A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  "That last part will be conjecture."

  "I know, Gabriel, but you're not a journalist anymore, you're an analyst. Conjecture is a big part of your job." He heard her begin typing.

  He cleared his throat. "This could take a month. You want me in Bolivia for that long?"

  She stopped typing. "Yes. In Bolivia, if you fuck up, it won't hurt us. If you succeed, there might be some valuable upside, but that's not the point. The point is that you're flying a shitty worthless Cessna, not one of our gold-plated seven-forty-sevens."

  Charm was not among Priya's gifts. She was lean, like Fiona, and she too was ambitious and had a temperament of hammered iron. But the similarities ended there. Priya was from Bombay and had been in charge of emerging-markets equity for the Calloway Group for five years. She had studied at Oxford in the nineties and when she finished there had promptly been launched as a fund manager at Lehman, where her portfolio was the only one to turn a profit during the Asian crisis. A millionaire by twenty-eight, she could supposedly intuit peaks and troughs in the market as well as Warren Buffett could. Every day she spent an hour at the gym with her personal trainer, ate a great many vitamins, and drank two liters of green tea. She didn't touch alcohol or cigarettes. "I would like to outlive my own children," she'd said to a Financial Times reporter in an interview in 1997. But as it turned out, the conception, carrying, birthing, and rearing of children were not activities that interested her much.

  When he'd sat down with her for his interview at Calloway's office in Weehawken, she'd stared at him and said nothing. He held back too. He had already decided to say as little as possible. Better to lure her out. Oscar Velazquez—Calloway's analyst for the wealthier Latin American countries, and Gabriel's first interviewer—had said she was thirty-seven, which would make her ten years Gabriel's senior, but she looked like a child. Even in her austere gunmetal gray Helmut Lang suit she looked juvenile: the most solemn and ponderous adolescent on the planet, but an adolescent nonetheless.

  After a while, when Gabriel said nothing, she'd nodded once and said, "You would be Oscar's counterpart in the poorer countries. We like you because you're like Oscar: you know the places, you know people, you speak Spanish, and you even sort of look like a native." She enumerated his qualities very matter-of-factly, including the part about his ethnicity. "Since I came to Calloway," Priya said, "I have steered clear of what I call the cucarachas, those chronically dysfunctional Latin American countries like Guatemala, Panama, et cetera." She inhaled deeply, noisily, through her nose, exhaled slowly and quietly through her mouth. She said, "Our default position will continue to be zero involvement with them, but we need to pay attention, which is why we're creating this position. We can't afford to miss anything."

  "I understand," he said. He waited, but she didn't elaborate. She had the corner office, and the views across the Hudson to lower Manhattan were postcard-ready. She also had two large wide-screen LCD monitors mounted on the wall like art running a colorful array of stats from Bloomberg. But she never took her eyes off Gabriel, so he avoided looking at the views and tried instead to match her gaze. She did not seem a particularly mysterious person. She exhibited above all a surgical focus. So while she could address whatever problem sat directly in front of her, multitasking would be difficult, and this, he realized, was the source of her awkwardness, because conversations require a certain talent for juggling.

  Hedge funds had traditionally played the numbers from a safe distance, but they had also found that there were huge surprises occasionally, which was why it was theoretically worth it to Calloway to spend a few million in wages and travel expenses every year to have half a dozen analysts out in the world, keeping an eye on things. He waited for her to continue, but when she didn't say anything, he resuscitated the conversation. "So, I'll research the cucarachas?"

  "Yes," she said and picked up her line of thought. "Oscar has his hands full with Brazil, Argentina, and so on, so you'll baby-sit the basket cases. There's not much action there, but that's life. Meanwhile, I stay here and go over the numbers with our quant for Latin America, Paul. You should meet him, but I think he just went down to the pier. He goes there twice a day to do a thousand jumping jacks."

  Gabriel nodded. "A thousand jumping jacks?"

  "Yes, he's concerned about his heart. It's a sedentary life."

  "Right. Better safe than sorry."

  "Not really. Paul's an idiot." Her mouth twitched as if she was trying to smile, but her muscles couldn't manage it and instead made the gesture of someone who was famished and anticipating food. Gabriel bit his lower lip and laced his fingers together in his lap. He did not let his gaze wander, despite an overwhelming urge to look away. It had been sarcasm, of course. Paul was not an idiot. A quant's analytical powers were expected to be cripplingly powerful. It was one of the few jobs for which a dash of autism was considered a plus.

  Priya—who was, it seemed, something of a quant herself—straightened her back, sucked in her cheeks, twisted her head in one direction, then the other, and relaxed. She looked at Gabriel for a while, and when he didn't speak, she sighed as though already exasperated. "Listen," she said, "we like you because you seem kind of cunning, and, after reading your work, we think you might have a talent for reading people. Why do you want to work for us?"

  He did not have an answer ready. To buy time, he broke eye contact and looked across the river at lower Manhattan. They were still scooping out the ground down there, but everyone knew that no more bodies would be found; there was nothing left but a giant ragged hole. Gabriel looked back at her and, for lack of a better position, told the truth. He said, "I want to make a shitload of money for a while."

  She nodded, unsurprised. She seemed to want him to say more, so he added, "I'd like to retire at forty."

  "If you manage to keep your job, that shouldn't be a problem." She glanced at the Bloomberg screens and he thought she almost smiled. Then she looked back at him. "So where do you see Mexican interest rates in a year?"

  The millionaire thing hadn't interested Gabriel during high school, when his bright yellow Sony Walkman was full of punk rock, and it hadn't meant much to him when he was in college either, where he manned a soft-serve ice cream stand on campus for fifteen hours a week. It didn't really mean much then that he was broke, because everyone was broke. But five years of scraping by in New York City was another thing. Being young and well-educated and destitute in the city had a way of sharpening a person's desires. Demonstrations, overt and implied, of the advantages of having heaps of money were so common that they ceased to register. So the feeling of wanting matured until what had been straightforward professional ambition became tinged by a hint of avarice. Not that Gabriel was, or ever had been, a greedy person; but money, in general—the plain and unassailable acts of acquiring and spending it—had turned out to occupy a more important role in adulthood than he'd expected. The issue finally wasn't that he wanted to be rich, per se, but that he wanted to be done with so much wanting. It was a feedback loop, and the only way out was deeper in: he needed to have enough money to be done with the issue of money forever.

  And though he wished it weren't so, once certain college buddies started buying giant condos in the Meatpacking District and kicking up their midnight blue Prada sneakers on their burnished leather ottomans, he did feel a many-pronged discontent. The shame did not temper the envy; it just made it queasy. Of course, they were all privileged, spectacularly so, on the global level. But this was not a global situation. It was the United States, where he had been born and seemed likely to remain in the bland band of the upper-middle class.

  It wasn't lost on him that each one of his young and newly rich friends, all of whom had been dateless for years, was now constantly anchored to the lithe arm of a woman so beautiful that her beauty itself seemed monstrous. Those friends started to look different too. They wore pointy black shoes, sunglasses on cloudy days. At Sunday brunch, they ordered off the menu, made easy banter with the waiters, an
d were altogether more confident and self-assured than anyone their age had a right to be. It was as if some irksome and never fully identified existential question that still nagged the rest of them had been finally and completely resolved for those few.

  So there was, in the end, no question about whether Gabriel would take the job at Calloway. The question literally never presented itself to him. After Gabriel's interview with Priya, Oscar handed him a binder full of legal disclosures and recommended that he go through the paperwork with his lawyer before signing.

  Gabriel didn't have a lawyer and didn't want to hire one, couldn't really afford one. Anyway, he didn't want to hear about the fine print. So he signed and initialed the papers while sitting on the PATH train back to New York from Weehawken.

  The figure was $27,751.33, after tax. That was his first paycheck. It was for less than a full month of work, but it included a ten-thousand-dollar signing bonus. He had direct deposit, so the funds magically appeared in his checking account one morning. His future suddenly blasted out in front of him, as glorious and wide as the sea. That evening, after changing out of his suit, he went to the liquor store for a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and as he walked along Manhattan Avenue he felt something akin to vertigo. He was dizzy. It occurred to him that his mother, a prominent professor at Pomona College, made a little more than half as much as he.

  On his sofa that night, he drank the champagne from a coffee mug and watched Dateline.

  Later, flushed and tipsy, he picked up his laptop, logged on to his credit card account, and erased five years of debt. He watched Letterman for a while and then, during a commercial break, opened a brokerage account at E-Trade. He muted Letterman and began researching stocks. He stayed up for hours making notes, the TV flickering silently in front of him, behind his computer screen.

  Plaza Murillo was named for Pedro Murillo, a revolutionary who had been hanged there in 1810. Were it not for the presence of the stout in digenous women in their antiquated garb—shawls, petticoats, tunics, and felt bowler hats worn at an incongruous tilt—the city could have been Florence, and Gabriel on his way to a café behind the Duomo. But this was not Italy. There were beggars everywhere, and grubby shoe-shine boys zooted on shoe polish. A block from the square, Gabriel cut through an alley full of street vendors. A griller of meats stood beside his shabby old stove, burning homemade charcoal that emitted a noxious effluvia: motor oil and sour beef. As Gabriel entered the plaza, pigeons flapped aloft to get out of his way. The morning was chilly, despite the screaming sunlight. At twelve thousand feet, and a short distance from the equator, La Paz was as close to the sun as any place on the planet. With a full mile less atmosphere to filter it, the light looked young, naked; it felt different too. It prickled. It was as if each individual photon were a teeny arrow, and there were billions of them raining down on him.

  The congress was on the far side of the plaza, catty-corner to the presidential palace, known as Palacio Quemado, "burned palace," because it had been torched repeatedly in the last two centuries. In 1947, a mob dragged then-president Gualberto Villarroel outside and hanged him from one of the plaza's lampposts. There was a small commemorative plaque on the post. With 191 coups under its belt since its 1825 independence, Bolivia had averaged more than one revolution a year.

  The façades of the buildings on the nongovernmental side of the square were pocked with bullet holes from a gunfight between police and the military in October of 2003, the height of the Bolivian Gas War. Earlier that year, peasants, led by the indigenous Evo Morales, took to the streets in protest of the unequal distribution of gas revenues. Violence flared, dozens of people were shot, and then the president dashed off to an idling Learjet. He vanished before the mob torched the palace for the eighth time. Now, two years later, normalcy had caught a toehold. Dapper old men in fedoras and three-piece suits congregated on the benches lining the square to smoke cigarillos and play chess in the shade of eucalyptus trees.

  Fiona was on one of the benches nearest Palacio Quemado, reading over her notes. So far, every time he had seen her she had been either naked or sharply dressed, but now she was just wearing jeans, heels, and a white V-neck sweater (Evo didn't wear suits and wasn't impressed by people who did). She'd tied her hair back in a ponytail.

  As he neared, pigeons edged out of his way and Fiona looked up. He sat beside her and she kissed his cheek. He could feel the dot of saliva drying coolly in the wind. He smelled a hint of stale alcohol on her, but there was no other evidence of last night's debauchery. He crossed his legs and put on an air of mock magnanimity. "And how are you this morning?" He patted her knee.

  "I feel like slapped ass," she said and rolled her eyes. "I can't party like I used to, and I talk too much."

  "Well, you're almost done here."

  "Almost! One more interview and I can go," she said and then smiled, awkwardly, as if confounded by secondary meanings. "But I'll be back for the election in a couple weeks," she added. He said nothing, so she continued, "I'm meeting Evo in fifteen minutes."

  "Can I tag along?" he joked.

  She shook her head. "Sorry, Gabriel. You'll get him, I'm sure." She was just being nice, which wasn't her style. Apparently, her faculties weren't entirely intact. Normally, she led in a brisk dance, but now there was no one leading, and the whole interaction was more awkward and more sincere than those to which Gabriel had become accustomed.

  "The thing is," she said, "I'm sure you'll excel at this if you stick with it, Gabriel, but—and I'm only going to say this to you once, I promise—but if there is another job that you can stomach doing, anything at all, you should do it."

  "You don't understand my situation, Fiona."

  She squinted at him. "I don't want to sound patronizing, because you're clearly made of just the right stuff. Really, you've got the razor edges, the scary ambition. That's all right, but that ambition does wear out eventually, and you're not left with much to show for it."

  "No offense, Fiona, but I think it must be easy to say that when you're a features writer at the Wall Street Journal. You're set."

  "Maybe."

  "No. Not maybe. Definitely. Look, your ambition might have worn out, but you can coast on the dividends for the rest of your life. Me—if this doesn't work, I don't know what I'm going to do. I honestly don't."

  "Fine." In a strangely self-conscious maneuver, one that read as childish, she tucked some of her hair behind her ear and crossed her legs. Then she pursed her lips, and he could see all the thin lines around her mouth that were normally invisible.

  "And you must have millions of air miles," he said, just wanting to lighten it up again.

  "And those miles will be the most valuable item in my will when I die." A pause. "Bequeathed to whom? I have no idea." She took a cigarette out of her pack, twirled it in her fingers. "Oh, there are perks. What else?" she said. She lit the cigarette. "I'm a connoisseur of luggage." She was recovering her poise.

  "Then tell me about luggage," he said.

  "Samsonite is okay." Her smoke paused in the wake of one gust and then vanished in another. "It lasts a year or so. Tumi is better, but it's expensive, so I only use it for carry-on. Victorinox is a good option for the bigger pieces. None of it will last you more than two, maybe three years. I could write a dissertation on luggage. But I have no experience with houseplants or pets. I've never had either. I love dogs, but...

  "And I find that the only people I am comfortable around anymore are people like me. There aren't that many of us, but we're all happy. We'll tell you how happy we are. You've seen us. You were there last night. If you're going to join the club, maybe you and I can date. That would be fun for a while. It might last a year. Probably not." She had a drag and tapped the ash away. Her hair blew into her face and she pulled it back behind her ear again.

  She looked at him sympathetically, and he could see then that she was three-dimensional after all. The height and width had been obvious from the first, but the depth (her sorrow, it might be call
ed) had eluded him. Now it was there: naked too, and just as proud.

  "I used to adore room service," she continued. "The whole fact of room service. That was what I loved: ordering meals and having them delivered to my room. There was something so fun about that. I could just sit there naked, eating whatever I wanted, watching horrible television, and there was no one to complain about it. I got used to the convenience of an in-house gym, laundry service. I got used to being naked all the time, eating whatever the fuck I wanted. The novelty does expire, though." She had a drag and blew out the smoke immediately. "Maybe you'll disagree?" She shrugged. "But I've never met anyone who disagreed."

  Gabriel looked at the cathedral beside the presidential palace. There were pigeons embedded in the façade. Huge tattered vultures groomed themselves in the spires. Gabriel watched as one vulture waddled after a pigeon that got too close. The spry pigeon hopped out of reach and fluttered off to a nearby ledge. The vulture lost interest, returned to its perch.

  During Gabriel's interview at Calloway, Priya had spoken about the need for secrecy. "Especially," she said, "with poorer countries, which are usually one- or two-industry economies, the fact that we're interested at all will tip our hand. With a bigger economy, like Brazil, there are hundreds of potentially attractive inroads. But if someone finds out that we're looking at, say, El Salvador, they'll be able to instantly deduce which corporation we're interested in."

  "I won't tell anyone unless I think it will be advantageous," he had said to Priya.

  But now, though it had little strategic value, he couldn't resist the temptation to set Fiona straight about himself. Maybe once she knew she wouldn't keep talking to him like he was an intern in the press pool. In any case, she was leaving, so it couldn't hurt too much. He took a deep breath and said, "I want to tell you something, and it has to be off the record."