Learning to Die

by Thomas Maloney

  She and Dan have been together for ten years, and married for six. Should he be able to choose a book for her by now? Probably. But she has always thought of their personalities as complementary rather than two peas in a pod. Their first conversation, in a Sheffield University courtyard, was prompted by Dan overhearing her correct a friend’s misidentification of a swift as a swallow. But while Dan knew about birds from studying his field guides with nerdish fascination, Nat knew because she’d grown up on a farm where such things were not of any special interest but merely taken for granted: Dan had not, after all, found a birding ally.

  Nerdy is not the worst thing a husband can be, not by a long chalk. And what’s done is done — love the one you’re with. They do like the same music, even though Dan sings like a donkey.

  James F. Saunders has written an opening paragraph. He has tried to harness something of the daring, contradictory brilliance of Montaigne’s opening, in which the essayist explains why his book is not worth reading and bids his misguided reader a friendly but abrupt farewell. James imagines a publisher encountering such a sentiment in the slush pile: ‘Don’t bother reading this self-indulgent mind-wank.’ You’d have to read on, at least a page or two, wouldn’t you?

  Now he is walking along the cliff-top north of the village, fag angled into the windbreak of his cupped hand, feeling already blank and exhausted. The wind has turned easterly, and an early flurry of snow is sailing in from the sea and accumulating in wavering strands in the grass. He plods up to the top of the little headland, to a sheltering wall and stile.

  He’s often imagined his ashes being scattered at this spot, which, presumably, he loves as much as anybody else. Perhaps his erstwhile friends would even place an unobtrusive, guilt-assuaging memorial stone in the wall. His eyes wander along the stacked fragments of North Yorkshire shale, looking for a suitable nook. There, just in the place he would have chosen, he finds a memorial already staking its claim. He scoops a handful of snow from the little drift at the foot of the wall and rubs it across the weathered inscription. ‘In loving …’ Whatever.

  Such a crowded world: crowded ideas, crowded schedules, crowded airwaves. He feels hemmed in, corralled by both his literary antecedents and his own smug generation into a hopelessly narrow realm of expression. He can’t even find an original place to die. But he will carve out a territory: he’ll fight for it, whatever the cost.

  What, you might ask, does Montaigne have to do with love? In more than a hundred essays, the navel-gazing, ruff-toting Frenchman didn’t think to give his wife more than a passing mention. But this patron saint of the self is, James has realised, his perfect guide through the landscape of the supposedly selfless emotion. Love is patient, love is kind, doesn’t boast, keeps no ledger, is always home by nine, washes behind its ears, et cetera. Alternatively, love is the flame life’s Fury slings. Either way, love is supposed to be a surrender of the self, but it isn’t: love is an emanation. James feels he’s glimpsed unexplored realms of possibility, and can tell his loved-out and lied-to readers — if he’s destined to have any — something new and surprising. Love-affirming and self-affirming, is what the critics will say.

  He doesn’t reopen his laptop until late in the evening. That time of day — the sweet spot between blank, saturated daylight and the terrible desolation of the small hours, when everyone else is slumped in front of the telly or pissing away their wages in bars — has been a loyal friend to him. Take the fuckers by surprise.

  He nervously reads through his opening gambit. Two memories from London have been bothering him: a tiny silhouette seated at a towering concert organ, ready to unleash the sublime; and a junkie tunelessly sucking and blowing a mouth organ with a paper cup between his feet. Which is he?

  Dan pulls out a heavy box of unsorted papers, and begins to extract folders, loose papers and magazines that were saved for reasons now forgotten. Before chemistry (the calcium ions) and fluid mechanics (the water pressure) intervened, Natalie had ear-marked today for an early Christmas shopping sortie, unmoved by Dan’s annual suggestion to do it all online. A cinema visit was to follow. Now, unexpected Natlessness and the troubling memory of her shallow, painful breaths keep turning his thoughts back to her.

  Natalie. People talk of chemistry in relationships — the mere exchange of electrons — which naturally leads a physicist to a metaphor for something deeper, more fundamental and more potent: Natalie has turned out to be the nuclear reaction of his life.

  A stranger seeing her for the first time might not describe her as beautiful. This is mostly irrelevant, though Dan has never been able to entirely ignore the discrepancy between his adolescent ideal of womankind — lithe, grave, dark-haired and ivory-skinned — and the red-headed reality of his wife: small, freckly and sardonic with a button-nose. Does this mismatch imply anything about the world’s measure of his own worth? Perhaps they are both in the second or third tier of the selection game.

  Yet outward beauty is mostly a cultural construct, whereas some of Natalie’s qualities may be absolute. There are her character strengths, of course — her honesty, courage and kindness being instinctive (most of the time), while Dan’s require a resolve that cannot always be relied upon — but there is something physical, too, something fascinating about the way her body is proportioned, and the way it moves, that doesn’t wear out but grows with familiarity. A glimpsed memory: Nat swimming her strong breaststroke in the pool at his aunt’s Spanish villa, fully submerged in that instant just after the kick, at once motionless and in surging motion. Yes, it is these subtler qualities that make her a desirable mate. Dan smiles at the idea that he had any choice in the matter: their courtship didn’t feel at all like the Darwinian process that, biologically speaking, it was.

  He frowns and drops a pile of New Scientist magazines into the recycling bin with a thump. Is it normal for a husband to subject his sick wife to an evaluation, to write her a spousal report card? Is he a calculating monster? And hasn’t he overlooked the component of their relationship that cannot be rationalised: the mysterious ember at its core, dormant in the day-to-day but capable of sudden flares? He was, after all, not long ago, brought almost to tears by the sight of a mortal vein pulsing in the crook of her arm. He turns back to his labour with a resolve — yes, sadly it requires resolve — to be humbler, more generous and less questioning in his affection.

  At the bottom of the box is an unmarked folder containing a thick bundle of letters, all written in the same hand, mostly on cheap lined paper and all in the same distinctive ink — fountain pen ink with a brownish hue. Dan has never seen them before.

  5. Rocket Jesus

  ‘In one man’s hand it is a sceptre, in another’s a fool’s bauble. But let us proceed.’

  Montaigne

  Monday morning. Mike’s hotel sprawls nonchalantly along the prime real-estate beside Middlewich harbour, forty minutes’ limo ride up the coast from New York and one of the priciest districts in America. The mega-yachts have by now all migrated to warmer climes, leaving only a few snugly-tarpaulined lesser boats to support the hotel’s maritime pretensions. Inside, the decor is a muddle of mock Rococo and Provençal that Mike, to his initial surprise when he first stayed two years ago, finds rather charming.

  Mike’s big pitch — what colleagues call his magic show — begins in two hours. He’ll poke his head into the regional office, slap a few backs, pick up his sales rep and then whizz back down the interstate to the prospective client’s offices in the city.

  The hotel’s restaurant staff know his breakfast order: three poached eggs on brown toast (wheat toast, they call it here — what do Americans make white bread out of, then?) and half a pink grapefruit. The jazzy muzak has only just been awakened, and the remains of last night’s log fire are still in the grate. One other table is occupied, by two men talking shop — an informal job interview, perhaps, or ex-colleagues catching up for a willy-waving contest, or to test the hiring waters
.

  ‘I can’t change my stripes,’ drawls one, a tanned walrus, shaking his head slowly, and Mike stops chewing to catch his words. ‘In my heart —’ the man lays a hand solemnly on his breast ‘— in my heart, I’m a portfolio manager.’

  Mike finds himself coughing, a crumb tickling his throat. Is this a vision of his future? But then, after all, why not?

  Whenever Dan Mock mentions that he goes to work by bike, most people assume he means a pedal bike: real bikes are out of fashion. Dan is not much of a biker — his 350cc machine is neither a muscle-bike nor a classic — but the thirty-minute blitz along the Thames Valley adds both pleasure and peril to his morning routine. He roars through the Goring Gap where the insistent Thames breaches the Chiltern hills, and then veers westward along the foot of the escarpment on the old London Road. Cornering on a bike is another glorious demonstration of mechanics: the terrible centrifugal heave that threatens to fling him into the hedgerow in either a slide, a spin or a roll depending on which mistake he makes, but that is — strictly speaking — only a consequence of his accelerating frame of reference, and the invisible, finely-tuned centripetal haul of his front tyre, imperceptibly rotated on the steering column, clawing against the indulgent road, dragging him round. The perfect corner is an exquisite joy.

  Dan works his helmet gingerly over the dressing on his cheek, kicks back the stand, launches himself into the Reading rush hour and negotiates a few roundabouts and traffic lights. The open road beckons and his plucky twin-cylinder engine roars to greet it.

  Of course he did know that Natalie had a meaningful boyfriend before he met her: they’d travelled a lot together, but the guy was at some other university and the long distance relationship hadn’t worked out. That was about all he knew. He asked her about it a few times in the early days and she was dismissive, so he let it drop. He doesn’t even know a name. He’ll call him Chris.

  And all this time she’s kept Chris’ letters. Why shouldn’t she? Eighteen to twenty is an important chapter of any life. There was nothing in their marriage vows about erasing their browsing history, so to speak. Maybe, after all, she just wanted to remember what a loser the guy was.

  The privacy of letters is, Dan felt instinctively, sacrosanct. Had it been a photo album, he could have looked. He’d have seen a teenage Natalie, with a bleached streak in her red hair, perhaps, and her man — Dan imagines him tall, dark and scruffy — happy and in love. There would have been lots of double selfies — a hit and miss composition in those days — their two faces pressed together (in one photo, kissing) with a wild landscape or ancient building in the background. There would probably have been photos of Chris looking relaxed and charismatic in exotic places: combat trousers, mirror shades, well-travelled rucksack. Perched daringly atop a rocky pinnacle; strumming a guitar on a beach; tearing up a blurry dance floor with unknown friends. And there would have been photos of the Nat he never knew: standing beside a waterfall, laughing, wearing not much and drenched by the spray; draped on the bonnet of a roofless car in the desert, relaxed in a short dress (she rarely wears dresses now, even on holiday). Carefree, fulfilled. So Dan imagines. As it happens, it wasn’t a photo album — just some letters that he didn’t read — but the effect is the same.

  Now, with Dan, Nat has a mortgage, a Tesco Clubcard and office politics. However the relationship with Chris was broken off, are these letters likely to be anything other than a memento of profoundly happy times? How much of a problem is that?

  ‘I think we’d all agree the markets aren’t a hundred per cent rational,’ Mike declares to the row of intent but sceptical faces. One wise old owl — white hair with that lurid yellow tinge, like tarnished silver, the CIO — three golfing family chaps in their forties, and a young woman power-dressed in vivid green. Mike has been carefully distributing his eye contact, giving Jade only her fair share even though a delicious little spark flies off her at each glance.

  ‘They do reflect the fundamentals — growth, inflation, geopolitics, monetary policy —’ he lingers wistfully over those ponderous syllables ‘— and it’s hard enough forecasting those. But the markets mix in a lot of crazy shit.’ Americans love hearing that in his plummy accent. There are nods and chuckles: he has them so far. ‘Is that crazy shit easy to predict? No. But is it random? Absolutely not. It’s the combined effect of a dozen behavioural biases clouding the judgement, tilting the decisions of thousands of market participants. Sure, each single investor might trade for any number of reasons, but those investor-specific motives average to zero. The biases, on the other hand, infect us all. So they’re in the driving seat.’

  No one argues. Mike flips open his laptop and two graphs appear on the giant screen behind him, one above the other. Like jagged rollercoasters, blue and red. The graphics are clean and spare: these graphs are more beautiful than any of the art on the walls.

  ‘Here are two anonymous financial assets,’ says Mike. He hits a key and the graphs change. ‘Here are two more.’ He starts tapping the key and the graphs flex and bulge into a parade of different shapes. ‘Here’s a whole zoo of them. Now, just to prove I’m not cherry-picking to tell a good story, you get to tell me when to stop.’ Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap —

  ‘Stop.’ It’s the CIO.

  ‘Done. Okay. Here are our two anonymous guinea pigs. Anyone like to guess what they are?’

  No takers. Mike punches out a few more letters and hits enter. Five fainter lines, each in a different colour, slide onto both of the graphs from the left side of the screen. ‘Here are your macroeconomic variables — the real, stick-your-fingers-in-it stuff.’ He hits another key and the new lines slide off to the right. He pauses for effect.

  ‘We don’t care about those.’

  The CIO raises an eyebrow.‘Economic forecasting isn’t our game,’ continues Mike. ‘You hire other managers to do that. We only care about the price. Decades of research — by psychologists, not economists — has identified the key behavioural traits that drive prices. Our challenge is to model those traits, and then — this is a technical term — to scrunch the bejesus out of them until the story of our chosen investment starts to emerge. Let’s see what happens.’

  He hits enter, and a progress bar appears over the blue graph and begins smoothly to grow. Notifications appear beside it: ‘Apply underreaction-to-news bias. Apply herding bias. Apply lottery bias. Apply disposition effect. Apply exuberance. Apply greed. Apply panic.’ With each new message, the graph flickers but doesn’t change. After ten seconds, the progress bar completes and is replaced by message in bold text: ‘MRI analysis effectuated. Model accounts for 0.0% of price variation. Signal: undefined.’

  ‘And we’re done. Hold on — that doesn’t look right. Signal undefined?’

  Mike stares at the screen with a comical frown, and can sense that glances are being exchanged behind him. He catches the eye of his sales rep, an amiable Texan who only joined six months ago and who now smiles nervously.

  ‘Gotcha,’ declares Mike, turning to his audience with a grin. ‘The blue line wasn’t a financial asset — it was randomly generated. There’s no signal, because there’s no story.’ Frowns all round. A chuckle. They’re thinking: Is this guy wasting our time? Mike proceeds calmly. ‘Let’s try the red one.’

  Again the progress bar, but progress is slower this time, and with each new message the line on the graph shifts — it’s being dismantled, slowly collapsing, flattening onto the axis. After about thirty mesmerising seconds the bar completes. ‘MRI analysis effectuated. Model accounts for 94.7% of price variation. Signal: long 56%.’

  ‘And there we have it. Long fifty-six per cent. This asset is, judging by the price profile, the Italian stock index.’ His laptop tells him that discreetly.

  ‘Your system wants to go long Italian stocks, as of today?’ asks the CIO. He has an Italian name, Mike recalls. A lucky strike.

  ‘That’s correct. As of ten twenty-six
this morning. Not full-throttle long, but decently long.’

  ‘I’d better call my broker,’ jokes the CIO, grinning.

  Dan Mock loves cornering on his way to work, but his place of work itself, being circular, has no obvious corners. No, he’s not a cricketer, a gladiator, an actor or a clown: he’s a particle physicist. The synchrotron, a giant gleaming doughnut nestled in the downs, is all curves from the outside — but, as it happens, corners are what make it tick.

  This accelerator isn’t used for incomprehensible (to most) particle physics research like its more famous big sister at CERN: here, the particle physics is just a means to more practical ends. ‘I make electrons dizzy,’ is how Dan describes it to the laity. He and his colleagues have to keep their little flock together and chivvy them up to about 99.9999% of the speed of light. At this rate they do half a million laps of the stadium-sized doughnut every second, which understandably makes them queasy. At each breakneck corner (the track is not actually a circle but a forty-eight sided polygon), the queasy electrons, which don’t like cornering as much as Dan does, spew out high-energy photons — these are what the synchrotron’s customers channel into their experiments. Dan’s official job is just to keep that dazzling photon-spew coming, in many shades and flavours, but he usually finds an excuse to poke around in the experiments too.

  He parks the bike, swipes his pass at several sets of sliding doors and descends into his windowless lab just as dawn begins to break. Natalie is coming home today. He’ll have to wait a while, until she’s feeling better — just as he’ll have to wait before tentatively trying to initiate some sort of sexual contact, which in further evidence of his uncaring nature he has been missing — but when the time is right, he’s going to ask Natalie to tell him more about her life before they met.