contracts we might offer.”
Galoorie took his prompting cards and put them into his coat pocket and smiling said, "Are
there any questions from the press?"
There was a flurry of reporters yelling out for attention, and Jeremy standing beside Galoorie
picked out the lucky petitioner. Galoorie stepped back to the microphone, his face suddenly
appeared relaxed, all the tension from delivering his statement suddenly erased with the realization
he had gone before the press and the pickets and made the company's case.
 Chapter Fifteen: Forced Overtime

The face-off, as it were, of President Galoorie and the pickets in front of the office building had
ramifications, which extended all the way to the sixth floor and to Alroy and Duncan.
Irv called a meeting of the two "FirstLife" insurance actuaries in his office.
"PR says phones have been ringing off the hook about this FirstLife policy. When is it coming
out? People think Atlas is about to pioneer this--"
He paused and Alroy knew a request was coming up. "As for Marketing, they are getting the
same question over and over from agents: When will FirstLife be sold?
"You see where we are? The product is white-hot and we've yet to launch. We're not ready.
We've only begun the regulatory paperwork."
He sighed, looked sideways out his picture window at the gray cloudy skies, promising, but not
delivering rain, rain that might drive away the pickets down on the sidewalk. "As your supervisor, I
hate to bring this up, but I have the weight of upper management on me to get FirstLife out and get
it out fast." He scribbled on his legal pad a few numbers. "Originally, we said launch in September.
With the interest in the product, that's too far off. We need to pull the schedule back two months.
Launch July at the latest. For you two," he said, eyeing Alroy, then Duncan, "this means forced
overtime, if you two are going to get the compliance paperwork ready."
"What is 'forced overtime'?" Duncan asked pointedly. His brow had an uncharacteristic furrow.
"Well, to put it in a bit of context, you two are salaried and exempt employees, which is to say
you don't get paid hourly, you don't clock in, and you keep normal work hours of eight to five, five
days a week. But because you two are dedicated professionals," he said, smiling, "you occasionally
will work late or maybe pop in on a Saturday to take care of something. Which is fine. I do it too,
obviously. But when a supervisor tells an employee work needs to be done and it will take overtime,
that's forced overtime if the employee doesn't come to the same conclusion and volunteer."
"Are you asking us to volunteer?" Alroy asked, new to these nuances of work hours.
"No, as your supervisor, I think the honest transaction is to request you put in these extra hours,
as needed in the months ahead to get those compliance forms out--ninety days before launch on
Department of Insurance seven-o-one, for example. Because it is a request from me, I want you
tracking your time, in fifteen-minute increments once you put in over forty hours a week.
Understood?"
They nodded.
"Then we will take the overtime you each have and offer time off--flex time--whenever you
want in the next twelve months. That's one way for us to comply with DOL rules on overtime. I'll
know you put in extra time; you'll know too. We'll have a record, so to be above-board, you need to
be paid for this time. Extra vacation time will do it. Duncan, you are not studying for exams, but
Alroy is. We have the tricky problem of keeping balance here, so Alroy keeps passing exams. Alroy,
I want you to keep me posted if any of this report compliance work on FirstLife drains time from
your studies--if so, I'll figure out something. Everything clear?"
"Sure," Duncan said, his face showing relief and some excitement work priorities had been
ratcheted up a few notches. "You think this policy will be a big seller?"
"Too early to say, it's new territory and might be part of the buzz we're getting from Marketing.
People are curious, they're not sure this product is one-hundred percent, but then they're not lawyers
either. I'll tell you who will be under the gun--"
"Marketing?" Duncan asked.
"And how. Do you realize all the sales collateral they've got to put together, all the brochures,
the handy two-folds an agent gives prospects, outlining the policy in Flesch-tested, layman's
language of the legal contract. The mind boggles at the midnight oil they'll burn down on the fourth
floor."
"Okay, this week, I want you two to go back to the premium calcs and solidify them. Compare
them with a double-checked mortality table, minus nine months forward. Then we sign off on those
and get busy on the compliance data compilation. We're tentatively planning to sell in thirty-seven
states, so there's plenty of forms to work through in the four months remaining. Understood?"
Alroy saw his future mapped out for the next quarter plus, overloaded at work and an always
daunting study schedule to get past Exam Four ahead.
§
One evening, Alroy headed home after work, the usual route, the same yellow, coral, baby blue
dwelling units along Avenue M 1/2, crossing two streets with trolley tracks. The air felt heavy with a
spring promise of overnight showers, he guessing the Bermuda high over the Gulf had weakened.
He turned the corner at Twenty-ninth, the handful of blocks remaining to his place, a quick dinner of
a sandwich thrown together and hours, again, of contingent life risk problems.
Around the corner at Avenue O, however, he was struck by a novel sight: a fire truck,
firefighters rushing about; and closer, a police car parked astraddle the road, its roof lights flashing
away, and smoke, white smoke growing into the sky ahead down there on his left.
He picked up his steps to see what was going on and soon enough he was staring at the stony
face of the policeman standing, arms tight to his chest in front of the blue-and-red striped white
Galveston P.D. pursuit vehicle. "The other side of the street," the officer yelled at Alroy, who
quickly saw the crowd on the sidewalk to the right, clustered as close as they could get to the fire
truck and its unrolled tan water hose two firefighters held, pumping a torrent of water at a house on
his left.
He obligingly scuttled to the other side of the street and stopped, looking at the fire under attack
by the water hoses. He did a double take. Was he seeing things? The flames and white steam plumes
shot out of a skinny shotgun house, the one where he first saw the guy arguing with his wife, getting
thrown out of the house, retreating to his Bondo'd-over Cavalier, now parked behind Galveston F.D.
Unit Number 5.
“I walk by here every day after work, what happened?” Alroy asked the nearest person in the
crowd he joined on the sidewalk.
 An older woman in a house dress said, “Who knows? Electrical short? Happens, landlords don't
care about those rentals,” she said with distain as if she had moved up into the homeowner class.
Alroy saw her speculation as answering nothing and searched the crowd of faces and spotted the
Bondo'd Cavalier guy. The guy held an orange kitten in his arms. He had seen the guy so many
times, but never got his name.
Alroy walked right over to the guy, who was wearing a tank top and jeans, holding the
obviously saved kitten in his arms. Beside the guy was the woman with him, probably his wife, who
said aloud to no one, “My lord, what have we done?”
The guy completed the thought. “We didn't deserve this.”
Alroy looked him in the eye and said, “Sorry to see this. I walk by here every day after work.”
The guy gave Alroy a look of numb shock, as if everything he had, save the clothes on his back,
would soon be ashes, nothing more.
Alroy smiled, “Yeah, I live just up the street at the B & B. You folks need a place to stay, I can
get a room for you.”
The guy came out of his disbelieving stare and said, “It's okay, they're setting us up at the
emergency shelter downtown.”
“Good.” Alroy glanced back at the flames jetting up with fresh life from a just collapsed section
of the charred roof and said, “This looks bad. You have renter's insurance?”
“What's renter's insurance?”
Alroy smiled at the orange kitten, the orange kitten with the outsized ears, the blonde fur circles
about its eyes as if wearing glasses. He reached out and patted the crown of its furry head. “Some
things money won't replace.” Alroy still did not know the guy's name, but added, “Anything I can
do, let me know.” He stepped away, a smile for the two and the kitten, knowing some insurance
money might have helped.
§
Alroy didn't immediately start to put in extra hours, but he checked in with Duncan often about
what priorities were. They didn't have time to waste and Duncan seemed to know where things were
headed. Besides, Duncan having no exams anymore, he had little choice except to put in the lion's
share of forced overtime.
When Alroy went home, mindful of the new aggressive schedule, he cracked open his copy of
Actuarial Mathematics with new keenness: He had only so many hours to master the work problems
underlying the fundamental concepts of risk analysis. He set up weekly goals, what chapters he
would finish on what dates and knew consistent nightly study was essential: He couldn't make it all
up with marathon hours on weekends.
As long as he had a study plan written out, he felt confident he would give it his best shot in
May. Paradoxically, he felt the pressure to pass the exam lessen. Irv knew he was demanding Alroy
put in extra time on FirstLife, so Irv said up front this might have an effect on Alroy's study time,
even if he hoped it wouldn't. But Alroy knew if everything went to plan, he would pass. Maybe not a
ten, but at least a seven.
Thus, it was with hope, however tenuous, he could get through the next months and succeed
Alroy went to work Tuesday morning, ready to tackle the blizzard of form filing for FirstLife.
Through the airlock lobby doors, past the security guard, his Atlas picture ID held aloft for her to
see, and straight to the elevator bank, where a door was being held open on the upward bound car.
The hand holding open the door was Emma's.
They looked at each other with open smiles, as if they each knew there was no need for names,
greetings, that sort of thing. There hung in the air an easy mutual acceptance.
Standing there, letting the door close now that Alroy was in the car, she pushed the button for 5,
her floor and the button for 6, his floor because Alroy realized she remembered. Or perhaps she
remembered he was in the Acturial Department on six.
Alroy felt time slow down, as he realized he was paying extraordinary attention to this sandy-
haired woman, a year or two younger than he--a guess--who was restrained, probably never given to
emotional displays, and like the girl next door, who grew up right, had a pleasing young woman's
figure. Alroy understood, other things being equal, he could ask her out, she seemed his type and he
thought they'd have a good time. But right then things were complicated. Olivia. Before, the
JoBecca visits. And he had to admit, he found Emma beguiling; he was curious if she was the right
one for him. He turned this all over in his head and knew if he approached his actuarial exams the
way he approached women socially, he would have a numerical meltdown. He'd be a slag heap.
Then Emma said, "I like your tie."
He blushed at the unexpected compliment, nervously fingering the wool tartan plaid hanging
down his white shirt, a tie he'd picked up in a men's shop when he was trying to put together an
office wardrobe after getting the job at Atlas Global. He didn't hesitate to buy it. He'd always been
on the lookout for it, ever since seeing Jean Pierre Leaud wearing Scot tartan ties in Truffaut's
"Stolen Kisses," years ago. He liked how Emma could pick up on the Gallic sensibility for modest
fashion he had in mind, noticing his tie.
"Thanks," he said. He could have added, Seeing you first thing in the morning eases me into one
heap of work the next several months. Thank you for the nice start to my work day. But he'd never
say this. It would destroy the subtle communication he felt he and Emma had going for them. What
they imagined in their heads was better than pitching oneself to the other in an elevator speech. No
her eyes said everything. She was interested in him. Why else would she compliment him?
The elevator car beeped at floor four and was approaching five. She would get off at that floor,
its button lit on the side panel. "You have a great morning," he said.
"You too," she said, adding, "Maybe I'll see you in the cafeteria again." Alroy smiled. She was
interested in him, wanted to pick up where they'd left off. Sure would be nice, but he didn't want to
get her hopes up either. He still was in pursuit of Olivia. He'd made his choice. "As it is, I think I'll
be having lunch a lot at my desk, I'm busy, but yes, I'll keep an eye out for you."
At floor five, Emma left the elevator, Alroy holding the door for her. He guessed she must not
have a boyfriend. But with her modest, but pleasing figure, she should have a boyfriend, possibly it
was because she was shy.
When the door closed, he thought it poignant she was trying to overcome her social shyness.
But he was seeing Olivia, for so long seemingly impossible and now Emma, seemingly so interested
in him. One an actuary, one a claims clerk--was he was weighing his preferences, his actions? He
told Emma he'd be working at his desk during lunch hours--did he have to be so blunt?
Sometimes, he thought, he was tactless.
§
Seeing Olivia at work and seeing her away from work were two different experiences. Seeing
her at work was metaphysical, in a way, for any thoughts he had about her had to stay strictly in the
confines of his skull. It was seeing her away from work, which brought the physical Olivia to life for
him, let him know he was in the presence of solid flesh that might pour over him like molten purple,
or something else when he got into his wilder imaginings.
With the full weight of what was in the balance to satisfy his more fervid imaginings, Alroy got
around to suggesting they have dinner together one evening after work. Specifically Thursday, a day
Alroy thought auspicious because it was a night the tourists tended to stay away from the Strand and
they could get a reservation at one of the better seafood restaurants there.
They met at The Shorebird, six straight up, and took a booth by the street window. A candle
flickered on the table and Olivia seemed somehow so much more alluring seated opposite him,
holding the menu the waiter had handed each of them.
"The specials of the day are lobster flown in from Maine daily, a blackened sea bass with a
Cajun punch and our locally sourced plate of crawfish. Do you have any questions?"
They shook their heads. "Then please take your time, I'll be back to get your drink orders, if
you'd like more than water."
"Nice of you to suggest this. I've only been to this place a few times," Olivia said, causing Alroy
to think it must have been in the heyday of Gary of deep pockets. "And I know this place is
swamped on weekends with everybody from Houston descending on the island."
"Weekends, you can't get a reservation," Alroy added.
"I know." She gave him a look that threw Alroy off-balance because it was different from what
he had seen in her face when they were wandering around in the graveyard under a full moon. No,
the look in her eyes had distance, a small disengagement, as if she already had one foot poised to
stand and leave. Or was he imagining this?
"At least the service won't be as slow as it gets on weekends," Alroy said. "I've heard of people
waiting twenty minutes or more for their order."
"Good, I've got to get home early tonight."
Alroy pressed fingers of one hand to his forehead. Her eyes are really looking past me. What he
imagined was true. She wasn't into dinner with him, she had to be somewhere else, like her place,
and the minutes were ticking down. "Oh," he said, showing a bit of surprise at what she telegraphed,
"maybe we should have picked a different night to come here."
"No, no, this is perfect, this dinner here. It's just I'm out of the office tomorrow morning and I
need to prepare some things to get ready."
"Oh, Irv have you doing a special project?" Alroy asked, being nosy, sure, but he had the sense
from the look in her hooded eyes and the precipitous way she'd just told him her evening was not
entirely free, she was going to be tight-lipped too.
"No, it's something personal, I'm taking a few hours' vacation time."
"Oh," Alroy said. A closed matter. Possibly, but not likely a doctor's appointment, for which she
could have used sick time.
He studied the menu with a new-found intensity. He was being short-changed on his dinner date
with Olivia and was in need of some comfort food to break the spell. "I think I'll go with the halibut
fish and chips," he announced with self-boosting gusto of one guy who'd seen his bird get out of
hand, about to fly away.
 "I think I'll take the cod and leeks, I've had that before," she said.
This was not a night, apparently, given Olivia's advance notice, for him to drink any alcohol and
feel relaxed, so he followed her example and stuck to water.
He sat there for a moment, still puzzled about what would take Olivia away from him early. He
smiled wanly and decided to do a bit of heuristic analysis in his head to arrive at what was going on.
Olivia, to the best of his knowledge had never been away from work while he was at Atlas Global
for undisclosed reasons--doctor appointments, yes--but anything else never. This was a first while
he'd worked there. And he guessed this was true of all her two-plus years there.
The big clue was she said she had to prepare in advance.
He saw the contingent event in a flash: If this was the first time she'd taken time off, even if
only hours, in her two plus years at Atlas, a duration marked by only one event: Her start at Atlas.
Voila! She must have a job interview and she's preparing notes tonight for it.
Alroy smiled at her and said, "I hope your job interview goes well tomorrow." She didn't say
anything, but he detected the hue of faint blushing.
§
Alroy thought long and hard about Olivia having a job interview and when she came to work
Friday mid-day, he didn't pick up any signs from her cool exterior pose. What he did know--if it was
true she was shopping around for another job--his pursuit of her might suddenly be absurd if she
were about to leave Atlas, that is, if Irv didn't make a counter-offer.
A week later, Alroy was scheduled for his biennial review with Irv. Olivia had continued to
come to work as always, acting neither more outgoing or less, as if she had nothing to hide. Alroy
concluded he might have conflated her lack of response to his suggestion of a job interview he'd
tossed out at Olivia into an indefensible imagining.
It was with a tentative idea he had to ask out Olivia soon, he went into Irv's office, figuring he
was in good shape: He'd passed his last exam.
"Where does the time go, you've been here almost a year, according to my records," Irv said, a
decided lilt in his voice, a wide grin on his face.
Alroy leaned back in the chair opposite Irv's desk, confident he was holding the ace of a ten on
the third exam he passed in November. He had no nerves about this review, unlike the one he had six
months before when he'd yet to pass an exam, other than the two from college days.
"Time's shot by, but might be because I've been busy," Alroy replied. He'd let Irv go into the
details.
"We get a copy of your exam scores, as you know, because as your employer we pay your exam
fees. And the ten on this last exam is encouraging. It signals great things for you ahead, Alroy. Keep
it up. How's the studies for this next one in May?"
"It's pushing me to learn new things. Mostly from many mathematical applications. Modelling
on all sorts of data sets--"
"They want you to develop your ability to create survival models for whatever you come across.
Sometimes the best way is not out of the book. That's the creative side of our work."
Irv summoned up a broad smile again, as if he was holding back something Alroy would take
well, but then it could've been his imagination. "I'm thinking specifically of your work on FirstLife.
There's no mortality table for that situation. And true you're working with an experienced FSA in
Duncan, but what did you do, you had to go in and create the table, so we could justify premiums--"
"Yeah, popped in my mind too. It's never left my mind, seems like FirstLife is my job for the
time being, which is great. It's an exciting project."
Irv then went down a short list of what he felt Alroy had done since his last review. He
complimented him on his punctuality and the honest hours he put in. He reviewed the off-site work
Alroy had done, interviews and research at the UTMB. He mentioned the contributions Alroy had
made to solving technical problems with workstations in the office: Alroy had a knack for
diagnosing loose cables and the like. Irv said teamwork was important, and he wanted Alroy to keep
it up.
Once he'd reviewed Alroy's past performance, he seemed to settle into a more somber tone.
"Now I want to talk to you about how, as we hope you pass this test in May and others afterwards, I
see you growing in your job over the next year or so. You will be taking on more of the complex
projects Olivia, for example, handles with her ASA." At the mention of Olivia, Alroy's pulse banged
along. Was Irv on to something he'd discarded in the last few days? He was all ears for what Irv had
to say.
"I'll look forward to that--" Alroy said, knowing he wasn't as insecure about his job as he was in
his last review.
"At Atlas Global, we're always ready for growth. This department will grow--there will be not
five of you out there, but possibly ten, maybe not on my watch, but someday, that's business, grow
or let your competitors pick over your carcass--"
Irv went over a list of three kinds of projects he might assign Alroy once the FirstLife business
was wrapped up, the capstone then being, he was sure, a presentation by Alroy and Duncan at the
annual agents' conference held in the convention center across town.
"After you and Duncan present for the national gathering of our sales force, I'll put you on a
new project just came across my desk. I won't give you the details because they're still being worked
out and I want you focussing on FirstLife, getting those forms done." He tapped his mechanical
pencil on the legal pad. "And all this brings us around to the matter of compensation for your work."
He smiled broadly. "Starting with your next paycheck in ten days, you will see more money. Works
out to the annualized raise I recommended for you and which was approved of seventy-five
hundred."
Alroy stared in disbelief at Irv. He would never have asked for that much.
§
The unexpected generous raise Alroy got from Irv might have had something to do with what
happened next. The following week on Monday, Olivia was in Irv's office when Alroy got to work
just past eight. The door was closed and the conversation appeared subdued. But when the door
opened some twenty minutes later, Irv came out with Olivia, who Alroy saw looked
uncharacteristically dazed, and Irv said, "Now you're all here," an introductory comment Alroy
thought superfluous, because he, Duncan, Van, and Tuan had been there working away at their desks
for at least fifteen minutes, only Van getting to work after Alroy, "it's with mixed feelings I must tell
you Olivia has taken a job with the Dallas office of Tower Perrin, the worldwide actuarial
consultants. It's a big step up for her, but as we all know, a loss for us."
"So," he continued, "we all wish her well, and let's enjoy her last two weeks here, okay?"
Alroy was stunned. He'd half hit on the idea Olivia might have an interview--phone interview.
But then when she kept coming to work, he decided he might have been mistaken or she wasn't
invited for a second interview, in person on the weekend. He was almost sure Olivia would still be
around.
But reality was reality. She had a career to follow and her ambition apparently had outgrown the
home office of Atlas Global Insurance.
"We all should take Olivia out to lunch," Duncan exclaimed, turning around in his desk chair,
"to celebrate all the extra work she's going to leave us." He laughed and popped a jelly bean in his
mouth.
Olivia stood there, looking crossed up, probably wanting to sit down and get to work, but also
compelled to stand there the ready target for Duncan's jesting barbs. "I'll miss you guys," she finally
said. She glanced at Alroy, but so briefly he knew the experience of taking another job had probably
overwhelmed her in the moment--this was not, after all, as simple as buying another car.
Relationships with people, her coworkers, were being ruptured, not the least of which was Alroy's
keen sense of a missed opportunity with her.
"We're gonna miss you," Van said to Olivia when she passed by him, going to her desk. Alroy,
the other side of the room, cast a glance her way, trying to catch her eye. She apparently didn't want
to get emotional about the news and steadfastly clicked her mouse, opening a window on her
desktop, the spreadsheet she probably would give her attention to the rest of the morning.
Alroy felt cast adrift. No warning. Just boom--Irv's announcement. He was sure Irv was busy
working the phones with recruiters to see if he could scare up a replacement. This was, after all, an
associate with seven exams, an ASA, so it might not be as easy as hiring Alroy fresh out of college.
He went back to the form he was filling out on his computer screen: a FirstLife policy
application for the state of New Mexico, he had dozens to go. In between tabbing from blank to
blank on the screen and completing each item, his mind, like a pendulum, kept swinging back to the
revelation Olivia, the voluptuous, brainy woman with whom he thought he was finally making some
progress had cancelled the game. She had her agenda and he apparently didn't figure in it.
He had known for years choosing to work in an insurance home office was a career choice. The
choice offered job security and a structured work environment, where the assignments, if
challenging, were still for the same management team. In contrast, actuarial consultants, like Tower
Perrin, were used to taking on different assignments, each as different as the client firm requesting
services, and your job security was closely tied to how well you performed and retained these
clients. If Atlas Global was the more insulated, secure choice; Tower Perrin was exposed to all the
vagaries of the market place, demand for services fluctuating with the economic forces at play.
Consulting was more demanding, but it also paid more. It could pay a lot more: Olivia could
eventually make twice what an actuary with similar exam success might make at Atlas. But the
reward came with a corresponding risk. Fail a client, one client, and you might be shown the door.
Alroy had to talk with Olivia, let her know the keen loss he was feeling, but also to prove he
wasn't completely self-centered and wish her well. He caught up with her as she was leaving work
and said he'd like to see her before she took off. She said she was busy with what had to be done to
make the move in two weeks.
"I'm packing like crazy, all I do when I go home. You can't just have movers filling boxes. It's so
much work. But at least I don't have to pay for the moving van, Tower Perrin will pick up that."
"I didn't mean we had to do anything," Alroy replied. His face had the seriousness of a gambler
who'd rolled the seven he wanted.
"I know. Why don't you come by Saturday afternoon, anytime, I'll be there. We can talk, I'll
make you coffee." She smiled.
§
Alroy was over at Olivia's Saturday afternoon. Stood there on the sidewalk in front of Tombolo
Manor, a scattering of bottle tree palms guarding the entrance to the courtyard between two wings of
the three-story, tan stucco building the color of shelled pecans.
Olivia was on the first floor--apartment 37 to the right--and he marched straight for her door,
midway down the walk, and knocked.
The door opened, her face was alluring as ever, the thick, black hair hugging her face, the
hooded eyes, the full lips; but she wasn't dressed to be out, she was dressed for labor. She had on a
threadbare T-shirt and dungarees for which only her delectable figure gave shape.
"Hi," she said. "You can see what I'm up against." She waved her hand at the boxes, stacks of
them sitting cattywampus all over the place. An open box nearby, she must've been wrapping dishes
in towels. He could see, when the box, like the others, was full, she'd reach for the tape gun, seal it,
and label it, systematically, with the Magic-Marker.
"I wish I could help," he said, "but only you, obviously, know your stuff." He grinned at his luck
she was willing to take some time for him despite having to get an apartment boxed up.
"The moving van gets here in two days and I plan to be ready. I'm just trying to be logical about
the packing, so it will be easier when I get to Dallas."
"You have a place there?"
"No, but after I drive up, that will be all I do. My stuff's at the warehouse for a week, no charge,
after that it costs."
"I hope you find a place with an easy commute like here. I've heard Dallas traffic can be a bear."
"Everything, in its time, works out. Say, how about a cup of coffee?"
"Sure, if no special trouble."
Alroy watched as she left the living room, headed for the kitchen area by a small window over a
sink. Despite the baggy denims she was wearing, Alroy could see the fluidity of her steps were at
one with the curvaceous body he'd fantasized about seemingly ever since he started work at Atlas.
He would miss her. Miss the possibility of capturing desirable Olivia.
A few minutes later, she'd boiled water, poured it into a press pot, waited the right steeping time,
then handed Alroy his small cup of coffee. "You drink it black?" she asked.
"If need be," he replied.
"Good, I've packed away the sugar and tossed the half-and-half. Nearly clean fridge."
He gingerly sipped the java. "What got you to looking around, work-wise, I mean?"
"Well, like you, I'm sure, I was glad to be hired at Atlas. Right out of college. Who wouldn't be?
You study hard and it's something you can turn into a profession."
"Yeah, I had my doubts, too, when I was looking to graduate. I'd been told the number passing
exams is purposely held back to approximate the expected job openings in the marketplace."
"There's probably something to that. It's not as if fresh out of college you can hang out a shingle
and call yourself a free-lance actuary." She laughed, no thin, nervous nasal laugh, but a deeper,
lower register release of exuberance from somewhere in the diaphragm depths.
 "Not like being a lawyer," he said with a chuckle.
"Anyway, answer your question, I don't know when, but after a year or so, I got to thinking,
'What's my future here? We only have a small department and not many ways to advance.'"
"No, you hire on as an associate actuary at AGI, and how do you advance?"
"Look at Duncan. FSA. What can he do? He's a senior actuary, but what happens next?"
"He waits until Irv retires?" Alroy said, with a knowing smile.
"Exactly. Just what I saw, and after a year I began to ask myself, 'Where's Olivia's career path?'"
"The odds of you or I becoming managing actuaries are super contingent," Alroy said.
"Atlas is a secure, stable, nondynamic work environment. I wanted more opportunity, and
consulting started to have appeal."
"You're working with all those clients--"
"Yep, and some actuaries even go client-side, get hired away from consulting. As I figure,
always the chance to move."
They finished their coffee and Alroy stood up from the cardboard box Olivia said he could sit
on: It was full of books. "I can't take up much more of your time, you need to keep packing."
"I needed a break. Thanks for coming by." She put down the cup, ready to bid him good-bye.
Alroy didn't know if he'd see her again, perhaps at an actuarial convention, but what could
happen? A year or so from now, a few minutes of catching up and poof, she'd be gone again. "I think
good-byes are tough," he said, "but I have nice memories of our time together, can't forget walking
under the full moon in the graveyard," he said, feeling something beyond him--Olivia's self-respect
and ambition--was taking her away, before he could see where they might go.
"Oh, it is really good-bye," she said, holding her arms apart, ready for a hug.
He was more than willing and as she put her arms around him--her seductively prominent
breasts rising, falling at his chest and momentarily staying his breath--her right hand reached around
to his back, his spine and pressed firmly, attentively massaging, finger strokes up and down, as if to
unleash some tantric energy there.
He tasted the wayward tresses brushing his lips: arabica-infused filaments; he hardened at the
scent of dermal sweat from the packing up, sweat for which he would have volunteered his tongue;
her soft shoulders rose rhythmically to his body with her moving hand, with the murmur of her
relaxed breathing.
He knew he'd been seduced with nothing more than those knowing strokes of her hand. The
warmth lingered, radiating out from his spinal shaft.
"You come see me in Dallas, okay?" she said, her words tangled in a breathy exhalation.
She stood there, apart from him, ever voluptuous, her left eye, its hooded, dark mystery,
winking away a spasm of what must have been desire, but they agreed she had packing to do. Her
hand promised more than enough for his pounding heart.
 Chapter Sixteen: Home-Delivery Pizza

Alroy left Olivia's, went home, and didn't know what to do. With one gesture, her hand on his
back, and her words he should visit her in Dallas, she had promised him the keys to the Golden
Kingdom, his fantasy-in-residence for much of the past year brought to life.
Except ... it was contingent upon his going to visit her in Dallas, a five and one-half hour bus
ride each way.
What was he to do?
All of sudden, he was the one who needed a telephone counselor, or at least someone with
whom to sort things out. He could have everything if. The if, the big contingency, was the problem.
His comfortable life in Galveston, spending his free hours studying to pass the next actuarial exam
would be disrupted. What if he went ahead and reworked his study schedule? Taking the bus when
he wanted to be with Olivia would be a one-way time sink. It would carve out weekends, easily.
He'd throw away hours to gain those minutes with her? He might shave a half hour off the travel
time to Dallas if he broke down and bought a car. But the cost/benefit ratio? Forget it. Any car was a
decision he'd resolutely resisted once he moved to the oh-so-flat island. Plus, riding his cargo bike,
who would ever blame global warming on him?
But given the green light to possess Olivia, he couldn't let go one briar-patch thought. It was as
if every erotogenic chakra in his body pulsated with desire to be satisfied. His throat felt dry, and his
breathing labored.
About six, he sat down dispiritedly to dinner. He had no appetite. A paper tray of microwaved
penne Florentine, he idly rowed his fork through, not sure what was in his future if he went to Dallas
and claimed his prize.
His arm and chest muscles were tight as wooden barrel bands. He mechanically finished what
he could eat and left the rest for compost. He had to leave his room, go out for a walk and shake up
his body, get it moving. Sitting around, he was just going to seize up, or blow gaskets.
He walked down the front driveway. It was dark. Just fine, he thought, I need to concentrate on
where I'm going. Get my mind off this mess. Yet the lack of light merely took away the customary
distractions of historical houses, lush vegetation, trees, and neighborhood odds and ends he liked to
look at. No, instead there was nothing to keep him from imagining a scale, weighing the conflict in
his head: the right hand of the scale was winning the MegaBuck lottery, worth millions of dollars,
well, not literally but it might as well have been because in his mind it was what Olivia's favors had
to be worth. On the left, the sinister side of the scale, so to speak, were all things that might go
wrong.
Unlike Gary, he and Olivia hadn't started a relationship. But what, if like a guy, she simply
wanted to try before she buys? What if Olivia were to tell Alroy in a few months, it's all too much
trouble. I want to do more on my own time than entertain a visitor from Galveston. Something
callous. Here was a woman, calculation her gift for sure, who after only two years on the job
decided her future at AGI was confining and bolted.
Surely, a huge debit for the proposed interaction would be less time to study. What if he lost
enough of an edge he didn't pass the next exam? After all, Duncan's prescription for exam success
included no sex for at least a week. When Duncan gave him the advice, it was sort of laughable,
given Alroy's sputtering social life. But with Olivia? How could it work? He could see himself going
down in lack-of-preparation flames.
Also in the debit column was his nagging suspicion what would happen might disappoint. Being
with Olivia, enjoying intimacy, might be a one-time shot, might not be sustainable, which was
something he'd like to have if he were to go all in for a five-hundred-seventy-eight-mile-round-trip
relationship.
He walked for blocks and blocks. Then saw across Broadway, the Old City Cemetery. Six
weeks ago, he and Olivia had walked through there under a full moon. His mental weighing of pros
and cons collapsed. He was taken by the quicksand of a memory, one of the best he had since
arriving on the island. Being with the woman he desired from afar, the two of them walking among
reminders of departed souls. Life was transient. Seize the day. Why reject joy in life? The special
feeling they felt walking under the moon. Wasn't this all he needed to think about? They would feel
that way again, if he went to Dallas.
Having seen the graveyard that night, Alroy decided the walking wasn't getting him anywhere.
He'd go back to his place. Maybe take a sheet of paper and write things out.
Back in his room, Alroy wrote out the pros and cons again, but without avail: His indecision led
him to see he was up against an inescapable fact: His desire for intimacy was trumping every logical
argument the other way, as if she were the only woman on the planet with whom he could have a
satisfying relationship. It was irrational.
He puttered around studying with listless intent, but about eleven, went to bed.
A mistake. The same dialectic: To Dallas, not to Dallas, kept coursing through his mind. His
brain stubbornly refused to turn off and let him sleep. Then he decided if he got up, opened the
fridge and ate something, it would shunt the blood flow toward his stomach and its digestive chores
and away from his overactive brain.
Worked like a charm and shortly after midnight, he fell asleep. But two hours later, he awoke
not able to go back to sleep. Eventually the sun rose.
§
Two hours sleep left him enervated. As if his body was deciding. Forget the cogitation on pros
and cons of seeing Olivia again. His body said he couldn't go on like this. It openly rebelled.
He got up. A hot shower did nothing to get his blood circulating. He came out of the shower,
dressed, had breakfast, and still seemed as bleary-eyed as ever. He made a quick cup of instant
coffee, hoping to jolt himself awake. He got out the door walking to work. He prayed his diurnal
body rhythms, rising through the day, would pull up the slack.
At AGI headquarters, he entered the lobby doors, waved his pass at the security guard on duty
and walked straight for the bank of elevators. Next stop, the sixth floor, and the Life Actuarial
Department sans Olivia. He'd adjust.
One elevator car door was open, going up. He snuck in.
 Emma. Alroy was awake.
She stood beside the bank of floor buttons, her index finger hitting 6. He didn't even have to tell
her.
What was there to think about? He started talking. Chatting with a purpose. "So when are you
taking lunch today, Emma?" he asked.
She blushed, probably not used to a guy's interest before eight in the morning. "Oh, I've been
leaving about eleven-thirty lately. What about you?"
"Same here. Trying to get a jump on the noon crowd. Say, why don't we meet outside the
cafeteria door, we could have a nice chat about the mysteries of death certificates and their
authentication," he said, a skip in his voice.
"That'll be fun," she said, playing along with the premise. She stood there, the smile on her face
as bright as klieglights, unquenchable. Alroy suddenly felt awake, bleariness banished, every fiber in
his body singing with electric desire for the woman who watched the elevator car door open at the
fifth floor, who stepped out and turning her head slightly toward him, as if to say bye, raised her
right hand, her coupled fingers bobbing ever so slightly at him, her face still radiant with joy.
The car door closed and Alroy's back fell against the wall. He'd done it. Asked her out, well, if
only to lunch in the cafeteria. Still, he had let her know he enjoyed being with her. That was how it
had to start.
Alroy got off the sixth floor in a daze, but not from lack of sleep. No, he entered his work room,
unencumbered of the past, the past few days, to be sure, and was looking forward to a new romantic
interest.
He looked at his wristwatch. Three hours, twenty-seven minutes to go and he would be down
there, next to the cafeteria door.
He sat down at his workstation.
Looked across the room, saw Tuan already at work, next to him an empty chair. Where Olivia
sat.
Time flew by, as Alroy plowed through state compliance forms, one after another, filling out the
blanks with the needed information to qualify FirstLife for sale in each market. Duncan or Irv would
have to electronically sign off on every form, but a mere formality. The forms were so much alike.
Read one, you might as well've read them all.
Before he knew it, it was eleven twenty-five. Alroy tidied up his desk and stood, looking over at
Duncan. "Early lunch, I'm taking off."
Duncan nodded. "Enjoy," he said.
Alroy smiled. No way could he know the lagniappe he had in mind with his lunch. Emma. The
name alone got him moving with a hustle to his steps for the elevator.
Life was simple and beautiful when you had a plan. And Alroy had a plan. Emma. He would
forget all fantasy about Olivia, Olivia in Dallas, the coaxing fingers at his spine in her apartment,
and the tempting torment, which impaled him after leaving her. Why put up with it when there was
Emma?
Admittedly, she was younger, fewer life experiences, no actuary, a cog in the insurance home
office machine, maybe, but still young, attractive, with her dimpled cheeks, and, well, easy to talk
to. He stepped inside the elevator, surrounded by three others, all apparently headed to the first floor,
no other buttons were pushed, and let the space they allowed each other compress, confine his
internal delight at what waited for him once the elevator doors opened again.
§
Alroy and Emma had a nice lunch together, penne rigate, shrimp salad.
At some point, Alroy mentioned to Emma he had a cargo bike. It was his way of getting around
the island, of shopping for groceries. He said he was doing without a car for now. He lived so close
to work--only a walk away. He asked her if she had a bike.
She nodded a No.
"That's too bad," he said.
"Why do you say that?"
"I was just thinking if you had a bike, the two of us could go bicycling along the Seawall some
weekend."
She blushed, smiled, her cheek dimples taking shape.
"Well, I know how to ride a bicycle, I just don't have one," she said, her voice rising.
"Oh, no problem, they rent bikes down at the pier on Twenty-first. The weather's supposed to be
nice this weekend, what do you say? I'll rent you a bike. Go over there, reserve it."
She pushed around her salad, isolated a shrimp she picked up, pulling off its finny tail, plopping
the rest in her mouth for a satisfying, it seemed, last delicacy of the salad before going back to the
lettuce, the dressing, the rest. "This weekend, we have visitors, I'm busy--" she said, sounding a bit
coy.
"What about the next weekend, the weather should hold?" he asked.
"We might talk next week, when it's closer," she replied.
Alroy savored internal joy at the sight of Emma, obviously alive to this game of ping-pong
negotiation about what was to be their date. He knew she would say, Absolutely, but she also wanted
him to work for getting everything just right. Just right, the one thing he knew about women. Things
had to be just so.
Alroy sat there finishing up the pasta on his plate, awed by what he'd done. He'd banished the
torment of Olivia by simply getting something going with Emma. All it took was an elevator
encounter to put her into his life, his social life. He wanted this to go right and he knew if he were
sincere in his intentions toward Emma, of the gleeful dimples across from him, it would.
In her all-American sort of way, Emma was every bit as attractive as Olivia. She just wasn't
exotic, no Sri Lankan Chinese-American by way of Vancouver, British Columbia. No, Emma was
the girl next door, probably BOI--Born on Island--down the street at UTMB and raised right, on the
island.
And as far as Alroy knew, things were unlikely to change. Emma had no overriding agenda to
skew any relationship they might develop. She was not, like Olivia, fishing around to leave town for
another job. She was not, like JoBecca, wanting some guy to help her bury the past and a
philandering husband with an appetite for young blood. No, Emma represented an unalloyed
simplicity, no agenda, no obvious personal problems. Things were promising for what he saw across
the table.
"Oh, look at what time it is!" Emma said, looking at her wristwatch. "It's twenty-five after." She
hurriedly gathered the last of her salad on her fork, eating it hastily, arranging her plate and
silverware and napkin on the tray to take back to the self-busing bins. Alroy was puzzled because
like him she must be salaried, exempt, and if she ran a few minutes over on her lunch hour, what
would be the harm? She wasn't punching a clock. "My supervisor Deborah is strict," she said, as if
reading Alroy's thoughts.
They took their trays to the bins where a kitchen assistant was removing a full bin for dish
washing, swapping out an empty one. Alroy looked at Emma and said, "I'll go with you to your
office, I need a little exercise to walk off that pasta."
She glowed. "Really?"
They got into the elevator car, which was busy with workers on their lunch hour, going between
floors. Alroy turned to Emma beside him and said, sotto voce, "What about lunch like this same time
next week? We can discuss the biking."
"Sure thing. Nobody likes to eat alone." She chuckled.
This from the woman who when he first noticed her was going outside with her sack lunch to
eat on the Gulf-side plaza, "To enjoy the fresh air," she said then. Well, if bicycling along the
Seawall is not conducive to enjoying fresh air, he didn't know what would be. The more he thought
about it, the more biking with Emma had an inspired sensitivity to what she enjoyed.
He walked her to Room 308, the Claims Department, and said, "I'll mark it on my calendar.
Next Tuesday."
"I will too," she said, those fabulous dimples he couldn't separate from evident happiness
flashing.
Alroy walked past the elevator, pushed open the exit door for the stairwell. He had done it. He
had relaunched his social life. It was as simple as looking around and seeing Emma again. Maybe
their meeting in the morning was meant to be. Who said, There are no coincidences?
§
In his room a week later, Alroy was about to crack open his Life Contingent Risks textbook, and
jump on some work problems when his phone rang.
"Alroy, it's me, Olivia, calling from Dallas," he heard the familiar voice say.
"Sure, hi, how're you doing?"
"Oh, work is exciting, I couldn't ask for more. Lots of travel ahead."
"Well, things are the same here. Except no one is sitting at your desk. We miss you," Alroy said,
wanting to hear why she was calling. Hadn't they said good-byes in her apartment? Now, did she
want to see him?
"I'm sure Irv will hire someone before long. He probably has a stack of resumes." Her voice
sounded indifferent, as if she had no nostalgic feelings whatsoever for working at Atlas. "You're
probably wondering why I'm calling--"
"Yeah, as a matter for fact, I was about to say, What's up?"
"Hmmmmmm," he heard. Her easing into telling him why. "Tell you the truth, I've only been
here a week and it's a much bigger city than Galveston, and it seems hard to get to know people,
they're all in such a rush. I've felt lonely away from work."
Alroy said nothing.
 "Well, anyway," she continued, "I got to thinking about what we did together, walking in the
graveyard, going to Rosie's place, that sort of thing, and I thought it would do me a world of good if
you'd come visit. Will you?" she said, an obvious plea in her voice.
Alroy held the phone away. What was he hearing? He realized he was just listening to a voice,
solo voce, a disembodied voice. No voluptuous, curvaceous Olivia attached to the voice. The body
he'd fantasized about for most of a year was not there on his phone. Just her voice. Pleasing, dulcet
tones, yes, but she wants to see me?
"When were you thinking? Alroy said, playing along.
"What about this weekend? Come up Saturday, I've got a couch you can sleep on, so no hotel
bill to pay, What do you say?" she said, sounding upbeat.
"Don't think I can, I'm already planning something."
"You can't get out of it?" she said, pushing.
"Sure, I suppose I could get out of it, but I like to be a man of my word, not let somebody else
down." There was no need to explain he'd promised to reserve a bicycle for Emma, or she would be
hurt if he bugged out.
"I'll make it worth your while, Alroy. I want to see you," she said, an undertone of seduction
creeping into her words. "My couch or my bed, you choose, Alroy."
Did she have to make it plainer? Had big city loneliness driven her to offering her body as an
enticement? Alroy's thinking was about to short circuit if he didn't say stop.
But he didn't want to hurt her feelings. He didn't want to come across as a blunt, boorish lout.
He'd have to be gentle with her. After all, he'd spent countless hours of fantasy contemplating her
body, trying to divine her mystery. But this wasn't fantasy; this was reality.
"Oh, Olivia, I've given it much thought since you left. The question whether we should try to
keep seeing each other. I knew going to Dallas would be unfamiliar to you at first, just like my
coming down here almost a year ago. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw it as
complicated--" He paused, letting her react.
"What do you mean complicated? We like being together, at least I thought you did--"
"I just think the time we spend together will seem tethered--"
"Tethered? What do you mean?"
"I mean, spend half day getting there. Okay, do something that night, but next day, we have to
keep in mind when I leave to catch the last bus back to Galveston, cuts things short--the time
pressure would feel tethered."
"I'd do my best to get you to forget time pressure--" she said, again slipping into a dulcet,
seductive voice.
"It just was different when you lived here," he said, exasperated at her refusal to see the burden
of trying for a long-distance relationship.
"How's so? I'm the same me, there, here," she shot back.
"I know. It's just things seem more sustainable when we live in the same place."
"Sustainable?"
"Okay, convenient. Like if I want to see you when you were here, it was no big deal."
 "So it's a big deal, an inconvenience to see me here, to spend this weekend with me, in my bed,
that's what you're saying," sarcasm slipping into her voice.
"No, don't misunderstand me," Alroy said, slipping past exasperation. He wanted to say out of
sight, out of mind, but he wanted to keep it rational and not personal.
"What's there to misunderstand, I offer you everything and you turn me down, like it's not
convenient home-delivery pizza," she shot back.
Alroy said he had to get back to his studies and he'd call her later, no time specified.
 Chapter Seventeen: Polarized Sunglasses

The next day and soon after Alroy got back from his lunch hour, during which he only grabbed
a Coke and Fritos for sustenance, Irv called him into his office.
"I spoke with Duncan while you were out, but wanted you also up to date on FirstLife." He
looked at his legal pad, tapping it with the ever-present mechanical pencil.
"The product launches in five weeks. But you and Duncan are done. Right now, Marketing's
bottlenecking, they've got to wrap up sales collateral. Then the policy rollout, agent teleconferences,
press releases--"
Alroy sat there nodding, not sure how he fit in.
"But as you might guess, new life insurance can get the media going. They will be calling us to
hear how the policy works, the legal grounds for the contract, and anything else to nail the story to.
It's hot, for sure. First of its kind. The obvious question is, 'Where is the mortality table for the
unborn?'"
"We did that," Alroy said. He, Duncan, and Irv must've gone over it a dozen times.
"I'll handle the media inquiries if they're kicked up to Actuarial. I'll put Duncan on the horn, too,
if they want technical detail. I just want you to know what's going on. Someday, I hope you'll be in a
position to take these calls, but I want you to observe how we communicate with the media. Clarity,
accuracy is everything. Too much of this can get distorted and take off like a runaway twister. That
we don't want."
"So it's just the facts, no entertaining a debate about whether we should offer the insurance?"
Alroy asked.
"Exactly. We settled the insurable contingency question months ago. With the media, we're
giving them description, no justifications, okay? If they want to know why someone would buy this
insurance, they can go out and dig up possible policy buyers to interview."
Alroy left Irv's office, happy, at last, what he and Duncan had fashioned actuarially would soon
cry out to the big world it had arrived.
§
Alroy was in HEB picking up groceries, wandering produce to see what looked good, when
who would he see pushing a cart his way but JoBecca. He squinted at the woman he'd once known.
She seemed different, she seemed unhurried, even content as she headed his way.
"Roy, how're you?" she said. She stood there, her shopping cart head-butting his, her familiar
slim body, the face an irrepressible smile.
 "Oh, same ol', same ol'. And you?" he asked, thinking Never expected to see you again.
"Life's funny. Moved back to Galveston, living with my new guy here."
"Congratulations," Alroy said, knowing that was as close as she'd get to being re-married, given
what she'd been through.
"Well, thank you. I'd introduce you to Jake, 'cept he took off to gas up the truck while I shop."
"Sounds like things are pointing up for you." Alroy wondered how to characterize those
Sundays with her. Was it her Recovery Plateau?
She placed one palm on her shapely hip. "So glad I ran into you. Been thinking about you, how
you got me out of that mess--"
"I know, something to sort out."
"Yep, I might still be going nowhere. Got a job, here on the island, where Jake and I met. We
work at the plastics fabrication place, you know, out on Forty-fifth."
"I knew you could do it." Alroy gazed admiringly at what he'd forgone in the name of not being
bossed around.
"You know what they say, one door closes, another door opens. That's me and Jake." Her eyes
locked on his, her face beaming with an uneradicable joy.
"Glad things got back to what you deserve," Alroy said, unsure what he meant. Did she merit a
better life because she made jeans and a T-shirt look great?
"Okay, goodtomeetya'gin," she said, pulling her cart back and pushing it past. The whiff of scent
from her hair touched off a frisson of joy in Alroy, absently-minded smiling and nodding at her
departure.
He pushed his shopping cart for a closer look at the celery, stacked like so many logs. What
could he do with that? A pasta dish with braised celery and anchovies, he had the recipe. JoBecca
retreated, pushing her cart out of produce, over to canned goods, leaving Alroy to reject thinking of
what might have been.
He pulled off two celery stalks, figuring it enough for the pasta recipe. He glanced at JoBecca,
happy as an apple.
§
Alroy went to work Monday, expecting nothing special. When he got there minutes past eight,
he was surprised to see a young woman in Irv's office, door closed. They seemed to be talking
animately.
Duncan pointed at Irv's office. "New hire, Olivia's replacement."
"Have you met her?" Alroy said, eyeing the young woman.
"No, they've been in there since I got here."
"How do you know she's the new hire."
"He told me Friday the new actuary was coming by."
"Oh."
Alroy sat down at his desk and started working. Irv had given him a sheaf of papers for a
restudy of the failed OneLife policy.
 About fifteen minutes later, Irv's door opened and he came out with the young woman.
Well-dressed in a business suit, she was, by Alroy's eye, plain except for her oversized black-
rimmed glasses, as if she was trying, with possible irony, to come across as an intellectual. She was
nowhere as distractingly attractive as Olivia, whom she replaced. His life had been complicated
enough by women without another choice to fathom.
"You all," Irv said addressing Duncan, Tuan, and Alroy, Van apparently still on his way in, "I'd
like you to meet our new associate actuary, Wanda. Fresh out of Texas A & M, but she got a
headstart on the exams and has passed four."
Wanda grinned. Alroy frowned. Will her four exams outrank my three for assigned projects? Irv
will decide.
"So it's Alroy, Tuan, and Duncan," Wanda said, nodding at each of her coworkers. They all were
beaming. Irv moved quickly to Olivia's old desk. "Your standard PC workstation, the usual software
here on the desktop. I'd like you to work with Duncan in getting oriented. Duncan is our FSA and he
knows the layout."
Duncan smiled.
It was inevitable. Still, seeing Wanda sitting where Olivia had sat meant all those fantasies were
doused and dirted over. In her place, a young woman, fresh out of college, he wouldn't give a second
look. She was okay ordinary. Perhaps, she was exactly what he needed to give that past yearning the
adios it deserved.
His focus was more realistic. It was Emma. They were going for a bicycle ride along the
Seawall and he couldn't wait.
Irv came up with the idea the department should go out to lunch to welcome Wanda. Wanda said
she was a vegetarian, which complicated things but only for a minute. On such outings, Irv
gravitated toward seafood places, so he changed it to Rosso Italiano. "Italian, they always can work
up vegetarian fare."
Lunch hour, they all traipsed off, and along the way learned it was Wanda's first job in actuarial
work, though she had summer jobs with plenty of computers and data analysis. Alroy knew she'd
make a good contribution. She was a good listener and articulate. He simply liked her manner.
And Wanda's ordinary looks might be a plus. The underlying sexual tension Olivia generated
effortlessly was absent. He could see her as a fellow professional with a personal life of no concern
for him.
At the restaurant, Wanda confessed she never expected to become an actuary when she started
college. But one summer job, a marketing research consulting firm, her boss said with her math
degree, she should think about a career as an actuary. Then began the exams she first took as a
sophomore.
When everybody got back from lunch, Alroy felt his work life had clicked into realignment.
Olivia in Dallas and Wanda, her ready replacement.
§
That night, Alroy saw he was all set for Saturday. He'd reserved the bicycle for Emma, and he'd
meet her over at Pier Twenty-one by the rental hut. Still, he couldn't speed up the days.
He had his supper, a quick sandwich he threw together and made some coffee to launch him into
Study Land: Crack open Dickson, Hardy, and Waters and start going over the exercises at the end of
the chapter on policy values. He took his scratch paper on a clipboard and one of his sharpened
pencils and began writing out the first problem at the end of the chapter.
This went on for half an hour. He didn't have the right answer. What was he doing wrong? He
took a sip of coffee, the last in the cup. Maybe he needed another cup. But that could only lead to
insomnia, the kind where he'd wake at two in the morning and not go back to sleep.
He pulled the sheet of paper off the clipboard, wadded it up, and gave a floater toss at the
wastebasket. A nice drop-in. He'd start over. Somewhere in twenty-or-so-steps solution, he dropped
something. Thiele's differential equation was like that: extreme attention or a gotcha stops you cold.
§
When Alroy rode over to Pier Twenty-one on Saturday, Emma was waiting. The splashing of
waves behind them, a cheerful spring sun overhead, she looked so much more approachable in her
weekend casual clothes: baggy blue jeans; a loose long-sleeve tan shirt; and an electric-blue down
vest.
"You been here long?" he called out, bringing his cargo bike to a stop in front of the row of
rental bicycles at Dave's.
"No," she said, glancing at her wristwatch, "a few minutes."
"Good, let's go see about the bike."
They went inside the hut, where Dave was busy on the phone, saying, yes, he was open for
business.
When he finished, he pulled the paperwork under "Shanly," and went outside with them to show
them Bike No. 11. He had Emma sit on the bicycle and figured the seat could be raised an inch and
took out a Mexican speed wrench, loosening the nut at the seat post and moved it up.
Emma got back on and said, yes, it was better.
"Okay, I think you're set. I close up five today. If you're back before two, it's half day;
otherwise, I charge a full day.
Ahead of them, as they started pedalling west, was the world's longest uninterrupted sidewalk,
all ten-plus miles of it. A few walkers, more runners, and a bicyclist or two in the distance. The
placid blueness of the sky drew them on.
"You know, I've lived here all my life and I've never bicycled the Seawall," Emma said,
alongside Alroy, who steered his long-nosed cargo bike forward. Her blue eyes sparkled with the
unbound excitement of what might be a new way of seeing the island. Her cheeks took on rosiness
from the Gulf breezes whipping about.
"Funny, ever since I got this bike, I've come here almost every weekend. Such a great way to
stay out of auto traffic."
A small white egret stood on the packed wet sand, ready to wade in and grab a meal of small
fish. Alroy had watched those waders for lost time, learning how methodical they were, stalking the
waters, raising spindly legs, advancing inch by inch for a beak strike at an unfortunate minnow.
The distance ahead was marked off by nothing more than piers. After Twenty-first, it was
Twenty-fifth, then Thirty-seventh, Forty-fifth and on past the airport.
Their bicycle wheels rolling forward, spokes flashing in the sunlight, Alroy felt a special affinity
for the landscape he hadn't felt bicycling alone. It was as if, alone, he was too preoccupied with
whatever he'd been thinking--if it had been Olivia on his mind, he'd have these imaginary
conversations with her, given the next time he might see her. But this, Emma by his side, was
different.
It was as if having her company, bicycling along the Seawall, drew him outside the labyrinth of
his mind. He had to converse. And she was such a compelling picture of unspoiled beauty, he
couldn't take his eyes off her. All the promises of a budding romance were there. He knew it.
"Let's ride down to Twenty-fifth Street Pier and rest," Alroy finally said. Emma nodded, her
brunette locks bouncing in the breeze, the tires of her bike humming along on the concrete sidewalk.
"Sure," she said. "I might need a rest, not used to this exercise."
He scoffed inside at the idea. Emma had a perfect figure, nothing out of shape about her. She
was, oh, slimmer than Olivia, but not as bony as JoBecca. Her body was the Golden Mean.
"You use your cargo bike for groceries?" she asked, her words seeming to dance in the breeze.
"Yes, three times a week. Works out well, the HEB is only a mile away. Carries two grocery
bags, three in a pinch."
"I suppose I have it easier. I drive."
"You have a car?" Well, he guessed that, but it had not come up.
"Sure, how I get to work. It's an old Corolla. My dad bought it for me. Rental car from Houston.
Used, but he said well-maintained. I like it, and the price, to me, was right."
"No problems? I thought people treat rental cars worse than their own."
"No, dependable. I'll show you it after we turn in the bike. Oh, and if you ever change your
mind about getting a driver's license, you're welcome to borrow it for the driving test." Alroy gave a
small nod of his head. Her generosity was too much to think about just then.
At Pier Twenty-five, they pulled over on the sidewalk and stood there, straddling their bicycles,
hands planted on the handlebars and gazing out over the pier, its bulky wooden structure, its
barnacle-encrusted pilings, and at its far reaches, a lone fisherman casting out a line.
"I wonder if that guy catches fish," Alroy said.
"We can watch," Emma said, apparently willing to rest. They'd as soon let the spiral of time
snail its way forward.
The fisherman was probably Vietnamese, Alroy guessed judging from the man's slim figure,
short stature, and baseball cap, what he discerned from a distance, and he knew the Vietnamese on
the Gulf had an unquenchable appetite for seafood.
"He wouldn't be there if he didn't catch fish. He probably has polarized sunglasses, so he can
see past the water reflections, see the fish below the surface."
"Really."
"Yeah, it saves time if you see fish swimming below. Otherwise, you might toss your line out
for nothing."
"But don't people fish without polarized glasses?"
"All the time. That's why they sit with their fishing lines out in the water for hours. Probably no
fish anywhere near their hook."
 "Seems like a meditation, just sitting watching the water."
"Two things you can stare at and lose track of time," Alroy said, "water and fire."
"Yeah, but see, he's already caught fish," Emma said.
"How do you know?"
"Don't you see? He's moving the rope around in his bucket of water. I bet that's where he keeps
the fish until he's ready to leave--" She squinted. "You think we should walk over and see?"
"Hmmmm. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want to talk. Besides getting the bikes on the pier
might be a problem with those steps--"
"Good point. Leave him to his waiting."
They stood there for minutes, silent, watching the equally silent fisherman at the end of the pier.
Alroy studied the distant figure he surmised might be an emigrant from Asia who came here under
vastly different circumstances than his former work colleague and friend and possibly more, Olivia.
What did the man do when he wasn't out there enjoying the saltwater air, the play of light over
the rippling water surface, the anticipation of a sudden jerk on his fifty-pound-test nylon fishing
line? He might have driven a delivery truck for FedEx or maybe he owned a 7-Eleven somewhere
on the island, selling ice, beer, soda waters, chips, cigarettes, candy. It didn't matter what he did
because Alroy could sense the man had it all in the moment, standing out there on wooden planks at
the pier's end.
He looked at Emma beside him, saw she was equally entranced by the fisherman. She glanced
at him, a smile warming her face, yet said nothing.
That fisherman might've worked hard all week, possibly schlepping stuff around in a warehouse
on the island, filling orders for electrical or plumbing parts, navigating a maze of Where’s the part?
He had his reward: Standing at the end of a pier and watching his fishing line ply the waters below
him, some thirty feet down. Yes, the time that need not matter. What was it someone said, The time
spent fishing is not deducted from your life span. Alroy was sure that was it. Waiting with all the
patience in the world was contentment, waiting for something to happen, something finally beyond
your control, like a hungry fish finning your way looking for something to lunge at and swallow. No
guarantee anything would happen, all you could do was wait for the outside agency, call it Fortune's
Wheel, the arbiter of contingency, to decide what and when something would happen.
Alroy and Emma spent a few more minutes contemplating the fisherman, what he was doing in
his not-doing. The Dao of nonaction, Olivia might say. Alroy also saw in that Vietnamese fisherman
and all his patience something akin to work at Atlas Global: the FirstLife policy written on a life
never to be paid because it would patiently wait out its duration until fate announced the time to
urge forward into the big world and its blinding light and a surprising newness after months of
monotonic waiting.
"You know," Alroy said to Emma, "I think the guy out there is content to just sit on that beach
chair and wait for a fish to bite. What else do you need, fresh air, the water, the island to look at?"
"I think so." She lifted the handlebars of her bicycle, bouncing the front tire off the ground.
"You think we should try for the next pier, get more exercise?"
"Absolutely, that's what we're supposed to be doing. Getting exercise."
With a push-off on her left foot, Emma got rolling. Alroy followed, and to the right, Texas
Highway 3005--alongside the Seawall--gathered and dispersed the muffled howls of engines from
cars going by in one scatter.
Emma picked up her pedalling and Alroy could see she wanted to make up for the pause back at
the pier.
He pedalled faster to pull even. She flashed a grin.
"Emma," he yelled into the Gulf breeze whipping at their faces, "do you think you'd like to do
something next weekend?"
She looked over at him with a smile and the mystery of a Mona Lisa she suddenly became.
Inaudibly, Alroy thanked her.
§§§
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlie Dickinson has published sixteen short stories online at Amarillo Bay, Blue Moon Review,
Eclectica, Mississippi Review, Southern Cross Review and elsewhere. His essays and book reviews
have appeared at several websites, including Savoy, Hackwriters, Portland Tribune, and Slashdot.
He also posts a blog at cosmicplodding. net.
Dickinson lives in Portland, Oregon.
 DISCLAIMER & ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Life is Pinball is a work of fiction and references to actuarial principles and practice are intended for
entertainment purposes only. Likewise, mentions of the Society of Actuaries and their examination
sequence for earned designations are given for story value and no implication is made as to accurate
or objective portrayals.
Cover design by Rosko Graphics. The black-and-white photograph on the cover is in the public
domain.