by Teddy Wayne
“No,” I say. “You may book it.”
Rebecca looks at me. “I’ll have the same,” she says. I ask if she’s a vegetarian. “No, but I should eat healthier,” she says, and I hypothesize she was prepared to order a meat dish but converted her order when I asked for the veggie burger, because she again was afraid to offend my religious beliefs.
“What kind of stuff have you been doing in New York?” Rebecca asks when our food arrives.
“I have gone to the Museum of Modern Art. I have explored Central Park and many neighborhoods.”
“Do you know other people here?”
“My family’s friends in Qatar provided me with the contact data of several people here,” I say. Then I add ASAP, “I apologize for not asking you before. How was your trip to see your brother David?”
“Good. Except he’s a little homesick,” she says. “And sort of lonely.”
I look down at my veggie burger for a few moments. “My sister Zahira is fortunate to live at home while attending university.”
“Though it doesn’t leave much room for growth,” she says. “But I guess it’s different over there. Do you talk to her much?”
“No. The time difference is difficult. But when I am there, we talk constantly.”
“She must miss you, then.”
“Yes,” I say. Suddenly the bar feels very dark and cold even though we are next to a heated pipe, and I wish the rock music was muted. “I think so.” Then I ask Rebecca about her neighborhood called Fort Greene in Brooklyn, and we discuss that for a while and other parts of New York. But we have frequent interims of non-conversation, and although it is mute, I can feel the slight vibration of my voice recorder powering on and off in my pocket for only a few seconds, e.g.:
REBECCA: [voice recorder powers on] “Do you go to the movies a lot back home?”
KARIM: “Sometimes. But most of the movies that come to Qatar involve car accidents and explosions, which I do not like to observe. So I do not go frequently.” [voice recorder powers off]
Then it remains off for another 30 seconds while we eat until I ask Rebecca a question. It would be enjoyable if the voice recorder remained on the entire duration, but that’s difficult with someone you still do not know well. Or if it remained off the entire duration but neither person experienced discomfort.
Near the end of the meal I become anxious about when the bill arrives. I want to tell Rebecca that I am not wealthy, as she thinks I am, but if I do that she may believe I am innovating an excuse not to pay for the meal, and I do think it is my duty to pay. When the waitress comes, she points to my plate. “Are you still working on that?” she asks. I say no, although I am.
Rebecca is finished, and she takes out a cigarette and asks, “You mind if I…”
I say I do not mind, but I wish she did not, both because of the odor and because it is unhealthy for both of us, but people do not like being told their choices are unhealthy, especially if they already know it. It also surprises me that she is worried about drinking alcohol around me but still smokes.
Then I tell Rebecca I must excuse myself briefly. On the way to the restroom I locate our waitress. “Miss, may I pay by credit card now for the meal so you do not have to bring the check to our table?” I ask. She takes my card and swipes it. I add, “Please withhold from my friend this highly privileged information,” and I give her a 30% gratuity to certify that she follows my request.
I return to the table and pretend to dry my hands on my pants. “I have positive news,” I say to Rebecca. “When I was at the front of the bar, I learned we were automatically entered into a lottery, and we were the winners, so therefore our meal is free.”
“You sure?” she asks.
“Yes. You will see. The waitress will not present us with a check.”
The waitress arrives in a minute to retrieve our plates. “Thanks a lot, guys. Have a nice night,” she says.
“Thank you, Karim,” Rebecca says.
“You do not have to thank me. It was a random accident that we won.”
“Thanks, anyway,” she says. “Randomly and accidentally.”
We walk to the Chambers St. subway station that we can both use, although I am going uptown and she is going to Brooklyn. My entrance is across the street from hers. She stands at the top of the stairs.
“This was fun. We both work a little too hard. You especially,” she says. “Let’s see if we can’t do it more often.”
“I would enjoy that,” I say. “But let us see if we can do it more often.”
She looks confused. “That’s what I said.”
“You said, ‘Let us see if we can’t do it more often.’”
She says, “That’s an idiom. It means ‘Let’s see if we can do whatever.’”
“Why would you employ the negative when the intention is a positive?” I ask.
“Maybe to make it seem like you’re not fully invested in it?” she says. “Not that I don’t care. I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m rambling.” We pause for several seconds. “Well,” she says, then puts out her hand, “have a good night,” and she shakes my hand hard like we are at a business meeting and quickly descends the steps.
I enter my subway, and by then she is reading a book on a bench at a distant end of the station. Her forehead is very concentrated most of the time with a small compression in it and sometimes she smiles to herself at what she is reading and once she even laughs quietly to herself, which I have never done while reading, but that is because I read financial books, which are humorless. She does not notice me, and I keep observing her until her train arrives, and through the window I see the back of her head and the subway light mirroring the top of her hair like a silver crown until she disappears into the tunnel, and then I listen again on my voice recorder to her saying “Well…have a good night” multiple times to decipher it, because frequently it is not the words themselves that matter but the way they are said.
are you still working on that = are you still continuing to eat a meal
grab a bite = get something to eat
homesick = missing home so much as if it were an illness
invested in = care about
kill it = terminate services
let’s see if we can’t do = let’s see if we can do
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: OCTOBER 24
On Friday morning I greet Rebecca, and she tells me again that she had a good time last night. Dan enters, and she says, “Time to put our noses to the grindstone.”
At 9:00 a.m. Kapitoil predicts the price of oil will rise 6 cents. I buy a contract. Kapitoil looks similar to other programs I am running, so my podmates do not know what I am doing.
At 10:00 a.m. the price of oil is up 4 cents. I sell the contract and we profit.
I immediately run Kapitoil again and put more weight on articles written in the last 90 minutes. It has a new prediction: down 3 cents. I short a contract.
At 11:30 oil is down 4 cents and we again profit.
I email Mr. Ray that we have made two consecutive profits on the hourly transactions. He green-lights me to continue until 5:15 p.m.
I make five more transactions during the day and profit on all of them. At closing time we have made 1.6% profit even though the ending price is only a few cents higher than the original price.
I decipher the reason it was malfunctioning. With the historical data, the program used newspaper articles written through the entire day and averaged them collectively to predict the closing price, but in practice I was using articles published in the morning. It was a foolish but understandable error: When you initially succeed without resistance, you sometimes overlook serious problems that may appear later. When people face challenges, however, they innovate more, e.g., in the way that the mother of a poorer family may produce a complete dinner out of minimal and inexpensive ingredients.
I can now revise the program’s potential. Because the market can vacillate approximately 0.5% every hour, if Kapitoil operates at full e
fficiency, it can achieve up to 4.0% daily average profits during standard business hours. Over four weeks, assuming maximum vacillation and optimal predictive ability, this equals profits of 219%.
Mr. Ray emails me at 5:30 p.m.:
Nice work today. Finesse the program some more over the weekend, and let’s do it again on Monday. I’ll replace the 100K in your account.
Mr. Ray does not seem like the class of higher-up who frequently provides compliments, so for him to write “Nice work today” means very much to me. I almost forward his email to Zahira, but I do not want her to know about the program, both because (1) it may still not function and I do not want her to think I am a failure, as she considers me the smartest person she knows, even though I believe she is probably smarter than I am, which normally bothers me but not when it is Zahira, and (2) Kapitoil must remain highly privileged information.
After Dan and Jefferson leave, Rebecca puts on her blue wool hat and coat. “You up to anything fun this weekend?” she asks.
I will be refining Kapitoil to operate at full efficiency, but I cannot tell her that. I also do not want to lie 100%, so I say, “I will be laboring on some projects.”
She crashes her hand against her head as if we are in the military. “At ease, then.”
Over the weekend I finesse Kapitoil. I am focused, but several times on Saturday night I wonder what Rebecca is doing, e.g., is she at an event, is she with friends, or is she alone like I am.
finesse = labor on for enhancement
put one’s nose to the grindstone = labor intensively
JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: OCTOBER 25
On Monday morning Kapitoil continues generating hourly profits. By noon, out of a possible 2.1% profit based on how much the oil futures have vacillated per hour, we have made a 1.7% profit, which is not full efficiency but is still robust.
Mr. Ray emails me:
Meet me in the conference room on 89 at 1:30.
Possibly he has reconsidered that Kapitoil might still be too risky. There are rumors that layoffs will soon occur, and maybe they do not have the money to continue high-risk programs like mine.
Or possibly they do not even have the money to retain me as an employee.
I omit lunch because my stomach is turbulent, as it frequently becomes when I am anxious, and do not run Kapitoil at noon, because I do not want it to lose money suddenly and give Mr. Ray more reason to kill it.
At 1:30 I knock on the door of the conference room. Mr. Ray says “Come in” from inside, and I open the door.
He is sitting, and at the head of the table is an older man. He has tan skin and black and white hair, and his nose slightly curves down like a vertical asymptote. His suit is gray and blue and his tie is dark red like blood that has dried.
It is Mr. Schrub.
“Karim,” he says. He stands and extends to a few inches taller than I am. “Glad to meet you.”
I am afraid to look into his eyes as we shake hands, so I look at his red tie. “It is my honor to meet you, Mr. Schrub.”
Mr. Schrub puts out his arm to signal his permission to sit down opposite Mr. Ray.
“George tells me,” he says, “that you can see the future.”
I look at Mr. Ray for help, but he is not looking back at me. “The program has been successful so far at predicting pricing variance,” I say.
“What’s the 1,000-mile view on this thing?”
“I am unfamiliar with that term,” I say.
“What are its long-term prospects?” he says.
“It is employing a market signal from news reports, and it should function for the duration of that signal’s strength,” I say, and I am no longer nervous because I am in the intersected world of programming and finance. “But if the signal converts a great amount, I will have to write a 100% new program, and that new program might not function as efficiently.” Because I am uncertain if he is familiar with these terms, I translate them to a sports analog: “It is parallel to predicting the strategy of a racquetball opponent. If you compete against him for a long time, you can predict his strategies. But if you receive a new opponent, you have to adopt new tactics because your old predictions will be obsolete.”
He smiles, possibly because he does understand the jargon terms and does not require the racquetball analog. “Is there a chance our competitors could catch on to what we’re doing?”
“If we continue making anonymous desk transactions through offshore holdings and keep them frequent but minimal, then no one will know it is Schrub, and therefore our market entry will not cause fluctuations in the market,” I say. “We can still make strong profits, as long as we practice restraint.”
Mr. Schrub taps his fingers on the desk. It makes a loud sound in the large room. Then he says, “I’ll level with you, Karim. We took a big hit in the fourth quarter. We bet the lion’s share of our capital that the bubble would finally burst, but it didn’t, and it burned us. Now we need to rebound, and from what George has told me, Kapitoil might be the way. So, as long as it keeps returning profits, we’re going to plough a lot of money into your program.”
I knew from released reports that Schrub suffered losses in the fourth quarter, but I assumed they had rebounded since then. If Mr. Schrub wants to plough money into my program after it has worked for just 1.5 days, then they must truly be in the red and not have other options.
Mr. Ray says, “You’ll receive a raise and promotion.”
“Therefore I would not be working on the Y2K project?” I ask.
“No. We want you working full-time on Kapitoil, doing everything you can to keep it humming.”
“I do not think we should tell my coworkers about this,” I say.
Mr. Ray says, “Absolutely. We can’t let on what you’re doing. We’ll just say you’re working on futures.”
“Speaking of which, how is the program protected?” Mr. Schrub asks.
“I have formally copyrighted it in my name, although I am not patenting the software, as that would force us to disclose its contents to the public,” I say. “And it is encrypted, so only I can enter into the code.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way,” he says. “I know you two are very busy, so I’ll let you get back to your work,” he adds, although of course he is much busier than we are, but it signifies control if you give permission for the other person to exit the conversation, e.g., Jefferson always ends personal calls by saying “I’ll let you go.”
He shakes my hand again, and his grip is strong but not too strong like some businessmen’s grips are to prove they are powerful. “A pleasure meeting you, Karim. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.” He looks closely at my left eye, and this time I do not allow myself to look away, although my blood simultaneously seems to stop and accelerate in my veins.
Then he leaves, and Mr. Ray and I discuss technical issues and how to enable him to utilize the program as well, and he terminates by saying, “Why don’t you finish up the Y2K work you’ve been doing over the next few days, and then I’ll let your podmates know we’re transferring you to another project next week.”
This is positive news, as I was truly non-stimulated by the Y2K project, but I feel bad about abandoning my podmates, especially Rebecca. But Rebecca also seems careless about which project she works on and is not envious of others, so maybe she will be happy for me.
When I return to my pod, people are whispering to each other and scanning the room. Rebecca explains to me that Mr. Schrub was just in the building. “He only comes in a few times a year, so it’s a big deal,” she says. “I’m having trouble containing my excitement. It’s like Christmas morning on floor 88.” She stops smiling and returns to her work and adds, “Or something like that.”
Near the end of the day, Jefferson and Dan discuss their plans to go to a nightclub. Jefferson asks me, “Karim, you want to come with?”
Although it is a Monday night and this is when I should be finessing Kapitoil even more, this may be my solitary chance. I can feel Re
becca listening to me even though she is pretending to focus on her computer, and I want to suggest that she should attend as well, but it is not my place to do so. “I would be delighted to come with,” I say.
At 6:30 p.m. they are ready to leave, and I say good-bye to Rebecca, who is staying late. Without looking up from coding, she says, “Have a blast, Karim.”
We taxi to Jefferson’s apartment near Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. It is the first taxi I have taken here, and the driver is African, although I am afraid to ask what country he is from, and I think of Barron, as the only two people who have driven me in a car here are black men. When we arrive I retrieve my wallet, but Dan says, “Don’t sweat it,” and he and Jefferson divide the cost.
Jefferson’s building is classy, but not as classy as mine (e.g., he does not have a doorman), so I feel bad about not paying for the taxi. His apartment structure is similar to mine inside, although it is smaller and the furniture is less expensive. He has posters in frames on his wall of some of the movies he has on postcards in his pod, as well as a painting of an obsolete Japanese soldier with a sword on a horse. Over the television on the wall is a true silver sword that curves at the ends.
Jefferson has a record player but not a CD player, and he cautiously removes a record from its case and centers it on the player as if he is carrying an infant. I hear a saxophone. Dan says, “Can we please play some rap for once?”
“When we go to your place, we can listen to your commercialized, Top-40, disposable MTV garbage. And if you had any sense of history, you’d know nearly all rap derives from jazz,” Jefferson says. “In this day and age, your ignorance of the oppression my brothers and I suffered at the hands of the white man is unconscionable and, frankly, straight-up racist. I’d think you’d sympathize, as a dirty Jew.”