The Leading Indicators (2 page)

Hearing the metallic crunch, Margo came to the door. Observing the collision, she ran to see if anyone was hurt. As she did this, a DHL truck pulled up. It takes a lot of deliveries to sustain a high-end lifestyle.

 

Chapter 2

October 2006

Record North American heatwave ends.

Snow falls in Jerusalem.

Xbox 360 sales reach 10 million.

National debt: $7 trillion.

M
argo Helot was easily dislodged by the small complications of life. The wide-screen television controller with its fifty-six buttons bearing cryptic labels like PIP/SWAP could make her lose it—fifty-six buttons, and just try turning the TV on. But Margo was composed at moments of distress. She ran to the injured driver, recognized arterial bleeding, applied pressure to stanch the blood. Margo had to twist her body sideways, squeezing against the driver, to get the correct angle to clamp his wound. She did not hesitate or waver, though she was splashed with quite a bit of blood and pressed hard against a strange man.

“Dial 911, then get the first-aid kit from the mudroom,” she called to her friend Lillian Epperson, who was watching the scene in rapt horror, too frightened to move. Lillian was an academic and successful in her chosen field, but, well, you know about academics.

“The first-aid kit—go!” Margo's voice was commanding.

Margo had been a Gold Award Girl Scout, the equivalent of an Eagle Scout, and had done well in first-aid training. Why, she had then wondered, didn't the top girls receive a classy rank like Eagle—eagles are decisive animals—rather than a Gold Award, which sounds like a prize for best-dressed? When they moved into the house, Margo mounted the first-aid kit on the wall labeled with its bright green-and-white cross image so her daughters could find it quickly if something happened when she wasn't there. Not that Margo ever allowed them to be on their own.

Already there was the sound of a siren in the distance, the echo growing louder. The other driver, unhurt, was impressed that Margo knew what to do and was not afraid of blood.

“Got to—call my—supervisor—explain—delay,” the injured driver said, groggy. Margo told him not to open his eyes, because of the blood.

“Shit, he's right, I better call in and report why I'm stopped,” the other driver said, and bolted back to his truck. GPS tracking had just become practical, and companies were installing the devices in their vehicles. When a delivery truck stopped moving for more than a moment, the company wanted to know why. Unscheduled soda breaks or fifteen-minute naps were out of the question. If you needed a little time away from the monotony of delivering, you had to be driving—keep the truck in motion to satisfy the GPS. As long as fossil fuels were being consumed, it counted as work.

“Is he going to live?” Lillian asked. She was terrified the driver might die, and excited at the thought of being present at a death. Medical examiners, news helicopters—wait till her friends heard.

“He's going to have a monster headache, and the next time he goes out for drinks with the other drivers, he's going to make this crash sound a lot more dramatic than it was,” Margo replied.

Lillian looked on, simultaneously frightened by the blood and trying to get a better view. She appeared to be expecting Margo to do something. But Margo could not remove her hands until the ambulance arrived—a clamped wound must remain clamped—and that meant Margo couldn't move.

“Maybe you should go inside,” she told Lillian. Margo knew the EMTs would inject painkiller near the wound, then wrap the site for the ride to the hospital, and the driver would howl when a big needle went into a place that already hurt like hell. That was a moment Lillian should miss. Margo felt relief that the driver's gash did not contain any glass or metal, because she remembered that with arterial bleeding, the first responder should not try to remove any objects in the wound. Just apply pressure—no matter how much the victim screams.

The DHL driver walked up to Lillian nonchalantly and asked, “Can you sign for this?”

“Part for the espresso machine,” Margo said of the package, a shade apologetically. “The espresso maker is as complicated as a steel foundry, but saves twenty minutes stopping at Starbucks.”

Margo had to reposition her body to maintain firm pressure on the driver's wound. She was pressing hard against him: they were getting quite familiar.

The ambulance siren grew louder. “I did a time budget,” Margo told Lillian. “I was stopping at the Starbucks four days a week, total of eighty minutes. Projected over the next ten years, that came to twenty-nine days—a whole month of my life would be spent in line at Starbucks while people were ordering shade-grown blueberry-almond drinks with names like Rapafrapazapachino. So I bought an espresso machine for the kitchen, twenty-five hundred dollars. Needs new parts pretty often. But added twenty-nine days to my life.”

The DHL driver blanched at the thought of a $2,500 coffeemaker. He'd have to work two months to clear that amount, after taxes and child-support payments. Lillian signed for the package, and the DHL driver smiled and hustled back to his truck. The guy wanted to be moving again before emergency vehicles, turning down the street, pulled up and blocked his path. The delay would be bad for his electronic rating for the day. There was no way his dispatcher would buy some story about stopping to assist at a crash of competitors' trucks.

Lillian said, “Coffeemaker that costs more than a furnace—only in America!”

“Lillian, a new furnace is seven thousand dollars,” Margo said.

“That much! I'd no idea what they cost. I've always lived in apartments.” At this point Margo and Lillian were holding a genteel conversation though Margo was splashed with a fair amount of warm blood.

The ambulance arrived, turning into the street with a cinematic screech. “Lillian, go inside!” Margo commanded.

To the emergency crew, accustomed to dealing with people who either just had horrible bad luck or just did something deeply stupid, the driveway crash seemed humdrum.

The EMTs worked quickly and efficiently. One took over applying pressure, allowing Margo to ease out of the truck's cab. Another prepared a gurney, a third brought the painkiller and bandages to stabilize the victim for transport.

Margo was splattered with blood, as if she were auditioning for a slasher film. “Thanks for getting here fast,” she said. “He was starting to look a little cyanotic.”

An EMT asked Margo if she was a doctor, and the compliment made her day. Then he advised her, “Strip immediately. Get into the shower and turn the water as hot as you can bear. Bleach your clothes on extended hot cycle. You know nothing about this guy.”

There was something faintly titillating about being ordered to strip by a handsome stranger. A police car, a fire engine, a fire captain's car, then a second police car arrived to join the ambulance. There were numerous crackling radios, people in uniform reporting information in clipped codes. It seemed as though the military had come to occupy the street.

Neighbors stayed inside, watching from their windows, when the accident had just occurred and their help was needed. Now that the neighbors clearly were not needed, they came out to ask if there was anything they could do.

The ambulance departed with the driver: he was sitting up, his bleeding controlled, and smiling after a hypo of morphine. Margo completed paperwork for a policeman, who seemed shockingly young for a position of such authority. She stood in the driveway with fresh blood dripping down her breasts, casually talking to him.

The two women entered the house. “He had a
gun
,” Lillian said, as though this were a news flash regarding a police officer. It occurred to Margo that her friend had never seen a real firearm. As instructed, Margo went directly to the shower, and fairly scorched herself.

Being inside lent a sensation of abundance. The many rooms, more than Margo's family of four needed, by their number testified to the ability to pay for such things. There was expensive furniture, paint chosen by a color consultant, the open-plan kitchen endorsed by architecture magazines. And perfect cleanliness. Margo had the house cleaned twice a week, paying the Guatemalan woman fifteen dollars an hour. Some of her well-to-do neighbors paid half that and shouted over the slightest error, knowing the cleaning women were illegals who would never dare talk back. Margo wrote down the names of her cleaning woman's children and always asked after them. Of course, she'd paid the color consultant two hundred dollars an hour. That role was a skilled position. Nobody's born knowing what goes with mocha.

Occasionally Margo caught herself feeling smug that she treated the Guatemalan woman generously. Paying an unskilled illegal a decent amount was better than nickel-and-diming but was not going to change the course of society. Margo knew that if she was called before her Maker and asked to account for her life, leading with “I gave my cleaning woman more than my neighbors gave theirs” would be unlikely to open doors.

“Do you want a cappuccino? The machine does those, too,” Margo said. She'd put on a tracksuit after her shower, and looked athletic. Setting about to install the new part in the machine in hopes of producing a cappuccino, she seemed the picture of competence. In a moment Margo began swearing like a sailor as steam blasted in the wrong direction—she had set one of the dials improperly.

Margo once passed an agreeable morning counting the controls and dials on her technological possessions. There were sixty-two switches with more than a hundred possible settings in the Lexus, and that wasn't including the hundreds of stations on the satellite radio. There were twenty-eight switches on the Bosch dishwasher. Her laptop, driven by software, could be set in essentially unlimited ways—and the moment she finally grasped current systems, upgrades forced her to start over. Margo tried to disable upgrades so the laptop would stay the same. But if she forgot and left the laptop on, the machine upgraded itself, mischievously, in the middle of the night. Too bad the laptop didn't make shoes while she was sleeping and leave them on the garage workbench.

Lillian watched, fascinated, as Margo confronted the cappuccino machine. This was something Lillian would never consider attempting herself, yet took on faith that a total stranger, earning minimum wage, would do correctly for her in a restaurant. Lillian lived alone, and made herself nothing more challenging than toast. Within walking distance of her downtown condo there were, after all, a profusion of interesting eating places, from quick American to elegant Northern Italian, plus every Asian, Central American and African subcuisine. Tea and a slice of toast with jam were all Lillian Epperson needed to start her day. Something better always came along later.

Margo had been born in Winnetka, Illinois, and raised in the kind of hopeful household that was drawing on two energies—the industrious hum of Chicago to the south and the peaceful murmur of Lake Michigan to the east. The sense of unlimited promise is trusted to all who come from the American Midwest, a place that was strong enough to resist an ice age. As a girl, Margo played on Tower Road Beach and liked gazing off into the distance, trying to spy where the lake ended. She assumed the water went on forever. In a sense this was true, since the water that now appeared to her as a lake had existed since shortly after the cosmos began and would continue to exist long after people were extinct or had evolved to some higher form.

Children born into circumstances where there is food and play but no war think the world was created to receive them personally. Margo as a girl thought this. For all we know, she was right.

Becoming a woman, Margo spent a few years on her own in the city, living in Lincoln Park, going to the music clubs and to watch experimental theater groups perform in converted auto-repair shops. She took lakeside walks with a succession of young men who collectively were somewhat above average in appeal. Lincoln Park was a comforting place—gentrified, with most residents headed upward in life, yet sufficiently urban and funky as to feel uncompromised. It was a privilege to have spent young adulthood there.

As for the apartment, she told her mother the building had been recommended by a good friend who knew the owner. Actually she'd found it by walking through neighborhoods until she passed a blocky tan structure with an
APARTMENTS FOR RENT INQUIRE WITHIN
sign by the entrance. Standing on the far side of the street for an hour, she observed the comings and goings of young men and women who seemed at approximately her station in life, which told her this was the spot. Margo worried about being conspicuous, that she would draw attention by lingering at the same location on an urban street for an hour. Instead not a single person looked twice at her, nor would have even if she'd been stealing tires or assembling a sniper rifle. But she was then only a few years removed from home—still at the point of assuming her every action was noticed.

Years later she would sometimes dream of her bachelorette apartment on West Belden Avenue. In her dreams, Margo saw not the boys who'd been her guests but the view through the window across West Belden to townhouses, the kind lived in by young couples who had gotten married and begun to make decent money.

Margo found a job as a trader's aide in the controlled chaos that is the Chicago Board Options Exchange—buying and selling not just the stocks of companies, which was comprehensible, but indices, swaps and spiders based on the stocks of companies. After a while she stopped thinking about what the indices and exchange-traded funds represented and cared only whether they went up or down: the attitude taken by the traders who were making the most money. Our distant forebears cultivated grasses into wheat; our nearer ancestors hewed land for farms; nearer still built factories, canals and bridges. The best-paid people of Margo's generation manipulated decimal points. Maybe this was a necessary stage in evolution to a higher form.