Authors: Hari Kunzru
“No mystery. I have a wife, a son. I want to give them a good life.”
“Is that all?”
“And of course because it’s interesting.”
“Oh, come on, that’s one of your dishwater words. A map of Brooklyn is
interesting
. A documentary on penguins is
interesting
. Not a life. Interesting isn’t the reason you get up in the morning. Tell me, do you believe in God?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?” He paused. “I see. Well, aren’t you going to ask me the same thing?”
“OK. Do you believe in God?”
“
Interesting
you should ask, Jaz. I think the real question is whether God believes in me.”
He began to laugh, a shrill ascending scale. Jaz was irritated. Raj had kept him awake much of the night, and the previous day the latest in their long series of nannies had quit. He had no patience to spare for Bachman’s metaphysical jokes.
“Look, Cy. You want to know why I’m doing this? Because with luck it’ll make Fenton a lot of money, and he’ll give some of it to me. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Walter is profound, but you know what? I don’t care. I just want to build a trading model, I don’t need to save the world.”
Bachman sat down at his desk. For a long time, he was completely silent, rocking slightly from side to side on his chair, steepling his long fingers.
“I’m sorry, Cy. I’m sleep-deprived. My son—I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“Next month we’re going to go live with Walter. Small volumes initially, but if it works as it’s been doing in testing, we’ll soon step up.”
“OK. Right.”
“That’ll be all.”
Jaz left feeling angry. Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? That night he tried to explain to Lisa what had happened. Having never met Bachman, she’d formed a romantic picture of him as some kind of unworldly scholar, toiling away in his office like a medieval alchemist. Jaz would remind her of the custom-tailored suits, the handmade shoes, but she couldn’t shake the image of a banker who wasn’t primarily motivated by money.
“Did you really shout at him?” she asked.
“I told him I wasn’t interested in his theories.”
“Oh, Jaz, why? He sounds like the most interesting guy in the place.”
“Interesting? Christ.”
“Are you going to get fired?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe he’ll just find someone else to rant at when he’s bored. I’m not sure he’s got any kind of home life. There’s no wife, no kids. It’s possible all he does is think up new ways to look for God in unemployment figures.”
Bachman didn’t fire him. The stream of data continued. Gas volumes pumped through the BTC and Druzhba pipelines, racial assaults in Australia, coltan mining yields in the DRC free zones, incidence of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in those same zones, hourly volume of technology stocks traded on the Nikkei … Jaz was no longer analyzing these clusters himself, just feeding them into Walter, which was unearthing connections at an alarming rate. Everything seemed to be linked to everything else: the net worth of retirees in Boca Raton, Florida, oscillating in harmony with the volume of cargo arriving at the port of Long Beach, Southwestern home repossessions tracking the number of avatars in the most popular online game worlds in Asia. At first Jaz had wondered whether the model was a hoax, something that existed only in Cy Bachman’s imagination. Now he found himself disturbed by its power. What would happen when they started trading? Like dipping your hands into a river and pulling out a fish, Bachman said. What ripples would Walter create?
Almost in passing, Bachman told him that he was already preparing for what he termed Walter 2. The firm had paid to install equipment inside the New York Stock Exchange, a necessity for high-frequency trading, in which a few milliseconds’ lag could destroy competitive advantage. In what seemed to be a gesture of reconciliation, Bachman invited him to watch the technicians connecting their system at a high-security data center in New Jersey, which also housed the NYSE matching engines, the computers that sorted through bids and offers to complete trades. The windblown site was on a bleak industrial park two hours outside the city, a low shed whose anonymous construction was designed to prevent its becoming a target for terrorist attack. As the limo waited in the parking lot, they walked between racks of humming machines, accompanied by a nervous NYSE employee who would evidently have much preferred it if Bachman didn’t run his fingers caressingly across the hardware as he passed, like a small boy trailing a stick along a fence.
He asked Jaz to imagine a Walter whose time horizons were in the order of milliseconds. A pattern could be identified on the first cycle, matched with others on the second or third, used to trade on the fourth and then would vanish back into entropy. The speed of light itself, the ultimate physical horizon, would be part of their daily lives as traders. As the data center manager hovered behind them, he began to talk about Walter’s ability to split trades into thousands of pieces, to disguise the positions the firm was taking from their competitors. “It has an effect we’ve not properly understood. We’re inducing stable feedback in the markets, propagating the trends we want, dampening down the others. It’s not just reacting, Jaz. We’re
making
the market, creating our own reality. And when we use Walter at high speed, the effect will be profound. Of course, when the regulators catch up, they’ll say we’re gaming the system. And they’ll be right. We
are
gaming the system. After all, there’s no social value to it. Markets are supposed to allow us to allocate resources efficiently. They’re supposed to be useful. But it’s nothing to do with allocating resources anymore. We’re not turning around container ships or varying toothpaste production at the speed of light. It’s a glass-bead game, and I sometimes think I’m the only one who has a worthwhile reason for playing it.”
When Walter went live, Jaz had an attack of nerves. He wasn’t sure what he was more afraid of: that the model wouldn’t work or that it would. He missed the first few minutes of trading, locked in a bathroom stall. When he came out everyone was celebrating. The rate of return seemed to surprise even Bachman. By the time the U.S. markets closed, Fenton Willis could barely conceal his glee. The traders were high-fiving one another and opening bottles of Krug ’95. Around him, ties were being loosened and plans made to hit a new lap-dancing club. He rang Lisa and told her he was on his way home.
That week people bought cars, ran up ten-thousand-dollar checks at Per Se. Jaz went to Harry Winston and chose Lisa a necklace, a delicate chain of platinum links that coiled in the hand like a very expensive snake. The returns continued to surpass everyone’s wildest dreams, and without waiting for further risk analysis Willis authorized the Walter traders to make much larger bets. Jaz got caught up in the general
enthusiasm. His worries appeared ridiculous, the effect of stress and overwork.
Soon afterward, Bachman invited them out to Montauk. It was a beautiful May weekend and Jaz couldn’t wait to get out of the city. The plan was to drive out on the Friday night, but at the last minute Lisa decided she couldn’t leave Raj. Jaz told her she was overreacting, which precipitated a bitter argument.
“Don’t you see?” he yelled. “We have to have a life. We can’t be shackled to him forever.”
“But we
are
shackled to him. He’s our son.”
“A weekend. It’s just one fucking weekend.”
He lay awake in bed, trying to control his anger; he could feel her body beside him, her back turned to him, walling off her space.
The next morning he finally persuaded her that the highly credentialed new nanny was capable of looking after the boy for one night. They threw their weekend bags into the car and headed out of the city to join the unbroken stream of traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Lisa checked her BlackBerry every few minutes, as if willing some disaster to arise so they had an excuse to go home.
Bachman’s house wasn’t easy to find, even with a GPS. On the third pass they spotted it, a narrow gravel drive leading off the Old Highway, terminating in an automatic security gate, which slid open to let them through. They parked outside an unremarkable modernist villa, low and almost squat, as if it were trying to sink into the earth beneath its sharply pitched roof.
The door was opened by a strikingly good-looking young man, dressed like a J. Crew catalog model, all linen and espadrilles and sandyblond hair. He introduced himself as Chase, took their cases and told them that “Mr. Bachman and Mr. Winter” were outside on the deck. Lisa let out a little gasp when she saw the interior. Even Jaz could tell there were some exquisite things: Bauhaus lamps, a plinth displaying a piece of abstract sculpture that looked like it might be a Brancusi. Most spectacular was the view. The house was built on the cliffside, and the entire rear elevation seemed to be glass, a frame for the gray Atlantic Ocean.
Chase showed them through to the deck, where a table was laid for lunch. It was the first time Jaz had ever seen Bachman dressed in anything other than a suit. He was wearing a pair of tennis shorts; beneath them, his legs poked out like two white twigs. With him was a considerably older man who was introduced as Ellis, his partner. It was clear Ellis was not in the best of health. With Chase’s help, he stood up to greet them. His handshake was a frail, featherlike thing, but his eyes were alert and humorous. Jaz felt like a fool. Why would Cy never have mentioned this man, his lover (apparently) of more than thirty years? Was it because he expected him to disapprove? He could almost hear the conversation. Yes, they’re very prickly about these things, very conservative.
Feeling sweaty from the long drive, they made a little conversation. Ellis had been a plastic surgeon, doing facial reconstructions on burn victims and car-crash survivors. “Never anything cosmetic,” he insisted. “I was an idealist in those days.” Later, when they’d been shown their room, Jaz tried to explain to Lisa why he was annoyed. It wasn’t that he had a problem—not even with Ellis being so much older, or with the fey boy floating about, smirking behind his hand. It was just that he hadn’t known. He’d worked with Bachman for a long time.
“Well,” said Lisa, hanging her evening dress in the closet, “you’ve never been the most observant person.”
They went back down to the pool, where Chase poured iced tea. Fenton Willis and his third wife, Nadia, made their way up from the beach, carrying towels and bottles of water. Willis looked slightly absurd in his weekend clothes—salmon-pink pants printed with a pattern of whales, a yellow silk ascot tied at the neck of his shirt. According to company gossip, Nadia, who was several years younger than Lisa, had been a hostess at some downtown restaurant when they met. She wore a sarong over a shiny silver one-piece swimsuit that looked like it wasn’t really designed for getting wet. Jaz couldn’t help but notice her gym-toned body, which was, he supposed, the point. Cy and Ellis greeted her like a long-lost sister, affecting to find her amusing, instead of trashy. This outburst of camp was another unexpected side of Bachman, and Jaz wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Chase served a lunch of lobster rolls and chowder, accompanied by
an excellent white burgundy. Jaz talked to Nadia about a foundation she was starting to benefit orphans in the Ukraine. She intended to host a gala in the fall, “with many celebrities, an atmosphere for people to feel comfortable to open their checkbooks.” Music was piped out to the deck from a system somewhere indoors, a man warbling German songs accompanied by a piano. Lisa identified it as Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert, which led her into a long conversation with Ellis about some Austrian director who’d used the music in a film. Lisa was clearly a hit with both their hosts. After lunch, Cy found her admiring a Schiele drawing hanging in the living area, and insisted on taking her on an art tour of the house. Jaz tagged along, mainly so as not to get stuck with Willis, who was telling some interminable story about a helicopter safari in Kenya. Each chair, each ornament, appeared to have a rich history. How long must it have taken to assemble such a collection? How much longer to gain the knowledge that lay behind it? Cy appeared particularly proud of an unabashedly sexualized painting of a young man dressed in overalls and an urchin cap, leaning against a brick wall in some kind of expressionist alleyway. Privately Jaz thought it was hideous, the sludgy greens and browns, the offensive bulge at the crotch. It was apparently the work of a noted 1930s black artist, a New York communist who’d worked with the WPA.
That afternoon he dozed by the pool, half listening to Cy and Fenton discussing America’s trading links with China. Fenton had been spending a lot of time in Shanghai, and had developed a sort of obsession with the mutual interdependency of the two countries. Lisa and Nadia were discussing a new boutique that had opened up in SoHo. Jaz knew for a fact that Lisa had never shopped there, but she discussed it as if she were a regular. Back issues of
New York
magazine, he supposed. Ellis was swimming, bobbing up and down in the water with the aid of two polystyrene floats. Chase was helping him, supporting his legs, retrieving his sun hat when it slid off his head into the water. Jaz watched them from behind his dark glasses, the old man’s frailty, the younger one’s tenderness. There was something about the intimacy of the scene he found upsetting. Where did it end, this paid companionship? Where was the line drawn?
As they dressed for dinner, Lisa rhapsodized about their hosts, their culture, their aesthetic sense. “If only you’d told me!” she said.
“Well, I didn’t know. We work together. We talk about work.”
“Oh, come on. You said he took you to see some Wiener Werkstätte silverware.”
“What? Oh, the museum. Yes, that’s right.”
“You must have realized he’s not like the others. Everyone else I’ve met from your firm is like Fenton.”
“Don’t you think it’s kind of strange, Ellis being so much older than Cy?”
“I think it’s beautiful. They fell in love when Cy was in his early twenties. Ellis saw him in the street in Greenwich Village and followed him home. Cy was very handsome and very aloof. Ellis had to woo him. It was like a nineteenth-century courtship—flowers and fans and handwritten notes.”