The founders of the Institute were not exactly sure what they were looking for. They were looking for a ‘live player’, someone who might stretch their legs or stab you, and you wouldn’t be sure of which until it happened. They wanted Barron Trump to be the new Caesar. They wanted Klaus Kinski to shill Bitcoin. They wanted eyes like his, boiling in their shells. Pressure would hiss from behind their leaching plastic contact lenses. And then: they’d open, plastic slick to the skull. A live player saw the rules of the game for what they were. The founders would not spell out these rules because they were impossible to sum up. Ancient Chinese philosophers had tried. Robert Greene had tried, with his forty-eight laws of power. But the live players had this knowledge almost primordially, the way a lizard understands how to move through grass.
The signs of a live player could be simple: majoring in political science was a negative sign, while pure math was positive. Being from a wealthy family was positive, especially if the wealth was stored or made overseas in a country other than Switzerland, which was a boring and obvious choice. Liking certain authors was positive: Habermas, Spengler, Borges, Goethe.
Knowing each country’s major imports and exports was essential, mostly so you could have an opinion on Vanuatu. Indonesian was, this year, a very good sign. German had been better last year, but was still superior to French. Chinese was practically a requirement. Certain colleges were known to produce certain types: Harvard had no one of value, except for a Belgian tap dancer who had once pledged to them that ‘many must perish so few may rise’. She assumed she would be one of the few. Princeton had a few contestants, disproportionately Comparative Literature students who ranted about Turgenev at Malibu pool parties. Oxford had some promising Turkish intelligence officers. Cornell was not reached out to.
The Institute was meeting at Yale, at a corner bar with a pool table and subpar beer. It was only a society at this point, attempting to build itself out. Many projects had been proposed: the largest organic beef farm in America funded by Chinese investors, nuclear fission in Canada, graphite mines in the Philippines, joining the international Ambergris trade, using LIDAR to dig in Afghanistan for wares to sell at indecent auction houses. Some of the founders were secretly considering grad school, but they would not tell anyone that. Most were currently assistants at think tanks, but they’d call their roles ‘chief of staff’ when asked, as if a think tank was a small country. Each of the founders secretly believed that, if dropped in a small country, they could quickly start running it.
The first candidate of the night would be arriving soon. The three founders sat in a booth in the bar, against a window. One was tall and skinny and oscillated between handsome and gaunt, depending on how much beef fat he cooked his morning eggs in. One was small and wiry, with pimples balletically arching over his brow. The last one was fat in the way comic book characters were, but he leaned into it, sometimes even wearing a porkpie hat. The tall one was quieter than the other two, who would drill facts out of their skulls as if excavation of their objects was necessary for the survival of the containers. They talked about synthetic palm oil, the upcoming Ecuadorian elections, South Korean ping pong champions. Two were wearing penny loafers, their sweating pinky toes rubbing against the leather. One was wearing a suit jacket found in his stepfather’s closet, custom-made on a trip to Vietnam. It was too small – his stepfather did CrossFit. They ordered beers for the table and let them sit, the glasses sweating.
A pale boy entered the bar, his eyes round and dark. He stalked over to the founders’ booth.
‘Are you the Institute? I’m Peter.’
‘You’ve got us,’ the fat one said, shrugging off the suit jacket.
‘I saw the posters about a reading group around campus, and I had to come. I love Spengler.’
‘Oh, really? Where are you from?’
‘Upper West Side. I study political science.’ These two facts canceled each other out.
‘Which high school?’ the gaunt one asked, stirring his beer foam.
‘Horace Mann, do you know anyone there?’
‘We have our guys,’ the small one assured him. They did not have anyone from Horace Mann. Peter would be the first.
It was clear that Peter was the son of a billionaire from the way he kept mentioning his ‘family friends’, of whom there seemed to be a rotating cast. He was vaguely rat-like and kind; the gaunt one liked him in the pitying way the children of professors admire the rich. His favorite poet was Percy Shelley. He said ‘wow’ a lot. He had made some short films in high school but put the camera down as soon as he started college. He had gone to Kyrgyzstan for a month, mostly to kill time. Going somewhere remote for a month just to look around was considered a sign of a live player, and Kyrgyzstan was a place on the rise, whether or not Peter knew it: he had struck gold.
‘We will be in contact,’ the small one said, going to shake hands with Peter, who was already skulking out the door.
‘He seems to be in a permanent state of defeat,’ the fat one said. ‘Bad sign.’
‘Lack of confidence can be a sign of low Magnesium,’ nodded the gaunt one. ‘We don’t want Deficients.’
‘Then that’s eighty percent of the American population out of the running,’ said the small one. They nodded gravely and awaited the next candidate. They picked up their beers and sat them back down. The fat one asked the gaunt one about his thoughts on the recent Danish election and whether it proved any of Bruno Latour’s theories. The gaunt one shrugged. The fat one guessed he had never read Latour. Realizing this, he felt a little triumphant.
A lanky figure opened the bar door and stared at them.
‘Do you three make up the Institute?’ he asked. They asked him to sit down.
The pale figure’s name was Mikael. He looked cancerous: his hair was patching off, he was junkie thin, his skin had the glassy look of a Christmas ornament. His eyes shook in their sockets, as if experiencing turbulence. Mikael explained, since his appearance needed an explanation, that he had been bedridden since he was fifteen. His disease, he said, was mysterious. It had allowed him to read almost everything worth reading – there had been nothing else to do. The founders tried to quiz him on Portuguese authors, the new Chinese century, Bougainville’s independence. He would interrupt them before they finished speaking.
He said he had ideas for the Institute, big ones. They would start by unfurling a large banner from a very high place. There would be someone on a horse, or in a helicopter. Something would be dropped from a great height onto an empty field. People would learn the Institute’s name. Mikael said he was willing to play any part, major or minor. There was something about him that was a little unreal, as if he didn’t yet know that taxes existed, or laws. Mikael said he knew some people high up in the Chinese government who ran a diamond mine in Tanzania on the side. He could introduce them. He said he knew TCB-2 suppliers in the Netherlands and that they could make the drug big in the States. He said he knew the Vyvanse-addicted daughter of an oil magnate and she would buy them a brownstone on the Upper East Side if they just agreed to be her friends. He said he knew some of the rationalist philanthropists in San Francisco who were throwing money around before their AI killed everyone on Earth. He said the philanthropists all had bunkers in New Zealand and he could get them into a bunker too when the time came. He said that time would come, they had to trust him on that one.
Mikael looked the founders square on when he said this. They shifted a bit in their seats – there was something about him that shamed them. He seemed to have been stewing in place, hardening for years. They didn’t have anyone with a waxy exterior like that, someone who could get burnt and keep walking. He seemed like he could regenerate, like he had regenerated several times already. He had a strange, stilted accent, like someone who had learned how to sound British from watching recordings of Shakespeare performances on the BBC. He claimed to be from a royal family, a branch that had been cut off and displaced to Reno, Nevada. He showed them a ring engraved with his family crest. There was a pot-bellied pig in the middle of it.
‘That’s Swedish,’ he said. ‘Traditional.’
Most of the guys in the Institute had vague dreams of being a Rockefeller: one had gone around touring plastics factories until he reported back that starting a factory was shockingly hard, even in the Philippines. There was a reason everyone just did consulting now. There was a reason everyone sold online financial planning courses or edited the college essays of high school students in Westchester. The founders couldn’t even imagine finding a banner large enough to unfurl off a building. They were waiting for the right donor to charm, someone who could throw money at them if they danced the right two-step, bowed deep enough, repeated the correct facts in the proper order. Mikael’s hair seemed to be falling away from him as he talked – he didn’t have time to wait.
Mikael’s sickness was infecting the bar; it was empty now, and the table felt sticky. There was a draft that penetrated even the custom Vietnamese suit jacket. The founders hoped Mikael was a pathological liar with a psychosomatic disease, one that would magically disappear when he got a girlfriend. They hoped he wouldn’t start a lucrative industrial shrimp farming company, or make it big in horse betting. He couldn’t become a lizard in the grass, not like this, dying. They wanted to get rid of him. No one would miss him, except maybe a bio-hacking group chat. Even then, they doubted he ever posted physique updates; they were sure he just lurked.
The founders looked straight at him, his curling, hard eyes volleying back. His skin seemed to turn more translucent as they watched, like an amphibian reacting to a change in water temperature – his veins and blood pulsing with expectation, his molars expanding in his mouth, his lymph nodes swelling up through his jaw. His ear twitched.
One of the founders held out a hand to shake.
Image © Noah Smith
