For a second, the room, the city through the windows, seem to shift and tremble, as though some other dimension has momentarily infused itself into this one, set it quivering. Perhaps, he reaches up for his jaw then checks himself, he should discontinue this analysis with Calvert. Connaught perhaps should be a cautionary tale.
Perhaps it is just that, yes that interview yesterday has disturbed him a little, despite his reputation for hardness of head, nose and at one time, heart. A situation he is trying now, through his curating, his charitable work and his analysis, to remedy.
Yes, the interview yesterday was a little tougher than these things used to be ten years ago, when they were all savants and saviours. The crisis was obviously to blame and he imagined that the piece would carry a fairly negative tone, as any such pieces were obliged to these days if they focussed on anyone who made money before the crash, or had continued to do so during it. And besides it was for The Guardian. The FT or The Economist would have been more supportive.
And yet, yes, he stretched up on tiptoe and settled back down onto his heels again, he did want to be, not loved, but seen differently, to be admired at least. To be, he searched for the right word. Understood. Connaught would sneer at him for that.
Yes he was faintly irritated by the interviewer, a very attractive but rather presumptuous looking young girl, fresh out of a Classics degree at Oxford, hence the reference to Croesus no doubt, obsessing over the phrase “Pay-Pal mafia”. He told her he hadn’t been involved in any of that for years and asked her, who did we exploit, helping to set up a payment system online? This is not the mining industry. Yes but the system, in its totality. This had seemed to be her argument. She had that faintly superior but brittle English upper-class appeal, an English Rose. She was probably good on a horse, had impeccable manners, was spending her twenties pretending to be tough-minded and radical. He felt a little throb of melancholy desire. She was nothing compared to Nastya of course. And yet he would love to somehow win her over.
No doubt this was why he had agreed to the interview in the first place. He did find himself seeking her approval, did feel a need to persuade her and her readership and the world at large. He stretched up on to tiptoe involuntarily again and again checked himself. Ah now what was this, another tic? He lowered himself down more circumspectly. I am not what you think I am, I am not who I was. I am one of the good guys.
She pushed him on his continuing and endlessly augmenting wealth and his maxim,
Positionality is Everything
. Had he not cornered many markets in many types of goods, especially foodstuffs, especially fish? Hadn’t one of his companies, for insistence, been racing against the major Japanese corporations to buy up stocks of Eel, Fugu fish and Blue Fin Tuna while another was harvesting seeds for particular types of potentially medicinally beneficial plants and stockpiling as much of the world’s declining biodiversity as it could in huge greenhouses out in Chilean Patagonia? Did he not have a vested interest in extinction? In creating artificial shortages, in scarcity?
His answer, which he had immediately sensed she was not prepared to listen to sympathetically, was that both he and his wife thought of themselves as Curators now rather than business people or entrepreneurs, that they were in a sense rescuing and maintaining, while on another level restoring and bringing into life, illuminating great swathes of the past. The past is not dead and gone, any more than the future is inaccessible, both are immanent. All I do, he explained, is draw value out of the future and use it to dynamise the past. I rewire it. Create new circuits. Forget the Futures market, he quipped, I am heavily invested in both the personal and financial senses of that word, in Pasts.
Take our great OutlierArt initiative, whose mission is to record and collate the entire artistic output of all humanity, not merely the greats, but to throw open the past and expose every nook and cranny to appreciation. To rescue the dead, he almost said that didn’t he? Then thought better of it. Yes, perhaps some man of means will pay an extraordinary sum for the particular frisson of sitting in that restaurant in Tokyo or Beijing or Singapore and eating the final piece, that extravagantly expensive piece of Blue Fin Tuna sashimi, knowing no other human being now will ever get to savour its unique delicacy. But this is how he sees his role, as a simultaneous driver into extinction in some ways and also a redeemer, a bringer into life, rescuing what was lost, granting recognition to the vast shadow-world of human endeavour and liberating it from the hierarchies of taste and judgement, the structures that have suppressed it.
If a man will pay millions for a sliver of flesh melting on his tongue and we can use that money to vitalise the great, unexplored, underexploited past, create more value, reinvest, drive forward more capital into the future! Look, he said. He became almost impassioned, didn’t he? He knows, he knows that he and Connaught are cut from the same cloth. He knows that this is all his mother’s and grandfather’s doing, this sense of mission, this religious fervour. He doesn’t need Calvert to tell him that. This is the only hope we have. You said earlier, you used the term “the spatial fix”. Johannes waved his hand skyward. There is lot of space out there still and we will reach it. You perhaps don’t know how close we are. But there is also the temporal fix, nor are they so distinct, time and space. The past after all is another country, is it not? Hamlet, too? He and Connaught.
He smoothes his jawline with the back of his hand, the screen up on the far wall is making a soft, insistent buzz and he pivots away from the window, checking the time on his watch. “Activate”, he commands and the screen clicks on. A soft exhalation of static, a faintly clinical glow and there is Calvert waiting to begin their session, his smooth face filling the huge screen, gazing enigmatically out.
The session is even shorter this time than before. He knows Calvert practices the variable length session, breaking off the dialogue when he thinks a significant moment has been reached, leaving the analysand to reflect on why perhaps the analyst has seen something in that moment, though Johannes is at a loss to see why his observations about his older brother being disciplined by his father are so significant. He thinks perhaps he ought to reflect on that if Calvert has found it notable and so returns to the window and his gazing. His family, all of them, are very well provided for, even his brother, who has put his wild, more dissolute years behind him now and settled into a position Johannes created for him, essentially unproductive and in a sense against all Johannes’ principles.
His brother, the freerider. Yes of course he resents him, yes of course he only gave him a job to satisfy his mother, his father he knows is more rigorous in his beliefs, a true man of principle who would have allowed Thomas to go to the wall, to have been washed away in drink and drugs, incarcerated, perhaps even allowed to die, rather than renege on his belief in individual responsibility. The modest bequest that they both received at age 23 Johannes put to good use, straight out of Stanford, hiring out what amounted to little more than a broom cupboard on Ansonia Street and setting up E-pay, while his brother dropped out of Law school and began a life of addiction and dependency, continual promises to reform his behaviour, constant relapses, disappearances, scrapes with the law, wild telephone calls in the middle of the night begging money or a place to stay. Johannes would have abandoned him too were it not for their mother always begging indulgence on Thomas’ behalf, manipulating both of them, both him and his father, appealing to Christian charity. Yes, his father had it right, Thomas and Johannes had equal chances, what more should he do? They were adults now and if one were squandering his resources, his life, in dissipation, that was his choice.
His father certainly would disapprove of Johannes’ sessions with Calvert. He scoffed at psychology; he did not believe that there were any forces one could not master within oneself. One had the capacity to reflect on the consequences of one’s action, to project the likely outcomes and choose accordingly. He believed in character, the ability to know that one had elected one’s life, and that to deny that one was free, subject to forces within oneself beyond your control, well, this was mere babyish pandering to weakness.
Johannes’ heart is beating a little more quickly, yes, he finds such notions, such assertions stirring, he agrees with his father and many of his friends that in the late Sixties with the hippies, that was where the rot set in, with this turning away from the world and the heroic vision of man to the inward looking, dependent permanent child, powerlessly caught up in the grip of the State and always demanding more.
But Nastya has suggested therapy to him and so he will do it. It seems that at least two contradictory impulses, his father’s severity and unflinching rigour, his mother’s pleas for charity and understanding, are pulling at him more fiercely now and he is finding it hard to bind them. Why should it be that he feels the impact of his childhood more keenly now in middle age than he ever did in his youth? When he was younger, hungrier for success, he was his father’s son, very much so, and that perhaps is why he has the reputation for toughness that the journalist focused on yesterday. And of course for Nastya analysis is really just a fashion, in New York someone mentioned that they were in analysis with Calvert and Nastya said that she had always wanted to try it but that she was too busy and so she would get Johannes to take it up on her behalf. That was the same party where a fellow philanthropist had mentioned Crane to him. Who was that?
No matter. The gauntlet had been thrown down, the complete works of Vernon Crane, the life of Vernon Crane, the residuum, the flotsam that his short, troubled passage through the world have left bobbing in their wake. Out there, somewhere. Johannes enjoyed these challenges, mobilising vast networks of contacts and information-gathering services, a few of perhaps questionable legality, to hunt down treasures long since lost, disappeared. A modern day equivalent of the Great White Hunter except that he brought life, resurrected the dead, conferred a kind of immortality. A modern day alchemist, taking what was once considered dross, effluvia, and creating a market, monetising it, transforming dead matter into product, into value.
Perhaps it also gave him an opportunity to come back to London too, and that was why he particularly seized on these works, this story. He was generally quite the Anglophile anyway, especially when it came to music. He admired what one of Nastya’s Curector acquaintances, listening to some extremely low-fi and very hostile form of early 21
st
century rap at his studio, dubbed a continuation of “the long peasant tradition in British music”.
He shifts his weight from foot to foot. Where is Nastya now? Out there, somewhere in the City. There are things he could tell Calvert that would surprise him. Do you know Dr Calvert that I have never seen my wife naked? Half-undressed and posing in the most provocative outfits, certainly. Do you know that we have never kissed except for a peck on the cheek, that she disappears for days on end and that I trace her movements through credit card transactions and status updates, that her feeds are filled with pictures that incite my jealousy without ever directly revealing any infidelity, and that no rumours reach me of a scandal? That once in Manilla she sat back in the chair in our suite at the Hilton, one leg draped over the arm of the chair, stripped down to her underwear, gazing at him and smiling as he, eyes roaming uninhibitedly over her, had two Filipina bargirls she had picked up on her flight around town blow him?
Yes, yes, they are a perfect couple in that respect, he is exquisitely unsatisfied. Even when they are together it is always as though he is seeing her on a screen, except of course for the scent of her perfume, the heat of her body, the million subtle disturbances of having her there in the flesh and how magnified to his engorged senses these micro-stimulations become, like being flayed with nettles, the smallest gestures, movements, the way she bends to buckle her shoe, the arch of her back, the dreamy absorption as she applies her lipstick, presses her lips to a paper towel then passes it to him with a smile, a memento, a sacred object. He becomes aroused walking past shoe shops or clothing stores, imagining how Nastya would look wearing particular items, and has spent significant amounts of his unimaginably vast resources dressing her up and asking her to parade before him. He has revealed himself, lain out the shapes and totems of his desire uninhibitedly before her and yet she seems to have no desire of her own, except to excite his further, always there is some reserve tucked away inside, beneath, beyond her at which his imagination aims but cannot shape or give name to, and it is this which drives him on.
Immortality. The stars. He lifts his eyes to the heavens, smoothes his jawline. Imagines himself up there, standing on a crag, sheathed in starlight, deathless. Other worlds, the superman, absolute conqueror of time and space. He wishes them all luck, Sharpton and Kurzweil, in their attempts to beat death, or Fisk’s determination to establish the first off-world colonies, he knows Fisk is probably right, that Seasteading is not enough, that only finally, ultimately with Spacesteading can a true libertarian society be born, only then will the dead hand of Leviathan be truly lifted from what is best in man and the best of men. Is it not then more than merely ironic that Fisk is so dependent on
NASA
for research grants in his attempt to set up free market utopias on the moon? Yes, that was the question that the journalist asked yesterday. That, you will have to talk about with Fisk himself, he demurred.
Fisk. There was a cartoon accompanying an interview in the Wall Street Journal, normally a sympathetic publication, a few months ago entitled “To Infinity and beyond?” with Fisk lampooned as Buzz Lightyear.
He is glad in many ways to be out of it. Perhaps the tide is turning again and the heroic effort his generation made to think on the cosmic scale, to pursue those dreams, will be dragged down and ridiculed. He still has his Prometheus Fund of course, to maintain his reputation as an Angel investor, and is still active in Zarathustra Capital, a source of some embarrassment and another of the obsessions of the girl yesterday, down 60% over a seven-year period. Skittish investors with no long-term commitment, no real vision. No, his decision to withdraw, to pursue philanthropic work and devote his time to Curecting with Nastya has been wise.