Prosperity
Steven wasn’t sure how this happened. He did everything right. Except marrying Julie, but that had been resolved the usual way– with lawyers, and several thousand dollars. Yet, here he was, drinking coffee at the window of his Cold Spring colonial and clenching his ass cheeks because he was staring across the street at a disgruntled former employee instead of taking his usual shit. Steven was very regular.
Steven did everything right. When the first horse died, he followed protocol– calling the vet and the coroner, who found nobody at fault. When the second horse died, he did exactly the same thing. By the fourth death of the season, however, the pressure from owners was heating up. And Steven understood that, because he was also unsettled by the deaths. Four horses. One for each of the horsemen of the apocalypse. So he called in an engineer who found nothing wrong with the racetrack aside from some light buckling, which was understandable given the amount of ice that winter. They smoothed those portions of the track over.
After the sixth death of the season, Steven called another engineer for a second opinion. And that opinion was inconclusive as of now. What was conclusive was that he was $500,000 dollars in the hole and that a man with nothing to lose was currently idling outside. Before the debt, he was seriously considering getting out of the business. (Horses made him uncomfortable.) With the debt, he would definitely have to stay. Steven dumped the dregs of his Chemex into the sink and left to meet the engineer.
The car radio was playing one of the storytelling shows that brunettes with glasses like to see live. They were interviewing a carpenter who designed tiny free libraries they have on the side of the road in quaint neighborhoods. Except instead of just a basic hut structure with a clear door, the carpenter designed the libraries to look exactly like the houses behind them. He added gingerbread trim and balconies and tiny light sconces. He painted ivy up the sides, and carved realistic bulldogs to lounge on the front steps, and even made miniature Eames chairs to sit in the bottom floors which didn’t swing open for the books but instead glowed with battery powered candles through the night.
The carpenter had a tiny library he was working on that wasn’t for a client, and he didn’t know why but for over two years he continued to add and add to it. It didn’t look like any house he had ever lived in, but one day he dreamed about opening the door to the house and seeing his wife in the kitchen– although she had been dead for over a decade. He realized that the house represented his lost future. He was constructing his own version of heaven. Steven pulled into the parking lot of the racetrack and looked into the rear-view mirror. He was crying.
***
People assumed that Steven was at fault in the divorce and he let them think that out of respect for Julie. Why wouldn’t they think that? He was an asshole. Yet, he was a surprisingly good husband while Julie was an emotionally distant wife. He had never felt anxiety like he did walking through the airport after their honeymoon. Riding high on the heat of the past week he had let out a little whoop as they disembarked and pumped his fist in the air. “I’m glad that’s over,” Julie said. When they went to visit their shared hometown, she never wanted to stay with his parents. Julie’s mock formality with his family physically pained him.
His parents were middle class, possibly even on the low end of middle class– although the designation was essentially meaningless. Even at gunpoint, he wondered if any of his Cornell classmates would admit to being from the upper class when the liberalism they lived and breathed was a ray of light that shone brightest for the common man, the working sap, sprinkling him with vitamin D ‘democracy’. Despite her lack of pretension, Steven’s mother conducted herself with the pride of a temporarily embarrassed patrician. At her own sister’s funeral, she had leaned over to Steven and told him to get himself a slice of cherry pie before it was all gone. Julie didn’t have to be told to get herself a slice.
Julie would post up at the coffee shop in the center of town with her laptop and drink espresso after espresso as she researched stuff to do in the area, as if she hadn’t grown up there. She bounced from project to project. First she wanted to co-author a newsletter with him about getting the racetrack off the ground, in which he flatly refused to participate. Courting old money investors in steakhouses was hard enough without them thinking he lacked discretion.
After the newsletter, Julie wanted an apartment in Brooklyn. She was teaching an online fiction course at the time and had the money to split a one bedroom with another upstate couple looking for a grungy pied-à-terre. She was there during the week and in Cold Spring on the weekend. And then she was never in Cold Spring at all. It was Julie that asked for the divorce. It was Julie that really, really did care about him but couldn’t stand to be married. It was Julie who suggested he take her accountant, Olivia, to coffee.
Steven had visited Atlantic City just once with a group of friends from college and their girlfriends. The casino floors were populated by zombies blowing their social security checks, some of them in diapers so that they didn’t have to take a break between bursts of ruin. Steven was thoroughly disgusted, with nothing to do but drown his disgust in successive rum and cokes. By the time his group lined up to get into a club, he was the drunkest he had ever been. The girlfriends were waved inside. The bouncer looked from Steven’s ID to his heavy eyelids and shook his head. “Really?” Steven asked. The bouncer smirked, enjoying his little power trip. Drunk Steven looked around at the New Jersey nobodies out of their mind. Couldn’t they tell he was here ironically? He didn’t remember how he got back to the hotel room, whether he stood on the pier for a while and looked out at the Atlantic Ocean past patches of grass and ashy sand and felt anything other than elitist indignation.
Steven went away from Atlantic City with hatred for its chief enabler. To be rich and have such terrible taste was the sign of someone deeply corrupt and rotten. It didn’t make the man’s politics irrelevant, it was simply a revulsion smaller and therefore more easily felt. Steven vowed that his racetrack would resemble nothing like this. No Venetian theater set, no Greek columns as flimsy at particle board. And absolutely no highway billboards. Instead, he modeled the common areas of the track after a Tudor carriage house. The first thing he saw when he walked into his office was an 1887 painting of thoroughbred champion Kincscem, his great noble ribs a reminder to always keep striving.
Steven was on his way into said office when he was intercepted by Celia Grey. Celia was a retired travel agent who planned to celebrate her 67th birthday at the racetrack with her husband and five of their closest friends. The day of Celia’s birthday outing, a 3-year-old filly named Prosperity injured her right hind fetlock three quarters of the way through the race. Unfortunately, Prosperity had fallen in a difficult position and despite the trainer and track veterinarian’s best efforts she could not be loaded into the equine ambulance. Tall screens were deployed to block the injured filly from view and she was injected with a sedative followed by a large dose of barbiturates. After a few moments of muscle twitching (which, Steven admitted, felt like an eternity) Prosperity fell still. Despite the fact that the entire unpleasant process was shielded from onlookers, Celia was traumatized by both what she saw and what she imagined happening behind those screens. That trauma was compounded when she went home and Googled the racetrack to find that Prosperity was not the only horse to die on the track, in fact, she was the third horse to die in less than two months.
Six weeks prior, a 4-year-old filly named Invisible Cities shattered her leg while training on the track and was put down. (Some old school track guys still referred to euthanasia as “destroying” the horse, but Steven couldn’t bring himself call it that.) The general public, who grew up on Black Beauty and Seabiscuit couldn’t understand why a leg injury was a death sentence, no matter how many times it was explained that a horse weighs 1,100 pounds and distributing that on three good legs– let alone holding the horse still enough to heal– was impossible. When a thoroughbred’s hoof touched down during a race (150 times a minute at top speed) it absorbed 2,500 pounds of force. You might as well run a marathon on sugar spoons.
Two weeks after the death of Invisible Cities, a 3-year-old gelding called Baked Alaska collapsed in the first half of a race. The necropsy showed that he died of a heart attack, a rare occurrence accounting for only 1% of thoroughbred fatalities. When he built the course, Steven had his pick between a dirt, turf, and synthetic track. He chose synthetic– a mixture of sand, rubber and wax– because it was thought to reduce fatalities, although the material was more expensive to maintain. Knowing that the track would wear out every 4-5 years, he took out a higher insurance premium to cover minor damage.
Given the relative safety of the track surface, rumors of performance enhancing drugs spread after Baked Alaska’s death. Unlike human athletes, horses don’t know they are on drugs that mask their pain, so they run themselves to death on a weak leg. A man from The Jockey Club came to visit Steven to discuss disciplinary action for managers and trainers found to be recklessly administering these drugs. He had a flat, boyish face. “I’m concerned that these incidents are a feature, not a bug,” the man said. Was it Steven’s imagination, or was he eyeing his framed Cornell diploma with something like a smirk? The Jockey Club recommended that Steven go through the race track’s surveillance feeds, looking for evidence of trainer impropriety.
Three days later, a pockmarked trainer named Kovacs was banned from the track. Security footage showed him carrying a bucket into Baked Alaska’s stall prior to the race. The bucket was located with the trainer’s other equipment and syringes still containing a cocktail of fatigue-fighting substances. Kovacs did not go gently. After he was banned, he demanded a letter of reference from Steven, which Steven did not grant. When Kovacs started showing up in his neighborhood, Steven ignored him for three days, but for the sake of his bowels eventually had a police officer come out and talk to him.
Meanwhile, the deaths hadn’t stopped. Celia Grey returned to the racetrack with 100s of flyers denouncing the cruelty of the sport, stuffing them under every windshield in the full parking lot. A week later a 4-year-old filly named Zipper Blues was put down with an injured pelvis. This got the attention of local media, who called the track “a house of horse horrors.” In order for an engineer to evaluate the track, Steven was forced to shut down during one of the busiest weekends of the year. This certainly didn’t help his financial situation, or his relationship with Olivia, who ended things via text message after a drunken blowout. Then came the deaths of Rugrat and Call Center. Which led him to enlist the second engineer.
***
Julie eased her car to a halt. She was at one of those traffic lights with eight lanes, where the potential for chaos is so great that turns are already sketched out in dots. Her thoughts went smooth when she followed the lane lines, placid as a first grader with three-step origami. Julie crossed this intersection at least once a day and had come to think of it as a “happening.” It was an event her body anticipated, the shiver of satisfaction from the turn well-executed lent a specialness to that stretch of road. An Arby’s, a Mattress Discounters, a Starbucks, and 10 seconds of knowing she was exactly where she was supposed to be. Julie thought that 10 seconds of confidence was nothing to take for granted.
She moved to the area to teach a one semester writing course at Brandeis. When she informed her Brooklyn subletter that actually she would be staying in Massachusetts indefinitely, they assumed she meant one of the neighborhoods churning with dead-eyed graduate students and independent bookstores. Instead, she lived in an apartment complex between a Holiday Inn and an anemic acre of trees that abruptly became a bluff overlooking the Massachusetts Turnpike. Her studio apartment was small and covered wall-to-wall with polyester carpeting the color of day-old oatmeal. Blinds hung like baleen across the one living room window, the sill of which was piled with dead ladybugs. To this unremarkable tableau Julie had added one queen-sized air mattress, a folding camp chair, a box fan and an electric kettle. The kitchen came with a microwave, and was separated from the rest of the apartment by the cord of Julie’s MacBook charger.
With her income from Brandeis paired with a rather lucrative copywriting gig Julie did for a sneaker company, she could continue paying rent for four months before she would need to find another job. Sometimes a bile of panic would rise in her throat as she remembered the months of financial precarity after she left Steven. But no, it was different this time. Her savings were more than enough to see her through the end of this project, if you could call it that.
Julie pulled into the parking spot in front of her apartment complex, which was laid out more or less like a motel. Inside, she turned the box fan on and looked out at the sycamore saplings swaying in the late summer breeze. Her window didn’t open more than a few inches, but she liked to pretend the air from the fan was the same wind dancing across the Red Bull cans behind the building. The apartment, ugly as it was, reminded her of childhood. The way the sun crawled up the ivory walls and the bathroom smelled faintly of ammonia combined with the certainty that she had hours to waste was the closest she had come to innocence in years. She thought about all of the things she longed for when she was married to Steven and commuting between Cold Spring and the city: Rachel Comey earrings, mango on a stick, the daily abuse of public transportation. Here, she wanted nothing more than to be completely suburbanized. Suburbanism as submission– suburbanism as art.
Steven didn’t understand submission, because his whole life was about submission. He never would have understood what she was working on. Still, she wanted to run it by him, give him a chance to give her advice couched in a race track metaphor: “Favorites are the best bet on the board.”
The working title of Julie’s current project was Suburban Sound Bath. She would immerse herself in the sounds of suburban life: Arby’s, Mattress Discounters, Starbucks, the box fan, until she simply couldn’t go on or ran out of money. Last week she went to a Christmas-themed candle factory, the interior designed like a Bavarian village dusted with snow. That such a place could exist just off the highway delighted Julie to her core, although the number of tantrums thrown over toy train sets in Santa’s Workshop put a damper on the whole experience. The wails of tiny consumers left wanting was a funeral dirge beneath the ambient music of the Sound Bath.
Today, Julie went to a furniture store designed to resemble New Orleans’ French quarter. The glass-fronted building emerged from the turnpike like a spaceship, or Oz. She pulled around back and entered through the adjacent roast beef restaurant which routinely turned up on Boston Magazine’s sandwich rankings. The watery core of the space was a jellyfish tank, free entertainment for the line of customers. The walls were painted like a carnival. Carousel ponies bobbed their way toward the exit which led directly to the furniture store. Julie made her way through this portal, and her eyes took ten seconds to adjust. Parents pushed their children in store-issued strollers painted to look like trolleys. Arrows on the floor glowed faintly in the purple light. This way to Space Mountain.
Suddenly, the entire store sprang to life. Spotlights illuminated the white balconies lining the second floor of the store and animatronic figures rotated out to play saxophones and wave Mardi Gras beads or else nod slowly in agreement with the blues music echoing off of the signage for Kitchen & Bath. The figures didn’t blink, and Julie felt her eyes water as she realized she wasn’t blinking either. The activity ended and the store fell back into human chatter punctuated by the occasional announcement for the IMAX theater also grafted onto the store.
Julie walked past a kiosk that read Dippin' Dots – Ice Cream of the Future and into the Living showroom. The floor was arranged into archetypal living rooms. Here was the leatherbound den with its copper globe and nautical bookends. There was the rattan set with beaded throw pillows. She fingered the base of a lamp built to look like a boyish horse jockey. All the futures one could have, all the futures one could want, were here: wrapped in the sheen of unreality. The ridiculousness of the jellyfish and the 3-D movie goggles overflowing from fleur de lis trash cans only served to underscore the ordinariness of all this striving. It was an honest portrayal of a life.
***
Steven met with the second engineer as planned and the prognosis was bad. The entire track would need to be resurfaced next year at the latest. He could operate through the end of the season, but only horses who practiced on the track could race. As a stopgap measure, he would build a temporary radiology facility along the track’s backstretch, evaluating the horses for hidden problems before they raced. And all of this would cost more money that he didn’t have.
When Steven got home, he installed a security camera on the front door and he planned to watch the footage in the morning. However, Kovacs didn’t visit the house that night. Instead, he filled a bottle with petrol, stuffed the neck with a rag, lit the rag on fire and tossed it in a neat arc through the lobby window of Steven’s Tudor racetrack. By the time the fire department arrived at the racetrack very little could be saved. Kincscem, the champion, was a charred mass of canvas and wood. The insurance money was enough to get Steven out of the horse business once and for all.
Steven sold his house and relocated to Vermont to try his hand at carpentry. He regularly meditated and one day it occurred to him to thank the universe for all the people who burned his life down. He called Julie from the car.
Daisy Alioto's creative nonfiction has appeared in Longreads, Paris Review and The Cut and her poetry has been published by Unbroken Journal and Triangle House Review. She is also a journalist with bylines at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The New Republic.
