The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  THE

  DISMAL

  SCIENCE

  Copyright © 2014 Peter Mountford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books,

  2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St.,

  Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mountford, Peter, 1976-

  The dismal science : a novel / Peter Mountford.—First U.S. edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-935639-73-2 (ebook)

  1.World Bank—Employees—Fiction. 2.Middle-aged men—Fiction. 3.Widowers—Fiction. 4.Economists—Fiction. 5.Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 6.Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. 7.Washington Metropolitan Area—Fiction. 8.Psychological fiction.I. Title.

  PS3613.O865D57 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2013026627

  First U.S. edition 2014

  Interior design by Diane Chonette

  www.tinhouse.com

  For my father

  CONTENTS

  1. MEETINGS

  2. COMMUTER

  3. OFF TO BATTLE

  4. KAMIKAZE

  5. SCANDAL

  6. MENDING FENCES

  7. PENDULUM

  8. FINALE

  9. BEN

  10. THE WORLD’S GREATEST FATHER

  11. BOLIVIA

  12. PHANTOMS

  13. LOVE IS A CHOICE

  14. SPEECH

  15. THE PURGE

  16. FINAL DISPATCHES FROM THE OUTER EDGE OF LIMBO

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities.

  —T. S. ELIOT, “Gerontion”

  1

  MEETINGS

  The annual meetings had become a kind of rowdy reunion, bearing, increasingly, the muffled bonhomie of a great funeral. At the Omni’s and the Sheraton’s dueling bars, dignitaries—old friends and colleagues and rivals who’d been driven apart and together by the conflicting currents of their careers—gathered over strong drink and weak gossip. For most, the old ambition that had brought them together was now largely vacuumed away. Vincenzo planted himself at the Sheraton’s superior bar, occasionally reading briefs in the comfortable chairs of the adjacent lobby, but otherwise holding to a tight orbit. There were fewer bilaterals this year, or at least he wasn’t required to go to as many. The young attendees still passed around their business cards, as if there was some angle to be had, as if someone would remember in a week, as if it meant anything to be remembered.

  This being 2005, it wasn’t lost on them that there hadn’t been a major economic catastrophe in five years. Except for Argentina, and that didn’t count, because their central bank was just too inept for words. So maybe everyone was starting to feel like they’d gotten it right after all. The medicine was taking. It was terrible about Iraq and Afghanistan and a lot of other things in the world were terrible, too, but really, it could’ve been so much worse. And so the proceedings seemed lifted by a calm buoyancy that had been absent before, especially during the troubled nineties when there began to be a lot of talk about hegemony, a word that hadn’t really seemed to exist before, but suddenly became so ubiquitous as to be immediately exhausting. Everything had been fraught in the international aid community then—crises came huge and frequent, each more terrifying than the last. Executives sharing elevators would exchange wide-eyed looks, shaking their heads, quietly pining for a return to the relative sanity of the Cold War.

  With this new calm, Vincenzo knew it was all the more important to remain vigilant. There was always, anyway, a lurking danger to DC’s autumn months. The city’s summer torpor lifted unevenly, erratically—especially for Vincenzo, from Milan, where the weather wasn’t so dramatic. DC in fall was unpredictable in the same way that driving at dusk can be more dangerous than driving at night, because at least at night you know that you can’t see, but at dusk the light is sneaking away and there are no headlights, no streetlights, nothing but long shadows and seductive gilded light streaming in from the horizon. In the fall, you’d leave your house in a winter coat, scarf, and gloves, scrape ice off the windshield, but by lunchtime you’d be rolling up your sleeves, turning up the air-conditioning. Everything was upside down. This was prime season for losing winter apparel—gloves left on a bar (after all, it felt like Caracas outside!).

  The meetings were in late September, the most inconsistent month, when the trees in Rock Creek Park were still shrouded like attic furniture under blankets of vines. Once that bite came in, you knew the howling bugs in the trees were not long for this world, nor were the vines. Soon, the trees would be stripped bare and freezing rain would claw the heaps of soggy debris, decomposing into mud, down into storm drains, flush it all out into the Potomac.

  Even with the chaos of September in the air, the meetings were fine. Everyone was fine. What else was there to say, after all? In Latin America, things were going well, more or less. The Bank’s programs, in particular—Vincenzo deserved zero credit for it, truly—were going swimmingly. No one really deserved credit. Politics had matured, capitalism was working. Stability had taken hold and the emerging markets were now actually emerging.

  “It’s almost on autopilot,” he said to halfhearted chuckles from the crowd.

  His panel was in one of the larger halls in the basement of the Omni. Although it was in a way the more stately hotel, the Omni always felt a bit bereft by comparison to the hullabaloo up in the Sheraton; it was kind of slouching into the valley of Rock Creek Park. The chairs had been mostly empty when he convened the talk, but he’d been pleased to see people filing in over the first half hour. And then, during the Q&A portion, he glanced at the clock and saw that there were eight minutes left, and what had been said? Nothing. Nothing much was ever said, but they had really said nothing this time. People were listing drowsily in their chairs, glancing at their phones; at least one of the reporters up front was doodling in her steno. She was attractive, or maybe not. She was young and healthy, and that was attractive. And his recognition of the predictability of his anguish at her boredom was almost as painful as his anguish at her boredom itself. Could it be so ghastly and predictable? Yes, it could.

  Afterward, he and his copanelists had a half-hour break before they were to reconvene in a boardroom upstairs for an hour-long closed-door session with delegates from the major Latin American economies, namely Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Brazil, who all wanted to explore their evolving relationship with the wealthy countries that had for so many decades been either—depending on whom you asked—bailing them out of bad situations they got themselves into, or shoving them into bad situations and then charging them for a bailout. In any case, these countries were seeming less feeble by the day. Something had shifted underneath everyone’s feet. It was time to have a frank conversation.

  Vincenzo was leaving the first meeting when Cynthia, whom he hadn’t seen in a decade, approached with that mischievous squinting grin. Maybe as an adolescent she had been embarrassed by her teeth, which were in fact a little crooked, but she always hid them with her lips. She’d left the World Bank for some forgettable leadership role at Inter-American Development Bank years ago. Now here she was, edging toward him with that self-conscious smirk, saying, “Oh my God, he’s alive!”
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  Setting his briefcase down on the chair, he grabbed her by both shoulders and kissed her on her cheeks and then held her back, like a child he was appraising. “How the hell are you?” he said, and they hugged.

  “I hate being back here,” she said into his shoulder. “I can’t walk ten feet without running into horrible old ghouls like you.”

  He grinned and they separated. “But you live here, right?”

  “God no, I slid over to the UNDP and they put me in Brazil, hence—” and she waved vaguely at the room. The new job was, strictly speaking, a step down from the old one, which was probably why she hadn’t broadcast the move. She’d gone meaty and middle-aged. A sexless pall had fallen over her, as it did most of them, as it had, no doubt, him. Back when they were sleeping together, when she was on mission in Peru, she had an impressive body for a mother of three in her forties, and her aura was distinctly sensual. She radiated low-frequency sexual enticement. Something in the body language, the way she sat down so slowly, how long she held your hand during a handshake, the overdetermined eye contact. Even her coy grin seemed dangerous. You just knew she was a pervert. Now she was—what?—probably in her late fifties. More battle horse than colt. That radiant carnality had dimmed. Or maybe it was still there, and his sensing mechanism was damaged. Worse still, maybe she just didn’t turn the signal on for him anymore.

  “Look, we should have a drink,” he said. “I have another meeting.” The last of the others were filing out of the room now.

  “I’m going to be at that meeting.”

  “Oh—the one upstairs?”

  “Yes. We’ll go to the bar up at the Sheraton afterward?” she said.

  He nodded.

  She smiled a little, and then said, “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, don’t think that.”

  He snorted. And then he slowly drew a deep breath, shook his head, looked away.

  Since he didn’t deny it, she said, “Do you still want to have that drink?”

  He paused for effect, looked her in the eye, and said, as unconvincingly as possible, “Of course I do.”

  She chuckled humorlessly, no doubt weary of men like him.

  It was only once they were in the elevator going up that it dawned on him that this wasn’t really a coincidence. She didn’t really have a reason to be at either meeting. No, she was angling for something. Maybe a job.

  They were not alone in the elevator, but he could smell Cynthia’s perfume, too sweet, too conspicuous. So much honeysuckle; it brought back a sour stain of guilt, all the worse now that he’d lost the reason for that guilt.

  Perhaps sensing where his mind was heading, she said, “How’s your kid?”

  He squinted at her. This not mentioning his wife—he didn’t quite know what to make of it. Maybe she hadn’t heard? Probably she had. Either way, he wouldn’t bring it up. “She finished college and is in New York.”

  Cynthia nodded.

  “A waitress. Tattoos.”

  She smiled in the repressed way that people do in crowded elevators, in the way she always did.

  “Your husband?” he said.

  “Fine,” she said. “Great.”

  He nodded. But she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. There wasn’t even a tan line.

  The problem was that Peru shouldn’t have been invited to the closed-door meeting. Peru’s development was still too gestational. As if to underscore this, their delegate was dour in a shapeless sports jacket and khakis, while everyone else in the room wore suits. But this was the era of inclusion, apparently. Eastern European countries were tumbling into the EU and the field was everywhere more open, more noisy and confusing.

  Not long after they had settled in, the Peruvian delegate set forth with a question, a statement really, about the Bank’s commitment to global emissions reductions. The question was odd and awkward for a variety of reasons, not least that a Peruvian delegate would take up this non-Peruvian issue so publicly.

  Here it was, naked and crazed, the hobgoblin of their era: fairness. A muddleheaded man, the delegate also produced a subordinate question about the long-term viability of the petroleum-based successes, which could seem like a weird dig at Brazil. Or maybe he was parroting Ecuador’s recent noise about the Yasuni-ITT initiative. Of course, he just wanted to show that he was formidable, but he came off as far too confrontational and obsessed with the hegemon. Anyway, he was on the wrong subject.

  Pablo Rendón, deputy director of the environment directorate at the IADB, and an old friend of Vincenzo’s, had talked about the environmental policy downstairs. Pablo had said what was to be said, really. They were forging ahead despite the maddening intransigence—Pablo had put it more politely—of the USA. Bush had just made it clear that they wouldn’t sign on to Kyoto, and that was the end of that.

  But the question was out now—he’d gone bold and there weren’t many people in the room, so they had to dignify it with a proper response.

  “Look,” Vincenzo said, “I appreciate what you’re saying, but the point remains that the growth is real.” Cynthia had sat away from the table, at the back, against the wall, and Vincenzo was distinctly aware of her presence. “Oil or no oil,” he went on, “those countries are buying time to develop a more sophisticated economy, and they’re using that time well. That’s my impression. Peru, also, your GDP comes from minerals, so it’s—”

  “But I’m talking about values, sir,” the man said.

  “Values?” Vincenzo shrugged, as if amused, and scanned the room incredulously, but no one met his gaze. Many of them also looked bemused, even Cynthia. Pablo, an Argentinean who adored Scottish whisky—and was visibly hungover—rolled his eyes and glanced out the window. The conference room was on the fourth floor; the floor-to-ceiling windows faced Rock Creek Park, the sloping grass and the twisting roads, the tall trees, the band of forest snaking through the city. Far on the other side, toward Dupont, Art Deco apartments stood stately on the rim of the vale. It was hard not to stare out the window. Noted for his pretty ice-blue eyes, Pablo was dull, had the suspicious languor of a lizard captured at midnight in the desert. Vincenzo waited another moment, hoping he’d wake up enough to put the delegate in his place, but apparently he’d already spent all his energy that morning.

  So it fell to Vincenzo:

  “Mister,” he said, “the question is vague and we have a lot of business ahead, so I don’t know why or how we would start—”

  “I’m concerned about the indigenous communities in the Amazon basin.”

  “Because they have money now?” Vincenzo said. “That’s what’s destroying them? They have medicine and education and—”

  “Have you even met these people?”

  “No, why would I? I’m not a politician. I don’t shake hands with people who work on oil rigs in the jungle. I’m not the pope or something.”

  People chuckled a little, but Vincenzo didn’t like his own tone, didn’t care for his own line of argument. It was true, and it wasn’t true. A more important question was why the US delegates were more or less denying climate change and refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or contribute to the process. There were other valuable questions, too, about carbon swaps and so on.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Cynthia pick up her phone and start typing. Collecting himself, he went on: “These people in this forest, they want to be part of modern society to some extent. I know because they are showing up for work at these oil-drilling platforms. But you here, in this room”—he gestured at the glinting chandelier above—“you are going to decide that they should remain in loincloths eating rodents and dying of the common flu?”

  “You’re making a decision, too,” the man pressed, “deciding that taking them from their community and putting them on oil rigs—you’re saying this is good.”

  Vincenzo groaned. “Let’s just—I know you haven’t been in these meetings before, so maybe you can just let things transpire naturally.” Again, he hated his own tone. He knew his cond
escending lines would be echoing in his head for days. “We should talk about this, but it’s too complicated for today’s meeting.”

  The man glared at Vincenzo. And still no one came to Vincenzo’s defense. No one said anything. What were they afraid of? Cynthia was still typing on her phone. So, with a rising voice, he said, “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation now, instead of the meeting we planned, but if we must! Let me see—history!

  “For many thousands of years, the world has been moving from being a barbaric and brutal place filled with people who roam the woods with blades and clubs, to a place where people pull four-course meals from their freezer and zap them in a microwave. Is this sad? Yes, it is sad. It is tragic! Really! We have lost our souls, and I believe this. Is it beautiful, too? Yes, it is beautiful. Babies don’t die from simple illnesses, and that is good. We can talk face-to-face to people on the other side of the planet, we can fly from here to Europe in half a day. We live in a time of miracles. So these people in the Amazon are going to do horrible work for Exxon for a generation or two. They might ruin that part of the jungle. Yes. They might be miserable. Yes. But they might not be miserable, too. It doesn’t matter. And yes, it does matter. We lose and we win. I don’t know what’s right, but, uh”—he looked at Cynthia, who had put down her phone, was biting back a grin.

  “Look,” he said, “this is capitalism. We happen to think it works. We might be wrong, but we think it is the best option available, and that’s why we are here. We have hope that this will work out.”

  He looked around the room, and there it was: life. People were awake! Not just Cynthia, but the rest, too—everyone was sitting up a bit straighter. For the first time all day, the first time all week, they were listening; even Pablo seemed to have been roused. Not that it mattered, really, it was just a bit of throat-clearing before the real meeting began, but still: here they were, all awake together for one wonderful moment in that gleaming conference room.