Eddy Boy was sitting in the park when he came up with the Big Idea. Everyone—the joggers, the nannies pushing the strollers, even the unhoused people sleeping on the benches—was sucking up free air, filling their lungs like it was no big deal. He realized this amounted to billions of dollars being left on the table—or out in the atmosphere, as it were.
So, we created a commodity. To be honest, the mechanics of this were a mystery to me. One second there was nothing then the next a number scrolled across the ticker. The guys on the trading floor went nuts, monkeys before the monolith, shouting and pointing. Just like that, fortunes were born. Dollar bills crawled out of the earth, wormed their way into our pockets, and burrowed deep into the crevices of our khakis.
Up in the executive suite we were all smoking cigars and drinking whisky; the combination made me nauseous and sweaty. I said to Ed, "This seems too good to be true, like maybe the bottom could fall out." Ed looked at the rest of the guys and jerked his thumb in my direction, as if to say, "Get a load of this guy." Everyone laughed.
Eventually, Ed realized he could inflate the price of air by depriving certain regions of oxygen, sucking it right out of the atmosphere. This sounded pretty wild but Ed knew a guy in the State Department who could take care of the red tape. Off we went.
Before long, we were all walking around with bulging, squirming pockets, the dirty bills roiling and writhing inside. It was not uncommon to hear one day trader turn to another and say, "Is that money in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" I didn't get it.
Watching the nightly news started to get depressing. There were people and animals suffocating all up and down the West Coast. From the C-suite to the trading floor, no one seemed to care. The dollar bills multiplied. For most of us, the money crawling around in our pockets was evidence enough that we were doing the right thing.
Nothing lasts forever, though. During a conference call, a stock analyst asked if the recent suffocations could be linked to our business model. I froze. Ed called the person something I'd rather not repeat here, then hung up. This proved to be an exceedingly bad move.
The media turned on us. Evidently no one cares when a bunch of poor people suffocate but you call one analyst a dirty word and all hell breaks loose. Regulators started sniffing around, going through our trash, following us home, being a general nuisance.
This meant we had a paper problem. There were loads of evidence of corporate malfeasance, bribery, insider trading, outsider trading, skullduggery, skylarking, buffoonery, securities fraud, market masturbation, and all manner of scumbaggery. Ed said we had to go see The Shredder. I didn't know what he was talking about.
The Shredder was a woman we kept hidden away in a back office. The guys on the trading floor were worried their natural male juices wouldn't be able to flow with a woman around but we were required to have one on the books for diversity purposes, so this was Ed's fix. Believe me, I know how this sounds.
On a good day, The Shredder was bleary eyed and overworked. This was because she was tasked with destroying sensitive documents which could be used as evidence in a criminal trial. She spent her days wading around, waist-deep in paper, stuffing documents into the giant belching machine. The documents screamed as they were torn apart. She was overworked and underpaid. She also had no idea what was about to hit her.
A huge pile of paper dropped from a hatch in the ceiling. I took my suit jacket off, rolled up my sleeves, and started grabbing documents and stuffing them into the shredder. Ed asked what the hell I was doing.
"Helping," I said.
He rolled his eyes and disappeared.
For a while it was just me and the woman, running around, chasing documents while shreds of paper shot out of the back end of the machine. Every so often, more paper would drop down or a group of interns would open the door and dump more into the pool. It was chaos. I noticed some dollar bills were worming their way into the shredder. I pointed this out and the woman shrugged and said, "You guys really had to go and kill the golden goose, didn't you?"
I didn't know what to do, so I went to get us some coffee. We were way up on the hundredth floor, so I had to wait as the elevator buzzed. Once it dinged, I jumped out and ran to the nearest diner. I didn't know what the woman wanted but I guessed it was something strong, dark, and bitter. I left a handful of wriggling bills on the counter and ran back to the office.
There were cop cars and news vans surrounding our building. The lobby was full of cops, scratching themselves and looking bored.
I held the tray with our coffee cups and pushed the button for the elevator. I watched the numbers count down and I started to get a bad feeling. The elevator was coming from the hundredth floor. I turned to one of the cops and told him he should be ready for anything.
"I'm ready," he said. "Ready to ask you boys for a job application." The cop next to him laughed.
The numbers went 3-2-1 and the doors began to crack. I could see a trickle of paper begin to pour out. That's when everything fell apart.
Millions of pounds of shredded documents cascaded out of the elevator, flooding the lobby, knocking the cops off their feet. Some of them pulled their guns and fired into the mass but it was no use. Moments later they were washed away.
On impact, one of the cups burst and hot coffee sprayed my face. I held the other one above my head as the paper lifted me off the ground. As I fought to keep my head up, I wished a stronger wave would come along and carry me up to The Shredder. I wanted to tell her she could stop working. None of it mattered anymore. We were finished.