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decided to separate is ridiculous and I don’t really want the attention. Next,
Alice is going to send me an offer to go clubbing or something – which would
probably count as a rebound to Renee, so I wouldn’t even be able to take her up
on the offer without offending my temporary landlord.
    I’m wrong, thankfully – the next buzz is from Max, asking if
I want to talk. This is handled more simply: the part of me that wants to move
on texts ‘no thanks’ and hits send before I give myself a chance to think about
it. I consider Tiff’s offer for another moment, longer than I’d like to admit.
Sending those two words looses a whole spill of emotions that I’ve been trying
to avoid for the last few days. Doesn’t matter, I tell myself. I can’t afford
to dig a relief well right now. I need to move on with my life and not wallow
in my feelings.
    I turn off my phone.
    It’s almost a pleasant lunch after that. We talk a little
more about Jeremy’s former workplace and about Phil’s silly obsession. Jeremy
says he was working on some ‘sensitive’ articles before he left, so Phil probably thinks that he got fired for
uncovering a conspiracy. It lines up – Jeremy was laid off right before the
last article in the series finished – but given that almost 20% of the rest of
the staff got fired at the same time, he’s pretty sure he was just downsized.
    “You gotta admit, it sounds like the perfect cover,” I say. “No
better way to disguise firing a guy writing about something you didn’t want
people to know. What were you writing about, anyway?”
    He laughs. “Nothing exciting. I was trying to give the whole
European debt thing a rock-and-roll spin, make it seem like there was some kind
of conspiracy or narrative behind it all. It was all supposed to climax in some
big reveal in the final article. Honestly, I’m glad I got downsized before I
had to write it. All I had was some boring facts about physical reserves.”
    “No actual conspiracy?” I say.
    “None,” he says. “I guess I did a good job spinning it if I
fooled Phil, but it’s all just politics as usual. Maybe a little lack of
forethought or imagination regarding some specific issues – I tried to cast
that as greed or malice where I could – but that only proves that the people
leading our society are human and that’s hardly a story.”
    “What’s so important about physical reserves? Why would Phil
think they fired you to keep from writing about them?”
    Jeremy smiles.  “I purposefully saved that for last and
alluded to it in a bunch of places because conspiracy theory people are
obsessed with physical gold. There’s always a big theory about how much gold
countries do or don’t have, about buying it unfairly from developing countries
or selling them plated lead as bullion – if you googled ‘gold reserves’ right
now I would be surprised you had to go further than a page down to find
something about Cecil Rothschild’s supposed hidden vault, which is supposed to
contain more gold than is publicly held by every Euro country combined. There’s
absolutely no evidence of this gold existing – no records of vault
construction, of transporting more than ten thousand tonnes – supposedly – and
the records we have of mining gold, which are fairly accurate, don’t support
the existence of even a hundredth of this magical unaccounted gold. People are
obsessed with it, though – they think that the Rothschilds use it to control
the IMF or some similar rubbish, that it’s a giant axe hanging over the world
economy. I took advantage of this and alluded to it where I could, but all I
had to write about were some boring facts and the fact that this theory
existed.”
    “So you tried to write a conspiracy article.”
    “I tried to make it look exciting. There was simply no
evidence for any sort of conspiracy,” he says.
    “That’s really boring,” I say.
    He nods. “Yeah. Like I said, I wasn’t really looking forward
to