Free Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett Page A

roof of the hotel, and his brain, once more, ran the stimulus to ground: the steel smelted from ore mined on some island of the Indonesian archipelago; forged into sheets on the hydraulic presses of a foundry outside Seoul; shipped across the Pacific to sit in a warehouse in Long Beach where it showed up in the Commerce Department’s numbers on inventory; ordered, packaged, trucked over the plains to an Atlanta wholesaler; bought by a contractor in Miami, who stood with a foreman directing workers riveting the vents together, operating the crane that raised into place the engine, itself assembledwith parts from ten countries or more at a Maytag plant out in Iowa or perhaps Mexico, calibrated to the precise wattage required to pump cooled air into the hundreds of sleeping chambers, where its faintly medicinal scent blanketed the slumbering travelers. And allowing each step from the miner’s lowly wage to the construction buy: loans, lines of credit, borrowed money—the vast creationary incentive of compound interest, blind artificer of the modern world.
    He wondered how it would be if the humming were just that to him: a sound.
    Leaving his glass on the table, he wandered out onto the lawn. He wouldn’t be able to sleep before he’d resolved Taconic’s troubles but until their CEO and Holland were on the phone there was nothing more he could do.
    On the far side of the pool area a footbridge led over the sand and the shallow water to a jetty that formed the outer edge of the marina. He crossed it and walked alongside the yachts and cigarette boats attached to their moorings with chains that glittered dimly beneath the dock lights.
    In the summers, he and Betsy had always gone up to Maine, to Port Clyde. A night in the mainland cottage, a day getting the boat out of storage, two weeks on the island. The same every year. Just as he rode the same train to work that his father had ridden. His father who’d worked for Roosevelt’s SEC, back in its early days, who had been a scourge to penny-stock fraudsters and pyramid schemers, arriving home each night with a briefcase full of pleadings and depositions, rarely back in time for dinner. He’d believed with fervor in the rules he’d enforced, in the idea of the government as the good leveler of the field. In 1944, he’d driven a Sherman tank through the streets of Paris to cheers. Back in the States, he’d spent his whole career going after securities fraud as if it were an insult to the country. How dare anyonethink they were above the democratic rule of law that he had fought to defend. Fair procedure meant everything to him. He’d been delighted when Henry chose to go to law school, though he would never have argued for or against it. Of the Federal Reserve, however, he’d always been a bit suspicious, given how badly it had failed in the Depression. And then it wasn’t exactly democratic either, with men from the private sector controlling the regional banks, appointing officers like Henry. An essential public function—the conduct of all monetary policy—handled beyond the public eye, by unelected officials. Of that his father had been wary.
    “You have to remember,” Henry could recall his mother saying, sipping her gin and tonic at the dinner table across from their father’s empty chair, “your father is a man of principle.”
    Henry had followed his father’s lead in never interfering with his sister’s life, even after the disaster of her affair with Eric. The old man had always hewed to his line about being proud of his daughter’s independence. The principled position. But then he wasn’t around anymore.
    Tires were lashed to the thick wooden posts at the end of the dock, where the dark water sloshed up against them. How was it that after all these decades his sister could still draw him back in? He’d thought once that having his own family would be a barrier of sorts, and for a while it had been, when his daughter, Linda, was a child. But it