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The Malthusian Catastrophe
Excerpt from The Malthusian Catastrophe: Prologue and Chapter 1
Prologue
New
York. The Seventh Year. September.
“My God! They are going to destroy everything.” Caroline stood in
the living room, with both hands covering her mouth, watching the events unfold
on television. Mrs. Klein sat on the couch with little Gregor by her side. Just
a few feet away, two well-armed guards in dark suits peered out of the floor-to-ceiling
window of the fifty-first-floor apartment. They could see the chaos in the distance.
The riots had begun earlier in the day. Now night was approaching.
“Don’t worry, Gregor, we’ll be fine here.” Mrs. Klein held his
tiny hand. Gregor was young, but he could sense the fear in the room.
That morning, one day after the announcement was made, the natural
order of the city collapsed. Many people were too afraid to leave their homes
to go to work. Several countries declared a bank holiday until further notice.
The stock markets opened briefly, only to be closed by the authorities after
panic trading commenced. By noon, it was reported that businesses were no
longer taking credit for transactions. A run on ATMs ensued. By 2 p.m., all of
the cash had been withdrawn from the machines. No one knew when they would be
replenished. By 3 p.m., the stores that had remained open were sold out of inventory.
Opportunists brought out what they could from their homes and sold it on the
streets for ten times what it would have cost the day before. By 4 p.m., almost
everyone with a car had left the City. No one was picking up the hitchhikers
desperate to get out. By 5 p.m., the Governor had declared martial law.
Everyone had to remain indoors after sunset.
The looting started around 6 p.m. The National Guard was called in
to maintain order, but they were hours away. By 7 p.m., all ground
transportation came to a standstill. All stores were closed. Every channel on
television was broadcasting the news. Much of the information coming through
was contradictory. There were more rumors than facts. One fact was
indisputable: a catastrophe was unfolding.
“Why are they doing this?” Mrs. Klein stared at the television.
Throngs of looters lit ablaze any car that remained parked on the street.
Almost every large window within throwing distance of a sidewalk was broken.
The rioters were now only a few blocks away.
“Let them eat cake” was all that Caroline could say.
“What’s that, my dear?” Mrs. Klein asked.
“That’s what they told them. ‘Let them eat cake.’ Everyone should have seen this coming. It’s ironic that the one thing that couldn’t possibly hurt them would cause this.”
1
Boston. The First
Year. May.
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"So
it’s not Wall Street,” Caroline said, digging through the closet for Michael’s
suitcase. “It’s still a very good job.” Their apartment could barely
accommodate the belongings of one person, let alone a couple. Caroline had to
navigate piles of papers and textbooks in order to move the suitcase onto the
bed. There were cheaper places to live in Boston, but they had decided to
sacrifice comfort for the quaint brownstone buildings and tree-lined streets of
the Back Bay.
“Yeah, a very good job as a vitamin salesman.” Michael considered
which of his two presentable ties to wear with the only good suit he owned. The
interview was the following afternoon, but he had decided to take the train
down to New York a day early. Aseso Nutraceuticals had offered to put him up in
a hotel for the night.
“Come on, Michael. You’re not going door to door. You’ll be a
distribution manager. Moving products around the world.”
“I think I’ll go with a standard white shirt. What do you think?”
Michael held up two shirts, a white and a blue. He could not believe that he’d
left his position as a senior logistics manager at the world’s largest online
retailer to enter one of the top business schools in the country, only to end
up interviewing with a company that sold herbal supplements.
“Michael, if you want to land a job, you’re going to have to at
least pretend to care.”
“I do care,” Michael said. He didn’t. Not really. Not about this particular
job. But it was late in his final semester of business school and he still did
not have an offer. He had no choice but to go after any available opportunity.
He could not have picked a worse year to enter the job market. The
ongoing recession had decimated investment banking and management consulting positions.
Caroline had left her hometown of Seattle to follow Michael across the country
and support his dream of a career on Wall Street. While she’d worked to pay the
bills, Michael had incurred more than a hundred thousand dollars in debt for an
M.B.A. from MIT.
And now he was applying for a position he could have performed
blindfolded, and definitely without a graduate degree.
Still, even though it wasn’t Wall Street, at least the Aseso job
was in New York; and it would pay enough for them to live there.
Michael laid the white shirt in his suitcase. “I will say one
thing about Aseso. I don’t know much about herbal supplements, but I do know
about sales,” he said. “And Sinsen definitely sells.” Aseso claimed that its one
and only product, Sinsen, a root based herbal supplement, promoted good health
by improving the immune system. Michael had finally managed to purchase a
bottle, after calling more than twenty drug stores.
He put on his favorite baseball cap and zipped up the suitcase. “I
probably won’t even get the job, but at least I’ll get a free trip to New
York.”
“Be positive, Michael! If they do hire you, we can move and get an
apartment that we can actually move around in. Plus, you could do a lot worse
than being the head of distribution for a fast-growing company. Anyway, they’re
doing something right. I just found out that my friend Beth—you know, the one I
work with at the shelter—takes Sinsen. Did I tell you? And she swears by it.
She thinks it makes her look younger.”
“Babe, I’ve met Beth. The opinion of a flighty twenty-something
isn’t going to make me feel any better. I swear by saw palmetto to prevent hair
loss, but that doesn’t mean I want to go to work for a saw palmetto
distributor.”
“You are not losing your hair, sweetie.”
“That’s because I’m taking saw palmetto.”
“Right. If you say so.” Caroline denied Michael’s hair loss the
same way she denied that she was going prematurely gray. At twenty-nine, she
was so pretty that no one noticed. She was the envy of Michael’s friends.
Michael kissed her. She pulled back and looked into his eyes.
“Michael, I have three things to say to you. One, I love you. Two, go knock ’em
dead. Three, Beth is thirty-four.”