The four of them did everything together. Meals were communal and, thanks to Kate and Alex, vegan, though if Ilya had a stoned craving for pizza every now and then, they shared that, too. Beds were bunked so the band could have a practice room and the artists (Molly, Kate) could cover the walls of their own studios with bubble wrap, dead leaves, or even pubes, though Molly’s attempt at this lasted only a week and covered less than a square foot. It was rumored that they were all fucking each other, too, in strobe-lit orgies of glitter and K-Y. The four of them, enamored with this cosmopolitan rumor, helped spread it, though Alex and Kate were the only ones who slept together, aside from a one-off hookup between Kate and Molly when they were on the substance that shared the latter’s name.

Any child of Chicagoland or the wealthier lobe of New Jersey who braved the house was bound to hear one of its residents give a proud rundown of the workings of their collective lifestyle. Kate had actually done just that just a few hours before she received the call from her uncle’s estate manager. She’d been talking about him too, actually, but that was no big coincidence—she often brought him up as a counterexample to the joys of living in community.

“He’s a huge pig,” Kate told a girl named Sara she’d met at the art supply store. “A global pig. He died about a month ago. Lonely and bitter up to the end. He had no one to share anything with. What’s the point of even being alive?”

“Do you guys have any extra room?” Sara asked. “My roommate has lost her mind. She’s afraid of chemicals and now she won’t let me drink Diet Coke. I have to use her special soap. It doesn’t smell like anything!”

“Let me go ask Molly. She loves chemicals.” Molly was the oldest of them, and like any thirty-three-year-old living among recent college graduates, the least mature. She would complain the most if she didn’t want someone new. 

“Molly!” Kate shouted into the kitchen. Molly wore the front of a two-person horse costume and was trying to get Ilya to step into the ass. Kate had met Alex and Ilya in college in Ann Arbor. Molly joined once the three of them had settled in nearby Ypsilanti, where the rent was cheaper. They all knew Detroit was inevitable, given their aesthetic, but the idea of moving overwhelmed them. Especially Molly, who claimed she’d rather rip out, sous vide, and devour her own liver before she’d move again. Just the sight of a U-Haul, she claimed, could make give her a complex migraine.

Kate introduced Sara.

“She wants to live here. Think we might have room?”

“Do you mind loud music?” Molly asked. “Very loud music?” The four of them played in a band called Big Baby. Molly would dress in a giant diaper and shower the audiences (which usually could fit in a single minivan) with milk. She was the Big Baby.

“I don’t mind that.”

“Well, we’re having trouble making rent, so you’re fine by me.” 

They partied for another three hours before the call came. Alex organized a photo shoot, and they poured melted candles onto one another and pretended they were in a zombie movie. At around 6 or 7pm, Kate, still covered in wax, felt her phone vibrate and saw the California number.  

“Holy shit,” she said once she’d hung up. “That was my Uncle Louie’s estate manager.” 

“Is that like a gardener?” Alex asked. He’d wound up in the back end of the horse costume, which he’d hacked away from Molly’s half with a bread knife. The shaggy legs, along with his stringy blond hair, made him look like Kurt Cobain if he’d been turned into a faun.

Kate tore down the black sheets covering the windows and told her housemates that she’d been left a little over twelve million dollars. 

Alex: “I thought you said you weren’t expecting anything.”

“I wasn’t. He knew I’m a socialist. God, I think he’s fucking with me from beyond the grave.”

Kate had long suspected her uncle might kick her a few dollars when his exquisitely shod foot hit its golden bucket. She had a vague scheme of buying a farm where she could rescue animals from the slaughter, something a little more life-giving than her anemic vegetable garden in the backyard. Gentle, squarish cows, a pig or two the color of a pencil eraser, and as many goats as she could get. Despite their satanic eyes, goats were gregarious. She could see them all: the skinny and scabrous newcomers, the old-timers plump and shiny from her care. Uncle Louie, a great lover of meat, would’ve hated that.

But their last encounter, about a year ago, ended in a fight after she came out as a communist. After that, she figured she’d be left out of his will, and she was fine with that. 

“Do I hate him?” Molly asked as she peeled a long stripe of wax off her face. “How’d he get so rich again? Fracking? Pharma?”

“Garage doors,” Kate said. “And then stocks, I guess.”

“Fictitious capital,” Ilya said, roused from a near-catatonic high. He’d been Brendan when they met, but rechristened himself with a more interesting name junior year. Ilya had a head of beautiful, springy curls that everyone in the house took pride in, as if his hair was a particularly lush houseplant. Right now there was a single piece of cereal—a Lucky Charm, it looked like—caught in the dense growth.

“Well, at least it’s not oil,” Alex said. “Or drones.”

“What are we going to do with it?” Molly asked.

Alex: “Isn’t it Kate’s call?”

“I know I’m being an asshole, but don’t the house rules apply here?” Ilya said, at about three-quarters the usual speed. “She didn’t do anything to deserve it. What, she was born to someone whose brother exploited the surplus value of other people’s labor? Congratulations.”

“We don’t need to figure this out right now,” Molly said. “Let’s get some food. We’re rich!”

Ilya spearheaded the operation, which took about an hour as he deciphered various menus on his phone, then reviewed them like court documents. The rest of them picked the last of the wax off each other, leaving a Tussauds’ worth to be crushed into the carpet.

“Where’s Sara?” a stoned Kate asked later, as the food was laid among the roach stubs and waterlogged magazines on the coffee table. 

“She just left,” Molly said. “I told her she’d caught us at a weird time, and that we needed to sit down and talk through adding her to the house. Vote, probably.”

Kate went to the door to see if she could catch her. Her feet stuck to the floor, from all the spilled beer, and she had to be careful not to step on a cardboard cutout of the Rock someone had knocked over. 

She eventually made it to the porch. Hordes of translucent green bugs swarmed the floodlight, adding some of their color to its glow. She looked down the street. Sara was gone.

◆

Uncle Louie’s estate manager helped her set up the trust and explained to Kate all the workings of her money and the money it would make. (Louie had left something for Kate’s mom, too, which simplified things, as far as house politics were concerned.) Kate did a little research and insisted none of it be put in oil, prisons, or weapons. And, after paying off the entirety of her student loans in about ten minutes, Kate and the estate manager arranged to deposit a reasonable sum into her account for immediate expenses, along with a twenty-grand donation to a mutual aid fund in Detroit she’d heard about, made in her brother’s name.

Kate didn’t tell the others about any of this. The more they knew about how it all worked, the more they’d judge her. She told herself they’d vote on it later, when the excitement settled down, but no one in the house was in any rush to map out just how they’d manage the exponential glut in their collective net worth. (They were good at putting things off. They’d never settled on a name for the house—it’d been Baby House, Seinfeld House, and the Black Lodge—before they gave up and decided to rename it for every show.)

Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the house rules formed a living document. Ilya had an inked-up manifesto printed out somewhere that grew more or less Soviet, Zapatistan, and mystical depending on what Ilya and Kate were reading, but the gist was this: vote on big decisions, share meals, host the occasional show, and, above all else, don’t be a pig. There weren’t any clauses about what to do with huge sums of money because no one expected to make it.

It would still take a couple weeks to finalize everything, but they began spending the money before it came in. First they bought a new TV, as the old one, an ancient Zenith, experimentally squeezed the image so actors lost their noses. Kate finally got a tattoo of a radish she’d been saving up for, which opened the floodgates for everyone else. Molly picked up a fog machine, supposedly for shows, daily turning the second floor into the guts of a cloud. Alex bought a new guitar amp, which he also claimed benefited the band. Like his beloved Theosophist monks who lived mostly on the astral plane, Ilya’s soul mostly harbored itself on eBay. He bought two lithographic prints from a Brooke Alexander sale, which sat in their cardboard until the real money came in and they could be properly framed. 

Before Uncle Louie died, Kate suspected she’d become more communist than Ilya, her Marxist mentor. Ilya had some bougie tastes. He spent a lot of money on olives, though she never called him out on this. At least they were vegan. But now something had shifted between them. When Kate mentioned some of the Noam Chomsky PDFs he’d sent her, she caught a smug expression on Ilya’s face. She knew the money, the money he was spending, gave him something to look down on.

“Should we be keeping receipts or what?” Molly asked during one of Kate’s chlorophyll-rich dinners about three weeks after the call came. 

“We need a system in place,” Alex said. Seeing all the spending, he’d grown protective. “This isn’t a free-for-all. Kate needs some say in how this goes.”

Ilya: “Well, it’s not your money either. It’s blood money.”

Alex: “From garage doors?”

“We should move to the Bay Area,” Molly said. “I hate moving, so you know I must really think it’s the best for us if I’m saying that.”

“The investment in fossil fuel,” Ilya said. “There’s no way some of his wealth wasn’t gleaned from raping the planet.”

“Then what should we do with it?” Kate asked.

“You should buy the house,” Ilya said. “Right? That way our rent doesn’t all just go to Theron.”

In the house’s cosmological map, their landlord Theron belonged on the same terrace of hell as Cargill CEOs and Koch brothers. He liked to use their living room as an office as he loudly discussed his construction schemes on his Bluetooth.

“We should move out of here. The Bay Area would be a better investment than Ypsi. Better quality-of-life.”

“I can’t live among technocrats,” Ilya said. Molly looked him right in the eye and ran her finger across her throat.

She knew they needed to have this talk, but all the arguing made Kate feel that Louie’s posthumous manipulation was working. She spoke up. “Let’s just make sure we’re voting on things. Don’t worry about the new purchases—once the money comes in, I’ll kick everyone a thousand, which should more than reimburse what you’ve already bought, and obviously I’ve got the TV. And consider the rent covered for the foreseeable future. Will that work?”

Everyone agreed Kate’s plan was a good one, for now. Ilya queued up some interminable masterpiece of Soviet cinema, and Alex and Kate went to the porch to smoke weed.

“I’m sorry Ilya and Molly are being such assholes,” Alex said.

“I set up something with Louie’s estate manager. I should have told everyone sooner. It’s as ethical as I can make it. I figure it’s just a transitional thing?”

“I think that is totally ok,” Alex said. “No one wants to get their hands dirty with the ins and outs of fiscal whatever. It’s best for everyone, as long as you just make sure it’s not being pumped into guns or oil.” 

“It’s not. But I looked the other day and some of it is in Amazon and Google. What do I do with that? This shit is hard. I want to prove Uncle Louie wrong. I didn’t start living this way, trying to be remotely ethical, just because I didn’t have money. Maybe I should just give it all away to help fight climate change or abolish prisons. What the fuck should I do?”

“Louie is dead. You can do this any way you want,” Alex told her. “It doesn’t have to be his way, and it doesn’t have to be their way. If you want to strike out and be more intentional about our community, we can do that. Molly and Ilya are fun now, but I don’t want to be married to them, and they’ll hang on forever now that there’s so much money floating around.”

Kate knew there was something else at work here. Alex had been toying with breaking away from Big Baby for a while. He’d told Kate he thought Molly was holding him back. She didn’t like running a song more than once, if he could get her to show up to practice in the first place. 

“I feel kind of loyal to these weirdos though. Molly’s held my hair back when I’ve puked about a thousand times. Ilya was really nice to me when Ryan died. He got me that cactus.”

“I mean, being nice to your friend when their brother ODs doesn’t make you Pope Francis.”

“I know.” 

A chubby racoon waddled out of the storm drain across the street. Kate and Alex watched him pick up a beer can and drain its contents, just like a frat boy.

Alex: “Man, he’s gotten huge. We need to lock our trash.”

“We can all figure this out together,” Kate said. “I’m not worried.”

She was worried, though. It wasn’t hard to imagine Molly buying a samurai sword, or Ilya trying to snag a Wayne Thiebaud. Alex, protective as he was, had been hinting at the new guitar pedals and synthesizers he wanted, purportedly for Big Baby. She knew that, whatever his misgivings about Molly, he wanted to get them a publicist, too, which would cost a fortune. Her favorite rappers seemed like prophets of her new situation, bemoaning the burdens of fortune and fame, all the people who wanted things from you. Now they were all she listened to. 

But then she got the first deposit in her account. When she saw the amount, she started laughing so hard Alex came in to check on her. After that, she started looking at websites on animal care and found herself watching YouTube videos of young goats hopping off each other’s backs or passing out when their owners darted up to them. She could picture her own herd, covering her yard, gathering around her like she was some goat-Christ there to wash away their sins and ailments and take them up to goat heaven.

◆

She remembered her mother driving them out to Simi Valley to ask Uncle Louie for money after her parents split up. Her mom, a middle school art teacher, dressed Kate and Ryan like her uncle’s house was church.

Louie was her grandpa’s brother. The two of them had estranged themselves over some mysterious, ancient dispute. All Kate knew was that it involved a set of golf clubs and Dwight D. Eisenhower or William F. Buckley. One of those initialed Republicans. 

Uncle Louie was short and built like a thumb. He ate only pot roast, a soft, gray substance which was also served up to his niece and her children. All of his furniture was shielded in clear vinyl, and his heart probably was, too. His joy, what little there was, came from his collection of ashtrays. Kate remembered looking at all of them: porcelain ashtrays with gold trim, chipped-hockey-puck black ashtrays, translucent green ashtrays seemingly carved from emerald, all bearing the names of long-gone hotels and casinos. They resembled the tops of castles, with their toothlike fortifications there to brace the cigarettes. Not that a cigarette had ever touched them. Louie didn’t smoke.

But what struck her most—more than her pot-roast-hungry uncle or his pile of ashtrays—was her mother’s behavior. She’d been irritable the whole ride up, then turned sugary in the presence of their sour uncle. “That fucking prick,” her mom said as they drove away. “Uncle fucking Scrooge.” Kate didn’t remember if Uncle Louie had denied or granted their request. She knew he’d helped them at least once or twice, but never without making her mother beg first. 

Despite Kate’s great resistance, Uncle Louie’s final gift was forcing her to see his side of things.

◆

They decided they’d have one last spree in their “period of conspicuous consumption”: a vacation, where they could party hard and, by the end, figure out what they were going to do with the money.

After some deliberation, they settled on a Greek island Ilya knew about. It had the natural beauty Kate wanted, a coke-fueled nightlife for Molly and Alex, and one of Ilya’s favorite poets had killed himself there. 

Once they helped Molly (who’d never left the United States) get her passport, they flew into Athens, rode a van to the coast, then took a ferry out to the island. 

Ilya had found the house, going more for aesthetic than practicality or price. It was much bigger than they needed. The whole thing seemed to be made out of chalk—its crumbs were everywhere, a kind of indoor snow. And there was a vinegary smell, likely the traces of a cat that had died around the time they were born. But it looked right out onto the sea, where huge, black freighters slid by. You could easily picture some ancient Greek punks holing up there. Diogenes, maybe. It was perfect, they all agreed.

They settled into different schedules right away. Molly and Alex turned nocturnal, spending most of their waking hours at the clubs down the beach. Ilya saw more daylight, but he couldn’t be bothered. For him, the vacation was a writing residency. He was always stalking the shore in his long black trench coat (worn despite the heat) and filling up his notebook, which contained two years-worth of poems he swore he’d never let anyone read “until it was published.” Molly successfully stole it once, months ago, but aside from a part about an orchid, she couldn’t make any sense of it.

Most days Kate would wake up, apply a dollop of sunscreen to her new tattoo, and explore the island. She spent a lot of time at a shabby temple dedicated to a god with the unfortunate name of “Melqart,” where she kept turning over what Alex said on the porch. She felt trapped. She could do what Louie surely had wanted, or the opposite, but everything would be guided by the dead man, not her own vision for her life. Did she really want to live with Molly and Ilya into adulthood? Or was she hanging on to them just to spite her uncle? The money had become its own green planet, pulling her world toward it, taking up the entire sky. Kate would feel better once they all talked it out, but the others were putting off the big talk. She could tell none of them really wanted the responsibility. They preferred this transitional period, when they were technically broke but got whatever they wanted. She’d let them have this care-free time, figuring they’d have their house meeting on the last day. But she was having trouble enjoying herself without a plan, and on the second-to-last day she forced them to have the conversation.

“Well I think it’s obvious we should buy the house,” Ilya said. He sat far back in his chair and aimed his eyes at the sea, as if channeling his own opinion.

Alex: “The place is falling apart. It’s teeming with nonhuman life. Shouldn’t we just buy a different house? You want to give Theron a payday?”

“I like our place. We can make him pay for repairs as part of the deal. That’s very common.”

“Wow, it’s Property Brother Karamazov,” Alex said. “I didn’t know you cared so much about the material plane.”

“I like the idea of buying the house,” Kate said. “I’m kind of worried that if we move somewhere, everything will change. I want to protect what we have and build on it.”

“If I go along with that,” Alex said, “and you’re going to need three people, then I want us to split the energy bill and groceries and things like that. And I think it makes sense that Kate remains in charge of managing the money. I mean, you don’t want me or Molly handling that.”

“No you fucking don’t,” Molly, who was still waking up, said. “I’m terrible with money.”

“Then let’s vote,” Ilya said, and they did. Molly held out for the Bay Area, but Alex sided with Kate and Ilya, which settled it.

“So you’ll be our landlord?” Molly asked.

“No.”

“First thing I’ll do when I get back is buy you a Bluetooth.”

They joked about Kate being their landlord for the rest of the day. Ilya and Alex bowed before her when she came into the living room. “Sorry, m’lord,” Molly said after she bumped into Kate on the way to the kitchen. 

That night Kate had the place all to herself while the other three went out dancing. She thought she wanted quiet, but after an hour alone she felt antsy and walked down the beach to admire the sea at night. 

The water looked like you could write with it. She felt like Sappho, looking up at a horny moon. She wished she could’ve brought Ryan along. A version of him, anyway, not the asshole he was before he died. That Ryan would have been the first to hit her up for something.

She came across a hotel restaurant and decided she’d get a drink before she walked back. As she took the steps up from the beach, she saw the others gathered around a table, eating. She spied on them from below, where no one could see her.

It was either chicken or lamb, she couldn’t tell, all covered in a viscous purple sauce. Molly chewed with her mouth open and talked through her bites. Ilya seemed to eat with just two fingers, like a crab, and licked them often. She watched Alex carefully pick through a tiny row of ribs, tearing off thin bands of flesh. Molly said something that got them all laughing, and Kate turned around and walked back to the house.

That night, when they came back, they found her in one of the chairs facing the water.

“I’ve made up my mind,” she said. “I’m going to buy some other building. A boarding house, or an abandoned monastery or something, an old one. You can all live there, rent-free, for as long as you want. But I get to decide where. And it won’t be with all the tech assholes in the Bay Area, I’m sorry. Maybe Lawrence, Kansas. Or Omaha.”

“The fuck,” Molly said. “I thought we were all going to decide.”

“So you’ve finally become an autocratic pig,” Ilya said. “The corruption is complete.”

“Ilya, your dad’s a fucking proctologist. Your mom is a lawyer,” Kate shot back, then added, “And there will be tons of goats!”

They fought for an hour. Molly yelled and Ilya slipped in with some clumsy bitterness. Alex exempted himself. The fighting kept up until Molly and Ilya realized Kate couldn’t be moved.

The next day they all got high, ate about a quart of hummus, and played in the water. Everyone was extra sweet to Kate. They wanted to be on her good side, so they could sway her from Kansas and toward somewhere like Philadelphia or Santa Cruz.

At one point, Kate swam out on her own, keeping her head down and stabbing her arms hard into the waves. She’d been a pretty good swimmer in high school and still had a feel for the water. When she looked up, she saw a fishing boat about twenty-five yards away. Inside, a man held an octopus by the legs, like they were stems in its purple bouquet. After admiring his catch for a few seconds, he slammed it against the side of the boat in a four-on-the-floor pattern until there could be no doubt it was dead.

◆

At the airport Ilya realized he’d left his notebook at the house, the one with years of poems scribbled in it. Kate told him not to worry—she’d booked the flights, and she could get him another a couple days later and put him up in Athens. She still felt a little bad for asserting herself two nights ago.

“I can go with him,” Molly said. “It’d be nice to get an extra night or two. I’m still mourning the Bay Area.”

Kate was about to explain that it wasn’t economical to rebook two flights, but Alex cut in.

“That’s a great idea. You two go, and we’ll take care of all this at the gate and meet you back in Michigan. Might be good for people to get a little space after all this.”

Once they made it through security, Kate rebooked Molly and Ilya’s flights with the woman at the desk, and she and Alex waited to board their plane.

“Ok, this is our chance,” Alex said. “When we touch down, let’s get our shit out of there. Molly and Ilya are users. They don’t really care about us. Ilya has plenty of money anyway, from his mom and dad. He’s a fucking hypocrite, both of them are. Two days is more than enough of a head start. Lawrence, Kansas is fine by me. Alaska, Uzbekistan, Mississippi.” 

Kate stayed quiet.

“I’m going to go take a piss and let you think on it.”

As soon as he left, a man tripped right in front of her. A white canister fell out of the leg of his jeans, and its cap popped open. Kate saw something orange and yellow dart out—the head of a snake or lizard. It looked as if it had been hand-beaded. She wanted the little animal to come out so she could see it, so it could get away. She’d be able to handle the creature, to slip it into her water bottle and bring it to security, she was sure. But it retreated back into its tube as the shadow of the man’s arm passed over it. He grabbed the canister, popped the lid back on, and stalked off into the crowd before Kate could register anything that might help identify the smuggler.

She looked around for a moment until it was clear there was no tracking him down. Out the window she watched the men below toss around dull rectangles of luggage as they were loaded onto a plane.

Once Alex returned, she got up and walked back to the desk to rebook the tickets one more time. The four of them would fly home together.