The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  And here is Life, dark and full of strangers, yelling at each other from their private intoxications like monkeys screeching through the bars of their cage. Music booms all around, prohibiting conversation at anything less than a shout; battalions of drones, haircuts modelled after the heroes of the day, neck their fizzy lagers, their syrupy alcopops, and perform the minimal courting rituals required before they have sex with each other. The bar’s style is classic Celtic Tiger – white armchairs with zebra throws, ubiquitous mirrors, large unseated area, palpable air of incipient violence – like a cross between a hairdresser’s and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Nevertheless, Life is the closest thing the Financial Services Centre has to a local. This is where the real information is exchanged: who’s getting paid what, who’s hiring, who’s on the way up/down/out; tips for good schools, good builders, good mechanics, good tailors, good divorce lawyers.

  The name is a pun – Life is Gaelic for Liffey, the river that splits the city into north and south (and, broadly, rich and poor) – and gives rise to many more puns (‘I hate Life’, ‘After a few drinks Life won’t seem so bad’, and so on), which we make instead of finding somewhere less repugnant. On Friday nights, patrons will typically skip dinner in order to start drinking sooner – unthinkable in Paris; get stuck beside Ish and you will first be treated to what seems an unending series of humorous cat videos, then, as the hysterical laughter dies away, find yourself attempting fruitlessly to comfort her as she rehearses yet again the break-up of her relationship, before lurching off into the night with whichever opportunist has bought her last drink.

  Tonight the turbulence on the markets has lent an extra edge of mania to the proceedings, as employees of the many banks not currently punching above their weights contemplate the idea that this time next week they may be out of a job, and reach desperately for a lifebelt.

  ‘Think the brunette there’s taken a shine to you, Kev,’ Gary McCrum, Utilities analyst, says.

  Kevin turns to look. The dark-haired girl at the end of the adjoining table glances up and away again. She has delicate hands, eyes with a little too much white in them, a disorientating air of weightlessness, like a dress on a clothes line flapping in the wind.

  ‘Totally checking you out,’ Dave Davison, Commodities, confirms.

  Kevin scrutinizes the brunette dubiously, like a diner in a restaurant examining the lobsters in the tank. ‘Is she hot?’

  ‘Is she hot? She’s right there in front of you!’

  ‘I’ve looked at so much porn I can’t tell anymore if IRL women are good-looking or not,’ Kevin confesses. ‘I have to imagine if I saw her on a screen would I click on her.’

  ‘IRL?’ I ask Dave Davison. ‘This means Ireland? Irish women?’

  ‘In real life, Grandad – here, Kev, look at her through my phone. See? She’s an eight, easy.’

  ‘Well, a seven,’ Gary says.

  ‘Maybe she is more of a seven,’ Dave concedes.

  ‘Pff, I’m not wasting a drink on a seven,’ Kevin says, and turns his back on the brunette, who dips her eyes woundedly into her lap, then reaffixes herself to her friends’ conversation, throwing her toothy smile about the room betimes like a cracked whip.

  ‘I used to feel that way about sevens,’ Dave says sadly. ‘Then I got married.’

  ‘Those two are really hitting it off,’ Jurgen says to me, nodding over to where for the last half an hour Paul and Ish have been deep in conversation.

  ‘I hope she is not telling him anything too personal,’ I say.

  ‘Such as her theories about where it all went wrong with Tog?’ Jurgen says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or the time she got diarrhoea in China?’

  My eyes widen. ‘You think she’s telling him the Yangtze riverboat story?’

  Maybe I should go and check, I decide; but someone is blocking my path. It’s Howie, arriving with Tom Cremins, Brian O’Brien and a couple of other traders, all carrying glasses of single malt whiskey. They crowd in beside us; the girls at the next table swivel their heads towards ours once more, like lovely, money-tropic flowers.

  ‘Hear you had a little chat with the government today,’ Howie says to me. ‘What’d he tell you? Are they going to recap Royal?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘He must have said something.’

  ‘He actually didn’t,’ I say, recalling with a twinge of horror the Minister’s grinning, terrorized aphasia. ‘Anyway, even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you – you know I couldn’t tell you,’ raising my voice as he starts swearing at me, ‘it’d be insider trading.’

  ‘Crazy Frog, if they locked up everyone in this town who’s insider trading, there’d be no one left on the fucking inside.’ Howie plonks his glass down on the table, making the ice cubes jingle. ‘Someone ought to be making money out of this eurozone shit-show. This whole fucking week has been a disaster on every conceivable level, like getting raped by a guy with a tiny cock.’ The eavesdropping girls flinch, but don’t stop staring; Howie’s attention, however, is already elsewhere. ‘Is that the writer?’ Pushing past me he taps on Paul’s shoulder and asks him the same question. Paul turns with a slightly confused smile. ‘What the fuck are you doing writing a book about this guy?’ Howie demands, gesturing at me.

  ‘Ah –’ Paul says, looking startled.

  ‘He’s not a player. He’s a research analyst. It’s like you’ve gone to Silverstone and you’re watching the mechanics. I mean, do what you want,’ Howie sniffs. ‘It just sounds like a boring book, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, you see, in a way that’s the –’

  ‘There is crazy shit going down right now,’ Howie interrupts. ‘I mean world-historical craziness. You should be speaking to the traders. Or the hedge funds. If I had a hedge fund, I’d be shorting the shit out of the whole of Europe. And in six months I’d be a billionaire.’

  ‘You’re talking about the –?’

  ‘The whole continent’s fucked. The politicians don’t know what to do. All that can save it now is a war.’

  ‘A war?’ Kevin hiccups.

  ‘That’s the way it’s heading. France, Italy, Spain are all watching their economies go down the tube, Germany’s there with its arms folded, saying, “Don’t expect anything from us.” There’s all the ingredients for a war, right? And it would stop all the, you know, the bollocks.’

  ‘War,’ Paul repeats, scribbling in his red notebook.

  ‘War’s a good thing. What stopped the Great Depression? World War Two. Or look at the Baghdad Bounce. NASDAQ crashes, the economy’s assholed, till the US invades Iraq and the stock market goes up 80 per cent. Capitalism needs war. Besides, war’s what made Europe great. The whole reason their currency’s in the toilet is you’ve got a bunch of bureaucrats in charge, trying to pretend the last thousand years of history never happened. Acting like Europe’s all just one big happy family, singing and holding hands like a bunch of fucking Smurfs. And they wonder why everyone’s lining up to short them! Would you invest in a Smurf economy?’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Kevin says.

  ‘No way,’ Howie says, but his eyes are suddenly vacant and he peers back and forth as if he can’t remember what he’s doing here.

  At that moment, Tom Cremins pulls his sleeve. ‘We’re going,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Howie says, and drains his glass. He turns to Paul once more. ‘When you get tired talking to this joker, come and see me,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you stuff that’ll have you haemorrhaging from every orifice.’

  With that, he and the traders bounce off, their conversation a blizzard of acronyms and stomach-turning sexual references, like a Scrabble game at a gang bang.

  ‘Interesting guy,’ Paul says thoughtfully. I watch him watch Howie barge his way through the drunken, suited bodies, feeling the same pang I might have at a school dance, seeing the girl I adored bloom at the attentions of some handsome delinquent. Then, as if he senses my unhappiness, Paul turns to me, and with an enthus
iasm that strikes me as false says, ‘But then, you’re all interesting! I just had a great conversation with your friend here. Did you know she studied anthropology? I thought you bankers were all rocket scientists.’

  ‘That’s just the traders,’ I say. ‘My background is philosophy – François Texier, do you know him?’

  Paul shakes his head.

  ‘In fact he might be a useful person to think about for your book,’ I say. ‘He had many fascinating ideas about simulacra, and the derealization of modern life.’

  ‘Derealization?’ Paul repeats, with a half-smile.

  ‘Yes. He was interested in a Buddhist concept called sunyata, or voidness. According to this sunyata, reality as we perceive it is an illusion. We see the world as divided up into objects – this glass, this table, this person. But in fact, these are merely snapshots of processes that are in a constant state of change, all parts of a great intermingling flux.’

  ‘That does sound pretty derealizing,’ Paul admits.

  ‘Actually, the derealizing comes as an attempt to cover over this notion of flux,’ I say, excited to feel these thoughts coming to life in my mind again. ‘To a culture centred on the individual, the idea that we are all just transitory surface effects on some great sea of emptiness has not been popular. Texier’s argument is that most of Western civilization has been an attempt to build over the void with huge, static systems of thought, religious, economic, scientific, that divide everything into facts, each with its own specific place. We call it analysis, but really it is escape. Or as he puts it, “We write the encyclopedia to explain the world, and then we leave the world to live in the encyclopedia.” The simulacrum is a kind of a derivative of these –’

  ‘Oi! What’s going on here?’ Ish arrives with a tray of drinks. ‘You know the rules, Claude. Friday night – no Frenchness!’

  ‘I’m just explaining that we have all come to banking from different disciplines,’ I say.

  ‘Kevin here was halfway through a medical degree,’ Ish says. ‘Imagine, he could actually have been useful to somebody.’

  ‘Doctors don’t make shit these days,’ Kevin says.

  ‘It used to be the smartest people didn’t always want to be the richest people,’ Paul says.

  ‘Maybe the smartest people got smarter,’ Kevin returns.

  ‘I’m not going to spend the rest of my life at it,’ Ish says. ‘I’ve still got a box of my old clothes at home. As soon as I get my next bonus, I’m going to chuck my whole wardrobe of daggy work shit straight into a skip and fuck off to the Pacific. It’ll be like Corporate Ish never existed.’

  ‘What about your apartment?’ I say.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Her face falls. Turning to Kevin she says, ‘Here, want to buy an apartment? It’s got a bidet.’

  ‘Property’s finished,’ Kevin says. ‘I’m putting all my money into global pandemics.’

  As midnight approaches, I see Paul put on his coat.

  ‘The end of your first week,’ I say. ‘It is all going well?’

  ‘Sure,’ he says – but I detect a hesitation.

  ‘Only…?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he reassures me. ‘I’m just trying to figure out how it all hangs together.’

  ‘If you have questions, maybe I can help.’

  At first he blusters nothings, then he pauses, looks at me, as if deciding whether to take me into his confidence: ‘I feel like I’m missing something,’ he says. ‘I’ve got the characters, what you do, the rhythm of the day. But I still – I feel like I’m not getting to the heart of things, you know?’ I must look very worried, because he claps me on the shoulder. ‘It’ll come. Maybe I just need to change my focus a little bit.’

  ‘We will see you on Monday?’ I say.

  ‘Of course.’ He grins. ‘Have a good weekend. You’re off-camera! Let your hair down.’

  Not long after, the lights come up; Life begins to empty, its pinchbeck promises having slipped away, as always, through the cracks of the night.

  We gather our things and make our way outside. I am deep in thought: what Paul said about missing something bothers me, and as if picking up on that, Jurgen says, ‘So he has told you what’s going to happen?’

  ‘Happen?’

  ‘In the book.’

  ‘We know what is going to happen in the book,’ I say. ‘It is about me, a modern Everyman, experiencing a typical day.’

  ‘Yes, but there will be some kind of story also?’

  ‘That is the story,’ I say.

  ‘That is the story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You, sitting at your computer, writing research notes about banks.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Jurgen says nothing to this.

  ‘It’s not supposed to be one of those books where things happen,’ I explain. ‘It’s about discovering the humanity in ordinary lives.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jurgen says.

  There is another silence.

  ‘It’s not going to be boring,’ I say.

  ‘Of course not,’ he says.

  Around us the Centre looms, darkened and empty like a Perspex necropolis. I think again of Paul’s parting words, and anxiety quickens in my sinews once more. ‘Did he say anything to you?’ I turn to Ish. ‘What were you talking to him about for so long?’

  ‘He was asking about the Torabundo archipelago. I travelled around there a bit with Tog back in the day. She pauses, then says, ‘I reckon he’s got something planned for you.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like … I don’t know … maybe you fall in love.’

  ‘I’m not going to fall in love,’ I say categorically.

  ‘In a book this is exactly the kind of thing the main character will say right before he falls in love,’ Jurgen says.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Ish. ‘Plus, you’re French. You lot practically invented love. French kissing. French letters. It’s the whole French thing.’

  ‘How would you feel if I said the “whole Australian thing” was kangaroos and tinnies and daytime soap operas?’

  ‘That is the whole Australian thing, Claude. Why do you think I left?’

  ‘Yes, well, then you will understand that not everyone fits into the national stereotype.’

  ‘I certainly do not think that when people speak of the “typical German”,’ Jurgen chuckles, ‘they are imagining a crazy man who loves reggae music, and writes articles about medieval economics while listening to reggae music on his computer!’

  ‘My point is that adventures, escapades, dramatic reversals, falling in love – these are the hackneyed tropes that Paul’s trying to get away from,’ I tell Ish, though I am perhaps trying to persuade myself as much as her. ‘He wants to depict modernity as it genuinely is.’

  ‘Love’s not hackneyed,’ Ish says obstinately.

  ‘What does love have to do with this place?’ I throw my arms up at our surroundings, great glass panopticons surveying all the other panopticons. ‘I am serious, what does love have to do with anything we do all day long?’

  ‘Well, that’s what he’d better work out,’ Ish says. ‘If he wants anyone to read his book.’

  ‘There are plenty of good stories without love.’

  ‘Like what?’

  I think for a moment. ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.’

  We have emerged onto the quay. Over the river, beneath the concrete skull of the unfinished headquarters, the zombies sleep in silence.

  ‘Just because you don’t have it doesn’t mean you don’t need it,’ Ish says, staring into the dark water. ‘Every story needs love. Even at the bottom of the sea.’

  Over the weekend, Forbes publishes a long article about our new chief executive, Porter Blankly. The accompanying photographs show a man in his sixties, with the craggy, portentous good looks of the star of a Hollywood Bible epic, and white hair in a sculpted wave, like a roll of ice cream caught mid-scoop. In every picture he is shaking hands with someone, as if that’s all he does for
a living; anyone in the industry will know that each of those handshakes represents a game-changing new synergy, a market stampede, and a multimillion-dollar windfall for his shareholders. The piece is titled Blank to the future, and it runs as follows:

  Four years ago this summer, Porter Blankly achieved a dream he had cherished since childhood: He became a billionaire. Subprime mortgages were booming, and Danforth Blaue, a bank once perceived as a starchy also-ran, was thanks to his leadership right at the heart of the action. The day stock options took his wealth on paper to the magical ten figures, Blankly celebrated with a quiet dinner at home with his wife and legal team. Then he bought eight stories of the Empire State Building.

  Porter Blankly has always dreamed big. Hailing from a hardscrabble town of blue-collar laborers, many of them employed on his father’s private railroad, he was spotted as a teenager by a scout for Harvard’s varsity golf team. He dropped out of ‘Old Crimson’ after only a year to play full-time, and although a shoulder injury cut short his professional career, his experiences on the courses of the 1960s were formative. This was a time of ferment in the Massachusetts golf scene. Ideas and books by the young firebrands of the new conservative movement were being passed around – as well as other material. ‘[US Ryder Cup team captain Don] Hartford turned up one day with a sheet of blotter acid,’ Blankly recalled later, ‘and everything changed. The fairways were rainbows, the holes were mouths, speaking to you. You’ve heard about crazy golf – at that time all golf was crazy. People were showing up in sunglasses, without ties … everything was being questioned.’

  The potent cocktail of fiscal conservatism and perception-altering drugs would shape an entire generation. Many of the figures Blankly encountered at that time went on to become key figures in politics, banking, and in the nascent world of computing, into which they carried the revolutionary concept they had learned on the fairways – that reality was plastic and could be molded as they saw fit.

  Though he never completed his degree and had no training in finance, arriving in Wall Street Blankly found his +2 handicap much in demand. He was taken under the wing of the legendary Walter Wriston of Citibank, and, as he quickly came to dominate in interbank and pro-am tournaments, effectively given an open brief. At the time the major banks were plowing money into Latin American dictatorships, but Blankly, never one to follow the crowd, instead staked his money on a then little-known warlord in the Middle East. The bet paid off: While Wall Street lost a fortune when their dictators were deposed, Ahmed bin-Ahmed, as he was then known, went on to become the Caliph of the oil-rich state of Oran, and today remains one of Blankly’s biggest financial backers and closest personal friends.