New Orleans · Chapter 3

Jean-Marc DeBaptiste

Jean-Marc DeBaptiste keeps three monitors in his Garden District office. Market figures on the left. World news in the middle. On the right, the people who know how to reach him.

Jean-Marc is thirty-two, from a Haitian family, and makes his living in New Orleans as an actuary and independent day trader. He’s comfortable letting a silence sit. If a friend brings him a troubling reading, he’ll listen all the way through before deciding what he thinks.

Sixteen shells

A bag of cowrie shells gives Jean-Marc a way to ask his own question. Each shell lands mouth open or closed. He counts them. When a friend asks him to check what she’s seen in her cards, he promises to call her after the cast.