by Tom Stern
Walter decided he would conduct research at the library every Tuesday afternoon, which was when the newest issue of the Business Weekly Journal would become available. But he found himself at the library most afternoons anyway. At first it was just to read up a little more on a business term or concept that he hadn’t understood. Then it expanded into reading other authors and articles and journals to broaden the context of his understanding of varying business-related topics. He found none of it particularly interesting, but he soon realized he wasn’t doing it for fun. He was doing it in an effort to find signs of what was sure to be the world’s foremost burgeoning business savant.
The afternoons soon turned into full days. The full days into weeks. And the weeks into months. All of the time and information heaped into a robust, indiscriminate mass of thought and memory that started to weigh Walter down. But still he came up with absolutely nothing. Each failed day he would push back from the book or magazine or computer screen or microfilm viewing booth with nothing more than scornful epithets to mutter about Dr. Benjamin Wilkes-Guipp.
Researching top performing businesses had proven far more challenging than Walter had anticipated, what with different publications utilizing different criteria to determine performance, and all of those criteria utilizing concepts that Walter seldom really understood without further research. Some sources used rankings focused on gross profit, for example, some on net. While others used metrics that centered around growth. But even growth, it seemed, was defined differently by each entity, some factoring in assets, some isolating pure revenue increases, some looking at revenue and assets as a combined comparator against estimated relative value at the beginning of the measuring period. Other outlets still were more interested in operational efficiencies as contributors to overall profitability and as a measure of a company’s relative intelligence. And on top of all of this was the fact that most businesses do not openly report detailed financial information about their operations.
But on what must have been a Tuesday, as Walter was rifling through the pages of a new issue of the Business Weekly Journal, it was not a number that finally set off a spark in his mind but a small, non-descript mention so slight that he initially scanned right past it.
It was a name. An almost remarkably vague name.
Halshfin Capital.
He had no conscious memory of such a business, yet something about the name persisted faintly, distantly familiar.
Walter cleared a table and started gathering on it the texts he had read over the past months. He began by pulling a journal or two. Followed by a few periodicals. And then a few more journals. And before he knew it he had accumulated a mountain of pages. He leafed through each document aggressively only to find himself changing strategies mid-search as each document either proved itself irrelevant or triggered a further memory that sent Walter off in a new direction.
Until he found one.
Sure enough.
There it was.
Halshfin Capital.
It was completely buried in an article on trends in international and domestic manufacturing and shipping. The article made a quick reference to Halshfin as an example of a company that demonstrated resolute adherence to sound business fundamentals when faced with challenges involving scalability.
And then he found a second.
In an article regarding market assessment, Halshfin was mentioned briefly as a company that demonstrated an intriguing track record of effective and deep market assessment. The article also referred to the company’s participation in significant venture capital investments and infusions based on these assessments.
Then he found a third.
This one noted Halshfin as the fourth in a list of six companies it dubbed “promising companies of tomorrow.” The article defined Halshfin as a “blue sky entrepreneurial firm,” but said nothing more specific about the business than that.
He then found a fourth and a fifth, both just as fleeting as the first three.
One used the company’s name as an afterthought in a larger discussion about diversification of assets before stating that Halshfin’s branches were so diverse that it was hard to define what this business truly was at its core.
The other again mentioned Halshfin as one of several demonstrations of “businesses that thrive by leveraging an atypically deep understanding of a variety of markets. “ This article seemed to consider Halshfin a company that “specializes in leveraging enhancement of operational efficiencies into profitability” and also made brief note of Halshfin’s record profitability in the product acquisition and licensing sector, as well as in the management of intellectual property.
Walter laid all the mentions out, side by side, on an adjacent empty table.
They added up to a confounding, opaque, and marginal portrait.
Walter made his way to the computers where, thankfully, a fat, greasy pack rat of a man was just leaving one of the otherwise occupied terminals.
An online search brought out only a handful more scattered and mundane details.
The company was based in Norman, Oklahoma.
It had a staff of five housed in a modest 1,400-square-foot office suite in the Breen Commercial Complex on the perimeter of the city. Other residents in the complex included an orthodontist’s office, a notary public, and a T-shirt printing and wholesale business.
There was a new business announcement buried in the back pages of The Norman Transcript and there were two different mentions of area little league teams sponsored by the business.
That was it.
Walter tried different search terms, but everything displayed mostly similar results.
He clicked pages deeper into the results.
Five, six, seven pages.
Until he found a link nestled at the bottom of the ninth page. It was an indiscernible governmental website involving taxes, trade, and subsidies, or so it seemed to Walter’s novice eye. The site listed, way deep down in a massive spreadsheet of data, the cumulative annual gross earnings of some thousands of businesses. The common feature that connected these businesses and pooled them onto this particular list evaded Walter altogether. But what did not evade him was the fact that this spreadsheet contained, all the way down in row 7,817, the first year gross revenues of Halshfin Capital, which was listed at just over $2 billion.
As Walter back-buttoned his way to the earlier results, his eye caught on a link he had previously glossed right over. It was on page four, buried smack in the middle, the word “Halshfin” hidden deep in the descriptor text beneath a link that read: “Butner Chamber of Commerce.” The link led to some template of a website that seemed to serve as little more than an archive of prior print issues of the organization’s newsletter. A new tab and a new search revealed Butner to be a small town about an hour outside of Norman with a population that, according to a few more searches and clicks, ranged from thirty thousand to forty-five thousand depending upon whose measure of the city limits you trusted. But on the back page of a newsletter from six months ago, there was indeed a spotlight on a local resident who had bought out and taken over Butner’s beloved Fatty Slim’s Griddle. According to the brief profile, the local mainstay was jam packed for breakfast every single morning of the week but the owner, Phaddeus Slim, was on the verge of shutting down as he was unable to so much as break even. But a local resident surfaced who was intrigued by the challenges associated with making the business sustainable once again. At the time of the newsletter, a mere two months after the change in management, Fatty Slim’s had not only already become profitable without changing any aspects of the food and ambience that locals so deeply loved, but it was also on track to become one of Butner’s most successful restaurants in spite of the fact that it served but one meal per day. According to the article, “the Butner resident who purchased Fatty Slim’s and subsequently managed the takeover, analysis, and new strategy implemen
tation is himself the founder, president, owner, and CEO of a Norman, Oklahoma, business named Halshfin Capital.” The article did not attempt to explain what Halshfin Capital was or did, but it did mention that its CEO was a “physically challenged man by the name of Larry Applebaum who declined to be interviewed for this newsletter.”
Walter pushed back from the computer, a scowl deep, deep set in his brow, and found himself asking aloud but of no one in particular, “Who the fuck is Larry Applebaum?”
The house at 2112 Sprucewood Street was completely unremarkable. It was a perfectly nice house, handsomely modest. But Walter had been expecting something much more grandiose for a billionaire living in an obscenely affordable neighborhood bordering an already obscenely affordable city. This home was maybe 1,200 square feet, probably two beds, two baths. It was painted white clearly some years back, only now just starting to gray. It read as significantly older than that paint job, though, asserting the type of character that only comes with time. Its mass sat heavy atop the earth, the eaves ever so slightly bowing with the years. A thin walkway split through the maybe one hundred square feet of well maintained lawn, winding up to a modest concrete stoop that framed a plain but confident navy-blue and windowless door lined by tall, thin windows on either side obscured on the inside by drawn blinds. The roof extended to a pitch overhead, giving the one-story home a perceived height greater than its actual, but only marginally so, and certainly not enough to stand out in any way amidst the other middling homes that lined the block.
Walter knocked before realizing there was a doorbell all but hidden beside the doorframe.
While he waited for an answer, he turned and surveyed the street from this perspective, hoping the appeal of the neighborhood might finally strike him. But it didn’t. From the stoop, just as from the street, Walter simply could not see past an overwhelming normalness that permeated every molecule of this place.
The door began clicking and sliding and jostling from the inside before giving way to a whine as it pulled open. Stepping into the space left behind by the sweeping door was, sure enough, the still-uneven Wallace Braum. He was dressed in a yellow collared shirt and a pair of navy slacks, both clearly store bought based on the way they fought the jumbled angles of his body.
Walter had amassed quite a few questions over the length of his research and subsequent travels, but in this moment none of these inquiries seemed all too pressingly relevant. While he had believed quite resolutely that he would indeed find Wallace here, at the Butner residence of a one Larry Applebaum, the person now staring back at him presented Walter with a reality subtly more confounding than the one for which his speculation had prepared him.
So Walter said nothing.
Wallace used the silence as an opportunity to look off in great consternation, which appeared to the untrained eye more like wincing, before shaking his head and dropping his stare into the concrete of his front porch. Inasmuch as still no specific path out of this moment presented itself to Walter, he opted to simply step forward and wrap his arms around his brother. After a moment’s hesitation, Wallace half-heartedly raised his crooked arms and returned the hug, in gesture anyway.
“I’ve missed you.” Walter found himself finally saying something.
Wallace nodded, still caught up in multiple tangled streams of thought. Eventually, he stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door nearly shut behind him, his eyes still boring holes into the concrete.
He took a few deep breaths and considered his words a bit longer before finally offering something up. “You can see that things haven’t gone as well as I’d hoped they would have,” Wallace muttered, sheepishly avoiding eye contact.
Walter grimaced in confusion, prompting Wallace to gesture to his unremarkable surroundings. “Not exactly the stuff of genius,” he added.
“But you…” Walter trailed off, second-guessing his research.
“I started this little business,” Wallace explained before Walter’s questions could take shape. “But it’s been a real struggle. Barely made it through our first year. Might not make it through two.”
“But I…” Walter began again, before failing to find any more words to tack on.
“I’m happy, though.” Wallace declared a bit too intently as he tried to bring the conversation back into some kind of focus. “I’ve learned that’s what really matters. I’ve got a great life. If I seem a little off, I’m just surprised you were able to persuade him, frankly,” Wallace elaborated. “Dr. Wilkes-Guipp is not an easy man to persuade.”
“What?” answered Walter.
This one simple word stopped Wallace cold. He cast his stare off again and recalculated. “Huh,” he mumbled as his mind raced through myriad scenarios and then connected those scenarios with other possible combinations of scenarios. “Well,” he finally added flatly, “I’m touched that it meant so much to you to find me.”
Walter cracked a thin smile.
“Now I’d like you to leave,” Wallace added, sharply.
“What?” Walter answered. “Why?”
“You’ve seen what there is to see, so you must be happy now.”
“I didn’t come all this way to—”
“I don’t care why you came all this way,” Wallace stated plainly, coldly. “Whatever you’re selling, I don’t want it.”
“Selling?”
“Selling,” Wallace stood firm.
Walter fell silent, waiting for whatever direction this conversation had taken to dissipate.
“I don’t care that you’re a fucking billionaire, Wallace,” Walter explained.
“Shh!” Wallace hissed as he looked violently about, grabbing Walter’s wrist with one hand and pulling him down by it sharply in an attempt to reach the other hand over his mouth.
“But I do want to know what you are doing here of all places when you could buy this whole town?” Walter asked as he craned his head away from Wallace’s flailing hand. So Wallace opted instead to pull his brother through the front door of his unremarkable home, slamming the door shut the second they had passed through its threshold.
“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” Wallace said sharply and in the privacy of his home.
“What the hell is going on? You’ve disappeared from everyone who knows you!” Walter fired back.
Wallace laughed.
“This is funny?” Walter asked. “You owe me at least an explanation.”
“This is what I need to do,” Wallace answered.
“That’s not an explanation,” Walter said, stepping past his brother and further into the house.
The living room was nothing more than a pale brown carpet, a card table, and a folding chair. The kitchen housed a plain white fridge, and a small stack of some dishes on an off-white counter. The bedroom was quite literally just that: a room with a bed in its corner. The den featured a good-sized flat screen TV mounted on the wall. It was tuned to a financial news network, sound muted as a ticker tape of symbols and numbers streamed across the bottom third of the screen. A folding chair, matching the one in the living room, sat facing the TV. A remote control sat on the floor beside the chair.
“Jesus, Wallace,” Walter declared as he sat down on the den floor. “You need some furniture.”
“I don’t want furniture,” Wallace stated unequivocally.
“I’ve still got all that money. Let me get you some stuff.”
“No, thank you.”
“Seriously, I don’t mind.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“It’s as much your money as it is mine.”
“I don’t want furniture.”
“Don’t be proud, I just—”
“I’m not being proud! If I want fucking furniture, I’ll buy fucking furniture! I’m a fucking billionaire, Walter!”
Another stretch of silence set in. Wallace took the o
pportunity to shake his head, walk over, and pull himself onto the folding chair in front of the TV at which he stared. “I have what I want,” he insisted, his meaning clearly extending well beyond furniture. “This is what life will be for me.”
Walter turned his eyes to the TV but comprehended none of the letters and numbers that streamed past. “You, of all people,” Walter explained, “could make your life more or less anything you wanted.”
“And I have done just that,” Wallace replied, his eyes holding locked on the silent images and symbols on the screen.
“You need people around you. People that care about you.”
“Why do I need that?”
“Because that’s what people need.”
“I don’t have any room in my life for bullshit, Walter.”
“You’ve got nothing but room in your life,” Walter corrected, gesturing to the empty house around him.
Wallace waved a hand in Walter’s general direction without so much as glancing away from the TV screen.
So Walter walked into the den and retrieved the other folding chair, placed it beside Wallace’s and sat down in it. He stared forward and struggled to unpack the information flooding forth from the TV screen.
“What’s the difference between a mutual fund and ETF?” Walter eventually asked.
Wallace sighed.
Then he leaned down, picked up the remote, and pressed a button, sparking the sound back on as a reporter’s voice tossed around words and concepts still only mildly familiar to Walter even after his months of research.
The two brothers sat and watched the TV in silence for at least an hour, Wallace effortlessly sponging everything in, Walter catching the quick glimpses that he could.