XII - THE HANGED MAN
I floated from my friend’s pool in Florida to the hotel pool in Dallas wallowing in my loneliness. I picked up the Bernstein side money from Florida and then went to spend two weeks with Harry Scott, the first of which was to be in Dallas at Harry Scott’s yearly corporate conference.
He put us all in a mega hotel complex with three towers and a giant mall replete with conference rooms, restaurants and shops. Harry was not just a holy roller; he was a dry holy roller and he expected his whole company to follow suit. Word had it that if he even smelled alcohol on somebody in the morning he eighty-sixed them. My whole body was a mess after a drug crazed weekend in Florida so I decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to lay off the booze for week and get some work done for Harry Scott. The second night there we were ushered into a few Hummer limousines while photographers took endless pictures and driven to a restaurant in Dallas. All fourteen of us drank soft drinks while we listened to Harry Scott talk about eighty million in revenue, Jesus, and cost cutting. I did my best to explain what I was doing but I was absolutely thrilled to get back to my room, get into bed and watch a couple of bad movies.
Their company awards dinner was a gala event highlighted by Bill Cosby’s stand up routine and the announcement that Dallas Cowboys quarterback of years gone by, Roger Staubach, would be the new company spokesman. During the awards ceremony about every other winner mentioned Jesus. Jesus wanted us to sell more seminars, Jesus made it all happen. Then Staubach gave a talk about Jesus but fortunately Cosby laid off the Jesus pitch. The next day I even went to church as Harry had politely asked me saying his wife’s brother was going to give the sermon. There I was at 7.30AM holding hands with Harry Scott and singing hymns.
I went back to Atlanta with Harry for a week at his office and by Thursday afternoon as I was leaving for New York I was ready to pull the trigger on a wild weekend. From the airport I called Karina, a woman I had met online and who I had seen a few times and told her I was ready for a party. The taxi ride back into the city was like a trip into the underworld down through the Midtown Tunnel and back to the dark side. I went straight to Karina’s apartment on 29th and 1st, right across the street from Bellevue, where she had a very comfortable and completely renovated one bedroom apartment. She’d made dinner and we sat on the couch and talked without TV or music.
“You know Arthur, sometimes I like to indulge myself, take a break from the world.” Her fabulous legs were crossed and covered in black stockings.
“Sure, I know what you mean.” I replied, wondering what she was getting at, “Sometimes you just have to breakout, leave it all behind. I feel that way now after two weeks with religious fanatics.”
“Really, I’m glad to hear it. I like to use drugs sometimes and I was afraid to tell you about this, but I sometimes, a few times a month, use heroin.”
Having slept with her more than once I got nervous. “Do you shoot it?”
“No, never! I’ve never done that, just snort it.”
“Are you sure? Please tell me the truth because the shooting part, well, you understand.” I was momentarily terrified.
“I promise, really. And while I’m at it, I just want to tell you one more thing. I’m not forty-five, I’m fifty.” The age really didn’t make any difference as I found her very attractive and marriage or children had never even come close to entering my mind in regards to her.
“Wow, you look fantastic, really. I can’t believe your fifty.” She was wearing a wrap around dress and was probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever been with- her being fifty just seemed to add to the appeal. I continued, “So, you want to do some smack? Do you have any?” I’d done it several times and after the two weeks with Harry Scott few things seemed more appealing.
“No, we have to buy some. Do you want me to call?”
I pulled out my wallet and handed her six-twenties. “Is that enough?”
“Yes, yes.” She started to get very excited. “How much should I buy?”
“Get six bags, and give him a good tip.”
“Six, that’s too much. Maybe four?”
“I want two for next week, two for this weekend, and two for you to keep? Okay?”
“Yes, good idea. You think of everything. Now, if he will only answer.” She dialed his number but he didn’t pick up and she started to get very anxious. “He is such a devil, just when you want him, he’s never there.”
I said, “The Devil, that’s a good name for him. Well, maybe he’ll call back.” But she became agitated and went into the kitchen and began speaking in Russian to herself. She called again but no answer. Watching her I realized that my girlfriend was a fifty year old Russian, Jewish junky and I trembled slightly imagining what her past might have been like. Just as the full weight of it all was coming down on me the phone rang. I saw her face light up and she shook her head and belched out a passionate hello into the phone.
“He’ll be here in ten minutes! Wait here for me. I’ll be right back.” She quickly put on a pair of boots and ran out the door in a hysterical panic to meet him on the corner but something in her anticipation rubbed off on me. I hadn’t done smack in years but I remembered that calm feeling and I hoped it might be enough to numb my pain. Everything at that point was an attempt to forget: Karina’s legs, the drinking and the drugs; all I wanted to do was not think about Irina. She got back and I watched her cut the lines on Freud’s Man and his Discontents.
“Arthur, this is the best thing for the discontents, really.” She giggled as she cut out six lines and we did three each and glided into the big relax. I asked her when she began to do it and she said in that Moscow, growing up.
“When I came to America it got bad. But then I was married it was okay for a while but then I started again and of course when my husband found out he wasn’t too happy. Then I got my family over here, all of them, and I got divorced. You know, for us Jews family is very important. Country and all those things, not so much. We’re about family, it’s all we have. When they come for you the only thing you have is your family.” She spoke like machine gun even after snorting heroin. “I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, we’re the most intelligent people in Europe, they say we have an IQ fifteen percent higher than the average. Look how many smart Ashkenazi Jews there are in the twentieth century.”
“It’s true, very amazing how many. Why do you think it is? Just genetics?” She was starting to get a bit hazy and her eyes sagged and her voiced changed but she still seemed able to talk. I was feeling good, calm, very comfortable on her white couch while she relaxed in the arm chair. Her wonderful knees pointed to one side of the big chair and her perfectly formed bent thighs mesmerized me.
“I think it is so many generations breeding for intelligence. Look who runs the banks, the newspapers, Hollywood. We’re very smart, very. And we study, we work hard.”
“But I think you stick together, too.”
“That’s anti-Semitic, it’s not true, we’re just smart and work hard”
“So nobody else in this country works hard or is smart? Come on Karina, it becomes a bit of club and if anyone mentions it, they’re anti-Semitic.” She smiled.
“Well, maybe a little, but I don’t know how much. I’m a Jew, I got a special visa to the US and we were helped when we got here because we were Jews, free healthcare, everything. We do help each other but is that a bad thing after everything we’ve been through? Nobody likes us; we’re always outsiders so we must stick together.”
“Sure, I understand that, it makes sense.” She cut up some more lines and it was really starting to kick in. After the dope sex was out of the question so we both settled into a very deep, relaxed state. The conversation stopped for awhile but we weren’t ready to sleep. Then we came back into it.
“You know Arthur, I’ve counseled many addicts and I’m doing my PhD at the Psychoanalytic Center. I’ve seen the way you drink and you need to stop, it’s killing you.
This stuff of course is not good for you but it won’t destroy you like the alcohol does; the alcohol is a poison. I want to help you, let me help you.”
“Okay, I’ll happily become your patient.” I chuckled as I said it. “Sure beats AA.”
“Why do you drink so much? Why do you think you need it?”
“I’m not sure, I think it is because something is missing. This is not what I wanted in life, I think I should have done something else. Maybe I should have had a family, but I don’t think so. Love never worked out for me and all this chasing money and power doesn’t do it either.” There, lying on her couch looking at her legs began our therapy, and a strange therapy it was.
“What happened in love? Have you ever been in love?” She asked.
“A few times but when it happens it always goes bad. I go all in and I think I scare them away or something.”
“How many times has it happened?” She looked very attentively at me through her doped up eyes.
“Twice. Strange, they even looked alike.” As soon as I answered her she became very excited.
“Repetition compulsion. Freud said that we look for someone who will play, who understands our script. Your role, what you like, is to get abused. And the girls you pick want to abuse you. You tell each other these things almost immediately. While you are being introduced you’re telling them, with your body, your eyes, ‘Hi, I like to play a wild game, big romance, than you dump me and I get depressed. Do you like that game?’ When there’s a spark it means they like the game you play. If their thing is being the victim, then there’s no spark.”
“So you think I look for these situations? That I want my whole life to come apart?” I had given her a very reduced version of the Irina story.
“Of course you do. You don’t think you knew, unconsciously, that the story with this Russian girl at your last job wasn’t going to explode and bring you down? Of course you did. You wanted it to happen, but why? Was the story before this similar?”
“Very much. After a wild affair, she left me. It got so bad I had to leave Europe, start over again in California.”
“You wanted it to happen, accept that. So what do you get out of it?”
“Get out of it? It made me miserable. I can’t believe I wanted it; that’s just too hard for me to accept.”
“Well, you get to lie here and be comforted and feel bad for yourself. Or maybe, you feel more alive this way. Normally maybe you don’t feel so much and then you have a wild ride, like a rollercoaster, up and down, and that gets you feeling and that’s what you seek it out. If you were a traditional type person you would be married and living in Connecticut with a few kids. That’s why I like you, because you aren’t there doing that. I’m the same way. I had one daughter which was enough. Being a mother and wife isn’t for me.” She paused for a moment and then continued. “I really want you to see Larissa, my therapist. I have been seeing her for years, mostly for the substance abuse part. You know, for a while, things really got out of hand and I was using every day but Larissa was able to help and I even went a year or so without using at all. I’m okay now, I only use once in a while. I go to see Larissa for free; it’s paid for by a fund for Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union but she also sees some non-Jews. They have a men’s center there and they help all kinds of people. Let me give her your number, she will call you and you can set up a consultation. She’s Ukrainian, but her English is very good and she’s not even a Jew, she’s a Catholic. You’ll like her.”
“Thanks, please do, maybe it would help me to see someone. Maybe you’re right about the crazy love affairs. Love is definitely a mind altering experience and the flip side of it, heartbreak, is also pretty mind altering. I guess I like extremes.”
She anxiously began to speak again. “If you didn’t you wouldn’t be here now but why do we like extremes so much? What’s in it for us? Sometimes I think smart people figure out things too quickly and life becomes a bore so they start exploring the extremes just to get some feeling out of life. I’m afraid you and I are bad monkeys.” We did more lines and I kept drinking even though she warned me against mixing it with alcohol and that last set of lines put us over the top and we finally collapsed into bed.
The next day she cooked some chicken soup and we watched Muhallond Drive before we started at it again and it was that way until Sunday night when I finally needed some air and walked home in the late October rain. It was a strange time between two worlds; all the drama of the preceding months was ebbing away but I was still afraid that the feelings for Irina could some how come rushing back and overcome me. Karina was sensual, exciting, scary and intellectually stimulating but she was also an escape and I knew I had no deep feelings for her. Our lost weekend together was like a trip to another dimension but there was no romance.
I’d come to a complete halt on my esoteric studies and writing as they seemed to bring Irina back to my mind. I no longer dreamed of anything: no happy future with Irina or big money with Vector; I just wanted to make it to the end of the day where I could lose myself drinking and playing with Karina.
That Tuesday Larissa, the counselor, called and we made an appointment which I enjoyed. I thought the chance to talk to her might help me and it did. She was about fifty, attractive, blonde, with small eyes, and very nice legs that she liked to show off with heels and knee length skirts. The first thing she said to me after introducing herself was that she never saw patients outside the consultation office which gave me the distinct impression that she wanted to.
Her practice was on the lower East Side below a residential center for men with addiction problems where she also worked. Her black boots hung down from her crossed legs, the skirt was knee length with black stockings. She had shoulder length blonde hair that she usually wore pulled back with bangs in the front. She had a soft, almost pudgy face that was attractive and at the same time humorous, with a wide nose, very dark eyes and thin brown eyebrows. She had on a blue blouse with a black jacket. I liked her, was attracted to her and I looked forward to our two meetings a week. She did a very good job of helping me plan my day and she made me send her emails every day I didn’t see her. Her goals were to get me organized and become aware of my drinking and it helped especially to get me to work a few hours a day. Our conversations eventually became very abstract and often we would talk for much longer than the allotted hour. While she was very feminist and reductionist in her outlook she also seemed quite interested in the Tarot cards and astrology, which we often discussed at length.
It was my fourth visit to her and after going over my schedule and how I planned my time she began to give me her overall view of things. “Arthur, after a few sessions with you I think I have a better idea of who you are and there is something you should think about. You are a very intelligent, worldly, handsome man. Most people like you are in a different position than you are. Have you thought about that? I mean, have you given thought to why you seem to underachieve or at least find yourself in difficult relationships with people who probably are not best suited for you? Even your career, while successful no doubt, seems to have had a lot of ups and downs.”
I had never thought of myself that way and it gave me pause. At thirty it seemed normal, even a bit romantic, but at forty it was starting to look like something else. I was making money, but not how most people did and my current girlfriend was a fifty year old junky. Something came up from inside me and seemed to speak for me.
“I think it all seems like a lie, all fake. A few times with women, like with Irina, something did connect and seem real but otherwise it was like living a farce. How could I put my heart and soul into a life, a culture, a society that didn’t seem real? Even Karina, I like her very much and I think she’s very attractive, but when I’m with her there’s no visceral connection.”
“Yes, and don’t you think she is a little too old for you?”
I ever so qui
ckly looked at her legs. “No, I’m attracted to older women.” She looked down as I said it.
Larissa’s face became serious as she spoke, “You should know that, well, Karina has had a difficult past. I mean, don’t get too involved with her because she has a tendency to use men; for her men are a way to get things. Have you met her friend Galya?”
“No, she told me they weren’t seeing much of each other lately and I got the feeling I was the substitute for Galya.”
“Okay, I’m sure you will meet her. Just be careful. They’re fun, very pretty and interesting to talk to but you don’t want to start a serious relationship with Karina.” I thought it was very strange that she should talk about another client like that but then again I was starting to have my doubts about how Karina was making as much money as she appeared to make. She said she was a life coach but I never saw any clients nor did she ever talk about them. She also said she did some design work for a company in New Jersey but I never heard her talk about that work either but she often went to dinner with the owner of the company. It didn’t take too much to figure out what was going on but I preferred not to connect the dots.
Things got even murkier that Thursday when I finally met Galya. They invited me over and had been indulging in their drug of choice and Galya was shooting it. They then proceeded to show me all the clothes they had bought at Macy’s and Galya made it clear they hadn’t actually bought them but stolen them. Karina, in a dazed state, was loading the merchandise on to eBay. Once Galya left, Karina gave me a short history of her. She had come from Moscow after meeting an exchange student in the late 80’s and they were married and she finished a PhD in linguistics and became a professor at NYU before everything blew up and she wound up on the street. Now both Galya and Karina studied at the Psychoanalytic Center and were planning to become psychoanalysts. Karina’s world was getting darker by the day but she was also the only person I had an active friendship with.
I made an excuse about watching a football game and got out. I needed something closer to home and headed to my local which I hadn’t been frequenting as much since I met Karina, but it wasn’t the same. It seemed strange and I felt like an outsider and I left after a couple of drinks realizing it was no longer my local; it had become just another bar. I kept walking and finally wound up about an hour later on 58th street on the East Side in a stuffy pub with an older, regular crowd. I pulled up next to a man in his mid thirties dressed in a suit and we started talking about the markets. He told me he worked at a bank but had trained as a physicist.
“I suppose the markets are a wonderful way to test hypothesis on game theory and systems theory. It must be a facsinating lab.” I commented to him.
He nodded. “Yes, I come up with the strategies and it’s very interesting to see how the traders fare with my work. Of course we make money but there’s always an element that the trader adds or subtracts. You can’t eliminate him completely from the equation.”
It was nice to talk to someone with such a clear mind. I continued. “So you don’t think you can completely reduce the markets to their most primary parts and then work your way up? Seems like that pops up in physics sometimes too. I mean, even Einstein didn’t like the idea that God could role the dice and I don’t think Lloyd Blankfein likes it too much either.”
He turned and looked at me as if he were sizing me up and then began to answer. “Look, if you asking me if I’m a hardcore reductionist, by which I mean someone who believes everything boils down to atoms and electrons and there’s nothing more; I’m not. I was that way through college and while I was getting my PhD but the markets have changed me, humbled me. I see myself more as an alchemist than a scientist really. Ostensibly my job is to find inefficiencies or dark areas in markets and exploit them but what really motivates me is the quest to crack the nut of the market, to see the underlying cycle which would of course be great for me and my employer monetarily but much more importantly it would, in a sense, mean finding something akin to the philosopher’s stone.”
He looked at me a little wide eyed and I wondered for a moment whether he might not be insane, but I continued anyway. “You mean you want to find the rhythm of life, the ultimate music, and once you do you could open the door not only to the markets but to history itself?” He nodded. “I follow you. I guess my question then is whether the cycle you are looking for evolved along with life itself or has always been there, a cycle that came out of the big bang and has resonated through all things ever since?”
“It’s an interesting question. If it evolved then it’s similar to the rhythm of traffic in a city like New York two hundred years ago- a slow horse & carriage rhythm which became what it is today, something completely different based on automobiles and massive highways. One the other hand, if it’s an eternal rhythm the only thing that has changed is the quantity of pieces and the tempo or speed, but the underlying system is exactly the same. The question is do the systems evolve through the individual elements interacting with one another or is it an eternal form that simply repeats fractally as an archetype. Until relatively recently I would have said for sure that it all evolves out of the individual elements, as almost all scientists I was a reductionist; I reduced things to their smallest components in order to understand them. Take for example sun spot cycles and the markets. Sun spots have an eleven year cycle with peaks and troughs so when I was an academic physicist I would have started by looking for the effects of sun spots on bacteria colonies and worked my way up. My question would have been how to do the sun spots directly affect the activity of the bacteria. Now I would approach it completely differently.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, now I’m more inclined to look for some underlying archetype or rhythm that resonates through sun spots and the markets. As the alchemists always said, ‘As is above, so is below’ and now I believe that. We are a reflection of the universe, not a product of it. It may seem like semantics but it’s not. Look at the form of an atom, heavy center, small particles revolving around it and the bigger you get, always the same, the earth and the moon, the solar system, the galaxies, and the universe itself. Is this a coincidence? I think not. We’re not even talking about the same laws of physics for atomic particles and solar systems yet the same form repeats. That’s an archetype and that’s what I seek, as did the alchemists.”
I anxiously responded. “Like Terence McKenna said the reductionists have one very hard swallow: the Big Bang. All they ask you to assume is that the entire universe was created out of a teaspoon of mass, in an instant and for no reason. That seems about as plausible as Genesis. I’m with you. I feel in my bones that there are forms that repeat themselves but how can you objectively identify them?” We were both quite engaged and I ordered us another pair of drinks. It was a Wednesday and I could feel the stress from the office evaporating off him.
“Yes, that’s probably the biggest riddle facing science and philosophy at the present time and there is no way to objectively solve it. I’ve looked at Terence McKenna’s work and even played around with his Timewave Zero, his great fractal wave of time that he said he discovered from the I-Ching and that is supposed to end on December 21, 2012, at 11.11AM, GMT. I tried without luck to correlate it to the markets but I’m still intrigued by his idea of a great attractor. He thought that novelty was driving the universe forward to some finality. As he loved to say, nature preserves novelty. We are being pulled toward an attractor of novelty, the eschaton as he called it; the final thing. McKenna’s idea is really the opposite of the Bing Bang. The Big Bang pushes us but McKenna’s eschaton pulls us toward an ever more complex future. It makes sense if you think about how slowly things changed for the first few billion years of earth’s history and how much things have been accelerating over the last few thousand years, and faster again, fractally, over the last few hundred years, and even faster over the last twenty years or so. If that rhythm keeps up, w
here will we be in ten years?”
“True, I’m sure you have heard of the singularists who are convinced that we will reach the technological singularity within the next thirty or forty years and at that moment the machine becomes smarter than us and then the unimaginable will become possible like genetic treatments that will reverse the aging process and make us twenty-five again. I’ve wondered if that was what McKenna was getting at, that moment when the machine takes over and history ends.” I hadn’t had a conversation like this since I’d seen Misha and it lifted me up out of myself and away from the last few months.
He nodded and spoke. “It’s fascinating to look at how much in denial we are as a society. We simply can’t go on as we are now. The whole system will just blow up at some point in the not too distant future. The amount of energy that it takes to just maintain this system is reaching its limits. Not just physical energy, but also the cultural and psychological energy needed to maintain the different actors functioning in their roles. There’s almost no room for error; we are one hitch away from massive chaos. Take the monetary system for example, if the dollar reached the tipping point and central banks around the world began selling US Treasuries in a panic the whole world economy would stop.”
“The whole world? You mean everything?”
“Pretty much. Imagine you have a factory in China that exports to the West and all of a sudden the dollar is worthless. Without the dollar as a peg for all the other currencies, what are the other currencies worth? Until things got sorted out everyone would just shut down. Without exaggeration, all that Chinese stuff in Wal Mart would be gone in a month. That crisis would bring on social turmoil and the whole thing unwinds. We see this in nature all the time but we have a hard time seeing it in our ecosystem.”
“Why did you leave physics for banking?”
“I never left physics; I just left academic physics. I’m still doing physics in a way. But what pushed me out of academia I think was dark energy. Through most of my education the universe was a puzzle close to solving. It seemed like we were almost there and then they discovered that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate which meant that the mass we thought the universe consisted of was wrong; there had to be much more mass than we thought. This wasn’t a minor miscalculation. Now it’s estimated that more than seventy percent of the universe is dark energy and no one has the slightest idea what it is. Either something is wrong with our basic understanding of gravity, at least at a very big level, or there is something out there, lots of it, and we don’t know what it is. The sudden shift in thinking made me reconsider what I was doing and I decided to make a change.”
“Maybe dark energy is the world soul, or the Anima Mundi as the alchemists used to say.” I said it half tongue and cheek but on another level I really did want to see how he would react.
“Maybe. I think we discard the ancients too quickly. Are we so sure there wasn’t an advanced culture behind the Egyptians and Greeks? Who knows, maybe they really did put very advanced ideas into their mythic cosmology. Maybe the UFO phenomena, fairies, ghosts and all of those unexplained things are just another form of energy that we simply don’t understand. String theory works in something like nine dimensions, maybe one of those dimensions is the Anima Mundi and occasionally it interacts with us. Remember that atoms and electrons, the stuff you and I are made of, are only 3 percent of the universe. There could be a lot of strange things going on that we just don’t see.”
He had me very intrigued, “I never bought that explanation that all the UFO and Virgin Mary sightings were just hallucinations. Maybe they’re not real in the atoms and electrons sense, but I think they are more than just products of our imagination. Are you looking in that area for the solution to the markets?”
“Well, I’ve heard about one very prominent bank that’s using remote viewers, people who can see things in other places or in the future, with some success. The CIA and KGB had big programs trying to tap into these capabilities but they cut off the funding once the Cold War ended. But if you look at the markets from an alchemic point of view, they’re simply a reflection, or a fractal, of the universe itself. Like the alchemist I’m searching for gold and it’s not a metaphor for what I do; I want the gold. But more importantly I want the knowledge, the experience of seeing the universal in the microcosm of the market.”
“I’ll drink to that.” And my new alchemist friend and I continued late into the night as the rain began to pour and I lost track of time and place.
Your Love Incomplete Page 9