The Dismal Science

by Peter Mountford

  Visiting her that weekend, Vincenzo asked if she had realized that Lee had died—this happened a year after her mother died—and she nodded sleepily, staring at her thighs. She was in her bed, her prosthesis leaning against the bedside table. Her eyes were still puffy and red and she looked battered, far older than her real age. She had another month or two of shock and horror left before this, too, became another large piece of trauma lodged into her soul. She was expert enough at the process to know how it worked. Vincenzo didn’t say it, because it’s not the kind of thing one says to another person, but he was sure this, too, was for the best, somehow.

  Looking at her in her dorm room that night and listening to her talk dreamily about what it was like to sit there on those damp leaves, staring up at the full moon and smelling the gasoline . . . and as she spoke, he knew for the first time with absolute certainty that she was already a better person—in every sense—than he, better than he’d ever been, better than he’d ever be.

  The following day, at three in the afternoon, nauseated and nearly feverish with some bubbling subterranean terror—a supercharged stage fright or stage fright plus another less definable, but still knife-sharp, queasiness—Vincenzo donned a crisp white shirt, dark-blue suit, and dark tie. In the mirror, he saw an aging man dressed for a funeral. He brushed his teeth (again) and urinated (again)—he’d been drinking coca tea all day long, hoping it would set him straight. It had not. His stomach was tangled, cinched, and saturated with acids. Walter, this working Walter, voracious consumer of facts, had spent the day doing interviews and had called to say he was back at his hotel now, filing a preliminary article. Vincenzo wasn’t sure he wanted to see him.

  Against his better judgment, Vincenzo went down to the hotel bar and ordered a whisky, which he hoped would dim his fear and therefore silence the roiling in his belly. Instead, the first sip was a knife twisting in his stomach. But he kept drinking anyway. From his perch at the hotel bar’s corner, the doppelgänger was nowhere to be seen. This was for the best. She was not a calming presence.

  Last night, Vincenzo had hastily typed up and printed out a draft of something that approximated a speech, but it was too short and too hazily conceived to be an actual speech; it was rambling and aggressively banal, violently bereft of character. He had two hours before Lenka was going to pick him up. He drained the rest of his whisky and was about to beckon the bill and head upstairs to reread the speech and pace for a while more when a supple-voiced man said, “Can I sit?”

  Vincenzo turned and saw Ben motioning at the chair beside him. Groaning, he glanced around the room—no one he recognized. He drew a deep breath, and then nodded. Exhaling slowly, he turned to the bartender and gestured for another whisky.

  “You ready for your big night?” Ben said. He was wearing loafers, the kind of boat shoes that the blond boys prowling Georgetown wore in the summer.

  Vincenzo shrugged, shook his head.

  “Was it hard to write the speech?”

  Vincenzo sighed again, not looking at Ben. He rubbed his eyes. Maybe he had the mortar of the speech, but he had not discovered any bricks, yet—or probably it was the other way around and he had the bricks, but nothing to bind them. In any case, time was up, and he had built nothing—time was up and he was drinking whisky, talking to this monster.

  “Well, you’ll figure something out,” Ben said.

  Vincenzo snorted. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Am I unusual?”

  Ben peered at him uncertainly.

  “Of the people you visit, am I different from the others?” he said.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Ben said, catching his meaning and slapping his back like they were old chums. “Everyone’s different from everyone, and you’re no exception!” He chuckled. What immaculate teeth! They were gorgeous.

  Vincenzo waited for him to settle back down, and then said, “And do you enjoy it?”

  “Enjoy it? I love it! What’s there not to like?” Ben gestured at Vincenzo and then he gestured at the hotel and he continued with the gesture, as if to include elsewhere, nowhere, everywhere, as if to say, Look at this world we walk upon, look at the majesty of it—what else could a person hope for!

  Vincenzo declined the opportunity to give a pithy answer. Instead he held Ben firm with his gaze. Maybe this was the purpose of Ben’s trip, right here. His whole trip to Bolivia was so that he could sit there, a gleaming enigma, charmingly menacing, beside Vincenzo in the moments before Vincenzo gave his speech. Maybe it was just a lot of intimidation and no matter what he said this would be the last time he saw Ben. On the other hand, maybe Ben would go upstairs and inject a lethal dose of radioactive isotopes into Vincenzo’s tube of toothpaste while Vincenzo was away delivering his speech.

  Sensing this was his time, his only opportunity, he said: “Will I die unexpectedly, some unforeseen heart condition, if I get up there and fan the flames of this anti-American thing—this, what is it? A shoving war from the south?”

  Ben rolled his eyes and smirked. But there it was, this little false note. Something in the flawless smile. The artifice was too much. Ben’s every movement felt a little overly studied, the opposite of effortless. Ben said, “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Vincenzo—we don’t care about this that much.” And he kept shaking his head, making skeptical faces, like some cut-rate actor, but it was all too deliberate, too forced, and so much less terrifying as a result.

  “You’re going to secure me a job at Lehman?” Vincenzo said. This hadn’t seemed terribly plausible before and now seemed even less so. Vincenzo knew the kinds of people who ran places like Lehman, and they didn’t take orders from junior CIA operatives in comfortable footwear, even if those operatives could magically insinuate themselves into their offices. It was too conspicuous. If Lehman hired every aging economist whom the State Department wanted to shut up, their upper-middle management would be overrun with uncooperative bureaucrats.

  “Lehman is possible. And I know you’re interested in Tellus, too—we can set that up. I understand that the Project for the New American Century is also interested in you, but I don’t think they’ve contacted you yet. If you conduct yourself respectfully, the world can be pried open for you.”

  Puffing out his cheeks, Vincenzo squinted as if contemplating this. But the answer, as with everything, was more complicated. In the Latin Bible of his youth, it was written, lectio difficilior potior: the more difficult reading is the stronger. Yes, maybe Ben could carve a swath through a crowd of powerful white people, but he was only as dangerous as his job allowed him to be. And this man, with his iridescent teeth and gloomy shoes, his sensible no-wrinkle shirt, this man was no killer, he was one step away from running the fax machine. If this were a convention, he’d be passing out business cards, looking for an angle. And twenty-five years hence, he’d be just another exhausted, well-traveled bureaucrat in the upper management of some organization or other. Vincenzo would bet his life on it. Since he had to decide how to treat this, had to decide right now, that was his decision. He bet his life on it.

  Standing abruptly, he drained his whisky, winced as it landed like fuel on the conflagration in his stomach. Then, gritting his teeth at the pain, he patted Ben on the shoulder, saying, “I’ll see you later.” And with that he walked back in the direction of the elevators, feeling those eyes on him, but never once hesitating, never once looking back.

  In Greek, Thanatos was a minor deity who embodied death itself. Son of Nyx (night) and Erebos (darkness), he was a taker of souls, and a prototype of Lucifer. He dwelled in the underworld. While he lurked mainly in the background of Greek myth, usually in the company of his twin, the god of sleep, his presence—and relevance—has endured through history.

  Later, the Romans depicted him as a benevolent winged child, not unlike Cupid, who would swoop in to usher people to peaceful deaths. This temporary gilding of his reputation did not last, however.

  To Freudians, Thanatos was th
e opposite of Eros. And, although Freud himself never used the word “Thanatos,” he identified its future concept concisely when he described “a diversion inwards of aggressiveness.” Later, Freud amended his assessment and came to see that the aggression in question was more often directed outward, pointed out at the world.

  From the same root we get “thanatology,” the academic study of death among human beings. We also get the word “euthanasia,” for when a person, recognizing that their life has run its course, embraces death gladly.

  Vincenzo held Lenka’s arm—she was dressed in a limoncellocolored suit, her hair up, her mouth crimson. A guard waved them inside the National Museum, which was composed of several interconnected colonial mansions and whose interior, as a result, was a tight, complicated series of rooms and hallways and antechambers and balconies that overlooked little patios. There were no windows facing out onto the street where the natives would have been. The museum organizers had roughly divided the maze into two sections, the modern and the ancient. The architecture was decidedly Spanish and most of the old art was poorly executed religious iconography. Crude and overly colorful images of a ghostly pale Christ looking down from the cross, dripping crimson from the gash at his side, or his emaciated corpse cradled by voluptuous maidens. Vincenzo caught glimpses of the art as Lenka swept him through the hallways and rooms, all filled with people—there were hundreds of people there. Vincenzo was aware, partially, that some of them were staring at him, but Lenka marched him right along to a small room, a claustrophobia-inducing windowless greenroom, in the modern wing.

  Tiny humitas filled a platter on a small vestibule. There was a bottle of Bolivian red wine, two bottles of water. A paint-spattered cassette player.

  Lenka was harried, had been so since she picked him up. Coordinating such an event was presumably not easy, and she was, after all, new at this. “Do you need anything?” she said.

  She was ravishing in her suit and he could barely suppress the desire to kiss her, although she had done such a splendid and diplomatically tactful job of deflecting his overture the previous day. “I—want to thank you for everything,” he said.

  “No, thank you,” she said. She nodded. She was in a hurry to leave and tend to business. “You wait here for ten minutes, and I’ll come get you when Evo arrives.”

  “Yes,” he said, and then grabbed her hand and pulled her close. He kissed her on the mouth, cupping the back of her head with his hand, her silken hair spilling between his fingers. For a brief moment, a glorious sliver of limbo, the two kissed and he felt no judgment one way or another—no victory and no defeat. He laid his hand on her hip, lightly. She pulled out of the kiss, wiped her mouth, and glanced around the room, as if looking for something. Then she took her lipstick out of her bag and a small handheld mirror, and he watched her reapply it.

  The spell was only half broken, and he didn’t want to do any more damage, so he said nothing. Once she was done she looked at him, amused, warmly even, approvingly even, and shook her head. “You are a crazy person,” she said. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek and left.

  He glanced down at the pages of his speech again, sensing that perhaps it might not sit well with her as it was. It was beyond noncommittal. It was committed to an extended stay in limbo. Maybe Walter was right and Vincenzo needed to stake his flag somewhere, anywhere—and maybe he would come down with Evo and the leftists who adored him? He could tilt the speech in that direction. Picking up the pages, he scanned for a place where he could skew the rhetoric, where he could declare a kind of allegiance to Evo. Did that necessitate him renouncing his work at the Bank, though? This question protruded, because he was not prepared to do that. He found a place in the speech where he could digress about Evo’s finer qualities. Pulling a pen from his pocket, he marked it with an arrow. In the margin, he wrote:

  TALK ABOUT HOW EVO IS SUPERB HERE. ALSO MAYBE TALK ABOUT HOW THE BANK SHOULD BE BETTER.

  An extended round of roaring applause outside signaled that Evo had entered the building. Vincenzo waited, feeling his blood pressure spike at the impending moment. Finally, the door opened, but it wasn’t Lenka; it was someone in a sport jacket, a man.

  “Señor D’Orsi,” he said. He was overweight, bald.

  “Sí,” Vincenzo said, wishing that he were better prepared for this, wishing he had found time to get this right, and wishing, moreover, that life didn’t happen so goddamn fast—wishing it didn’t come at you like so many flying daggers.

  “Por favor, venga conmigo,” the man said and Vincenzo did as he was told, following him out into a packed atrium. He spotted Lenka there amid the throng; she was dispatching orders to an underling, she was in charge, formidable. Seeing him, she waved the overweight man away and, taking Vincenzo by the arm, marched him through the crowd. People stared at them, but she parted them assertively and impatiently. Glancing around, he noticed huge translucent rectangles were dangling from cables and within each rectangle sat an array of bills, no doubt Bolivia’s abandoned currencies. Each phase of currency representing a new fantasy of stability, each an imagined prosperity that eventually died. There were more bills mounted on the walls.

  Lenka brought him into a long, narrow room, which was to serve as their makeshift auditorium. Evo Morales stood at the back, grinning and talking with Walter, who was tilted predatorily at him, grinning maniacally.

  They all took their seats and the museum’s director, whose voice was radio-ready, spoke briefly about Evo and the art on display, about the country’s rich history of rebellion. He mentioned the exhibition of money too—“A display that was developed with the help of the World Bank and IMF”—at which the crowd laughed raucously. Vincenzo smiled obligingly. A photographer snapped his picture.

  Then the director turned his attention to introducing Evo, lavishing him with praise, going so far as to say he was “the most important and exciting leader this country has had since its independence.” Vincenzo wondered if that was true. And, if it was true, he wondered if what he had done was more important than even he understood. History would render its verdict sooner or later, of course, and then his kamikaze could be reassessed.

  Evo kept his remarks brief, talking about his gratitude toward Vincenzo for standing up to the imperialist forces of his former employers, for sacrificing himself at their hands. Echoing—deliberately, perhaps—Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you” speech, he said that such selflessness was imperative for the Bolivian people, moving forward, as they were facing dire poverty, and only through personal sacrifice could they lift the country.

  Evo concluded by thanking Vincenzo for “championing this little country. For too long we have been food for the globalization animal.” Finally, he beckoned Vincenzo to the stage.

  In his best Spanish, Vincenzo said, “Thank you, Presidentelect Morales, for inviting me to Bolivia. I have never been before, but I have found the country very beautiful; the people are some of the most lovely people I know. Modest and proud—nothing like us Italians.” A smattering of laughter filled the ensuing pause. The lights were bright and shined directly into Vincenzo’s eyes when he looked up at the crowd, so he could not see much. Lenka and Walter were off to his left, he knew; Evo was off to his right, at the front. He could see the silhouette of Evo’s distinctive head, but little else was clear to him.

  Against his better judgment, he decided not to switch to English and, casting his eyes down at the page, he did his best to translate the speech into Spanish, saying: “I worked at the World Bank for a long time, since I was in my twenties, and I enjoyed the work. When I was hired, Robert McNamara was in charge and the World Bank was a different institution. We were smaller, for one thing. But, ahm—” Vincenzo hesitated, as if he’d lost his place. He read on, though there was nothing appealing ahead and now that he was getting the temperature of the room, the antiestablishment tone of the night, he could tell his rote talk about his career at the Bank wasn’t going to work, so briefly switching to Eng
lish, he said, “I’m going to skip ahead.” He flipped to the next page of notes.

  Then, thinking better of trying to do an impromptu translation of his speech, he said, “I will read the rest in English, if that’s okay.”

  The crowd was painfully silent.

  “It’s, um—fine, here: the World Bank was conceived in 1944 by the Allies, because they needed—” He paused again because this was not of any use, either.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Sorry,” he said. He skipped ahead, and read, “The future of the Bank is—” But he gave up right there, blushing, as this travesty came into focus—and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t read this.”

  The crowd chuckled uncomfortably. There was some scattered applause. Vincenzo didn’t talk for a while—he wasn’t sure what he might say. He should praise Evo, he knew. He was supposed to align himself with the liberals in the room; or, that had been the plan, such as it was.

  He wiped more sweat from his forehead and said, “I quit the World Bank because I hated what had become of my life while I worked there.” This was true. “It wasn’t the job, actually.” This, too, was true. The truth was, if not liberating, simpler than trying to concoct some other tilt, some advantageous hue, so he relinquished himself to the truth. After all, he was starting to suppose it was all a wash in the end anyway. And, continuing, he said, “I know that this won’t be a popular thing for me to say here, but I think that the World Bank is a good institution. It’s more useful than NATO, probably. Everyone who works there, including the president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, whom I and many of my colleagues expected to hate, means well. Believe it or not, Paul is a good person. And he is a smart person, and he cares about the world more than most people. He works hard. He—well, I don’t know. All of my colleagues there worked hard. Me too. I did it for more than two decades.”