Kapitoil: A Novel

by Teddy Wayne

  My podmates are Dan Wulf, Jefferson Smithfield, and Rebecca Goldman. Jefferson stands up to shake my hand and Dan shakes my hand from his chair and Rebecca waves. The desk assignments are:

  Jefferson is the pod leader. He is very short, possibly even shorter than Rebecca, although he wears shoes that have thick soles and when he took them off later that day I saw additional cushioning in the interior, so with them he equals her vertically. His pale face has acute angles and looks like it belongs on a sculpture and shares some features with Taahir’s from Doha Human Resources, and his hair is between blond and brown. His forearms are highly defined with muscles and he frequently rolls his sleeves up to type but I hypothesize also to reveal them. Multiple postcards on the wall over his desk display the posters of Japanese movies with translated titles such as Akira and Seven Samurai and Ikiru. Sometimes during work he writes in a small notebook and counts with his fingers five or seven times as he moves his lips and mutely reads it.

  Dan is slightly taller than I am, potentially 75 inches, although he constantly minimizes his height by not standing 100% vertically, and his dark hair is already slightly voiding on the top. He is plugged into earphones most of the time. Over his desk a framed image of the top of a mountain displays:

  THE ART OF BUSINESS:

  ANTICIPATE, DON’T WAIT

  REACT TO THE FACT

  THRIVE, NOT JUST SURVIVE

  Rebecca wears glasses like a turtle’s shell I once located for one of my father’s customers and her black hair is not short or tied up like the hair of the other females in the office, although you can still see her earrings, which are in the shape of dolphins. One lower tooth is misaligned with the others. Her only desk decoration is a small photograph of her with her younger brother.

  Jefferson and Dan complain frequently to each other about our “minor league bitch work,” which is partially true of the Y2K project because it is repetitive and Jefferson commands me to “piggyback” on the team’s previous work and not create anything original, although I believe it is inappropriate to complain in the workplace and demoralize your coworkers. They sometimes quietly discuss other programmers and financial analysts ranked above them that they believe they have superior skills to. Rebecca does not make any negative comments about the project or other workers except on the first day when she says, “Don’t expect to receive any kudos. We’re essentially vassals here.”

  However, I can tell she is not stimulated because she frequently puts her lower face in her hands shaped like a V and stares at the divider wall above her monitor.

  Jefferson and Dan also recreate with a game called fantasy baseball. When they arrive at work, they analyze the previous night’s performances of the players they “own.” Typically I do not listen to them, because I do not know the players and have difficulty understanding their jargon terms. Rebecca tells me they converse about it even more now than they did during the summer because they are in a special playoff fantasy baseball league and the winner receives more money. They also make daily bets of $10 with each other on the stock market’s performance.

  But I do listen to one integral conversation on Wednesday as they are leaving.

  “Book it,” Dan says as he clicks his mouse. “I just traded away Bernie Williams for Scott Brosius with Tim.”

  Jefferson cleans his mouth with a toothpick from a box he stores in his desk. “You was robbed.”

  Dan points to a newspaper article on his monitor. “Nope. The Post said Williams has never had a consistent playoff run—he always burns out. Brosius was consistent in every series last year. The data’s out there. Tim’s lazy, he never looks it up.”

  After they leave, Rebecca rotates her chair to me. “Do you ever just sometimes genuflect and thank Jesus that we’re privy to such scintillating conversation?” she asks.

  Although I can detect most of the idea from her voice and face, I do not know the definitions of some words, so I say, “I am uncertain what you mean.”

  Her small smile deletes. “Forget it, dumb joke,” she says, and she leaves so quickly for the restroom that her chair makes a 270-degree rotation afterward.

  I take the subway to the Museum of Modern Art after work to utilize my free access as a Schrub employee. The business section of The New York Times is on the plastic subway seat next to me, and I read about a merger on Tuesday between two start-up companies that raised their stock. A merger is similar to a mutually beneficial trade, although of course there is no way an investor could know about it before it occurs without insider trading.

  But possibly there is a way to predict news like this without insider trading. E.g., what if I can decipher that a merger or another major transaction will take place, via public data, and then predict if the stock will rise or plummet? Dan performed normal research for his trade, but all financial workers do this for stocks and companies, so it is difficult to gain an advantage. I can merely hope my research is the most accurate.

  My brain continues to evaluate this idea as I walk through the museum exhibits. The paintings of the Dutchman Piet Mondrian intrigue me, as they look like city streets, and one of his famous paintings is titled New York City. His lines are perfectly straight like geometric Islamic designs and would extend infinitely if the frames did not restrict them.

  Then I enter an exhibit on the American Jackson Pollock. At first I do not enjoy his paintings. They are too chaotic and have no logic and organization like Mondrian’s. I could have painted the same thing, and so could many other painters, only Pollock was the originator and therefore he receives all the kudos. Paintings of this class make me feel like I do not understand why people appreciate visual art.

  But then I see some quotations by Pollock about his paintings, such as: “I don’t use the accident—’cause I deny the accident.” And I reevaluate that possibly Pollock’s paintings have more value, because he has a philosophy similar to mine, which is that life is ultimately predictable. Many people believe it is science that controls life or Allah or some other spiritual energy, and in my opinion also we do not have true free will, e.g., my conscious decisions are the product of my neurons and not my will as an independent agent. Therefore, the variables that appear to be chaotic in fact exist in the environment for us to collect and analyze and make predictions from. This is how many systems function, like the weather, and, although some people believe it is impossible, the stock market.

  When I was 11, my friend Raghid kicked a soccer ball through the window of our elderly neighbor Mamdouh’s apartment. All the other children, including Raghid, ran away, which upset me since my team required only one more goal to win. But I forgot about the score and remained because the pieces of glass on the ground looked like icicles, which I previously saw photographs of exclusively, and I studied their shapes for several minutes as well as the patterns of cracks in the window that looked like spiderwebs and the parallels between the cracks and the arrangement of glass on the ground, and that is how Mamdouh detected me. My father commanded me to labor at the store until I could pay for the window. He knew I hated laboring there. I frequently complained as a child that it was too small for me to run around in, and when I was older it always bothered me how disorganized the items were.

  I said it was not my fault. He asked who kicked the ball. Raghid’s family was poorer than ours, so I said I kicked it. But I also innovated a clever explanation: I argued that because events are predetermined as Qadar in Al-Lauh Al-Mahfuz, where Allah writes all that has happened and will happen, it means that it was not truly my fault.

  My father said that everything we do belongs to Allah and to us equally. He also said something that I have always remembered, because I read later that it was a strategic technique for parents, as it makes the child want to enhance his behavior, and I used it with Zahira on the few occasions when she did not perform well in school.

  “I am not angry with you,” he said. “I am disappointed.”

  Then he made me labor twice as long at the store so I could
not only repay for the broken window but also buy new Korans for both Mamdouh and me.

  But merely because something is predictable and destined does not mean it is logical outside the world of numbers, e.g., a scientist with infinite resources could have predicted my mother’s breast cancer by analyzing her biological properties and her environment, but she was not personally responsible at all for becoming unhealthy, even though my father argued we are responsible for everything.

  In the museum there is another Pollock quotation that intrigues me even more: “My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.” I read it just after I notice that it is difficult to focus on his paintings.

  And then I have an idea, and although the typical image to represent having an idea is a lightbulb powering on, for me I visualize the stars slowly becoming visible in the nighttime sky, because (1) like a strong idea they were always present; but (2) it requires the correct conditions to observe them; and (3) make connections between them. My idea is: I can use Pollock’s ideas about denying the accident and about there being no center for a stock market program. Everyone else who writes programs to predict the stock market concentrates on the most central variables and incorporates a few minor ones. But what if I utilize variables that no one observes because they seem tangential, and I utilize exclusively these tangential variables? I would have an advantage like Dan had in his fantasy baseball trade, where he used tangential data instead of central data. And because I am a tangential foreign banker in the U.S., possibly I will have a greater chance of locating these tangential data, e.g., as a parallel, because I am not a native English speaker I must pay closer attention to its grammar, and therefore I detected the error Dan made that most Americans also make when he used “data” as a singular noun.

  And possibly I will predict events that other people consider random accidents.

  On Saturday morning I have my first opportunity to call Zahira when I am not too taxed and she is still awake.

  “Karim!” she says. “I was wondering when you would call.”

  She is probably in our living room, next to the window that overviews our courtyard and the other apartments, and sitting on the brown cotton couch which we have had since I was a child and whose material needs to be repaired.

  “I have been very busy. And I have emailed you,” I say.

  “Yes, but that is not the same. It is nice to hear your voice.”

  It is nice to hear hers as well. She does not remember it, but her voice sounds like our mother’s: clear but soft and loud simultaneously, like warm water poured over your head. I ask her how she is performing in school, and she tells me about her biology class. It pleases me that she is engaged although I do not understand most of the jargon terms and ideas and cannot respond, except when she discusses viruses, as I mostly self-taught computers by studying viruses at night for a year when I was 18, and I was always the employee at the Doha branch who healed viruses. Biological viruses are of course not perfectly equivalent to computer viruses, but they share some theoretical similarities, and I find it intriguing that they are all self-replicating, as if they have their own brains, and it is dependent on my brain to contain and destroy them.

  “Certify that after you finish your introductory quantitative analysis course you first take microeconomics, as it is important to understand individual motivation, and then macroeconomics for the big-picture view,” I say.

  “I know,” Zahira says. “You have told me a million times.”

  “And if you enhance your English, we can converse in it more frequently.”

  In English, she says, “You tell me one million times.”

  “You have told me a million times,” I say. “But I can tell you are studying idioms. If you read and practice as much as I do, your skills will broaden.”

  I talk about the airplane and the ways midtown reminds me of Al Dafna and the West Bay, and how rapidly people walk when transferring subways, especially the professional females, and that everyone’s aggregated earphones in the subway sound like machines striking metal. I inventory my apartment: a high-end television and stereo; a quality couch of black leather; a bed that could contain three of my bodies; a silver refrigerator of spacious storage capacity; a white carpet that feels like a horse’s hair; a square black table with four chairs; and an invisible glass coffee table that is elegant although when I arrived I did not observe it and crashed my knee on it.

  She makes jokes that amuse only us, e.g., when I tell her how efficient the subways are and she says, “I would like to see Aunt Maysaa on the subway. She would complain even if it transported her from one station to another instantly.”

  I say, “And if it paid her money as well.”

  She adds, “And if the conductor told her she was the most important passenger.”

  We find similar concepts humorous, although she produces jokes at a greater and more successful rate. Business manuals explain how valuable it is to have a sense of humor, so I am studying how others produce jokes, such as making a statement that is clearly the reverse of what you truly mean and using a tone of voice that indicates the reversal. But it is not a natural response for me, minus sometimes with Zahira, and I am unskilled at intentionally adjusting my voice.

  “I am working on a prototype of a program for the stock market that I will soon present to a superior at Schrub,” I say.

  I explain the concept, and how it employs complex algorithms, which are parallel to instructions or a recipe. Although she does not have my math or finance skills, she is intelligent enough to decipher the main idea.

  “I am certain it will be successful,” she says.

  “Why?” I ask. “I have not completed the program yet.”

  Then she says what I always said to her when she was in school and was having difficulty with an assignment: “Because you are very smart and you labor very hard, and if it is possible to achieve, then you are the person to achieve it.”

  “Where did you learn that idea?” I ask.

  “From a stupid person I know.”

  It is the class of joke she produces rapidly which takes me longer to think of, if I even do think of it.

  She asks if I want to speak to our father. I pause, then tell her to transfer the telephone. Zahira yells for my father. In a minute he greets me.

  “You have been away a week without any calls,” he says.

  Without attempting, I convert to the voice people use when speaking to an automated telephone menu. “As I told Zahira, I emailed immediately to inform you I arrived safely, and the time difference makes it difficult to call during the weekdays.”

  “Your sister was worried,” he says.

  The windows in my apartment have a partial overview of Times Square. At the top of the chief building is a neon-green Schrub logo of the hawk transporting the S and E in its two feet, with a thin horizontal monitor like an electronic ticker tape that displays a scrolling font of news, e.g., METS TAKE 2–1 DIVISION SERIES LEAD…YANKS LOOK TO SWEEP RANGERS…The monitor travels around all four sides of the building so that it is visible from every direction. It is enjoyable to watch the words angle around the corners.

  “I will contact her more, but she is also very busy with her schoolwork,” I say.

  “Her work is not so important that she cannot take a few minutes off.”

  My hand tightens on the cellular and I walk in a rectangle around the white carpet. “I would not know about regular university courses. I know only about the nighttime courses I paid for myself.”

  He is mute for several seconds, then he says, “I have to leave for the mosque. I hope you have not been too busy so far with work to find one near you.”

  I tell him I have been to one already, and we disconnect. I spend the rest of the weekend working on my program and thinking about what Zahira said. If it can be achieved, then I have faith that I possess the skills to do it.

  book it = make a transaction official

  genuflect
= angle the knees into a position for prayer

  kudos = praise

  minor league = inferior level of play in baseball; also applicable to other skill sets

  piggyback = add on to previous work

  pod(mate) = workstation (workstation coworkers)

  privy to = have access to

  scintillating = stimulating

  vassal = inferior worker in the feudal system

  you was robbed = usage of incorrect second person to indicate an unsound transaction

  JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: OCTOBER 13

  I stay up late Monday and Tuesday nights programming and email Zahira a longer description of my program. It is difficult to translate into words what is a very rigorous mathematical process, but it is still like scanning a Pollock painting. There are so many layers and colors and patterns of paint that it is impossible for an art critic to analyze all of them, just as there are so many data in and surrounding the stock market even for a computer program to evaluate, and in fact it does not help the program to evaluate all the data, because then it does not know which layers, colors, and patterns of data are truly important. So other programs typically weight the obvious variables more, but because they are all using them, they produce similar results.

  My program magnifies variables that I believe other programs are underutilizing and creates links between these and other variables that do not seem to relate. It is like scanning one minimal corner of a Pollock painting and studying only that corner carefully, and then scanning another partition of the painting somewhere, or even another painting, or data from Pollock’s life, and discovering how the different partitions of data are equal or different. Then the program repeats this comparison with more partitions and more paintings, which computers are of course more efficient at than humans are.