James dislikes text messages, ugly and ephemeral abasers of his beloved language, crushing it to fit a tiny screen. Email he considers an acceptable medium for correspondence (he used to correspond with friends, before ‘How’s the book going?’ became intolerable). Without giving his objective a moment’s thought, he begins typing.
Dear Mike,
I have the book: it is necessary for my work. If you are looking for something pretty to replace it, might I suggest a jewel-encrusted tortoise?
Sincerely,
James F. Saunders
P.S. My intention is to marry your sister and thereby inherit your ill-gotten wealth when your chopper crashes mysteriously in the Carpathians. I hope this plan has your blessing.
Send. He hasn’t felt so good for weeks. Does he have enough change for a parkin square?
Natalie has to pay attention to her breathing: normal, shallow breaths are fine now, but anything deeper still hurts. She’s surprised by how often she sighs, while awake and, apparently, while asleep too. Every sleepy sigh wakes her with an unpleasant start. She stares up into the darkness and waits for sleep to come creeping back.
She hasn’t thought about him, Dan’s predecessor, for years: used to, perhaps, occasionally, but not anymore. Time heals. Or conceals. Or just obliterates. Outside, a jet scores a murmuring line across the sky.
She curtails another sigh. She met him in Laos, on her gap year: they had both joined a loose-knit group of backpackers to tackle a hiking trail. The two of them got ahead of the group, and she had hiccups that wouldn’t go away. ‘You need to surprise me,’ she said, as they paused on an outcrop and looked out across the bejungled hills — a pristine realm at their feet. He kissed her (the best kiss of her life); the hiccups stopped; they stayed together for two years, despite going to different universities; they split up. Now, a decade later, she finds that she doesn’t quite like to say his name even in her head.
Unlike Dan, he seemed to know her by instinct. There — she’s committed the thought-crime of comparing them. It didn’t stop him being a knob, of course, and the fact that he always knew when his behaviour was knobbish made it less excusable. Dan’s occasional knobbishness tends to be accidental.
The comparisons come easily now. Unlike Dan, he was spontaneous. He persuaded her to do mad things — hitching a lift with Mexican gangsters — while Dan, fearsome logician, can rarely persuade her to do sane things. Why is that? After all, Dan usually turns out to be right.
Unlike Dan the walking encyclopaedia, her ex experienced the world with a childlike wonder. ‘Look at that!’ she can hear him saying. ‘Feel this!’ Facts were unimportant; guidebooks were shunned — sensation was everything. He ignored, subverted the obvious to delight in the peripheral and the overlooked. ‘Weird!’ he would pronounce, turning to look at her, his eyes flashing with joy. Odd, the tricks of memory: those times seem so expansive, so luxurious, while the years with Dan have flown.
Natalie remembers the feeling of being eighteen, the taste of it. ‘Let’s do it right here,’ he would whisper, usually as part of a running joke, sometimes for real. How silly and selfish life was then, and yet … She shifts a little closer to Dan, whose back is turned to her. Presses her face gently against the nape of his neck to smell him, feels that little stab in her lungs again and cuts short her inhalation. Slides a hand onto his chest, where he has an off-centre straggle of hair. He grunts and sleepily reaches an answering hand back onto her hip. The hand stops, surprised to find no T-shirt or pants, and he gives a murmur of pleasure.
‘Hi,’ she breathes into his ear. ‘Be gentle.’
Stocks are down, bonds are up, copper is tanking. Mike is short copper. He sits quietly and surveys the markets. He double-clicks a chart of the copper price so that it fills one of his four screens: a jagged white path on a black map, a quiet trail of destruction that is twitching and probing as he watches.
A gobbet of economic news emerged from China this morning. Mike is hazy on the details — Rocket Jesus he may be, but he doesn’t know the first thing about investing or economics (okay, perhaps the first thing, but not the second). As far as he can tell, he’s not alone. The pundits paraded on the financial news channels are the new astrologers, aren’t they? Spouting shameless, ambiguous crap designed to seem like a bold prediction while keeping all options open. As for the other traders around him, Mike wouldn’t be able distinguish luck from skill. There might be a bit of both.
Anyway, impelled by a divine mystery, the Box, a.k.a the MRI, Mike’s trading system, is raging back from last week’s wobble. He raises his coffee to his lips, eyes still fixed on the copper chart. The white line jolts down to a new low, and he glances across at his live profit-and-loss dashboard. Where last week it was covered in red, now he sees black numbers multiplying. Someone has hit their stops and is dumping copper, and nobody’s buying: it’s free money.
His desk has a window on one side, looking into a vertiginous atrium. A translucent film has been applied to the lower half of the glass to frustrate any prying eyes from two floors below, where another large hedge fund is working its proprietary magic. On Mike’s other side sits Mij, a developer working on electronic trade execution. This is in some ways an old-fashioned shop, where many of the traders still murmur or snap into their double-handset phones to trade — Mij is on the team tasked with dragging it into the electronic age. Since April, Mij, softly spoken, shrewd, somehow always in the know, has been Mike’s closest confidant. Mij’s name suits him well, in the manner of Little John’s — he’s built like a fridge — but his other colleagues, apparently lacking a sense of irony, call him that — Fridge — instead. The photograph of him and his pouting wife, for whom Mike feels that troubling sense of recognition as well as covetous attraction, stands inches from Mike’s mouse hand.
It was in April that Mike’s former boss, Crispin, ferocious nerd and architect of the Box, stormed out of the office, never to return. Mike later learned that Crispin’s boss, one of the big-shots, a tall, stooped, reptilian man with heavy-lidded eyes, had been heard saying to Crispin, with his office door wide open, ‘What was it David Ricardo said? Let your profits run and cut your losses. I think we both know which you are.’ Crispin had replied, ‘And we both know what you are, too,’ and that was that. Once you’re out, you’re out of the building.
But Mike and the Box remained. It wasn’t actually losing money, just not making much, and as well as personality clashes there had been a few unfortunate breaches of trading mandates and risk limits. Crispin, who had designed a rules-based trading system of devilish complexity, didn’t much like obeying rules himself.
The lizard summoned Mike to his office the same afternoon. ‘Can you operate it?’ he snapped. His eyes have a habit of wandering up and down, and Mike always thinks his flies must be undone, but they never are. ‘Yes,’ he said, feeling flattered. ‘He’ll ask if you can operate it,’ Crispin wrote in a text, which Mike read three minutes later. ‘He’ll flatter you, say you’re promoted and then keep all the profits. You must DEMAND a trading contract in your name with the same $$$, and threaten to resign if you don’t get it. If he calls your bluff I’ll look after you. If he doesn’t, good luck. Crispin.’
That, a few months of good performance, a decision to spin off the strategy as a new product, and Mike’s unexpected gift of the gab is how he’s ascended rapidly from the position of assistant trader to that of Rocket Jesus. The big money is coming in next week. Since Mike’s bonus — his first as a trader in his own right — will be based on his strategy’s raw dollars of profit, the last month of the year will be decisive.
Mike’s bank of screens is designed to dominate the real-estate of his visual field. He pushes his chair back a few inches and looks around at the office, the white-and-glass-walled cultural desert quietly humming with transactions that has gradually become his natural habitat.
To be fair, love is here, remotely. �
�The wife’ and ‘the kids’ are common topics for vapid banter, alongside sport and financial markets, but a different tone, hushed, charged, is produced for the telephone when ‘HOME’ flashes up on the screen. Love and its expensive offshoots are, after all, why most of the mere mortals — the underclass of facilitators of which Mike was until recently a member — are here (the megastars, seated a few desks away in the centre of the trading floor, toil for other, stranger masters).
And death is here, of course — the security guards, ex-Gurkhas with kukris, it is said, in their suit pockets, cannot keep him out. He poisons the icing on birthday doughnuts — one year closer — and drapes his mocking pall over the partners’ private gym, the only defence money can buy.
As for beauty, well, there are those silly token plants that look fake — their leaves glossy as vinyl — but are in fact real, and alive, and furtively watered.
James F. Saunders needs to expedite Project Q. He has written five thousand words and hit a wall: introduced his themes but not explored them — produced an unresolved short story, not a great novel.
There is no credit on his phone, so he calls Brenda from the payphone in the Bay Hotel. On answer press A. The coin clatters down.
‘Hi.’
‘Hello Brenda — it’s James.’ Silence. The seconds are ticking on the display.
‘Oh. Hi.’
‘How’s the chainsaw?’ More seconds.
‘Fine. Noisy bugger. How’s the typewriter, or whatever you have?’
‘Pretty quiet, actually.’
‘Writer’s block?’ She’s picked up a sporadic Highland twang, and it sounds like ‘bollock’. That’s his affliction: he’s suffering from writer’s bollock.
‘I’d like to see you.’ More seconds of silence.
‘I don’t know.’ James holds his nerve, says nothing. ‘I’ll be in Edinburgh this weekend,’ she says at last, the tone reluctant. ‘Staying with a friend. We could meet.’
‘It’s a date.’
‘It’s not a date.’
He’s elated. It was so easy. Getting to Edinburgh will be expensive, but not nearly as expensive as getting to NH 30253 00930.
‘I’ll wear my lucky pants anyway,’ he says.
8. Unruly trail
‘… whoever calls to his mind … the great image of our mother nature … whoever sees himself in it, and not only himself but a whole kingdom, like a dot made by a very fine pencil; he alone estimates things according to their true proportions.’
Montaigne
Let’s talk about electrons. Wait, don’t skip this bit! Not because Dan’s dizzy little flock might take offence, but because there is magic here. Electrons, as most of us vaguely know and little care, govern chemistry and bind atoms into molecules, and so explain why everything around us — including this page, the air in your lungs and the front tyre of Dan’s motorbike — looks, feels and works the way it does. Most of us could also guess that electrons are what electricity is made of: when you switch on your kettle, electrons in the copper cable start to sway backward and forward, like weeds on the seabed. The electric current shuttles through at the speed of light, but the electrons themselves just sway gently: the current is not them flowing, but them passing on the nudge, like the clicking balls in a Newton’s cradle. Similes drawn from scales we can comprehend.
But what are electrons, really? Are they, really and truly, little shiny balls whirling around in orbits, and occasionally drifting off as though caught in a breeze? Like any other balls, but smaller? Or are they mere eddies of the breeze itself, or ripples in a flowing stream? Or are they, in the end, just equations on a page, mathematical constructs designed to embody a fundamental constant — a suspiciously arbitrary number, the elementary charge, that we are told possesses a profound and magical significance — that it is better not to try visualising at all?
Dan Mock is happy to think of his electrons as all of these things simultaneously. When he first encountered the wave-particle duality, reading ahead of the GCSE syllabus at school, the concept elbowed its way into his tidy brain and started a riot. Not waves, not particles, but both! At the same time. Wow! Everything I — we, everyone — had assumed about the world is fucked! When, soon afterwards, he read about relativity and its consequences, his mouth hung open. Even more fucked. It had been years earlier, at a parents’ evening when he was just eleven, that his science teacher had confidently predicted, ‘Natural Sciences at Cambridge’ (overconfidently, as it turned out — Dan spilled a glass of water down his trousers while waiting to be called for his interview at Peterhouse, and fluffed it). But it was then, at sixteen, learning of these mind-bending wonders, that the passion, the thrill, took root.
Since then his vision of the universe — yes, Dan carries in his mind a vision of the universe — has matured and expanded, but the thrill has remained. His vision encompasses not only observable reality, which is peculiar enough, but also the hinterland of conjecture, of interpretation, at the fringes of science. You can, for example, make the wave-particle duality go away, if it troubles you — but at the cost of accepting countless parallel universes. His job at the synchrotron combines the fantastical — electrons going so fast that time itself runs slow — and the tangible — oversized fridge magnets. Magnets are the tools of his trade. It’s magnets that accelerate the electrons to their barely conceivable, take-it-on-trust speed, magnets that steer and focus them, and magnets that hurl them around those vomit-inducing corners. Dan’s father — another gadget-lover, but one fitted with a pacemaker — isn’t allowed on the guided tour.
Dan didn’t end up at this particular synchrotron by accident. Ever since he specialised it has been his ambition to defy the critics of his arcane field — particle physics — by helping to solve real problems. In recent months he has been working with a team of pharmacologists, interrogating a protein in the DNA of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, seeking a vulnerable spot on which to focus future attacks.
Come on, he urges, as the electrons shine their blinding X-ray torch on the miscreant. Strike a blow for all the consumptive scientists who died before they could make their discoveries, and whose names we have therefore forgotten — and for the million human hosts TB works through every year in its own mindless, pointless battle for survival. It has a ferocious armoury of adaptations, but we, the human species, are the more ingenious.
Are we the more deserving? Dan briefly ponders interspecies ethics as he skips through diffraction images of blurry dots — TB’s Enigma code. Yes: the vicious little monsters have to die.
James F. Saunders thinks about his impending rendezvous with Brenda, and speculates furiously. He hasn’t had sex for seven years. After Becks commanded him, in front of all their friends, to walk out of her life (he pushed back his chair, stood up, strolled out of the restaurant forgetting his jacket and never saw Becks or the jacket again), he had a couple of drunken one-nighters. Then there was a two-month thing with Kate, the librarian with big glasses, who was a decade older and didn’t really want a loser like James. He shudders to think of it.
Cowed by the failure and embarrassment of these ill-matched unions, he became for a while a sullen slave to internet porn. He was living in a shabby house-share in York, supposedly writing his debut novel behind a locked door, but actually clicking through an endless, lonely anatomical slideshow, trying to escape or conjure memories of Becks, perhaps, or just wallowing without intention. The Cormorant, at first so imperious, so electrifying, his paean to mortality, died itself there among the computer viruses and bog roll.
This is one reason he is happy to have no internet connection in his room in Merryman’s Bay. Over the past five years the sexual impulse, which transforms an intelligent man into a slavering beast but which is, ironically, essential to his identity, has slowly faded. He has written about it, read about it, abstracted it, and finally starved and sublimated it almost out of existence. Almost: arousal revis
its occasionally at odd or inconvenient times, like a bad back. He usually tries to ignore it.
Now he’s going to meet Brenda. It’s not a date. But he can’t stop thinking about those biceps under the lace — that physicality — and a knowingness, a sexual presence that moved behind the screen of her shyness. He pushes aside his chair to make a space on the floor and attempts a few press-ups. To his surprise, he can do ten. Later, in the bathroom, he examines his stooped reflection, forces his shoulders back, tries to look like a sound specimen. Should he clean-shave, or just tidy up? Should he trim the unruly trail of hair below his navel? Should he splurge eight pounds fifty on a haircut in Whitby?
Love is an emanation. Love is a mirror. Bring the notebook.
When Natalie Mock describes her accident, representing the shower cradle with two up-curled fingers of her right hand and her falling body with her left, her colleagues’ faces wrinkle with fascinated horror. The bruises and the breathing discomfort are fading and various scabs are itching and flaking over vivid new skin.
She has, of course, skimmed through the letters. The girl they’re addressed to isn’t her — no longer exists. Could it have been otherwise? Is it possible to ride so carefully through life, push so smoothly and confidently over obstacles and traumas, that your identity is preserved more or less intact at thirty, forty, eighty? Would you want to? Or does time itself enforce reinvention, repurposing, rebranding? Are she and Dan the same people who agreed to marry each other? Back then, she was going to be an architect (a nettling postscript: Dan was going to be a particle physicist, and is one).
Such silence here without you. You are my voice, my music, my rowan parting the wind. Rain falls, my heart beats without a sound until you return. Come back to me soon.
Learning to Die Page 6