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At Fifty-seventh Street, waiting for a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign to change, a strong sense of gratitude for all of this welled up inside of me – though gratitude directed towards whom in particular I didn’t know. It was accompanied by an acute sense of exhilaration, and was quite physical, almost like a form of arousal. But then moments later, when I was half-way across Fifty-seventh Street, something weird happened – all of a sudden these feelings surged in intensity and I was overcome with dizziness. I reached out for something to lean against, but there wasn’t anything there and I had to stumble forward until I got to a wall on the other side of the street.

Several people skirted around me.

I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath, but when I opened them again a few seconds later – or what seemed like a few seconds later – I jolted back in fright. Looking around me, at the buildings and at the traffic, I realized that I wasn’t on Fifty-seventh Street any more. I was a block further down. I was on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street.

It was the same thing that had happened the previous evening in my apartment. I had moved, but without being conscious of it, without registering that I had moved. It was as if I’d suffered a minor blackout – as if I’d trip-switched forward in some way, or click-clicked forward like on a faulty CD.

The previous evening was because of not having eaten – I’d been busy, distracted, food had taken a back seat. At least, that was the assumption, the rationalization.

Of course, I hadn’t eaten since then either, so maybe that was it. A little shaken, but not wishing to dwell too much on what had happened, I walked slowly along Fifty-sixth Street towards Lexington Avenue in search of a restaurant.

I found a diner on Forty-fifth Street and took a booth by the window.

‘C’n I get you, hon?’

I ordered a Porterhouse steak, rare, french fries and a side salad.

‘To drink?’

Coffee.

The place wasn’t busy. There was a guy at the counter, and a couple in the next booth up, and an old lady putting on lipstick in the next one up from that.

When the coffee arrived, I took a few sips and tried to relax. Then I decided to concentrate on the meeting I’d just had with Van Loon. I found myself reacting to it in two different ways.

On the one hand, I was beginning to feel a little nervous about taking up his job offer – which involved a nominal starting salary and some stock options, with whatever real money I made being on commissions. These would be from any successful deals that I recommended, brokered, negotiated, or, in the gnarled syntax befitting my current thought processes, participated in any phase of the negotiating of – like the MCL-Abraxas deal, for instance. But on what basis, I asked myself, had Van Loon been able to offer me such a deal? On the entirely spurious basis, perhaps, that I even had the slightest notion of how to ‘structure’ or ‘engineer the financials’ of a big corporate deal? Hardly. Van Loon had seemed to understand pretty unequivocally that I was an impostor, so he couldn’t be expecting that much from me. But what, precisely, would he be expecting? And would I be able to deliver?

The waitress arrived over with my steak and fries.

‘Njoy your meal.’

‘Thanks.’

Then – on the other hand – I had this clear vision in my mind of what a pushover Hank Atwood was going to be. I had read articles about him that used woolly terms such as ‘vision’, ‘commitment’, ‘driven’, and it just seemed to me that whatever the nature of that thing I had triggered in the others really was – I would have no difficulty in triggering the same thing in him. This, in turn, of course, would place me in a potentially very powerful position – because as the new CEO of MCL-Abraxas, Hank Atwood would not only have the ear of the President and of other world leaders, he would be a world leader himself. The military superpower was a thing of the past, a dinosaur, and the only structure that counted in the world today was the ‘hyperpower’, the digitalized, globalized English-language based entertainment culture that controlled the hearts, minds and disposable incomes of successive generations of 18 to 24-year-olds – and Hank Atwood, who I would shortly be making friends with, was about to be placed at the apex of that structure.

But then all of a sudden, without warning or reason, I’d swing back to thinking that Carl Van Loon was surely going to come to his senses and at the very least withdraw the job offer.

And where would that leave me?

The waitress approached my booth again and held up the coffee pot.

I nodded and she refilled my cup.

‘What’s the matter, hon? You don’t like your steak?’

I glanced down at my plate. I’d barely touched the food.

‘No, no, it’s fine,’ I said, looking up at her. She was a big woman in her forties, with big eyes and big hair. ‘I’m a just little concerned about the future, that’s all.’