Gabriel nodded. "I know."
Outside, the airport was nothing but a flat grassy field that went on for miles. Beyond that, El Alto—a slum with more than a million inhabitants—sprawled in every direction. The driver cruised at fifty miles an hour along the drive. There were few other cars. The parking lot, far ahead of them, was tiny, a minuscule patch of asphalt next to a squat whitewashed terminal and a functional little control tower. Gabriel rolled the window down a crack again, and the wind bellowed. It sounded like the static from a television on the wrong channel turned up all the way. Though he inhaled deeply, his lungs were still hungry for oxygen. He exhaled and inhaled again. The air smelled like nothing at all.
EPILOGUE: A Room on the Tenth Floor
Saturday, July 4, 2009
THE CALLOWAY GROUP had booked the conference room for the whole day, but the meeting concluded in under an hour. It had been very simple. Gabriel had explained the offer, and the others had said they needed a week to consider it. That was it. They could have done it all on the phone. Gabriel called down to the front desk and canceled the catered lunch. He went to his room, put on gym clothes, and rode the elevator to the basement.
For forty-five minutes he jogged on the treadmill, perusing reports that his assistant had sent. He kept the speed low and the incline steep. He did two hundred crunches while listening to CNN International. After showering, he dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
He stood at his window.
This was the second of two days in Lima. He had spent the last week in Santiago, negotiating the purchase of a minority stake in a midcap silver-mining operation, as well as much smaller stakes in an asphalt company and a glass manufacturer. Priya had been running, almost exclusively, options straddles and strangles since Lehman collapsed. It was pure mathematics now, so Gabriel had little connection to the bulk of Calloway's capital. At the same time, Calloway had shifted a few hundred million dollars to a cluster of managed FDI projects in Latin America. This subsection would operate, essentially, as a private equity firm. And it was, for all intents and purposes, Gabriel's.
He had only the one meeting in Lima. Tomorrow, he'd fly to Buenos Aires for a few days, then Caracas for few more, and then briefly go to Mexico City before returning to New York. Bolivia was no longer on the books in any way. He gathered that, although Evo had not turned out to be a fraud, he had certainly been lively. The previous year, he had expelled the U.S. ambassador for "fomenting subversion and national division," according to a statement delivered by Evo's press secretary, Lenka Villarobles. The statement was now available on YouTube. In the past few months, Gabriel had watched Lenka read it dozens of times.
In Lima, Gabriel stayed at the Four Seasons. The hotel was on a ridge above the ocean. His room faced the dreary sea. He stood and took in the view, arms akimbo. Even ten stories up and with the sliding glass door closed, he could hear the mob below. That familiar roar; he barely noticed it anymore, except at moments like that, when there was nothing to do but listen.
The air in Lima was always damp but not hot; the Pacific Ocean kept it cool. The weather in Lima never changed. It was cool at night and humid always. It never rained. It hadn't rained in ten years. It averaged a fraction of an inch of precipitation per year, mostly in the form of a predawn mist. Lima was hostile to life. There were few native plants or animals. It was so arid that the streets had no gutters, no drains. Roofs were flat and not very water resistant. Were it actually to rain, the city would be in chaos: ceilings would collapse, streets would pool with water, and disease-carrying mosquitoes would flourish.
When he'd come to Lima with his mother nine years before, they'd enjoyed a day trip around the city on a tour bus. They'd stopped at the fireworks market, which would ignite on New Year's Day a few years later, killing scores of people. As they'd continued through Lima, the guide, holding a battered microphone and speaking in broken English, pointed at buildings and described them. This is Moorish architecture, he'd said, and that is Baroque. To young Gabriel, the city had looked merely brown, an enormous smudge. The guide was stocky, his skin oily. His resting expression looked pained. He pointed out the American ambassador's house, gleaming white, and said it was bigger than the Peruvian presidential palace. The tourists chuckled politely, all but Gabriel's mother, who cackled loudly for too long, drawing stares.
Their final stop of the tour was a sixteenth-century cathedral and its adjacent Franciscan monastery. According to Gabriel's mother, who whispered her own parallel lesson to him while the guide lectured, the Franciscans were the most scrupulous order of monks with their vow of poverty; they were also the most ruthless missionaries in the New World.
Gabriel could already smell the catacombs. Over centuries, the stench had mellowed into something musty. Down the narrow stone staircase, the odor grew stronger, sharper, and the air cooled. Their guide led them through a series of chambers, where Incan corpses had been disposed of with an efficiency that would have impressed the commanders at Buchenwald. There were twelve wells in a row. A souring cadaver would be dumped into a well and covered with lime and charcoal dust. The next body could then be dropped on top, covered with another layer of lime and charcoal, and so on. When a well could hold no more bodies, the monks would move along to the next. After a year, they would return to a full well and exhume its contents. Upstairs in the monastery's courtyard, under the relentless sun, they would sort through the mud and bones. Smaller bones were cast into the sea, but they stored the sturdiest bones in a series of pits throughout the catacombs. There were separate pits for femurs, for skulls, and for pelvises. The largest pit, at least twenty-five feet wide, contained a painstakingly arranged pile of femurs and skulls—the elegant detritus of centuries of their labor.
At the end of the tour, back aboveground, Gabriel and his mother wandered into the blinding square, where a barefoot and toothless old woman begged, groaning, her knotted gray hair askew. She smelled of hay and urine and looked like an exile from a previous century. Gabriel could see the structure of her skull under her skin. Her gums had receded so badly that he could see where her long narrow teeth, the color of molasses, entered her jawbone. He and his mother picked up the pace until they were practically jogging. The woman gave up. When he turned around, Gabriel watched her approach another tourist, her dirty hand outstretched and empty, shaking. Clusters of pigeons waddled around too, scavenging, all of them.
His mother looked at him. "What do you think?"
He shook his head, as if he didn't know. He was supposed to be outraged, of course.
On the far side of the square, a few paramilitaries were eating sandwiches by an armored vehicle mounted with a fifty-caliber machine gun. Alberto Fujimori, then president of Peru, wanted to discourage angry constituents from misbehaving, no doubt. The eight years of his presidency had, in fact, been a relatively prosperous and peaceful era, at least on the surface of things. In two years, he'd be chased out of the country amid accusations of corruption and human rights abuses. But, as they had with Pinochet, the people would remain conflicted about his reign and hesitant to prosecute him, pointing out that he had brought enduring economic stability after decades of chaos and turmoil. Gabriel's mother would never accept such a discordant perspective. While Gabriel admired the certainty of her viewpoint, he couldn't bring himself to the earnest embrace of her cause. The answers were just not that simple. Despite what his mother—and her fiercest opponents, for that matter—wanted to believe, this was not algebra. The numbers just didn't cooperate.
Back in their bus, its air conditioning hissing, they rode along a cliff beside the sea. It was twilight, and the sun melted into a ribbon of gray at the horizon. The Pacific Ocean was fetid and streaked with silt. It belched up clouds of brackish sewage.
Now, years later, back in Lima again, he stood at the window of his suite at the Four Seasons and gazed at that same stretch of sea. A bank of pink foam undulated on the tan water just past the breakers. A city of eight million, but there was not a single per
son on all those miles of tropical beach. He hadn't spoken to his mother since she'd sent him that e-mail in Bolivia. He hadn't even sent a reply to the e-mail.
That afternoon in Lima, he left the Four Seasons and wandered around the nearby open-air shopping mall. The mall had been built into the ridge of the cliff face. He found nothing of interest in the mall, so he walked south along a balustrade perched at the edge of the precipice. Seagulls hovered nearby in a steady southerly breeze. Hours passed, and when the sun slumped, he headed back to his hotel.
He stepped under the perfunctory awning, and a bellhop hurried to pull open one of the heavy, brightly polished doors. He continued to the swank bar, which was called poco. The self-consciously lowercase name was stamped, in a faux-modest Helvetica, on the door, the napkins, and a melon-colored sign embedded above a large fake fireplace.
Gabriel no longer drank alcohol. He had given it up a couple years ago, but he still liked to visit bars, particularly when traveling. He usually ordered a fragrant malt whiskey and just smelled it. At poco, he ordered sparkling water and a ten-year-old Laphroaig. He lifted the glass of whiskey and sniffed it. It reeked of saline, iodine. It smelled medicinal. He drank the water. The bar was quiet and unexpectedly had the atmosphere of an old church. Small groups of people huddled at mini tables at the edges of the room, whispering among themselves, but no one else sat at the bar. The place was swish in a vulgar way that reminded Gabriel of Miami. Everything was made of cold stone. Muted light emerged from improbable places: tabletops, large panels in the walls, beneath a thin sheet of polished sandstone on top of the bar.
From the background, Gabriel picked up a familiar voice. He turned to see who it was. There, he saw Fiona. Her hair was shorter, above her shoulders now. Otherwise, she looked much the same. He hadn't seen her since the night of Evo's party. She was in the lobby, talking on her mobile. She approached but still hadn't see him. He briefly considered trying to conceal his presence and sneak out, but he saw that it wouldn't be possible. Instead, he'd have to pretend that he was excited to see her. She made it almost all the way to the bar before she noticed him and squealed with a mixture of undisguised horror and pleasure.
"Let me call you back," she said into her phone, and she hung up, dropped the phone into her handbag, stretched her arms out for a hug. He stood, hugged her. She was still using the same pricey shampoo, a scent that would be branded into his memory for life, no doubt.
They sat down. "It's great to see you," she said.
He smiled and said, "You too."
"Sorry, I can't linger. I'm meeting someone at the restaurant in ten minutes," she said. "What are you doing here?"
He shrugged.
"Oh," she said when it dawned on her that he probably couldn't explain. "Well..." She took a deep breath, staring at him and shaking her head, still surprised. "Wow."
"Wow, indeed." He could see that she was staring at his scars. She had sat down on his scarred side and had full view of his ear, which hadn't healed well. He turned his head to face her so she wouldn't be broadsided by it. "You still keeping an apartment here?" he said.
"I'm here full-time now. I bought a house last year. A mile south, in Buenaventura, a beautiful neighborhood."
"No more New York City?"
She shook her head. "I sold my place." She seemed pleased, even happy. She shrugged, and he noticed her very strong shoulders, not at all like Lenka's—too brawny, but nonetheless attractive. She was more relaxed than before. She wore an easy pleasure in her attitude. In fact, she was delighted in a way that reminded him of Grayson slightly, minus his sleaze. During the ensuing pause she stared at him eagerly, as if taking in a cherished and long-misplaced memento. When he still didn't say anything, she said, "So?"
"I heard that you quit the Journal?"
She nodded. "Two years ago."
"Murdoch?" Rupert Murdoch had bought the Dow Jones Company, which owned the Wall Street Journal, in the summer of 2007, and some WSJ reporters had resigned in protest.
"I just didn't want to participate," she said. She lit a cigarette. "Been with the Times bureau for the last year."
"Ah, sleeping with the enemy—"
She batted her eyes gamely. The gesture didn't quite carry anymore. She had no more enthusiasm for so much lunging and parrying. Gabriel sympathized. He didn't either. When he glanced at her fingers, he saw they were stained like new leather. And he wasn't sure if he'd noticed this before, but he now saw that her lips had thin cracks cutting directly perpendicular to her mouth from years of bunching up around narrow filters. He saw her complexion was grayish, as if, in exhaling all that pale smoke, she had somehow leached the color out of herself. Imagining her lungs, he visualized a chainlink fence he'd seen on the beaches of São Paulo a few months earlier, which had plastic bags embedded in it. The bags were blackened with sand and dirt, repositories for all manner of wind-borne garbage: plastic straws, cigarette butts, fragments of mystery items worn down to tiny nubs by the sand and the sea. Still, the burly fence stood there, sinking gradually, a vertical trash receptacle.
He'd given up cigarettes too when he'd quit drinking. He'd also quit coffee and all other drugs. But he knew he didn't look especially well either. Despite all the exercise and the mainly vegan diet, his complexion was sallow. His hair had thinned on top and was streaked with gray. He had lost even more weight. He had permanent dark bags under his eyes. All of this he blamed on a combination of circumstances, including perpetual jet lag, unpredictable diet, the fact that he could never get accustomed to a bed, also the wages of aging, chronic stress, watching too much hotel television at night, and relentless loneliness.
"How do you like the Times?" he said, for lack of anything else.
She shrugged, picked up his untouched whiskey and sniffed it, grimaced. She put it back down. "You offering me something better?"
"Like a job?"
"Yes."
Astonished, he furrowed his brow and shook his head. "But you can drink my whiskey."
"You don't think I'd be useful at Calloway?"
"No. I don't think you'd be useful. Or, I wouldn't want to be responsible. You have too much—" He wanted to say heart, but that wasn't accurate. "Maybe it's too little?" he wondered aloud. He thought about it. "Too little appetite, maybe? I don't really know."
She stared at him dubiously. Still, she seemed clearly lighter, more amused.
"Anyway, you're too old," he said. He'd said that just to test this placidity of hers, to see if she'd snap back and lavish him with abuse. But she didn't flinch.
After a pause, she said, "You have Oscar's job now?"
He nodded.
"He quit?"
He shook his head. "Fired. Now he's at Fortress. I run Calloway's direct-investment program."
"That sounds impressive."
He shook his head. It wasn't impressive—or anyway, not as impressive as it sounded. But he couldn't explain that. "Our portfolio has been radically redistributed."
"Calloway's been doing well though, right? I heard you've managed to not lose money."
"That's true."
"It's remarkable."
"Well," he said. In fact, it wasn't remarkable, but he couldn't explain that either. When the market cratered in 2007, Priya had simply stopped making directional bets (that is, betting on prices going up or down) and started using options strategies to bet on increased volatility. From then on, it didn't matter to her where the market went, just as long as it went there with uncommon violence. D. E. Shaw had done the same thing and had also profited every quarter of the downturn. It wasn't remarkable and it wasn't artful. It was just business.
He had a sip of the sparkling water and then, using his cotton coaster, mopped up the little ring of condensation on the glowing bar top. He put the bottle back down in the same spot. He said, "You know, Priya kept trying to hire these forty- and fifty-year-olds as political analysts—this is before my time—but they never lasted."
Her attention perked up. "Really?"
"Yes. It kept happening until she changed her applicant pool and started hiring younger people. Oscar was one of the first of that new batch, the late-twenties applicants."
Her expression hardened slightly and she said, "Okay, I get it."
She had misread his point, had thought he was making another dig at her age. He wanted to tell her that she didn't get it at all. He wanted to lash out, yell at her about how little she understood it, but he held back. He said, "I'm starting to get too old for it now too."
"Nah, you're still a kid," she said, but the lie didn't hold up. There was no getting around it: he was anything but a kid. Only three and a half years had passed since their adventure in Bolivia, but almost all trace of youth had been rubbed out of him.
Neither one of them said anything for a while.
She stubbed out her cigarette. "Whatever happened to your plan? Weren't you going to retire once you'd made a few million?"
"Did I say that?"
"Yes, you did."
Then he remembered it, the fantasy about wanting to be "done with the issue of money forever." He could have retired a couple years ago by that measure. But then what? It had been beyond naive. In hindsight, it was embarrassing. Specifically, it had been naive to think that life offered a broadening spectrum of possibilities when clearly the reverse was true. Life was funnel-shaped. There was only one way out. The breadth of possibility shrank every single day until there were no possibilities left, and then life was over.
She had a sip of the whiskey, kissed him on the forehead, and said, "I should get going."
He could feel the ghost of her lips on his skin and he knew the impression would last hours, maybe days. "I'll see you around."
She stood. "How long will you stay there?" she asked.
"At Calloway? I don't know. Maybe I'll replace Priya one day?"
She chuckled for a second and then said, "I'm sure you will."
She walked away. He watched her go. Once she was gone, he turned back and sniffed the glass. He could smell peat and kelp, the saline breeze. Seeing her lipstick imprint on the rim reminded him of that night near Christmas in 2005, when she showed up at his room with a bow around her waist. He couldn't quite believe that he'd been there that night. It didn't feel like a memory; it was as if he'd watched someone else be there with her. He felt no ownership of the experience. He looked at it and it looked absurd, fake.
A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism Page 30