At least the party that ends your life starts off fun.

Everyone shows up, as they always do: your best friend who always sneezes at just the wrong times, the guy from your office who speaks only in high-fives, the neighbor who mows their lawn wearing the same magnetically tight tank top and shorts, and dozens more. They’ve loaded the snack table with their offerings: burnt ends, cheesy bread begging to be ripped apart, chilled melon gouged out of its skin. 

For now, it all remains untouched. It’ll be a nice celebration if things go well; a consolation if things go the other way. You haven’t been able to eat anything since getting your ticket yesterday. The numbers that you told the Lottery official are still lodged in your throat, their sharp angles and points digging into your esophagus.

The drawing approaches. Tension knots into a pulsating cord, strangling the room to silence. You end up squashed between four other people on a three-cushion couch, fondling the television remote, trying to remember why you volunteered to host the Lottery party this year. Had you just offered for good karma? Had you wanted to be sure you could invite your friends and family? But why would you have ever wanted them here, for this?

Then you recall that you hadn’t volunteered at all. You’d had your name drawn. Given the party’s circumstances, this small unlikelihood strikes you as a good omen. Or a terrible one. Statistics had never been your strong subject.

At exactly one minute to midnight, you turn on the live stream. Everyone is already watching the screen—not just the few dozen people crammed into your living room, but the half billion across the country, all waiting to see if this is just another New Year’s Eve, or the night that will change their lives. 

The Lottery drawing starts with its usual synthesizer fanfare. A digital marquee flashes onto the screen, incandescent bulbs blinking around the words:

WELCOME to the 388th NATIONAL LOTTERY DRAWING!

Applause breaks out in the live studio audience (which you still aren’t convinced is a real entity, not just a computer-generated reassurance that the results aren’t rigged). A Lottery official sweeps onto stage, immediately recognizable with her gold blazer, her matching pants and bowtie, the solemn ceremony with which she takes her place behind the raffle machine. 

You run through the familiar, comforting odds: a hundred golden balls, five numbers selected, ten billion possible outcomes. Even with the country’s bloated population, the annual Lottery should only yield one perfect match, on average, roughly every twenty years. 

And nobody has won in almost five decades. 

The gods of statistics are getting fidgety. They’re not the only ones. Your living room is a bundle of trembling nerves, waiting to be severed.

Sappy brass-band music now pumps through the live stream, the kind found in game shows, and in game shows only. The Lottery official grabs the raffle wheel’s handle and begins cranking it in slow, measured circles. The wheel rattles predatorially. It spits out the numbers like expletives, each one plucked from the wheel’s wire jaw and held up for all to see. 

The first number eliminates almost everyone at the party. By the second, none of the guests have any chance at a perfect match. Sighs fill the room like popping popcorn, a whole year’s tightly bound anxiety releasing into fluffy, buttery relief. People laugh, clink their beers, congratulate each other’s good luck. The guy from your office makes his rounds handing out high-fives.

Then, one by one, people begin noticing that you haven’t moved—that you are, in fact, paralyzed on the couch, as if freezing all movement might freeze time itself, might preserve this uncertainty before it decays into disaster. You sense the invisible, monstrous finger of doom roving high above the nation, searching for a victim.

The last number drops from the raffle wheel. Doom’s finger drops and pins you down with a terrible suddenness, pressing until you’re certain your spine will snap, your lungs will collapse, your spleen and stomach and brain will pop. Your next-door neighbor reads your matching numbers over your shoulder, eyes bulging, fighting against vomit. The guy from your office blinks rapidly, hatchets a chip into the cheese dip on the snack table, and crunches it numbly. Your best friend, classically, sneezes into the silence. “I’m sorry,” she says, the only thing that there is left to say. 

The money arrives the next day. A fleet of dump trucks line up all along your otherwise generic street, waiting their turn to defecate uncounted millions onto your frost-coated front lawn. Your neighbors swarm around their yards, some of them still wearing glittery New Year’s glasses and party hats, chasing flyaway bills through the air with brooms and butterfly nets and their vacuum cleaners’ hose attachments. You let them take whatever they want. The cash-filled dump trucks are just for show anyway. The Lottery officials already distributed the real prize to your online bank account that morning, punctuating your name with the official golden dollar-sign emoji of a Lottery Winner, forging the two zeroes under your account balance into a neat infinity sign.

By the time the dump trucks are done, your home is overrun with money. Dunes of silver coins crowd the living room, sloping in through the now shattered windows. The basement brims with loose dollar bills, turning the room into a swimming pool filled with dirty papercuts. You’d almost need a separate house just to store it all. Panicked hilarity flickers in your belly as you realize that this is now within your power to buy.

You’ve already quit your day job. There’s no way you’d have time. Overnight, you’ve gained a certain fame in the way that broadly pitied and powerful and feared people often do, a morbid fascination swirling around your persona like the accretion disk around a black hole. Your email inbox maxes out by noon; constant text invitations ping your phone like ricocheting bullets. Movie debuts. Keynote speaker gigs at graduations. Sideline seats at the Superbowl and Grammy afterparties for the next decade. Everyone wants your implicit endorsement via association, to rub the golden horn of the unicorn that you’ve become.

Spending so much time around so much wealth, breathing in its vapid, intoxicating fumes, you decide to do everything you fantasized about when you had less money, searching for the crazy fun that you’ve always learned only the crazy rich can have. You shop exclusively at Whole Foods. You attend auctions selling ancient jewelry and uncommonly hideous art. You consider buying a golden private jet but decide it would clash with your ethics. First-class will do. You lavish in the fully reclinable armchairs and pre-flight cheeseboards, shielded behind your personal, retractable big-screen television from the hateful glares of the passengers shuffling to economy class.

You join a golf club, then change your mind and buy it instead, as well as all the houses surrounding it, walking door-to-door and informing each homeowner that their property has sold, and that it was for sale in the first place. For a while, as you pop golf-cart wheelies down the fairways and eat ice cream naked in your personal clubhouse pool, it almost feels like summer vacation—except, that is, for the deep sense of unease knowing that this summer vacation isn’t one that you’ve earned in any way, that you have no other choice than for it to be summer vacation, that this lacks all of a summer vacation’s typical promise and challenge and growth and will instead pin you into this purposeless, performative basking until the day you die. Like standing in a hot shower after a long day. A shower that you cannot turn off. A shower with concrete walls and no drain or doors and water already beginning to rise around your ankles.

And as you struggle to breathe, pressure building in the geographical center of your chest, all you can think is that if you don’t get rid of it, this money will kill you.

You offer it to nonprofits, whole treasuries’ worth, making great, desperate gestures for your own salvation. Greenpeace. Red Cross. Feed the Children. One by one, they turn you down. They’ve done the risk-benefit analysis—they tell you while sitting around their sleek, black conference tables in glass-walled penthouses—and pulling all that money into circulation would only worsen inflation more. Have you ever studied inflation, they ask? Don’t. It’s depressing. Point is, they won’t be held responsible for bringing around an economic collapse. It’d ruin their donation campaigns.

So you switch tactics and become a charity vigilante. Rather than Melbourne and Venice, Reykjavik and Fiji, you start taking vacations to Tijuana, Lagos, inner-city San Francisco, passing out cash like the flower girl flinging petals at a wedding. It’s not until the Kathmandu airport that three Lottery officials corner you in the baggage claim area. They inform you, as they snap on your golden handcuffs, that the United States has issued an international travel advisory. Named you a threat to capitalism. Can they see your passport? Thanks. They’ll just be taking that. 

There’s still the grassroots option of leaving generous tips—ridiculously, idiotically generous tips, befitting the fact that you are ridiculously, idiotically rich—but the hairdressers and golf caddies and middle-aged pizza delivery people all look at you with smoldering suspicion. One cab driver throws the neatly stacked bills back in your face, tells you that he doesn’t run that kind of taxi, and leaves you agape on the curb outside your red-carpet event; the paparazzi spray your face with flash bulbs from below, scrambling for the cash scattered around your slick golden loafers. You stumble away, shredding the social fabric in your wake like a serrated knife dragging itself down that velvet rug, untouchable, out of touch, economic collapse bulging from between the blood-red threads.

Your best friend, with a sneeze, admits that they’ve been avoiding you and the financial fallout zone you create with your continued existence alone, which has itself escalated into an unforeseen national threat. History’s dozen or so other Lottery winners have already self-destructed by this point in their infinitillionaire careers, tumbling down the nihilism-narcissism spectrum and crashing against one or the other extreme. Only you have slid along the perpendicular axis, altruism to evil, the orientation of which appears to be a matter of perspective. Public opinion turns against you with neck-snapping speed. Subconsciously, you suspect, people hate money for how it commodifies the cosmic marvel of their improbable and necessarily limited existence; consciously, they just hate you for having more, though they avoid admitting this truth with all manner of creative justification. Television psychologists speak out against your hero complex, your first-world guilt complex, even your Lottery complex, a new phenomenon they’ve coined especially for you, and about which they can now publish various books for a neat profit. College professors band together with students wearing crescent-and-hammer pajama pants in rallies against what they call your neocolonialist fetishization of poverty. The church hefts its favorite blunt, rusted old weapon and says that you’re trying to play God, an opinion that they repeatedly assert has nothing to do with how you denied their exhortations to tithe ten percent of your infinite winnings. 

And yet, in some ways, you grow even more popular than before. The phrase “Do you know who I am?” takes on a mystical power, flinging people out of your way as if by a force field, conjuring smartphone cameras like crucifixes held out towards vampires. People continuously swipe right on your dating-app profile, dogpiling into your notification feed as they grasp for that golden infinity sign branded beside your username. It doesn’t matter who you match with. Money third-wheels along on every hookup, hovering just out of sight, constantly inserting itself into the conversation. Halfway through your date with your hot former neighbor, you push the sushi platters out of the way, lean across the table, and check your reflection in their eyes. What you see is a dollar sign stamped over each pupil.

You witness your own rise as a meme on social media, your notoriety like a shadow growing steadily larger, detaching its feet from your own. Finding you becomes a game. People you’ve never met capture you in the background of their selfies, grinning wildly at the camera while you yawn over your morning latte, wheeze on the gym’s elliptical, cinch your belt through the gap around a bathroom stall’s door. 

Even Oprah cannot resist your intrigue and revives her show for a special episode with you. From the moment you step onto her studio’s stage, she makes you feel truly seen even through those layers of dollar bills padding your persona. She gives you her million-dollar smile. Yours is one of infinite wealth. What have you learned from winning the Lottery, she wants to know. What does this tradition say about this country? About us? About what it really means to be human?

Your smile stiffens; your vision zooms out. The audience’s shuffling mutes itself. Time pauses, and starts rewinding.

Here, the first paycheck from a summer job, the numbers vibrating with potential, a cheat code to the world that you now had a chance of beating. Next, your parents stifling a fight when you walked into the kitchen one lazy Saturday morning, each holding their credit cards weighted with debt like swords brandished to swing. Then, the words of that infamous Ammendment you’d had to memorize flashing behind your closed eyelids in your elementary-school history class: For so the founding fathers declare, that at each year’s inception, a Lottery shall be drawn among all freed men, the winner of which shall be granted funds unlimited, that the good People of this blessed Nation might never forget the evils of wealth unrestrained. What a stupid law, you’d thought as you’d scribbled it on your worksheet. Why wouldn’t anyone want to live that? You freaking loved money.

Now you see the reason. The cruel, vicious irony. You can love money all you want. The point is that money does not love you back.

You tell Oprah all of this. She offers you a tissue, shakes her head, sighs with the weight of the thousand troubled lifetimes she’s lived vicariously. 

Then one of the spectators shouts to ask when they’re getting their free cars. Oprah sighs again, gives you a long-suffering look, and tells them all to look under their seats. The audience goes wild.

Up until this point, money has made you a target. Real wealth, though, in the quantities available to you, can be molded into a bulwark, a barricade, a bastion, impenetrable and inescapable. Living rich, you learn, means living lonely. Private concerts. Private visits to art exhibitions. Private mansions in private neighborhoods on private islands, which you fly to with your new private jet. The size of your habitable world shrinks from the country, to the city, to the space between your eyeballs. The claustrophobia is crushing. You begin having nightmares, each one a flipbook of images snapped down at a slow, malicious rhythm. 

The line outside the national Lottery building.

Black-vested armed guards half-hidden between potted ferns.

Clipboards, gold suitcoats, infinity-sign lapel pins. 

The curve of the roof’s golden dome, and the white concrete pillars pounding down into the front steps; the doors that are built for giants, and which you enter as a speck of dust, swept up in the draft as they open—your driver’s license between the long fingernails of a Lottery official behind the security counter, and the slim golden microphone arcing towards their face like a cobra, and the hiss of their words through the speaker embedded into the bulletproof glass between you, congratulationsss, you’ve wonnnn—the limp, bumping drag of your heels along the infinity-patterned carpet as the guards drag you away; your pleas that there must be a mistake, please, you haven’t even chosen your numbers yet; the official behind the glass smiling with three rows of teeth, thanksss for playinggg, before disappearing into the evaporating mist of a dream.

You snap awake in a bath filled with now lukewarm water, fully clothed, back spasming from a night spent curved against the tub’s interior. A chocolate pie lies beside you, half-eaten, and eaten straight from the tray. With a groan, you fumble for a handhold, which turns out to be the faucet handle, which in turn blasts your face with icy water. It’s as you’re sitting on the tub’s edge, hair dripping, wiping down the fork with your tongue, that the idea comes.

It seems, at first, unthinkable. Then again, what is all that has happened to you if not unthinkable?

You text the guy from your old office, tell him you’ll be picking him up in your private jet. He responds with two high-five emojis. Once you’re up in the air, though, and you’ve told him what you’ve planned, he pushes his grass-fed ice cream out of the way, saying, nuh-uh, no way, not for all the money in the world. 

This turns out to be a gross overestimation of his own morals. Or an underestimation of just how much infinity truly is. Either way, he takes the money; either way, your obituary appears in the newspaper by the week’s end.

You might feel pleasantly surprised (if you were still in an entropic state capable of feeling anything) to know that he made both a polite hitman and an efficient arsonist, burning your entire golden-walled island estate to the ground before the firefighter boats could arrive. On the other hand (if the very notion of “you” hadn’t reverted to a concept), you might resent how the press reveled in your death as a pro-capitalist victory rather than take the obvious opportunity to push reform, not to mention the several paparazzi snapshots of your hot neighbor throwing themselves on your golden casket, as if they weren’t simply mourning a blank check that’d slipped through their fingers.

But then (if you were still alive, which you aren’t, obviously, of course), you might’ve been interested to see the new upstart running for president. Nobody knows where they came from. They’re young. Attractive. Surprisingly knowledgeable about inflation. Yet what most stands out is their shocking, sad eyes, the kind showcasing a soul that has held true power in their hands, felt their heart stop at its jolt, and still, amazingly, let it go, its devastating charge having fused idealism and humanity into a single vessel as transparent and sharp as desert glass. When they talk about using the country’s resources for good, it seems like they actually have a reasonable grasp of the concept. They’ve gotten the whole country, the whole world excited. College students nationwide attend political rallies. Even Oprah has thrown herself behind the campaign. Your best friend will be voting for them—so will everyone else’s. 

Nobody this young has ever become president before. The chances of them winning, at first, still seem impossibly slim; the chances that they’ll follow through on their promises, even smaller.

But the gods of statistics are getting fidgety, once again.