Читать книгу Coming for Money - F.W. vom Scheidt - Страница 6

1

Some days it felt like the money left blood on my hands.

Not the weary allusion to the stains of Iscariot.

Sometimes, when my complex calculations penetrated its sly whispers of profit, like the smears on the latex gloves of a surgeon probing a body laid open and breathing beneath sure fingers.

Sometimes, when I pounded its promises into the phone, like the flecks blown back into the clenched knuckles of an assassin working too close to the throat.

Most often like seared blisters blossoming from the soft centre of your palms when working wood or rope without the protection of leather, because the devastating urgency of profit or loss arrived as a crisis in a storm and you had no other choice but to grapple with it to the exclusion of everything else; lose your grip, lose your life.

That was always how I visualized it, the money – as a storm raging: billowing from one trading market in the world to another as the sun passed from Tokyo to Hong Kong, relentless in its advance to Frankfurt, across the Channel to London, and then on to New York and Toronto, and continually westward to Asia again. Sudden squalls at opening bells that drove us, investment bankers, like ardent navigators at lurching helms, whipping the financial markets up into floods of trading, and then passing, on the closing bell, without pause or caring or conscience.

Always, the pace of it made me feel I was vanishing into myself.

Why I could never quit – when I was so unremittingly reminded by the velocity of the money that there was no end; that there were no enduring winners or losers; that, finally, no one prevailed; and that, like the process of life itself, nothing was permanent – I was unable to fully understand, despite my rigid pursuit of an answer.

My understanding always remained hemmed in by my recognition that I was better at it, the money, than anything else I did. Skilled. I could manipulate it with my intellect. Shave a single investment transaction into a hundred layers, thin as onion skin, translucent, all the profit and loss exposed. Then remould them into a solution, dead simple, unerringly profitable.

And sometimes I could operate on instinct fleeter than intellect, my feet never having to touch the ground.

But none of it was meaningful enough to explain why I kept hanging on. That was all I was doing any more. My determination to succeed reduced to a determination not to surrender.

I sat in my office.

Alone.

I let my fingertips leave the arms of my chair to touch the rim of my desk with both hands meeting, attempting to complete myself in the circle of their joining. The slight nervous habit had become a trusted routine for holding myself firm in a pulling tide of unease.

I was tired. I needed to sleep; not just wait out the night, a pit of hollow shadows and scraps of dreams when I closed my eyes.

I needed to stop moving. I needed to stop feeling that, like a shark, I had to have continuous restless movement to maintain my breathing.

I caught myself listening to the curtain of stillness in the empty office. Everyone had long departed. In their departure, the daily accumulation of noise and vibration and frenzy had been deflated out of the rooms and cubicles and corridors. The cleaning staff, with their hum of carpet vacuums and soft whoosh of emptied paper shredders, had already trooped through. The lull pushed back against my listening.

It was almost ten, the leavings of the day shrinking towards midnight.

I shoved my heels out beneath my desk, lifting myself on them, and leaned back into my chair. I stretched savagely, striking jagged pain into my knees and shoulders, attempting without success to dispel the doubts seated within me, as unbreakable as stones.

Dropping back down, I looked to the creased calendar page of my desk diary. Days fenced within squares – neither their number nor their duration to be altered despite my wanting. Seven months to this day since it happened, leaving me with lop-sided anniversaries: Friday bending each week; the twenty-first day bringing a false stop to each month. And also leaving me pursued by an internal voice that had begun speaking within me since that day (reduced to “that day” by the voice). An unfamiliar voice, maybe reclaimed from an invented self of distant childhood, it leaked through the cracks and gaps between my thoughts. I could not turn it off the way I turned my thoughts off, or turned them to something else; persistent, sceptical, the voice crowded my thoughts with words I could not speak out loud to anyone.

Tonight, the voice stalked my solitude, interrupting my thoughts each time they began to settle, causing a flutter of fear within me, like a sharp noise jerking me awake just as I was falling asleep. It fed a stubborn suspicion that it was becoming possible for me to lose my grip on my ambition and accomplishments, and let my interrupted life diminish to nothing.

Sitting there, edgy and worn, I tried to dispel the voice and prove it false, tried to prove my life still had some substance by compiling a mental list of my achievements. I was hard pressed to show anything for the past seven months; baskets without bottoms that the days had fallen through, and were then lost. Lately, I had tried to fabricate some refuge within a detached acceptance: in the end, what did anybody have to show for the time before their lights went out? But that was an open-ended question that brought me no closer to any answers. Nor did it serve me tonight with any fresh truth.

My day was run out. My week was run out. I felt no further from my past, no closer to my future.

Outside the tall narrow windows, with the surrounding office towers gone mostly cold and black, the darkness folded around the glass, squeezing in the light, turning my gaze back at me.

Within, my computer screen cast feathery ripples of brightness that lapped at my wrists. Its metallic incandescence seemed a digital fire, keeping predators at bay. It also brought forth an enticing murmur of distant bonds and treasury bills that trolled through my idleness, luring up the darting fish of my trading reflexes.

I tapped up a cluster of Bloomberg screens that tracked twenty-four-hour global futures and foreign exchange markets, the incoming trades stacking up for execution on a Monday morning that would begin in Asia while we remained stuck behind the starting gate on Sunday night.

The procession of numbers painted a series of portraits. A Tokyo stock market that would sweat under the exertion of massive trading volumes in its opening hour. Currency markets in Singapore and Hong Kong that would take faltering initial steps in their pursuit of the previous week’s money trails. The luminous computer screens giving me windows into a day not yet arrived in the world. One window tumbling onto the next at the command of my impatient fingertips, like cards dealt from a deck.

The screens were alive with stacks of iridescent numerals that popped and jiggled like electric fleas spilled from an open box, and with fluorescent sticks of lightning undulating up and down on charts and graphs; all monitoring and measuring, in ceaseless statistics and averages and returns, the vital pulse of the money. In this through-the-looking-glass image of commerce and trade, there was no evidence of human life – only the outcome of harvests taken from fields or minerals hauled from mine shafts, loaded onto trains and ships, processed in plants and factories; sold; and repeatedly sold again; no sense of intent, no sense of labour, no sense of use – only a precise chronicle of the profit and loss that accrued at each stage.

Flipping through more screens produced a rainstorm of numbers and computations: bonds bought, stocks sold, currencies traded this day, wheat and corn to change hands next month, gold and silver promised for delivery at year end.

In the hyperactivity of the numbers there was a powerful pornography of betting and winning or losing, lurid and selfish and seductive. I drew the flow into myself, inflating my veins and arteries with the short-lived tension of profit and loss, an invalid plasma without sufficient substance to sustain life.

When I became aware of the telephone buzzing on the corner of my desk, I knew I had, within those moments, become so deeply entangled in the screens I had missed the initial trills. My direct line flashed. I reached quickly, awkwardly off balance from bending so deeply into my computer screen. Racing my gummy tongue across the day’s accumulation of coffee on my teeth, I scooped up the handset and closed it to my face.

“This is Paris,” I answered.

I listened intently, without interrupting, repeatedly pressing my upper teeth against my lower.

“Okay,” I replied. “Do it. Do it now.”

Without waiting for any response, I hung up.

And my hands?

I let them hang, jittery at my wrists, static in my fingertips.

I could not go away from who I was.