Chapter Text
Back when I was a rookie in this game called life—younger, more vulnerable, basically a Level 1 Noob—my father gave me a piece of advice that has been looping in my brain like a cursed loading screen ever since.
“Whenever you feel like flaming someone,” he told me, “just remember that not everyone in this world started the game with a Premium Battle Pass and a trust fund like you did.”
That was it. He didn’t elaborate. We’ve always had this weird, reserved communication style where we say three words and expect the other person to derive the meaning of the universe from them. But I got the hint: he wanted me to keep my judgments in my inventory.
The result? I’m now the involuntary therapist for every "main character" with a tragic backstory.
Seriously, "reserving judgment" is basically a beacon for the abnormal. If you’re a normal person and you project even a hint of tolerance, the weirdos will find you. They will hunt you down. In college, people actually accused me of being a "politician" because I was constantly being cornered by wild, unknown men who wanted to whisper their secret griefs into my ear.
Most of these "confidences" were completely unsought. I’ve mastered the art of the "Feigned Sleep" maneuver. I’ve perfected the "Hostile Levity" defense. I can see an intimate revelation quivering on the horizon from a mile away, and usually, it’s just some guy plagiarizing a bad poem or leaving out all the parts where he was the villain.
But hey, reserving judgment is a matter of infinite hope. I’m still a little afraid of missing some legendary-tier plot point if I forget that—as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat—a sense of fundamental decency is randomly rolled at birth. Some people just spawn with better stats.
Anyway, after bragging about how "tolerant" I am, let’s get one thing straight: my patience has a hard cap.
Character can be built on solid rock or literal swamp water, but after a certain point, I stop caring about the foundation and start looking for the exit. When I crawled back from the East Coast last autumn, I wanted the whole world to be in uniform. I wanted everyone to stand at moral attention forever. I was done with "privileged glimpses" into the human heart. I didn't want any more riotous excursions.
Except for Gatsby.
Gatsby—the guy who literally has his name on the cover of this story—was the only exception. And the irony is, he represented every single thing I’ve been conditioned to despise. If "personality" is just a series of successful poses, then this guy was a god-tier performer. He had this heightened sensitivity to the "promises of life," like some high-tech seismic sensor designed to detect hope ten thousand miles away.
This wasn’t that "creative temperament" fluff you see in indie movies. It was an extraordinary gift for hope. A romantic readiness that I’ve never seen in anyone else and probably won’t find again unless I start reading Isekai novels.
In the end, Gatsby turned out fine. It was the "foul dust" that followed him—the absolute trash-tier humans who preyed on him—that made me lose interest in the short-winded dramas and pathetic sorrows of men for a while.
[LORE DROP: THE CARRAWAY CLAN]
My family has been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. We like to tell people we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual "founder" of our line was my grandfather’s brother. He arrived in ’51, paid someone else to fight in the Civil War for him (classic wealth move), and started a wholesale hardware business.
My dad runs that business today. I’m supposed to look exactly like that great-uncle, specifically the "hard-boiled" version of him captured in a painting in my father’s office.
I graduated from New Haven in 1915, exactly twenty-five years after my dad. A bit later, I participated in that massive "Teutonic migration" better known as World War I. I enjoyed the counter-raid so much that I came back feeling restless. Suddenly, the Midwest wasn’t the "Warm Center of the World" anymore; it felt like the ragged edge of a map that hadn't finished rendering.
So, I decided to go East and learn the bond business.
Why bonds? Because literally everyone I knew was doing it. I figured the market could support one more single man. My aunts and uncles held a council, discussing my career path like they were picking out a prep school for a toddler.
“Why—ye-es,” they finally said, their faces grave and hesitant.
Father agreed to bankroll me for a year, and in the spring of ’22, I moved East permanently. Or so I thought.
The logical thing would have been to get a flat in the city. But it was a warm season, and I was coming from a land of wide lawns and friendly trees. When a guy at the office suggested we split a house in a commuting town, I thought, Perfect. A roommate to share the rent and the existential dread.
He found the place: a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow for eighty bucks a month. But at the last second, the firm ordered him to Washington.
I was left with the house, a dog (who ran away after three days, honestly, I don't blame him), an old Dodge, and a Finnish maid who spent her days cooking breakfast and muttering Finnish "wisdom" over the electric stove like she was casting a low-level debuff on me.
I was lonely for about forty-eight hours. Then, a guy who had arrived even later than I did stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked, looking completely lost.
I told him. And just like that, I wasn't a lonely transplant anymore. I was a Guide. A Pathfinder. An Original Settler. This random guy had just handed me the "Freedom of the Neighborhood" perk.
The sun was out, the leaves were bursting from the trees like a time-lapse video, and I had that familiar, delusional conviction that life was beginning all over again with the summer.
I had big plans. I bought a dozen volumes on banking, credit, and investment securities. They sat on my shelf in red and gold, looking like fresh currency from the mint, promising to reveal the "Shining Secrets" that only Midas, Morgan, and Maecenas knew.
I was going to be the "Well-Rounded Man." You know the type. I’d been "literary" in college—I wrote some incredibly pretentious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring all that back.
Pro-tip: life is actually much more successful when looked at from a single window. Being "well-rounded" is just a fancy way of saying you’re a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.
Anyway, by total chance, I rented a house in one of the weirdest communities in North America. It’s on that slender, chaotic island east of New York where there are two unusual land formations. Imagine two giant, identical eggs jutting out into the Long Island Sound—the "Great Wet Barnyard" of the Atlantic. They aren't perfect ovals; they’re both crushed flat at the end, like the egg in the Columbus story.
But the real "phenomenon" is how different they are.
I lived at West Egg. The... well, the "less fashionable" one. That’s a polite way of saying it’s where the "New Money" people live to be loud and bizarre. My house was at the very tip of the egg, squeezed between two massive estates that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.
The place on my right was a colossal flex. It was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, complete with a tower, a marble swimming pool, and forty acres of lawn. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, since I didn't know him yet, it was the mansion inhabited by a "gentleman of that name."
My house? It was an eyesore. A small, eighty-dollar-a-month eyesore. But it was an eyesore with a view of the water and the "consoling proximity" of millionaires.
Across the bay, the white palaces of East Egg glittered like high-level loot drops. The real story begins the night I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.
Daisy was my second cousin once removed. I’d known Tom in college. Right after the war, I’d spent two days with them in Chicago.
Let’s talk about Tom. This guy was one of the most powerful football players New Haven had ever seen. He was a national figure at twenty-one—one of those guys who reaches such an "acute, limited excellence" so early that everything else in life feels like a massive anticlimax.
His family was "Wealthy" with a capital W. Even in college, his spending was borderline offensive. But now he’d moved East in a way that actually took your breath away. For example, he brought a string of polo ponies down from Lake Forest.
Think about that. A guy in my generation was rich enough to ship ponies around for fun.
I don’t know why they came East. They’d spent a year in France for no reason, drifting around wherever people played polo and were rich together. Daisy told me over the phone that this was a "permanent move," but I didn't buy it. I couldn't see into her heart, but I knew Tom. He’d be drifting forever, wistfully seeking the "dramatic turbulence" of a football game he could never play again.
And so, on a warm, windy evening, I drove over to East Egg to see two "old friends" I barely knew.
Their house was even more extra than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion staring down the bay. The lawn was doing too much; it started at the beach and ran for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks like it had too much momentum, finally crawling up the side of the house in bright vines.
The front was a line of French windows glowing with reflected gold. And there, standing on the porch with his legs wide apart like he was defending a goal line, was Tom Buchanan in his riding clothes.
He looked like he was waiting for a challenge.