by Ayad Akhtar
NICK: The rest of the market?
BASHIR: Steady.
(Suddenly)
Here’s the first official report.
(Reading)
“Among the dead is controversial water minister Bilal Ansoor. Ansoor’s death will spell some uncertainty for the large-scale water privatization that has been under way in parts of Sindh Province and which has been seen as the test model for a possible national directive.”
NICK: How many people were killed?
BASHIR (Reading): “Forty-five confirmed dead. Seventy-eight wounded.
“Ansoor was in attendance at the wedding of his eldest daughter.”
NICK: It was a fucking wedding?
BASHIR (Reading): “Ansoor’s wife, the well-known film actress Fiza Qureshi, was also reported killed.”
NICK (Alarmed, quietly): Holy shit.
BASHIR: Fucking whore is what she was.
NICK: What are you talking about? What do you know about her?
BASHIR: She’s a film actress.
NICK: Do you know her?
BASHIR: Don’t have to. They’re all prostitutes.
NICK: Keep your fucking ignorant opinions to yourself.
BASHIR: What’s wrong with you?
NICK: She happened to be a very nice woman.
BASHIR: For a prostitute.
Nick looks over Bashir’s shoulder. Stewing. Angry. Conflicted.
BASHIR (CONT’D): Kaghan dropping through the floor.
Pause.
NICK (Decisive): Sell.
BASHIR: What?
NICK: Start selling.
BASHIR: But the prices are falling.
NICK: Bashir. Just do it.
BASHIR: Why? We’re still making money.
NICK: Volume’s dropping. It’s gonna turn. Get out.
BASHIR: It’s not turning.
NICK: Bashir—
BASHIR: Kaghan down another seventeen to two-oh-eight—
NICK: I understand the situation here—
BASHIR: Gwadar’s still moving, too—
NICK: And I understand that I’m in charge right now. So just do as you’re told. Sell.
(Off the screen)
Look. See? First Wave. Isn’t moving.
(Beat)
Put in the order to sell.
(Beat)
Do it!
Bashir finally relents.
BASHIR (Confused): Sell at market?
NICK (Irritated): No. At the current ask.
They’ll wait to fill the orders and skim. We’re selling a lot of contracts. Pennies matter.
Bashir types orders in…
Nick watching…
NICK (CONT’D): Goddamnit, Bashir! Not like that. Put the number in there.
Look, just let me do it.
BASHIR: Get back. Now. You are not touching the computer.
(Back to typing)
In there?
NICK: Yes.
Bashir keeps typing in the orders.
Nick watches.
BASHIR: Kaghan sold. Two thousand five hundred contracts at two-oh-five.
(Typing, beat)
First Wave position…
… closed at seventy-four rupees.
(Typing, beat)
Paani closed at one seventy-one.
(Typing, beat)
Gwadar closed at one fifty-six.
(Typing, beat)
Jaan Subsidiaries…
(Waiting)
… now closed at ninety-five and a half rupees.
NICK: Proceeds?
BASHIR: One hundred fifty-one million six hundred thousand forty-three rupees.
NICK (Calculating): … so we made roughly seven hundred thousand dollars.
Pause.
Bashir continues to watch the screen.
BASHIR: Prices are still dropping.
(Silence)
Kaghan down another seven rupees.
NICK: Bashir—
BASHIR: First Wave down another ten…
NICK: Bashir, look at me.
Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered.
BASHIR: What the fuck is that?
NICK: What they say on Wall Street.
Being a bull or a bear means you have a disciplined philosophy about the market. You stick to it? You get rich. Greed is what loses you money.
BASHIR: You think leaving cash on the table is going to make you feel better about your best friend and his wife biting the dust?
NICK: He wasn’t my best friend.
BASHIR: She give you a good blow job?
NICK: This is not about me wanting to feel better.
BASHIR: Bollocks. You’re fucking soft. The whole lot of you. Can’t even fight a war anymore.
NICK: That’s enough.
BASHIR: Send a bunch of drones around—’cause you don’t have the stomach to face death yourself. Yours or anyone else’s.
NICK: I said that’s enough!
Pause.
BASHIR (Back at the screen): Still dropping…
(Beat)
Gwadar’s down to one thirty-nine.
Bashir’s mood shifts as he sees something on the screen. Tapping…
BASHIR (CONT’D): Wait a second…
(Clicking)
I don’t believe it… The exchange… has stopped trading.
NICK: What are you talking about?
BASHIR (Reading the screen): “Trading on selected securities suspended…”
NICK (Reading the screen): “… until further notice.” Jesus.
BASHIR (Reading): “All trading halted for fourteen companies…”
(Searching)
Kaghan, First Wave, Jaan, Paani, Gwadar…
Yeah, they’re all on the list.
NICK: You sure we’re out of those positions?
Bashir types again. Waits…
BASHIR: Yes.
NICK: Ten minutes. Bilal Ansoor’s powerful friends started losing money. And ten minutes is how long it takes them to shut down trading.
BASHIR: Pakistan.
NICK: You’d be surprised. It doesn’t just happen here.
Awkward silence.
NICK (CONT’D): Don’t forget to convert the proceeds to dollars.
BASHIR: Now?
NICK: Yes.
Bashir starts typing into the computer.
NICK (CONT’D): The rupee is one political crisis away from insolvency. Downward pressure on the rupee means we make money just by keeping dollars.
BASHIR (Off the computer screen): Okay. Rupees converted.
NICK: Okay. Well, we’re done for the day.
Long pause.
BASHIR: Well done. You got us out.
NICK: Yeah. Well. I couldn’t have predicted that.
BASHIR: What a disaster if we’d been left with that stuff…
NICK: Not necessarily. I mean, they have to start trading again at some point.
(Beat)
But I wouldn’t want to have to sleep on that.
Long pause.
Bashir goes to Nick’s cot. Takes a seat.
BASHIR: I’m sorry.
NICK: For what? It’s fine.
BASHIR: No, it’s not. I was being a wanker. It’s not appropriate. I saw the numbers dropping. I was getting greedy.
(Beat)
“The greedy man is like the silkworm: the more it wraps itself in its cocoon, the less chance it has of escaping.”
NICK: What’s that?
BASHIR: The Prophet Muhammad. Peace be upon him.
NICK: Like I said, pigs get slaughtered.
BASHIR: Not in Pakistan, mate.
(Lying down)
You’re right about making money. It really is a bit like being banjo’d, innit?
NICK: Banjo’d?
BASHIR: You know. Leathered. Ripped. Arsed. Drunk.
NICK: You drink?
BASHIR: Did all that. Back home. Growing up. Don’t touch the stuff now, of course.
NICK: Right.
(Beat)<
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Um—Bashir, you know, I don’t have a lot of things of my own at this point and… well… do you mind letting me have my own bed…?
BASHIR (Realizing): Right.
NICK: Thanks.
Bashir gets up. And goes to the table. Where he sits.
BASHIR: You sleeping okay on that thing?
NICK: Fine.
BASHIR: Maybe we should get you another one.
NICK: I’m fine, Bashir.
BASHIR: Something more comfy.
NICK: I’m used to it now. I like it.
Bashir nods.
Silence.
BASHIR: I know you don’t get it, but sometimes the revolution is violent. And sometimes the peace can only come after the violence.
Beat.
Nicks nods. Not affirming. Not denying.
Another long pause.
BASHIR (CONT’D): I know what you’re going through.
NICK: What’s that?
BASHIR: Last year, my mum died. Back in London. We’d been out of touch. Seven years. My father wouldn’t let her speak to me. He didn’t understand what I was doing. Couldn’t understand. All he cared about when I was growing up? Asking after my love life, chuffed to bits anytime he got wind of something going on with a white girl. He’s a dirty old geezer and he treated my mum like shit, but she listened to him…
A woman deserves better.
NICK: I agree.
BASHIR: Innit?
NICK: Absolutely.
Lights Out.
Act One: Scene Seven
Night.
Nick is alone.
He stands on the chair, looking out the window. Taking in a scene we cannot see.
Yapping dogs in the distance.
After a long beat, he quietly steps off the chair and returns it to the table. Pulls the cot out quietly and resumes the work of digging discreetly at the wall with the nail cutter…
Lights Out.
Act One: Scene Eight
The following day.
The same room.
Bashir and Nick. At the tables. Nick explaining. Bashir listening and responding. Laptop open before him.
NICK: The most important thing about money, Bashir, is that people don’t like losing it. People, companies, governments. So they’re always looking for safe places to put it. For seventy years, the safest place has been the U.S. dollar.
BASHIR: Seventy years?
NICK: Yeah, since the Second World War. Europeans destroyed each other, destabilized the world economy. America had to step in.
BASHIR: How’d it do that?
NICK: Most of the world’s currency rates were a mess. So the decision was made to get everyone back on gold.
To stabilize things. But that only worked if someone could guarantee the price of gold. Which the U.S. came in and did, at thirty-five dollars an ounce. If France wanted money for their gold? They came to America. Germany, England? Same thing.
BASHIR: Right.
NICK: We guaranteed that price for nearly thirty years. Effectively becoming the world’s bank.
BASHIR: Brilliant.
NICK: It was called the Bretton Woods system.
BASHIR: The what system?
NICK: Bretton Woods. It’s the town in New Hampshire where they came up with this idea. I wrote my senior thesis on it in college.
(Beat)
There’s a reason I keep telling you to change your personal savings to dollars.
BASHIR: Driving me nuts with that.
NICK: Yeah? Well, people in Iran who started buying dollars? Just two years ago? Have doubled their money against their own currency.
BASHIR: Right.
Silence.
Bashir gets up.
Nick turns his attention to some statements on the table.
Beat.
Bashir stands at the window, listening. The by now familiar distant buzzing of flying drones.
And then, ever so faintly—beneath the buzzing—what could be an explosion.
BASHIR (CONT’D): You hear that?
NICK: What?
BASHIR: Listen.
More buzzing. And another distant explosion.
NICK: Yeah.
BASHIR: Drone attack.
NICK: How far is that?
BASHIR: Other side of the river. Ever since Lashkar hit Bilal Ansoor, they’ve been feeling the pain.
(Pause, turning back to Nick)
So I’ve been wondering…
NICK: Yeah…
BASHIR: If people have it in their interest for a stock to go down, can’t they just do stuff to make it go down?
NICK: Theoretically, yes. But the market is huge. A single player can’t usually affect—
BASHIR: What’s to stop them from getting together and making the price drop?
NICK: I mean, look. When I was working at a hedge fund, we’d leak word about a stock, sow a rumor, or buy a huge position just to get the market to move.
BASHIR: That’s what I’m talking about.
NICK: Right. But it’s a short window. The market catches on. So you can do that. And banks on Wall Street do…
BASHIR: It’s what you did with Bilal Ansoor.
NICK: Well…
BASHIR: I mean, isn’t it?
NICK: I didn’t kill him.
BASHIR: I’m just saying: You had the information.
NICK: Fine. But see how short that window was? It was just a few minutes before the market started correcting by itself.
(Beat)
At the end of the day, everybody’s self-interest works as a check against everyone else’s. Shorts keep longs honest. Vice versa. That’s what they call the invisible hand.
BASHIR: The what?
NICK: The free market is guided by the confluence and conflict of everyone’s self-interest, like an invisible hand moving the market…
BASHIR: Hmm…
Bashir turns his attention back out the window. As Nick turns back to the statements.…
NICK: Wait. Is this right? Are we missing…
(Searching more papers)
Are we missing money…?
BASHIR: Did that go through?
NICK: Did what go through?
BASHIR: Expenses.
NICK: Expenses?
I need that money to trade. That’s the capital base. You people can’t—
BASHIR: It’s not you people. It’s Imam Saleem. He needed it.
NICK: For what?
BASHIR: Vaccines. A stolen shipment from one of those pharmaceutical companies. He was gonna buy it. One hundred fifty thousand dollars is a small price to pay.
NICK: There’s four hundred thousand missing. Not a hundred fifty.
BASHIR: What?
(Going over to check)
He said it would be a hundred fifty.
NICK: That’s what they all say.
BASHIR: What are you talking about?
NICK: Wake up.
BASHIR: I’m sure there’s a reason it was more.
NICK: The reason’s as old as the fucking hills…
BASHIR: Four hundred thousand…
NICK: The money is actually worth more than that. The purchasing power. The trading power that it gives us. You need to talk to him about this.
BASHIR: He thinks I’m getting chummy with you.
Beat.
NICK: Yeah. Well. Whatever.
(Beat, exasperated)
Fucking ridiculous.
BASHIR: Stop being such a bitch.
NICK: I’m the bitch?
BASHIR: Little fucking whining bitch.
NICK: I’m the one bitching and moaning twenty-four/seven about how everybody looks down on me, and everyone thinks they’re so much better than me… and the whole load of whiny crap coming out of you and your fucking imam? Who probably didn’t even buy any fucking vaccines.
BASHIR: Fuck you.
NICK: No. Fuck you. And fuck your sleazebag Saleem.
BASHIR: Is that right?
NICK: That’s right.
BASHIR: You forget where you are, Mr. Bigshot?
NICK: No, I didn’t fucking forget! I didn’t forget my wife. Or my three-year-old son. Or some stupid idea I had to make you fuckers money to save my life. My wife’s hair is probably falling out of her fucking head right now. Kaden? He has no idea what’s going on. And I have no idea what Julie is telling him. But whatever she’s saying? I know he knows something’s wrong. And he’s goddamn right there is.