The New Gatsby; From Gettysburg to Raleigh by B. Scott

Sample:
Whether real or imagined, it mattered little. What endured was belief—belief in him, in the possibility he represented. And belief, as Tiffani had warned, lingers longer than truth. It seeps into a city’s bloodstream, shaping its choices, its skyline, its very idea of what the future could be. Raleigh, forever straining to prove it was something more than the numeracy of its Southern heritage, discovered in Broaster Knightshade its perfect reflection—an amulet polished, alluring, and forever just beyond one’s grasp.

From the balcony of my three-bedroom apartment (one of the bedrooms for computer equipment and one for my collection of books—yes, printed and bound and able-to-gather-dust books!), I would often drift into thoughts of him, Broaster Knightshade, a distant star trembling with equal measures of promise and peril. Below, the city shimmered in the haze, restless and alive, its ambitions humming like cicadas in the thick summer air when they emerged en masse. Meantime, the skyline rose in jagged Rochester-glass and Chinese-steel, each tower a monument to hunger, insistent as the juxtaposed human tides beneath it. Lights blinked across the horizon like coded messages, and in their quicksilver rhythm I could hear the city’s pulse; it was an uneasy tempo where hope and tension mingled without resolution—a tension needing a comeuppance.

Through the eddies and flows of rumor and contradiction, the fragments of truth and invention swirled about Knightshade, and one certainty pressed itself upon me—he was no ordinary man. To many, he had become a legend, the very embodiment of Raleigh’s dream. He was a figure shimmering with the city’s brightest aspirations and darkest depths in the same breath.

Spring turned to summer, and ambition clung to the air like the season’s Southern heat. It was dense and inescapable, pressing itself into every corner of Wake County and its MSA. It drifted through the streets in a restless flow; it colored the speeches delivered beneath banners of progress; and it lingered in the parties where tomorrow’s valuables were exchanged across glasses of something pale and costly.
Though I had not yet looked Broaster Knightshade in the eye, his presence seemed to weigh upon everything. I heard it in the eager incantations of investors, in the careful nods of city planners, and in the uneasy silence of those who knew the peril of dreams too recklessly pursued. It was as if my coming to Raleigh had not been chance at all, but some inevitable summons, a slow drift toward the orbit of a man who had perfected the art of fashioning dreams into hope, and hope into belief, and men into…I was not sure what.