Wages of Fear

Jason Yeo sat alone on the bench in the middle of the park with a cup of coffee. He had been sitting for an hour, dazed by the news. He didn’t shed a tear; he didn’t call anyone; he just sat, watching the frail human beings, who had no idea how frail they were, stroll- ing past him with their friends at their side, their kids at their side, their dogs at their side.

It was just another day to them, wiping children, laughing in the midst of conversation, cleaning up after their dogs.

Two lovers were arguing on a bench farther down the path from him.

Yeo chuckled over the efforts he had made for fifty-four years to maintain his life at peak health.

From the time he was ten, he never stopped exploring athletics, new forms of good diet, and his daily private practices for keeping the self and soul in balance.

At the same time, he had taken the wealth his father had left him and multiplied it tenfold.

But it all came down to this.

Another cup of wheatgrass tea couldn’t change the course of events.

For two years now, the headaches had become increasingly more intense, until they finally became unbearable.

He was not someone with a history of migraines.

He started forgetting important details at work. He refused to admit to his decline.

Finally, Maitland, his CEO and closest friend, insisted that he see his doctor.

The results of the MRI and biopsy were conclusive. The aneu- rysm had grown to a point that was inoperable.

He could die under the knife if he underwent surgery.

There wasn’t a chance. All they could do was medicate the head- aches now.

They couldn’t promise him more than a year.

Last night, in the hospital bed, in the middle of a restless sleep, he heard a drum beating, slowly at first, then more quickly.

The drummer walked through predawn Baghdad, letting both Sunnis and Shiites know that Ramadan had arrived.

It was a day of peace for both sects.

This had never happened before. The martyred Sunnis had always had to fight the Shiite majority for the right to celebrate.

Yeo looked down and saw that he was the drummer. He awoke in the hospital bed, soaked in his own sweat, gasping for breath.

When he had calmed himself, he reflected: “Even on Ramadan, the war continues. Even on Ramadan, people are dying. The history of humanity is a never-ending cycle.”

He checked himself out of the hospital that morning and went to a café and enjoyed a long breakfast.

The walk in the park had been refreshing at first, but then he had to sit on the bench and rest with his coffee.

For some reason, he thought of his mother.

His mother was a Snow Queen, an untouchable, a beautiful art object.

Was that what distanced her from him? Is that why she sent him off to boarding school in England? To keep him away from his father perhaps, always dividing her suitors to be certain she would be at the center of things.

But none of that mattered now. Even his aloneness would cease soon enough.

He thought about his father.

Bapa had been a dynamic leader, even before Jason was born. He made his fortune young.

He foresaw the fall of Singapore during World War II, and had evacuated his loved ones to Australia.

After the war, Bapa moved back to his homeland and Jason was born.

Jason was twenty-three when his father died in the suspicious crash of his private plane. There were unexplained flaws in the plane. Jason had never felt certain if it was an accident or an act of

sabotage by an ex-suitor of Mother’s.

From that moment on, Yeo had taken control of his own lofty flight, the pilot of his own destiny, never looking back again, until he had built his father’s wealth into a financial empire.

Now, as he looked down the cobbled path toward the domelike monkey bars where children climbed, he saw a homeless man, no more than twenty-five, digging through a public trashcan.

He came up with a half-eaten sandwich.

As the young man came walking past him, chomping at the sandwich, Yeo noticed the small American flag attached to his back pocket by a safety pin.

“The poor will always be with you,” the priest had said from the pulpit one Sunday morning when he was a boy and Bapa was sitting close to him in the very last pew.

Bapa leaned over and whispered in his ear, “And so will the rich.”

Yeo spent his entire life living in accord with what he knew would be his father’s wishes for him.

But he had one special gift his father lacked. He was a big idea man. And he could market an idea at the same scale.

The TransGlobal Building, only several blocks away, was a mere shell for his true wealth.

The financial tentacles that flowed out from the foundation of the building ran so deeply into the earth beneath it that there was no way of knowing where the stream actually stopped or whether it actually had an end.

But now, deep in the pit of his finitude, facing certain extinction, on a humble bench in a neighborhood park, Yeo recalled the admonishment of that Victorian poet he cherished as an undergraduate: Always let your reach exceed your grasp. At that moment, Yeo reached for the highest human gesture he could ever possibly imagine: He would give it all back