1. DAVID

So there he is, sitting in his private hammam. Through the thick man-made fog, David sees his insignia on the glass door. The architect had convinced him that having his own insignia throughout his entire home would give it that extra touch of class—that it would, as he put it, transform it into a résidence. He’d roll the R and draw out the nasal-ence before pronouncing the final E: “résiden-n-n-nsuh.” And when you said “résidence” that way, you just had to add a lot more gestural flourishes and nasally inflected grimacing than one could ever hope to see accompanying the little pedestrian word “house.” The main reason David had agreed to the insignia, in fact, was to get past all this high theatricality. Good architects were hard to come by these days.

The hammam was made for eight adults. David sat there on his own. It was Tuesday afternoon. He hadn’t been awake that long.

Around eleven o’clock that morning, he’d started with a hand-pressed newspaper. He’d always skip quickly past the domestic news stories, past the politics and society pages, to sports and economics—the only things that mattered in the world as far as he was concerned. He was looking above all for stories about start-ups or young sports talents who were nurturing big dreams.

This morning’s stories were mostly about clumsy big businesses run by what he saw as even clumsier bosses, who had what they called “plans for innovation.” “We’re going to be doing things radically differently,” they’d say, and then reel off a slew of buzzwords such as “the cloud,” “mobile,” and “holacracy.” Not even a quarter of the way through that story, David had given up.

The kitchen had clearly done its best with his breakfast. He’d already fallen out with them over the thickness of the yogurt and how much milk they’d put in his cappuccino.

David hadn’t been born a nasty or an especially spoiled person; he’d been forced to become one—or rather, he acted that way for the sake of his staff. At least that was how he saw it.

After finishing with the newspaper, he’d turned to the day ahead. A businessman from up north might be coming to pitch his invention, and in the evening, he’d been invited to a fair for those willing to pay an entrance fee of “just” 2,000 euros. David had decided then and there not to go.

To give a bit of purpose to his life, he’d decided to go do some sports. He’d called his personal trainer over, only to end up doing exercises for way too much per hour while someone barked in his ear. The barking had gone on and on and on, so it no longer had any effect; at a certain point, he was going through the motions not because he was being barked at but just so he could say he’d done what he’d set out to do.

He was not unhappy after he’d finished. After his allegedly super healthy shake,