34856893457934

Chapter 7
THE SILK ROAD
Stuff, to Ross, was just that: stuff. He had no interest in any of it.
But there was one object Ross couldn’t live without: his laptop. That rectangular clamshell
was, in many respects, Ross’s life. All of the files and folders it contained made up a map of his
brilliant and, to many, enigmatic mind. And it was on that very computer that, on a late summer
morning in 2010, Ross began working on a project that was going to change everything.
He had recently moved into an apartment with Julia, a live/work space in downtown Austin with
shiny concrete floors. Julia had started a new business, which she called Vivian’s Muse, where she
photographed half-naked women for their husbands. Her pitch was simple: What do you get the man
who has everything? Sensual pictures of his wife, almost nude. And so, several days a week Julia
would set up candles throughout the main room of the apartment, play sensual techno music, and snap
thousands of boudoir pictures.
In the adjacent bedroom, as Ross would get to work on his latest project, he could hear the pop!
pop! pop! of the camera flash and Julia commanding her muse, “Stick your ass in the air,” and “Now
act like you’re having an orgasm!”
Their bedroom, where Ross often sat to work, was its usual mess, with Julia’s crumpled-up
jeans, discarded dresses, and underwear littering the floor. When they weren’t working, they spent
hours under the covers, snuggling or watching TV shows on Ross’s laptop.
The latest show they had become obsessed with was Breaking Bad. They would cuddle on the
bed, warmed by the glow of Ross’s screen, as Walter White transformed into the terrifying and
mysterious drug kingpin Heisenberg, a man who justified his evil along intellectual lines. Ross liked
the drama, and it was hard not to appreciate what Heisenberg had done. Once an underachieving,
largely browbeaten high school chemistry teacher, Walter White found in drugs the best way to
express his technical brilliance as a chemist and businessperson. What he did may have been terrible
and destructive, but he did it with such beauty and so adroitly that, to him at least, the very sin was
absolved by the manner in which it was carried out.
Still, Ross thought the story line was a bit far-fetched. “That would never happen in real life,” he
said to Julia.