ONE.
DOWN TO THE LAST DAY, even the last hour now. I'm an old man, lonely and
unloved, sick and hurting and tired of living. I am ready for the hereafter; it has to be
better than this.
I own the tall glass building in which I sit, and 97 percent of the company housed in it,
below me, and the land around it half a mile in three directions, and the two thousand
people who work here and the other twenty thousand who do not, and I own the pipeline
under the land that brings gas to the building from my fields in Texas, and I own the
utility lines that deliver electricity, and I lease the satellite unseen miles above by which I
once barked commands to my empire flung far around the world. My assets exceed
eleven billion dollars. I own silver in Nevada and copper in Montana and coffee in Kenya
and coal in Angola and rubber in Malaysia and natural gas in Texas and crude oil in
Indonesia and steel in China. My company owns companies that produce electricity and
make computers and build dams and print paperbacks and broadcast signals to my
satellite. I have subsidiaries with divisions in more countries than anyone can find.
I once owned all the appropriate toys-the yachts and jets and blondes, the homes in
Europe, farms in Argentina, an island in the Pacific, thoroughbreds, even a hockey team.
But I've grown too old for toys.
The money is the root of my misery.
I had three families-three ex-wives who bore seven children, six of whom are still alive
and doing all they can to torment me. To the best of my knowledge, I fathered all seven,
and buried one. I should say his mother buried him. I was out of the country.
I am estranged from all the wives and all the children. They're gathering here today
because I'm dying and it's time to divide the money.
I HAVE PLANNED this day for a long time. My building has fourteen floors, all long
and wide and squared around a shaded courtyard in the rear where I once held lunches in
the sunshine. I live and work on the top floor -twelve thousand square feet of opulence
that would seem obscene to many but doesn't bother me in the least. By sweat and brains
and luck I built every dime of my fortune. Spending it is my prerogative. Giving it away
should be my choice too, but I'm being hounded.
Why should I care who gets the money? I've done everything imaginable with it. As I sit
here in my wheel-chair, alone and waiting, I cannot think of a single thing I want to buy,
or see, or a single place I want to go, or another adventure I want to pursue.
I've done it all, and I'm very tired.
I don't care who gets the money. But I do care very much who does not get it.
Every square foot of this building was designed by me, and so I know exactly where to
place everyone for this little ceremony. They're all here, waiting and waiting, though they
don't mind. They'd stand naked in a blizzard for what I'm about to do.
The first family is Lillian and her brood-four of my offspring born to a woman who rarely
let me touch her. We married young-I was twenty-four and she was eighteen-and so
Lillian is old too. I haven't seen her in years, and I won't see her today. I'm sure she's still
playing the role of the grieving, abandoned yet dutiful first wife who got traded in for a
trophy. She has never remarried, and I'm sure she hasn't had sex in fifty years. I don't
know how we reproduced.
Her oldest is now forty-seven, Troy Junior, a worthless idiot who is cursed with my name.
As a boy he adopted the nickname of TJ, and still prefers it to Troy. Of the six children
gathered here now, TJ is the dumbest, though it's close. He was tossed from college when
he was nineteen for selling drugs.
TJ, like the rest, was given five million dollars on his twenty-first birthday. And like the
rest, it ran like water through his fingers.
I cannot bear to recount the miserable histories of Lillian's children. Suffice to say they're
all heavily in debt and virtually unemployable, with little hope of changing, so my
signing of this will is the most critical event in their lives.
Back to the ex-wives. From the frigidity of Lillian, I ran to the steamy passion of Janie, a
beautiful young thing hired as a secretary in Accounting but promoted rapidly when I
decided I needed her on business trips. I divorced Lillian and married Janie, who was
twenty-two years younger than I was and determined to keep me satisfied. She had two
children as fast as she could. She used them as anchors to keep me close. Rocky, the