The bankruptcy filing hit the wire at 6:03 a.m. on a Tuesday. The headline used the company's legal name, which is a paragraph, and then the name the employees used, which is one word you have already seen on a pay stub. I will give you neither. Twelve thousand people had been using the short one. The last time we printed an enterprise value, the number was eight hundred million dollars. By 6:04 that number was a hobby for the unsecureds.
I was already dressed. I had been dressed since five, which is a habit left over from the years when a book was a book you stayed up to finish and not a docket you stayed up to survive. The kitchen in Sagaponack was dark except for the under-cabinet strip the previous owner had installed for a life that involved zesting. I do not zest. I stood with a glass of water and watched the hedge, which at that hour is only a darker rectangle against a dark lawn, and I refreshed a feed that had not yet learned the short name. At 6:03 it learned.
The house makes a particular sound before the heat comes on, a click in the wall that the inspector called normal and that I have learned to use as a clock. I had already made the coffee I would not drink. I had already put the keys in the dish by the door, which is a dish the previous owner left and which I have not replaced because replacing it would be a decision about permanence I am not in the mood to make. The lawn, if you can call a service a lawn, was wet in the way of a night that had not decided to be rain. I could see the wet from the kitchen because the security light on the garage is set to a motion I do not make at that hour and therefore stays off, and the wet was only a shine that the hedge interrupted. I stood there anyway. Standing is a kind of work I do when the work has already been done by a filing.
Jonathan was on the call at 6:15 because Jonathan is on the call. He was general counsel to a senator when I was still an associate who thought a confidential information memorandum was a kind of literature. He left the Hill the way some men leave a marriage: with a better title and the same hours. He does not perform panic. He asked whether the filing was voluntary. I said yes. He asked whether I was on a plane. I said I would be. He said the Hamptons were a bad photograph and a correct calendar. He did not tell me to run. I do not run. The house in Sagaponack is in my name. The town knows the car.