The kid would not shut up about Bitcoin.
This was the autumn of 2013. Tae was fourteen, and he had found, somewhere in the unsupervised back rooms of the early internet, a thing he believed was going to rearrange the world. He believed it the way other kids on the block believed in a rapper nobody had heard of yet: totally, humorlessly, like he'd been let in on something. And he said so at the table every single night, until the word itself started landing in the apartment like a smell somebody should've taken out.
It was a small table. It had to be. The kitchen was the kind of Bronx kitchen where you could stand in the middle and touch the stove, the sink, and the refrigerator without moving your feet, and the window over the sink looked down on the elevated track where the 5 train came grinding through every eleven minutes and rattled the dishes in the rack. You learned to talk in the gaps between trains. Everybody in that apartment could time a sentence to a train without thinking about it.
His mother was Adrienne. She raised Tae and his little brother Magic by herself, and she did it on a schedule that would have broken a stronger-looking person. She was a small woman, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with any single day. Their father was not part of the arithmetic. He was a name, a couple of stories, an absence Tae had stopped picking at the way you stop picking at a tooth that's already gone. Adrienne had never once bad-mouthed him at that table. She just quietly did the work of two people and told her sons, on the nights it mattered, the only piece of advice she ever really gave twice:
"Follow your dreams, baby. You hear me? Don't let nobody hand you a smaller one."
She said it about basketball. She said it about the drawings Magic taped to the wall. And now her older son was at her table talking about money that lived inside a computer, and she was trying, God knew she was trying, to fit it under the same blessing.
"It's going to be worth thousands," Tae said. "Each. Ma, you could buy some right now for the price of a pair of sneakers."
Adrienne didn't laugh. That's the first thing to understand about her, and it matters later. She didn't understand a word of it, and she'd tell you that herself, but she didn't laugh at her son. She just said, "Then eat your food and tell me about it after," which was her way of loving something she couldn't see yet. Follow your dreams. She never asked to see the map.
Magic laughed, though. Magic was eleven and laughed at everything Tae said on principle, because that is the sacred job of a little brother. "Computer money," he said, drawing it out, cracking himself up. "Tae's rich in computer money." He'd say it for years. He was saying it, in a way, right up until he wasn't.
But it was Sunday, and on Sundays the table got bigger.
On Sundays Aunt Gerri came with foil trays, and Cousin Chris came to eat everything in them, and (the part that mattered, the part this whole book is really about) Uncle Kenny came. Kenny was Adrienne's brother, and in the ledger of Tae's life he sat in the one column his father had left empty. Kenny drove for the MTA, ran the 5 line the same track that shook the pictures on the wall every eleven minutes, so that the sound of the train was, in a real and literal way, the sound of his uncle somewhere out in the city, keeping it moving. Kenny had taught him to ride a bike on the service road by the Bruckner. Kenny had shown up to every game, loud, in the front row, embarrassing and magnificent. Some mornings Kenny would swing by the block on his way to the yard and grab the Rivera kid from two doors down, whose mother worked the same overnight Adrienne worked, and drop him at the school gate before the second bell without ever telling anybody he was doing it. The kid's mother never said thank you because Kenny had never let her know it was him. When Tae did anything at all, sank a shot, won an argument, walked in with a good report card, Kenny would throw both hands up and holler the same thing, in Howard Cosell's voice, at a volume that turned heads three tables over:
"DOWN GOES FRAZIER!"
He'd been doing it since before Tae understood the joke. Down goes Frazier, the call from a fight older than Tae's mother, the moment the whole world watched the man nobody could beat go down. It meant: my nephew just did something. It meant: look at him. It was the sound of being believed in, and Tae had grown up inside it.
So that Sunday, when Tae started in about the computer money and Magic started laughing and Gerri said something about a scam she'd seen on the news, it was Kenny who put down his fork and said, "Nah. Hold up. Let the man talk."
The man. Fourteen years old.
"Go 'head, Tae. What is it."
And Tae tried. He talked about a fixed supply, twenty-one million coins, ever, a ceiling built into the thing itself that no bank and no government could raise no matter how bad they wanted to. He talked about a ledger that lived on thousands of computers at once, so no single one could lie about who had what. He had the shape of it exactly right and almost none of the words, because he was fourteen and understood it the way you understand a song in a language you don't speak. You can feel where it's going, you just can't say it. It came out as noise. Gerri asked who you'd call when it disappeared. Chris asked if you could buy sneakers with it. Magic made the ghost sound, woooo, computer money.
But Kenny listened to the whole thing. And when Tae ran out of words, his uncle didn't say he understood it, because he didn't. He said something better.
"I don't get a lick of that," Kenny said. "But I know you. And you don't get lit up like that over nothing." He pointed his fork down the table at his nephew like he was calling a shot. "You keep pulling that string, hear me? Whatever it is. You pull it till it comes apart in your hands."
Nobody else at that table remembered the moment an hour later. Tae remembered it for the rest of his life.
On his way out Kenny hugged his sister at the door, and while he was hugging her he tucked a folded bill into the pocket of her work coat where she couldn't see him do it. She'd find it Tuesday. Neither of them would ever mention it. Tae saw and didn't say anything either, because saying anything was not how it went.
That night he went to the room he shared with Magic, waited for his brother's breathing to go slow and even, and pulled the notebook out from between the mattress and the box spring. He wrote down the date. Then he wrote down the price — the way another kid might write down a girl's number, careful, like it might be worth something someday.
I won't tell you the figure yet. It comes later, and it matters later, and half the cruelty of this whole story is buried in what that small number would one day become. It was a laughable number. The kind you could buy for the price of a pair of sneakers, like he'd said.
Write it down anyway, some instinct told him. Write down exactly where this started. One day you're going to want to prove you were here first.
He clicked the pen. Down the hall, the last 5 train of the night went through and shook the windows, and then the apartment was as quiet as the Bronx ever gets.
Somewhere in that quiet was a man who had said let him talk. A man who had said pull the string. Tae fell asleep believing the whole world would catch up to him eventually, and that when it did, Kenny would be in the front row with both hands in the air.
He was right about the world.
He got the rest of it wrong, and it would take four cycles and everything he had to learn how wrong.