Dogelon Mars
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‘How you doing?’ Óscar asked the driver of the mud-dotted Subaru Outback as he climbed, or rather hopped or flopped, into the back seat. Hah-you-doon, he’d pronounced it, in the accent of his lately adopted home – an accent he’d picked up more from movies than from other people. It was the phrase he often opened with when first encountering strangers.
‘Ah, you know, man, just trying to get through this storm.’
The sky was bright white, summer sun swathed in contaminated haze, and Óscar didn’t know what storm he was talking about. He thought the statement was metaphorical, and tallied in his mind the most distressing, or most ominous, current events: the wars in Ukraine, in Yemen, in Sudan, in Gaza and probably in other places he didn’t know of; the elections upcoming in France; the Olympics were on, perhaps there had been a scandal? But he couldn’t imagine any of these concerned the young man in the driver’s seat toying with his short, spindly braids. Óscar also had preoccupations of his own, and was not in the mood to talk. And so instead of inquiring, he grunted a gravelly, knowing yeah.
The driver shook his head with a sort of recognition and said, ‘Right, man, you know what I’m talking about.’
They passed the hulk of the luxury apartment building just opened across from Óscar’s home – luxury by this point in time denoted price and not quality: grey vinyl wood-grain floors, stainless-steel appliances, aluminium studs under quarter-inch drywall and studios starting at fourteen hundred a month. It was the latest of many eyesores that had appeared in his neighbourhood in the two years he’d been there, replacing churches without parishioners and shops without customers. Construction waste and orange plastic barriers littered the lot in front of it, which would eventually become a dog park. The last of the workers were kicking off for the day.
‘You want to take the interstate around to Normandy?’ the driver asked. Óscar did not. He had been on that route many times, and knew it would be bumper to bumper as the tens of thousands who crowded the city for work fled to their homes in the suburbs the next state over, where taxes were lower, schools were better and shootings and robberies more sporadic. When he was drunk or cranky, Óscar would sometimes complain about rideshare drivers who always preferred the interstate, because they didn’t know their way around, and would pine for the taxi drivers of old, who knew the shortcuts and back alleys, the dives and gambling dens and cat houses. He had rarely met such a taxi driver, but they figured prominently in his imagination, along with thousand-seat movie palaces, honkey-tonks and many other features of big cities that had vanished before he was born.
This driver, though, was a local, and when Óscar replied, ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘Yeah, you right, matter of fact I’m a take thirty-eighth street all the way down, those turkeys’ll be at a standstill over there, and I think they got one southbound lane blocked off.’
Óscar held in his lap a compact bag of a glossy white paper so thick it was nearly cardboard, with a pink ribbon laced through tiny holes in the top. Stamped on either side of it, to his slight shame, were the name and logo of Paul Weiss Jewellers, reputedly the cheapest in town. They ran ads on local TV and online about customers the police had arrested after eyeing up their receipts and refusing to believe the prices were so low; an embarrassed Paul Weiss would then come to the city jail, convince the trusties with his motto I’m losin’ my shirt over here and bail them out. The scenario didn’t speak of romance; the ring itself didn’t speak of romance, not to Óscar, anyway; he’d have preferred a trip to the Grand Canyon or the Azores to the dinky gold band with its solitaire stone looking like a tiny ball of foil. As a young man, he’d sworn he’d never buy a girl a ring; he’d sworn he wouldn’t do many things he had subsequently done; he imagined he would eventually do the few that remained.
Lining the sidewalk on the corner where his street crossed a long avenue of mostly shuttered shops were what his neighbours called ‘gardens’, plots of weeds and mulch to him, most often full of garbage, out of which, as though by accident, a flower might occasionally emerge. Around them was a miniature plastic fence that the children walking to and from school would kick over, and that a lonesome-looking woman in thick glasses would replace with stolid unconviction each evening. Óscar saw a person with a beard in a ragged vintage dress walking a three-legged husky and holding a tiny green sack of its shit.
‘Hey man, you know about money, right?’ the driver asked. Óscar did believe he knew more than most people. He had read a book called What Money Can’t Buy about the moral limits of markets, and had watched a video explaining where money came from and how the supply of it expanded and contracted. But he had the feeling this wasn’t what the driver was asking him. In his own life, money had been nearly but never wholly absent, manifested in quantities of just-barely- and almost-enough. And in his work, as an advocate for the homeless, he had seen the sort of allergy some people had to plenty, or plenty to certain people; on bad days, it made it hard to help. There were those with nothing who were nonetheless almost nihilistically prodigal, and others bad luck had conspired against with inconceivable malice. The saddest of his clients, as he was supposed to call them, reminded him of the old joke about Job who, being smote with boils, victim to calamities heavier than the sea, had cried out to God, why should his faithful servant suffer so, and the clouds parted, and the sun shone between, and the voice of God spoke gravely: I don’t know, Job, something about you just pisses me off.
Óscar told the driver, ‘I guess.’
‘Yeah, I could tell you knew about money, I seen you got the jewels there, that’s what’s up,’ the driver said, and Óscar did not know whether the driver hadn’t heard him right or had decided he was modest. He blamed his block, a strange oasis of dainty old houses with lush, carefully tended magnolias in the midst of blight, but the wealthy party was Óscar’s landlady, who, as real estate taxes rose and the reach of her pension diminished, had chopped her massive Italianate mansion into smaller and smaller apartments that she rented out for more and more money. From the outside, the place was imposing, with the elegance of crumbling but once-lovely things, but inside was all dust and cat hair, the intermittent scent of piss, outdoor carpeting laid indoors, buzzing appliances, flaking varnish.
‘You know about crypto?’ the driver asked next.
Here we go, Óscar thought. What he knew about crypto was that crypto people were always talking about crypto. Again, his acquaintance with the subject was vague, quip-sized chunks of noncontradictory words that allowed him to talk without really saying anything: he was aware that it was a digital currency, that its transactions were recorded on the blockchain, that the blockchain was a decentralised ledger, but if asked to define these terms, he would start to hem and haw. They were like the names of chemicals or atmospheric phenomena that you were pretty sure meant something but that could no more be grasped than truth or beauty or God. He had seen that the halal fried chicken place seven blocks from his home had a bitcoin ATM, but he didn’t know what it meant to deposit or withdraw bitcoin; he knew a Boston man and his wife had been arrested for stealing over a billion dollars’ worth of bitcoin, but he wasn’t certain how that worked, either.
Óscar breathed more lightly when the driver said, ‘What’s your name, man?’
‘Óscar,’ he responded, pronouncing it ahs-ker like his father and not oh-skar like his mother.
‘Oscar man I’m Ellis,’ the driver said with no pauses, ‘and yeah I’m keeping a eye on that crypto right now as a matter of fact, the dip, buy the dip, storm finna come, you gotta be up for it.’
‘What do you mean, storm?’
‘Do me a favour, man. Go to your Instagram, or go to your Twitter if you have that, look me up, bluedream_bluntz, that’s blunts with a z, underscore in the middle, bluedream is all one word. I’m a influencer, that’s what I really do, I’m just doing Uber to build up a nut for my investments.’
Óscar did as he said. He found Ellis’s pinned tweet: an AI-generated illustration of a purple planetary surface with a satellite truck, a craggy, shaded mountain and orange rays sweeping up into the sky. What he thought at first was a large hair wreathed by rings of smoke proved to be the twirling exhaust of a rocket flying away. The explosion had knocked a camera from the hands of a whimsical cameraman; next to him, a suited figure was grasping a microphone and pointing upward. A humanoid dog held a placard that read: Take me with you! His companions were howling in grief. In the upper right, a blond Shiba Inu sat in a cockpit moving thrusters and gearshifts. Beneath all this was one word: $ELON.
A retweet below showed the dog again, with a caption Óscar couldn’t understand: 10,000 ELONUSDT and get listed on XT.com. bluedream_bluntz had added: The roots grow deeper. Óscar sensed, without being sure, an interweaving of bad news and obdurate faith in Ellis’s interaction with the account Dogelon Mars Official, which promised The best wave of your life is still out there. Hang ten, captain, he had replied. Flicking his thumb up the screen, at first attentive and then disheartened, Óscar tried to glean a narrative from the cryptic text and garish visuals. He saw the clichés of investing: markets are cyclical, buy low, sell high – superstitions that predicted the crests and valleys, which were aligned with cycles of the moon, sun flares or the presidential election, anything that had the quality of propitiousness at the moment of tweeting. And the principle was repeated that folding was weak, that he who perseveres wins, or more dramatically, in the words of bluedream_bluntz: 40 more years of being told to hold and when to eat fuck no alt season coming don’t clock in lock in $ELON #dogelonmars.
Like so much that made him, on worse days, feel a stranger to the world, the term alt season was opaque to him, though so familiar to its users that no one bothered to explain it, and only after much searching, while Ellis spoke to someone on the phone, did Óscar figure out it was a conjectured moment in the future when bitcoin would lose its allure and investors would flood into alternative coin markets, enriching those who had bought in at the right time.
Ellis spoke again: ‘You need to get on that crypto. There’s really not no words for me to tell you how powerful these currencies will be in the next couple of years. Next couple of months. I only fuck with two coins. That’s Floki and Dogelon Mars. Floki, you know like what rich people do, they assets perpetually go up, they houses go up in value, they art go up in value, and you and me stay standing out in the fucking rain. Floki solves that, because every single time Floki is used, a transaction fee burns up the coins, and that raises the power of the currency. All of a sudden, we ain’t out in the rain no more, right? And with Dogelon – I got twenty-four million in Dogelon. Dogelon ain’t even about no bullshit here on earth. Elon, you know, he going to Mars, we about to colonise Mars. And Dogelon is that, we’re looking at the first intergalactic currency.’
‘I can’t afford crypto,’ Óscar said, hoping to change the subject. ‘I just bought an engagement ring, and I can barely afford that. And my girl wants me to get a car. Maybe I’ll look into crypto later.’Â
He spoke the way men speak of women, as of an encumbrance, the old ball and chain. He didn’t feel that way, though, and the ring had been a concession, not to any covetousness on Lucinda’s part, but to his own half-notions of how things were done. As for the car, she wanted the two of them to get out of town more, and he couldn’t tell her to get it herself because her credit was shot and she couldn’t drive. She had grown up in town on a grimy block of tightly packed townhouses with iron bars girding the porches to ward off thieves, and had gotten around her whole life on its baroque, unreliable bus routes; it was, for her, winos and corner stores and takeout Chinese shops with bulletproof windows, not the Museum of Art or the centenary Shakespeare theatre or the sculpture gardens Óscar was always trying to drag her to. ‘I want to go to the beach,’ was her refrain in the spring, repeated last year till the October chill blew in, she had been saying it for months now, and still they hadn’t been.
‘You don’t got to tell me about that,’ Ellis said. ‘I’ve been in the dog house. That’s what got me into this crytpo. See, the cupcake – that’s my little one, I call her the cupcake – we got the Disney streaming for her, we got the daycare, she got to eat, she got to have clothes, she grow out of them every two months, but I also got to think about her future, you know? I’m coming at that from three ways. I do this, the driving, my main job’s a plumber, I’m not certified, but you know, I get mine, and then the crypto, that’s for the long term. When we come up out that dip, I’m gonna get my certification, union certification, a union plumber round here set for life.’
‘How long does that take?’
‘Twenty-six weeks. Then ten weeks of OSHA training. Then the apprenticeship, you gotta find a master plumber to take you on. But you know, I’m a take care of that, then I’m a get the cupcake whatever she needs, she a little princess, you know. And then, I ain’t into drip or nothin’, but I will get myself a Rolex, just a little base model, you can get the Yacht-Master for maybe like ten k.’
Óscar, knowing little about watches, uttered the one thought he’d ever had about them: that if they hadn’t vanished upon the widespread adoption of the cellphone, it was because they weren’t really for telling time, but served instead as a badge for the wealthy to discreetly recognise one another. Ellis turned to him with a skeletal grin, mandibles apart, teeth bared, eyes bulging, and nodded one, two, as many as eight times, spasmodically, a looping image. Óscar was unsure he’d ever seen something so unsettling in his life.
‘I’m talking intergenerational wealth,’ Ellis said, turning onto Purcell Avenue, which skirted the imposing buildings of a gated private high school. ‘See, we was shut out from this shit by design. You think the Founding Fathers back in the fourteenth century, they wanted us to get our shit? Nah, they bought up the oil, bought up the gold, bought up the railways, bought up the trees, then here come Apple and Bill Gates and them and they shut us out again. My parents were too stupid to invest in all that. But they didn’t see this coming. They didn’t see this coming. And all these motherfuckers…’ The street was mostly unpeopled just then, the traffic fluent, but Óscar did espy a frumpy man in a saggy collared shirt and khakis with that expression of inward exhaustion of the middle-aged man descending inevitably towards old. ‘These motherfuckers is food. It’s eat or be eaten, and I’m about to have my meal.’
Lucinda had warned Óscar that he was too incautious in the city; he was always talking to crazies, and one day it would get him hurt. ‘If I didn’t talk to crazies, I’d never have talked to you,’ he liked to tell her, remembering the day she’d wound up in his office. He assumed she was a courier, and had knocked on his door by mistake; his usual client was broken, smudged and had that cuminy smell of accumulated weeks of sweat in their clothing; if they were women, they were ringed by wailing, frenzied children. But Lucinda hadn’t a junkie’s sunken cheeks from rotten molars, and no scars marred her skin, its pleasing brown like light amber honey. Her lament began with the words, ‘Eh-toy buh-cando casa,’ those missing esses, that accent – Venezuelan, he’d guessed wrongly, she was Colombian, like his mother, but from the Llanos – explained her presence. Lucinda’s talk was an avalanche, and Óscar realised it must have been too much for his secretary, Alicia, who spoke a crumbly third-generation Spanish mostly good for exchanging commonplaces. Lucinda’s English was perfect, though; she’d been in the US since she was nine and was putting on a show to get an immigrant housing subsidy that didn’t actually exist. Bureaucratically, Óscar informed her that the best he could offer her was an emergency bed for the night if she truly had nowhere to go, and later that week, they could start the paperwork that might eventually find her something more permanent.
‘Oh, nevermind, then,’ she responded. How many times he would hear that nevermind, when woolly notions occurred to her that she didn’t wish to bother thinking through, and Óscar had to intrude upon them with frowsy reality.
Lucinda wasn’t homeless; she was living with a girl she didn’t like; she was broke, and on her walk to work kept passing Carrie’s Place, a model subsidised apartment building on a busy downtown block. Rumours were rampant on social media about immigrants getting free food and housing while hardworking Americans were left to fend for themselves. ‘I don’t see them working as hard as me,’ she’d often said, and she didn’t see why she shouldn’t get help with lodging if we were constantly bailing out banks and giving subsidies to giant corporations, but Carrie’s Place was only for the elderly, and the waiting list was years-long.
It bothered Óscar she was a schemer, but she was gorgeous and you forgave gorgeous people everything. And she did work endless hours, he would learn, sugaring lashes and doing nail enhancement, and most of her money went to buying her mother’s groceries and helping out with her niece’s Pre-K. She skipped out of his office with his card in her hand, and called regularly over the following days. Óscar was single then; Óscar had been single enough that he deemed it his nature rather than his condition, a ser and not an estar. He was easy for Lucinda to seduce, and was grateful when the seduction was consummated; she recalled to him a line of a poem – Even when she walks, she seems to dance – that he’d seen on a greeting card or inspirational poster.
‘Nah,’ Ellis exclaimed. ‘The Matrix ain’t gone play me out. The Matrix ain’t gone play Ellis out. Ellis woke, Ellis is on to them, Ellis is trying to wake you up, too. You should tap in, Oscar. Dogelon Mars. I’m giving you this advice, I don’t make nothing off of it. It’s just when this rocket take off, I want to bring along as many as I can. Up, up, and out. Leave these peasants to fend for themselves.’
A fair back-of-the-envelope arithmetician, Óscar typed twenty-three million, the number of Dogelon Mars coins Ellis held, into his phone. Then he looked up its closing price for the previous day: $0.0000002. Multiplying these two numbers, then dividing a million by the result, and multiplying this product in turn by the trillions of such coins in circulation, he found that in order for Ellis to become a millionaire, the total value of Dogelon Mars must exceed a hundred quintillion dollars, outstripping by orders of magnitude the entire global monetary supply.
‘My lady will give me the business if I go around making investments,’ he said.
‘That’s what they do, though,’ Ellis retorted. ‘Them women a hold you back. Me, I had to cut mine off. Trim the fat. She didn’t have the vision, see. Buy and hold, ten toes down. She’s all in the now, my goal is a infinite mind state, I can’t be trapped, not now, nooo.’
It struck Óscar that Ellis had two or three discourses turning round in his head like gears within, of which his mouth was the passive transmitter rather than the productive organ, and because he’d become agitated, they were shearing and mingling discordantly, coming out as emotionally charged nonsense. Óscar had seen this happen with his clients, who sometimes broke down there in the office. ‘A bitch will…’ Ellis said, and began to enumerate the many ways a bitch will sabotage you. Ruminating over this insistent screed, Óscar recollected when Lucinda and he had split up, because, of all things, she kept coming over late and wouldn’t let him sleep at night; in fits of romance or sometimes wrath she’d keep him up till four and he’d have to rise at seven while she’d stay in bed and drowse… She kept her keys to his place and crawled in bed with him one Saturday after their supposed separation and sat on his morning boner. When he looked groggily into her glazed brown eyes and asked if they should be doing that, she told him, ‘People are supposed to have sex. They’re supposed to be touched. Otherwise they start to fall apart.’ He wondered if something like that was happening to Ellis.
‘Our parents lied to us,’ Ellis said. ‘The schools lied to us, college lied to us, recruiters lied to us, what did they tell us? Go out there and get you a job, the American dream’s out there waiting for you: have a family, go on vacation, go to Six Flags and shit, all that’s a fucking joke. You need two-three jobs now, we got a whole fucking city full of immigrants willing to take your job for pennies on the dollar, now what the fuck are we supposed to do? This is not the time to be afraid. This wealth being transferred here, it’s going to the strong, those who can pass the test, and it’s only going to keep flowing upward these next couple of months. I wish I had more money to buy this dip. This parabolic run. I may not be a millionaire this time around, I’m not greedy, I’ll be a hundred-thousandaire, start small and build up, you should do that, too, Oscar. I’m not afraid of this bull run not coming to fruition, I know it’s going to come to fruition, you just got to stay the course.’
Óscar texted Lucinda discreetly, ‘I think I might be about to die,’ with an emoji of a face with chattering teeth. He didn’t know whether Ellis’s comment about immigrants was hostility, or whether he hadn’t guessed at Óscar’s origins and took for granted they felt the same way. Óscar had inherited a lightened version of his mother’s café-con-leche skin – she used that term instead of moreno, which in her family meant black; he was dark enough that he’d answered many times the question What are you? or, if the person was taciturn, What exactly are you?, but his features were European enough that others thought he just tanned easily. It had bothered him when he was young; later he’d milked the Latin lover stereotype, with some sense of irony and not much success, and had made a stab at getting to know that side of himself by starting and not finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nowadays, his solidarity had dwindled to calling the guy at the taco truck hermano. His impulse was to defend the immigrants, to announce defiantly that his mother was an immigrant and had worked harder every single day than Ellis had in his life – he didn’t know that, but it sounded good in his mind. The oscillations in Ellis’s speech, however, had become menacingly erratic in that way engineers described with the lovely word flutter, and Óscar worried he might kidnap him, crash the car, turn violent. He opened the Uber app and saw Ellis’s rating: 4.8 stars.
‘Ten toes down, though,’ Ellis repeated. ‘I’m keeping a infinite mind state. People already tried to knock me off with fake profiles, like I was pumping some other coin, I got these cat coin haters, what have I repped this whole time? Dogelon and Floki, that’s it, how the fuck am I going to come out one day repping cat coins all the sudden? The cat coin people haters, though, they gonna hate, because I’m the one spelling it out, if you’re holding Dogelon Mars, you’re in a winning situation, September – you hold, you can chill till September, you bought the low, and when the blood starts running in the streets, you can reap that profit.’
Óscar scanned the front seat as a bead of sweat rolled down his head, lodging in the hairs of his eyebrow. The A/C was on high, but was broken or low on freon, maybe, and the currents that reached him were of a temperature indeterminate but unsoothing. In the passenger floorboard was the bag of trash so many rideshare drivers had, with empty chip bags and candy wrappers, cans of Monster and cups from Dunkin’ Donuts. On the dashboard was a box cutter. Óscar wondered for what.
On Maierhoff, named for a German tradesman who had founded the city’s stock exchange back when municipal stock exchanges were a thing, Óscar saw a laundromat and hair salon, and between them the bright LED lights of a smoke shop advertising Kratom, Delta 8 and Exotic Snacks. He’d been seeing more and more of these places lately. They looked to be of dubious legality, and he barely understood what they were selling. Hoping to distract Ellis, who was now spitting dry, foamy saliva as he denounced the cat coin people once more, Óscar interrupted with the question, ‘Man, what’s the deal with these stores everywhere all the sudden?’
Ellis seemed to turn away from the vituperative part of himself as from a process that might be left to run on its own, and scratched his head as his voice eased into one of friendliness and disdain: ‘Look around, Oscar. People be smoking. Plus they sell lotto tickets, that’s a voluntary tax on the poor.’
Óscar relaxed, but his fear returned as they veered onto a long avenue beside a railyard that looked like an optimal place to dispose of a dead body. His inner compass began to fail him; they weren’t off course, he hoped or thought, but Ellis’s zigzagging turns, taken at greater and greater speed, could no longer be justified by avoiding congestion, and Óscar wondered what his motives were now. He crumpled and rolled, against his will, the Paul Weiss Jewellers bag in his hand; how stupid he’d been to mention the ring. Ellis had sent several texts along the way, maybe to criminal sidekicks, who knew if his rants weren’t meant to keep Óscar distracted while preparing his robbery and murder. Óscar debated jumping out, but saw nowhere to escape to. And after a moment, Ellis returned to the cat coin people, they could impersonate him now; what did he care, he’d be living the lush life on Mars soon looking down on them while they were stuck on this ruined planet.
‘Do you really think you’re going to live on Mars?’
‘I got to believe,’ Ellis replied. ‘What the fuck else am I going to believe? I live on Eighteenth and Bayton, you ever been out that way? There’s no trees on that block, no nothing. Look out that window. This city’s about to fall into the fucking ground, Oscar. The whole country, too. You think me, as a father, I can sit the cupcake down, this little girl I created, and tell her, I’m sorry, baby, this is all I can offer you? Nah. That ain’t it. You can lead these other dickheads to the slaughterhouse, but not Ellis, and not the cupcake, aright?’
By now, Óscar recognised the viaduct that marked the western edge of Wyman Hill, a once shady, now hip neighbourhood where he would meet Lucinda that evening. She loved spice, and he had chosen a Thai place for their seventeenth monthiversary, their mesiversario as they called it in a Spanish that made at once more jocose and more felt the intuition that they must celebrate the stages along this romantic way that would be the last and longest they would ever take. She had come to him at the start of a harsh and ugly winter, and he remembered how, when the grey sky got to him, he had mailed her postcards and left notes in her shoe reminding her that she was his sun, his sol, his tidings of spring. A horror overtook him of not seeing her, of not slipping onto the tiffany skin of the third finger of her left hand this trinket he hadn’t told her about, but that he hoped she’d see as the mere precipitate, the dross of a love that was infinite as the sea. He told Ellis, ‘You know what, I’ll go ahead and hop out here,’ and before Ellis could respond, he took off running.
He hurried through the tunnel, where a man was sleeping in a shopping cart, impossibly contorted and alone; passed the restored warehouse of glazed red brick that housed a coffee roastery and coworking space; cut across a beer garden, ignored a red light, waved in apology at a driver who honked at him, sticking his head out to ask, ‘Fuck you doing?’ He could feel, as he opened the door to L’Amarante and the blast of cool air hit him, the perspiration gathering on his chest and back. ‘I’m meeting someone,’ he said to no one in particular as he spotted Lucinda at a table for two, in the middle of the dining room, playing a game on her phone. Her hair was dark, her dress proper, her lower lip puffed out, she was concentrating, she was perhaps a little nervous. He savoured for a second that feeling he would never know again, that knowledge that he could yet turn back, but would not and didn’t want to. Then he walked close, crouched next to her, kissed the back of her hand where three bones showed like a trident, swallowed and asked, ‘Will you marry me?’
.
.
Adrian Nathan West is the author of the novel My Father’s Diet, a literary translator from German, Spanish and Catalan, and an essayist whose work has appeared in The Baffler, Liberties and The New York Times Magazine.
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