The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld Read Free Book Online

broker knew who she was but was too polite to mention it.
    â€œTradition,” the broker said and shrugged.
    â€œI just want to rent it. Now. I don’t want to wait.”
    â€œWe’ll send our guys out here to photograph it today.”
    The broker gave a smile that Gemma detested for the sympathy she perceived. Or was this the usual default smile of a woman who worked in a business where pleasing buyers and sellers started with a vacant grin?
    Franny and Ginny had become bogged down sorting through their old toys. And these were only the second-tier toys, the stuff that had not been loved enough to make it back to the city. How long would it take them to sort through the city toys? Gemma had been tempted to toss every photo of Arthur into the plastic garbage bags but decided, for her daughters’ sake, that she had to save a few. She went through the bedrooms, tossing out old magazines, boxing up books, and trying to figure out what to do with the various driftwood and seashell tchotchkes that inhabited coffee tables and bookshelves. She picked up a carton filled with seashells and coral bits and conch and took it out on the deck to the wooden railing that lined the pool and cast the marine detritus back onto the beach.
    She walked over to the pool and opened the doors to the slatted wooden chests where the pool equipment and aquatic toyswere kept, the masks, snorkels, goggles, noodles, and flippers that at the end of a summer day were strewn all over the deck. She began to gather the rubber gear, some of it still sandy, but then dropped it. Whoever rented the place could use all this stuff as well.
    She walked back to the edge of the deck, which had been built years ago, in contravention of local ordinances, over the sea-grassy dunes. The cloud cover was thick above her, giving way at the horizon, where a sliver of golden light and blue sea extended in a long strip as far as she could see in both directions. The appearance of that strip of light to the east was momentarily disorienting, making Gemma feel as if it were early morning instead of midafternoon.
    A few hundred seagulls standing at attention on the beach, facing the whales, were patiently awaiting the dying that they sniffed in the breeze. What was worse—humans feasting on the spectacle or seagulls hoping for an actual feast?
    She would leave tonight if she could.

CHAPTER 3
    I N THIS CLIMACTIC AGE OF American capitalism, the endgame, I suspect, where the forces of profit and avarice are putting the final squeeze on all of us and we find ourselves subsiding in a denuded wasteland of McMansions, succumbing to antibiotic-resistant strains of mutated microbes or shriveling as our multiplying tumors are excised from our bodies and watching our final generation of obese, attention-deficit-disordered children grow up functionally illiterate and capable only of sliding their thick fingers across touch screens until finally the Chinese think of a product that all this American flesh can be made into—sofas, perhaps, an appropriate use for couch potatoes—I find myself still plying my trade despite all evidence to the contrary.
    Getting through full days of this shit—watching the world end fucking sucks—requires some of the strongest weed ever grown. My marijuana provided now by the same companies thatformerly retailed cigarettes—Atria, R. J Reynolds, Liggett—and that have driven the mom-and-pop medical marijuana shops out of business.
    This is what it’s come to. In my early middle age, I’ve become a more grown-up version of the stoner I was at sixteen, only now I can afford better weed and munchies. But the rest of it, my life, if you actually followed the path of my day, like one of those Family Circus cartoons where a dotted line traces the activities of the young rascal of an afternoon, would make Mr. Farnsworth and Mrs. Shirley, two high school teachers who foretold my adult fecklessness, feel smug.
    For my