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“Peaches.”
I grew aware of the relentless thump of the bass from the soundtrack and felt it now in my bones. I closed my eyes behind my sunglasses.
“Crissy?”
“Yes, Nigel?”
“You’ve googled Futurium.”
“I have,” I said. I was pleased he had returned to the subject at hand and what really mattered.
“You know what you should have been researching?”
I waited.
“Frankie Limback. He’s what all of this—whatever this is—has in common.”
“What are you doing?” I asked Betsy.
She told me: she was writing her crypto seed phrase onto the bottom of a bathroom drawer. She said it was in case she ever forgot it.
I nodded like, that’s cool, that’s the only reason she was doing it. But I was pretty sure she was also hiding it there because she was worried about someone or something, like her new employers. So, later, I put the chain in my tablet in the middle of a meaningless email from the Gap. I also hid there her checking account number.
The next day, we opened a little savings account for me. She gave me an “advance” on my allowance that totaled three hundred dollars, but it wasn’t really an advance, because I knew she’d keep paying me an allowance and never ask for it back. She knew it, too.
I have to admit, everything about Futurium began to weird me out after we got to Las Vegas. First of all, I wasn’t wild about Frankie’s friends out here. I liked him just fine. But the others gave me the creeps. Second, their office was a warehouse. I’m not kidding. It was like one big Costco, but instead of stuff for sale and human beings walking around with shopping carts and screaming toddlers, there were crazy big computers.
But here’s the thing: I love computers. So, I did like the idea that the whole point of these ones was to solve math problems to make money.
I remember watching them one day with Betsy and thinking, “That’s the future.”
And I couldn’t believe it was in the hands of—pardon my French—ratfucks like Futurium.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Betsy
She didn’t see her sister for days after she and Marisa visited Crissy at the water park. Nigel had seemed oblivious to Crissy’s willingness to so completely subsume who she was in the guise of another person, which left her wondering: how much did he really know about his “costar”? How much had Crissy told him about her eating disorder and why she had been in rehab? He knew some things. Did he know everything?
The few times that Betsy had seen her sister since she and Marisa had moved to Las Vegas, she’d noticed that Crissy was peppering her offstage conversation with British words and expressions more than ever. Now Betsy could hear that what had once been a slight, occasional British accent—a small affectation—had become dramatically more pronounced. It was as if her sister were a method actor and her life was her role. Her whole life. She was a walking simulacrum.
Not far from where they had grown up in Vermont, across Lake Champlain in Ticonderoga, New York, a retired Elvis impersonator and Star Trek superfan had bought the husk of a failed supermarket and in the shell re-created the set of the starship Enterprise from the original 1960s Star Trek TV series. The whole set. Not just the bridge where William Shatner sat in that chair with Christmas lights posing as functional buttons, but the transporter room and Dr. McCoy’s sick bay and Scotty’s engineering hub and all the ship’s corridors. It was meticulous—and one of those accomplishments that seems futile and strange to the uninitiated, but audacious and valiant to the devout. Apparently, he had items in there pulled from dumpsters and uncovered in deep dives on eBay. But even though that first series had been canceled well before Betsy and Crissy’s generation was watching television, their elementary school’s fifth-grade class would go there on a field trip the same day they would visit Fort Ticonderoga, the historical site from the Revolutionary War. It was an eclectic—if not eccentric—doubleheader: the rebuilt fort from the 1750s and the rebuilt TV set from the 1960s.
The reason why the starship Enterprise was considered “educational” was because it helped the students understand, in theory, a little bit about theater and drama and how TV was made. Forced perspective. Turning a kickball into a dilithium crystal to power the ship’s warp drive. The idea that the chairs used in a starship conference room would be the very same ones the Brady Bunch would use in their kitchen. Betsy recalled howthey loved the Star Trek set at least as much as the fort, though the high point of the day invariably was when some redcoats would fire off a cannon. In any case, on those trips they saw two kinds of reenactors: the paid ones in Revolutionary War garb, and the unpaid ones in cosplay costumes and pointed Spock ears from the old TV series. The latter were obsessed. In Betsy’s opinion, if you viewed that sort of behavior on a spectrum, she would have put the eighteenth-century soldiers on one side, the Star Trek superfans in their Spock ears in the middle, and Crissy at the other end. Normalcy was on the side of the soldiers, since they were donning those impossibly hot uniforms because it was a job. Maybe they enjoyed it. She hoped so. And while the Star Trek zealots weren’t getting paid, at least dressing up like Lieutenant Uhura or Captain Kirk gave them camaraderie. A posse. But Crissy? My God, Betsy thought, it was a weird, lonely world, even with the addition of Nigel.
Crissy was three parts Diana and one part diva, and when Betsy and Marisa arrived in town, there were moments when Betsy wasn’t sure she saw her sister lurking anywhere behind that accent or those sunglasses or inside that poolside cabana that had become her castle keep.
And the idea that Crissy still blamed her for their mother’s death? It made Betsy think of another royal, King George, and his absolute madness.
* * *
It wasn’t precisely that Betsy was steering clear of Crissy for the next week. But she was trying to settle into her new job at Futurium and build Marisa’s and her new life. She bought a used car, a four-year-old Toyota Corolla that was a robin’s-egg blue and had a sun roof. It wasn’t as sporty as Crissy’s convertible, but she loved how once more she had a vehicle and no longer had to depend on Frankie or Ubers, and everything got so much easier. Once again it was fun to go to the grocery store. And her job demanded more time and focus than she had anticipated, which was good. She wasn’t merely coordinating meetings and Zooms for the small cadre of Futurium employees in Vegas, but for people around the world who worked remotely, including some financier who was working from the Maenads in Grand Cayman. She was, much to her surprise, syncing calendars with Futurium’s lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and its engineers in two hemispheres, and making travel arrangements for investment analysts in lower Manhattan. She was on the phone with other admins for members of the Gaming Commission or casino execs, and setting up lunches and meetings between them and Rory or Lara or Damon or Frankie. Twice she found herself setting up meetings between Futurium executives and staffers for Representative Erika Schweiker, one of which the congresswoman herself attended. Most of the time, it really did seem that her boyfriend’s new associates were on the up-and-up.
But then there were meetings with a team from a commercial real estate firm and members of the Mastaba “family” from West Palm Beach who were far more shadowy than Tony Lombardo—he of the boat shoes, for God’s sake—who had flown in to Vegas because they were going to have something to do with a casino acquisition. Apparently, the BP was one of four they were looking at, all smaller, a little downtrodden, and off the strip. At first, she had been confused, because these properties were nothing like the Maenads. Were they going to demolish one of them and build something new? Bulldoze a second-rate casino into oblivion, because all they wanted was the real estate? But the meetings with architects suggested otherwise, because the conversations and notes from the meetings were about rehabbing and reimagining these relics from another era, not blowing up the buildings and starting from scratch. The Futurium team didn’t want to spend a lot of money: they were, it was clear, even to her, going to buy one cheap and spend as little as possible to improve the property. Still, if she didn’t know that some (and only some) of these people were members of a crime syndicate, it all would have seemed bureaucratic—and downright boring. And maybe, in that regard, it was above board. She took comfort from the idea that so many Clark County politicians, and even a congressperson, were involved. How corrupt could any of this actually be?
She always carried a heavy sweater or sweatshirt with her to work, because the warehouse temperature was glacial compared to the outside world. It had to be for the computers. She christened her cubicle the Ice Cave. She brought in photos of her mother and Marisa and one of Crissy and her as little girls: they were dressed up for Halloween. Crissy was an angel and Betsy was a devil. Their mother had made them the costumes, and only later would Betsy read meaning into them.
One morning, Frankie stopped by with a bag of miniature doughnuts from a trendy bakery between his home and the warehouse. The little doughnuts were called reels, named after the part of the old-fashioned slot machine that spun, because they were small and came in funky, slot-machine-esque flavors like lemon and cherry and strawberry.
