Authors: Hari Kunzru
“It’s a new global quant model.”
“Goddamn theory of everything, isn’t that right, Cy?”
“If you say so, Fenton. Everything would be kind of a large dataset.”
Jaz was intrigued. “What stage are you at?”
“Personally,” interrupted Willis, “I think it’s just great already. If it was up to me I’d go live right now, start counting my winnings. But Cy says the bastard’s got a half-life of about twenty seconds, and if we go off all premature we’ll blow the chance of a bigger payday down the line.”
“But it
is
down to you, Fenton. Just say the word.”
“Cy. If you tell me I can have a dollar today or three tomorrow, I’ll take the three bucks. Deferred gratification—it’s what separates civilized man from chimps and children. We’re getting OK returns on the established models, so I’m happy to wait. Just as long as Renaissance or those bastards at Goldman don’t get there before us.”
“Fenton, I’d be very surprised if they had any interest in this strategy.”
“Well, I wouldn’t. Probably bugging the damn table decorations in this joint, paying off the sommelier. Speaking of which, let’s get another bottle.”
When Jaz presented himself at Bachman’s office the following day, he
expected to be shown some kind of formula. The Walter setup was very cloak-and-dagger, a separate address, pin codes and biometrics to get through the door. Bachman had a view of the Hudson and a display case full of curios behind his desk that Jaz avoided scrutinizing too closely, in case it led to a conversation about basketry or ceramics or netsuke, topics that would quickly lead him out of his comfort zone. Luckily Bachman got straight to business. He told him the best way to understand the model was to work with it, which seemed sensible enough. When Jaz asked about its basic principles, he waved the question away.
Bachman’s model was conventional in that it relied on discovering certain predictable behaviors in the market—regularities, trackable cycles—and using that knowledge to trade. But as far as Jaz could grasp from the initial presentation, which took almost three hours and left him feeling like he’d been sparring with some kind of higher-dimensional gorilla, the type of regularities Walter sought were particularly fleeting and unstable. The model was being trained not simply to exploit some temporary price disparity but to identify and track entirely ad hoc constellations of five, six, seven variables, brief but dazzling phenomena, lightning flashes of correlation. The math, Jaz thought, was some of the most beautiful he’d ever encountered. The problem that would come to tug at him like an importunate child was something else. Something about Walter’s responsiveness, its voracious thirst for data. It was more like an organism than a computer program. It felt
alive
.
For the first few months he had little to do with Walter’s guts, the software that identified patterns and executed trades. His job was to take certain datasets and hunt for statistical relationships, what Bachman called “rhymes.” The material (prepared according to some arcane process Bachman refused to discuss) came in discrete clusters, little clots of seemingly unrelated numbers. Some of it was familiar: commodity and share prices, government bond yields, interest rates, currency fluctuations. But there was other data: on shopping-mall construction, retail-sales figures, drug-patent applications, car ownership; on the incidence of birth defects, industrial injuries, suicides, controlled-substance seizures, cell phone tower construction. Walter consumed the most esoteric numbers: small-arms sales in the Horn of Africa; the population of
Gary, Indiana, between 1940 and 2008; the population of Magnitogorsk, Siberia, for the same years; prostitution arrests in major American cities; data traffic over the TPE trans-Pacific cable; the height of the water table in various subregions of the Maghreb.
Some of the data were so bizarre that Jaz couldn’t help but feel that Willis’s quip about a theory of everything was close to the mark. It was as if Bachman were trying to fit the whole world into his model. What was external to Walter? Was there anything it
didn’t
aim to comprehend? When Jaz tried, hesitantly, to frame this question, Cy launched into a convoluted monologue, at the end of which things were no clearer than before. Walter, he said, pacing his office like a prisoner exercising in his cell, didn’t rely on the opposition between external and internal. It wasn’t some tin-toy simplification of the world, which chose a few variables and ignored the rest. Conversely, it didn’t need to know the state of “everything” at some initial time
t
in order to find the patterns it sought. Walter worked in a different way. “It’s like plunging your hands into a river,” he said, “and pulling out a fish.”
Despite Jaz’s skepticism, he soon had to admit that there
were
rhymes, and they existed in the weirdest places. One day he found a periodic cycle in a cluster of figures for CPU transistor counts since 1960, IQ test scores for African American boys from single-parent families and an epidemiological analysis of the spread of the methamphetamine drug ya-ba through Thailand and Southeast Asia. Not only was there a strange harmony to the movements of this grab bag of statistics, but it seemed to track a certain popular measure of volatility in currency markets. He checked and rechecked the figures. He hadn’t miscalculated. Filled with an odd sense of foreboding, he presented his findings to Bachman, who nodded appreciatively.
“Perfect,” he said. “I told Fenton you had the knack for this. I wasn’t wrong.”
Jaz spoke carefully, not sure where his words would lead him. “I’m not sure I understand, Cy. Surely this is meaningless coincidence. There’s no link between any of these things.”
Bachman’s hands fluttered to his neck, checking the perfect Windsor knot of his tie. He swiveled his chair toward the window and looked out
at the river, a dull gray band between the sleek black faces of the towers. It was early February and rain was smeared against the glass, the outside world a barely recognizable blur.
“Get your coat. I want to show you something.”
They took Bachman’s car uptown through heavy lunch-hour traffic. Bachman fiddled with his cuff links, idly leafing through a stack of reports. Jaz sent texts, half aware of the rubber-booted pedestrians swarming the crosswalks, wrestling their umbrellas into the wind. It was a bad day to be selling gyros or hailing a cab. Trucks plowed furrows through the curbside puddles, sending waves of dirty water arcing into the air. Office workers scurried for cover; die-hard smokers jostled for position in sheltered doorways. Any heavier and there’d be kayaks, people clinging to floating wreckage.
The driver let them out at a town house in the east eighties, facing the park. A discreet plaque announced the place as the Neue Galerie, a museum Lisa had talked about, but Jaz had never been inside. Bachman appeared to be known to the staff; the security guard greeted him by name as he waved them in. They climbed the stairs and entered a room hung with paintings. Bachman steered him past a flashy Klimt, ringed by tourists, toward a vitrine containing various small decorative objects, clocks, glassware and jewelry. Like a waiter gesturing at a particularly good corner table, he extended his hand toward a silver coffee set, sleek and plain and scientific-looking, pots and jugs with big geometric handles and rows of studs around their bases, arranged on a little tray, complete with a set of tongs and a spirit burner to keep the coffee warm.
“Do you enjoy the Wiener Werkstätte?”
Jaz would probably have used the word
deco
to describe the things in the case. Bachman frowned, picking up on his discomfort. “I’m sorry. I didn’t bring you here to lecture you about art history. This was made in Vienna just before World War One by a man called Hoffmann. A very brilliant man, an architect and furniture designer, founded a sort of Viennese arts and crafts movement. I don’t know why I find it so moving. It’s such an unserious thing. What a lot of effort and skill to lavish on something as ordinary as making coffee! And when you think about when it was made …”
He trailed off, staring gloomily into the case. After a moment, he shook his head in the abrupt manner of a sleeper trying to wake himself up. Jaz realized he knew precisely nothing about Cy Bachman, about how he thought, the things he loved. He had a sudden image of a man for whom the present day was no more than a thin crust of ice over a deep cold lake. Disturbed, he turned around, pretending to examine a painting on the wall behind him. Bachman touched his arm, gently repositioning him in front of Hoffmann’s coffee set. He spoke under his breath, as though imparting a secret.
“When I come here, I always find myself wondering what happened to the people who owned this. I feel they must have been Jews. Wealthy Viennese Jews. How long did they survive? First, their country vanishes. Then the Anschluss, the deportations. How many years could the family maintain a life that included such luxuries?”
He sighed deeply. Jaz wondered if he expected a reply.
“Have you ever been to Vienna, Jaz?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“It’s a very unsettling city. At least I find it so. The main cemetery is vast. They say it has a larger population of the dead than the city has living. All very well kept, very neat, until you come to the Jewish section, which has been completely neglected. There’s no one left, you see. No relatives, no descendants, to tend the graves. All those families, with their possessions and their big houses and their servants and their
taste
, all vanished. Ashes floating out of a crematorium chimney.”
He went on, speaking urgently now, gripping Jaz’s arm with one hand and describing little arcs and circles with the other, like a concertgoer following a score.
“As with most art, this is an attempt to stand outside time. That’s perhaps its most luxurious quality—one could even say a sign of decadence. What a moment to deny history! When it was about to trample over everything, not just the ritual of coffee and cake, but everything! The whole culture! There’s a tradition that says the world has shattered, that what once was whole and beautiful is now just scattered fragments. Much is irreparable, but a few of these fragments contain faint traces of the former state of things, and if you find them and uncover the sparks
hidden inside, perhaps at last you’ll piece together the fallen world. This is just a glass case of wreckage. But it has presence. It’s redemptive. It is part of something larger than itself.”
“I see.”
“No, I don’t think you do. Not yet. What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can’t just rummage about like you’re at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That’s what we’re doing with Walter, Jaz. We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It’s not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It’s certainly not a theory of everything. I don’t have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.”
“What’s that?”
“A sense of humor.”
Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such—what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man that brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs.
“We’re hunting for jokes.” Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. “Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.”
“Discover what?”
“The face of God. What else would we be looking for?”
Perched on the lounger, pushing one of Raj’s plastic toys around with his toe, Jaz tried to form sentences for Fenton Willis, trying to explain why he’d come to be afraid of Cy Bachman and the face of God. “It’s not a question of conscience, Fenton. I know you have no time for that—and of course neither does … Well, yes, I am kind of going on my gut.… No, Walter’s robust. I’m not disputing that. It’s a very powerful model.”
That was the problem: Walter’s power. The power to affect the things it observed, to alter the course of events with its predictions.
It seemed impossible. After the visit to the Neue Galerie, Jaz started
to suspect Bachman was a crank. He’d call Jaz into his office and initiate esoteric and largely one-sided discussions of recursivity, noncomputability, the limits of mathematical knowledge. At times he was openly mystical, wanting to discuss the Fibonacci sequence, Kondratiev waves, predestination. He’d make gnomic pronouncements (
When price meets time, change is imminent
) and read aloud from books that appeared to have nothing to do with finance: the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching. For a man who worked with computers he had a strong taste for pen and paper. His desk was frequently covered with hand-drawn charts, often hexagons, plotted with tiny numerals. Once he showed Jaz a graph plotting the Dow Jones Industrial Average against phases of Saturn, claiming that he was “tinkering” with the idea that all significant cycles in stocks and commodities were either multiples or harmonics of something called the Jupiter-Saturn cycle. Occasionally, he’d mention his house in Montauk, imagining his retirement there, or proposing to sell it and buy somewhere in Europe, possibly Berlin. “I think that’s the only place I could truly understand the past,” he said once. “But what about the future? Is the future even possible there? Maybe Mumbai or Beijing?”
Why he chose him as his interlocutor, Jaz couldn’t tell. There were surely other people in the firm better able to follow the forking paths of his conversation. Sometimes he seemed manic, staring out his window at the forest of lighted bank-tower windows like a cartoon supervillain in his mountain hideaway. At other times he could be despondent, slumped in his chair, muttering about the world being a hall of mirrors, a puzzle with no solution. Once Jaz found him at the window with his arms outspread, a silk-suited
Cristo Redentor
blessing Broad Street.
“Why do you do this work, Jaz? Strange I’ve never asked you before.”