Dawn of the Unthinkable (21 page)

Riven sensed him staring at him, and looked
up from the newspaper he was reading. “What?” he asked his partner,
knowing already what the answer would be.

“You make me sick, you know, when you eat
like that,” Willows said with a look of disgust.

“What?” he asked again in mock surprise,
knowing that he annoyed the fastidious Willows. It was good that
they had some trivial differences, because otherwise, it was scary
how well they got along. The fact that they approached investing
from two different perspectives made them perfect partners as they
could bounce ideas off each other and gets some insight into what
the yin to each yang was. Life was starting to seem pretty
nice.

Riven was so pleased with the way things
were going that he hardly noticed the small changes in his friend
lately. Willows was somewhat more irritable and anxious, not his
usual high-spirited self. Riven wrote it off to the new crowd of
models that Willows had hooked up with, some of them had started
investing their enormous amounts of income with him, and he had to
do more night-life to keep up with them. Since new money always
carried with it new responsibility, lack of sleep and more worries
could lead to temporary personality aberrations. Riven was more
than content to wait out any unpleasantness to keep this important
friendship going. He turned back to his gastronomically incorrect
lunch and ate contentedly.

Willows actually was annoyed at his friend
for being such a slob. He had hooked up with some people in the
modeling business that had near pathological problems with gravity,
viewing anything that would cause them to gain a gram with disgust.
He had met one of the lesser luminaries in the field at a New York
late night hot spot and had found her to be a vacuous airhead who
was cashing her checks and storing the money in fake soup cans in
the kitchen. She had not been burgled yet, which was unusual for
New York, but when she was, she would find those cans were a place
that savvy criminals actually always looked. He had convinced her
with conversation and some dandy swordsmanship to let him invest it
for her, and before long she was spreading the word about both his
business acumen and his prodigious lovemaking stamina. He was
grateful for the referral and had kept the relationship going for a
while but had finally been turned off by her near-constant coke
snorting. He himself had no use for it, preferring to just drink.
He had of course tried it and had got a mild kick from it but not
enough to really get excited about. The nice thing about her was
she furnished some contacts to other people in the business, and he
started to mine this fertile territory.

As he started to pile up some more
successes, the class of model that he was introduced to started to
increase until he was with girls who made more in a day than he
made in half a year. He found out that the beauty that you saw on
the cover of the magazines was helped to a large extent by
favorable lighting and make-up, but these women were still more
beautiful than anyone you could imagine. Sleeping with them was
incredible; their breasts, most of which had been enhanced,
literally exploded from teeny-tiny rib cages and led to some
exciting visual effects. But the actual fire you got from some
lesser looking women was usually not there; it almost seemed like
they were afraid of getting too messy looking, or that you were
going to bruise them. They did not want any attachments, as they
were always off to one city or another. Their strongest attachment
was to their agent, who they teased about “giving good gig,”
meaning he could land choice assignments.

Sex was assumed to be part of most
assignments, and a shocking amount of people had slept with each
other in all sorts of combinations. One thing that was also part of
most shoots was copious amounts of coke, and Willows found out
there was a difference between the garden varieties he had tried
before, and the premium quality stuff these people used. He had
kind of been forced into using it to not look out of place at
parties, and before too long, he found to his dismay he was hooked
on it. He was disgusted with himself but could not shake it like
before. He found he also needed more as each day went by, and the
freebies he got before were no longer available. The ticket to ride
was expensive, and his budget was starting to be strained. He was
starting to consider options to increase his revenues that would
have been unacceptable to him in the past.

He looked at Riven. His plump friend at
times appeared to him to be a turkey waiting to be eaten. He had
started having some pretty strange visions like this. He had heard
there could be some unpredictable effects from using drugs, and now
he was starting to experience them. He had lost weight, which was
good, but some of it was muscle tone, which was hard to replace at
his age. For the first hour or so after he snorted, he was
energetic and euphoric, but that faded and left him feeling worse
than before. He found himself laughing less, but that was replaced
by an intense desire for more exciting experiences with his new
“friends.” He wanted to have the money they did, to be able to drop
everything and jet off on the Concorde at a moment’s notice to ski
in the Alps and party till dawn. That life was not possible with a
beginning broker’s salary, which while good, did not allow many
extravagances. Besides, part of making money in the market was the
constant studying of balance sheets and making contacts with
company insiders, and that could not be done from a European ski
slope. So he was torn between two conflicting lifestyles.

He considered again the story of the
convicted broker and his own modification to his plan. With joint
access to Riven’s accounts, he could churn them now and again, as
his friend no longer checked his activity log very often. He tended
to puts his clients’ money in a mutual fund, blue chip stock
portfolio or bonds, and then not move them much. His stock-in-trade
was making distributions with a personal touch, often delivering
checks personally, which made him popular with the many widows he
serviced. Willows could sell and buy back some of these funds on a
sporadic basis without his partner noticing and pick up an extra
five to ten thousand a month commission, probably. He always made
more than Riven anyway, so the increase could be explained by
having an extra lucky year. While this wouldn’t put him in the
models’ league financially, it would still be a big help with
financing his new hobby, as the premium coke he was using was three
hundred a gram and he was working up to three grams a day.

He would have to start poring through
Riven’s accounts as well as his own to look for candidates for this
scheme. They wouldn’t be hard to find. In the world they lived in,
there were plenty of people who had more money than they knew what
to do with, and he wanted to be one of them.

Winter 1991

Cunningham, in Ryan’s opinion, was an
excellent teacher. He enthralled the class with his ability to tie
disparate points of history together and plausibly explain how some
innocuous event in one place could lead to a string of events
someplace else. Ryan was having a ball in the class and not only
learning new facts but how to think in the abstract like his
esteemed professor. He was learning how the philosophical half
lived, ungoverned by the world of balance sheets and shareholders.
He liked the freewheeling approach to analysis; there was plenty of
sarcasm and cynicism involved and a more-than healthy dose of
skepticism about everything. While his training as a federal
employee had taught him to be cautious also, some of these people
raised it to an art form. He guessed lawyers-in-training had to
sharpen their talons early, and many of the people in his class
were apparently on a fast track to professional obnoxiousness.

As much as he was enjoying the class, it
seemed that Cunningham wasn’t enjoying his work. He thought he had
done a good job on his first paper, but it came back with a C
grade. Cunningham wrote, “This is sterile, newspaper writing. If I
wanted to read one of them, I’d just pick one up. You have to be
able to read between the lines and extrapolate how these events
caused the war and what the leaders and their followers’
motivations were. If you don’t come to understand these factors,
you won’t understand politics, government, or systems.” Though he
was typically an A or B student, he realized that he was going to
have to adapt in order to get what he wanted out of this course,
which now was turning out to be Cunningham’s respect.

Cunningham taught them that while most
people in any given society said they wanted to have lifestyles
that were beneficial for everyone, what the vast majority really
wanted was to benefit themselves and their family first and
foremost. While they all knew that, he showed them how that led to
government and political systems that were much less than they
could be, even when funding was available. He showed them how a
society could be manipulated to be prouder of an aircraft carrier
steaming around the world than lifting several hundred families out
of welfare forever. He also pointed out that while that might be
shameful, the same government could in times of crisis, such as a
war, convince young men and women that giving up their life was a
necessary thing. He took them through the crafting of laws and how
compromise sometimes resulted in a better product for everyone,
rather than a tit-for-tat exchange. This often led to one crummy
bill that favored one senator’s bill being passed in exchange for
an equally nasty bit being passed elsewhere, which proved his point
that the human factor of a faceless government was more predominant
than anyone thought.

Events that before had just been of interest
to him because they were the big news of the day were now becoming
more alive, and he found greater interest in them by trying to
interpolate the information and find a new way to look at things.
He applied it to his next assignment and got a B minus, which he
considered progress. The comments were brief this time, “Better.
Still need to dig for the unspoken motivation of the key players,
who may NOT be the ones making the news." He hadn’t really given
that much thought. He had usually concentrated on what the leaders
were saying, as that was what most of what the media dealt with.
But he found out if you dug around in the internal records of an
organization supporting the leader, you could find out what had led
up to him taking the position that he did. Sometimes the leader was
merely a telegenic figurehead who was a spokesman; other times he
was the driving force behind the group’s actions. Either way, he
had to placate the group in some way, or they would remove him as
leader. So Cunningham was more interested in what the collective
had arrived at and how than what the leader was saying.
Okay
, Ryan thought,
I can do that
.

His family was getting a kick out of his
travails. William, who struggled to stay interested in school,
which he found largely irrelevant to his computer game world, was
enjoying these rather unimpressive marks for his dad. Scott, who
usually had about the same scores, could commiserate. Ashley, who
was not even in elementary school, could not understand how someone
could give her daddy, who to her seemed as smart as anybody in the
world except Mommy, anything less than an A. She was upset that
someone out there did not think as highly about him as she did and
asked if she could help him with maybe pasting some pictures on his
stories, or doing some drawings for them. He was touched by her
support and gently told her that this was something he would just
have to work out for himself. Kathy was amused, as she was used to
him tackling most problems effectively, and here he was giving
himself conniptions over something he didn’t even have to do!
Practical people like her never understood why the dreamers had to
go out looking for trouble when enough of it found its way to your
door as it was.

His grades continued to improve, but he
realized he’d need an A on the final in order to get an A for the
course. The assignment for the final paper was to take any
political system in the world today and improve or change it. He
couldn’t believe his luck! Now he would not only have a chance to
have someone who knew about these things review it, but it could
help him earn a grade he wanted. He just added a small prologue to
his existing paper stating that it was a change to the United
States system and handed it in. He waited in anticipation as
Cunningham handed the papers back. He had written the grades on the
back page… an A! He got it! He read the comment, “Could I see you
after class?” and caught Cunningham’s eye and nodded. He noticed
that Cunningham had a big smile on his face; apparently he was
happy about something.

The rest of the students filed out, some
pleased, others cursing. After everyone had left, he and Cunningham
sat down and looked at each other. Ryan had come to really enjoy
the man’s personality, such as it was displayed during class, and
hoped that he would see the guy in the future. He was expecting a
non-committal comment like, “Nice going for a guy who hadn’t been
in school for a while,” or “This was so off the wall I had to give
it an A.” What Cunningham said instead surprised him.

“Do you like beer? Because if you do, I’ll
buy you one.”

Ryan snorted a short laugh. “Sure, I’ve had
one or two in my life…when?”

Cunningham looked at his watch; it was 8:30
on a Thursday night. “How about now?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s okay, let me just call my wife
and let her know,” Ryan responded.
Well, a beer with the prof,
this is a first.

He went outside to make his call on the
payphone; Kathy wasn’t at home, so he left a message on the
machine. She didn’t mind him going out because he was just as
accommodating when she wanted to go out with her girlfriends.
Usually, she preferred some advance notice, and he was taking a
risk that she needed him at home for something, but he was afraid
that if he put the professor off they wouldn’t hook up again, and
he wanted to hear what the man had to say. So he hung up and they
walked across the campus to The Owl’s Nest, a local watering hole.
It was still early for this kind of place; it wouldn’t start
hopping until around ten. It was a smoky, noisy joint, the kind
that Ryan was starting to find annoying. But there were only a few
students in there, so it wasn’t too bad, and they took a couple of
stools at the bar. Cunningham bought the first round and they
clinked bottles. They both had a long swig before he started.