Angel investor, he likes that term. Curector is ugly, he agrees. He thinks of himself more as a patron, a gatherer in of lost souls. A shepherd. The wanderer above the sea of fog, crook or staff in hand, in this world or the next or some other entirely. To be able to live to see that, to live forever and to touch the dust of distant planets, to hurtle on alone into the bright unending emptiness. He imagines Nastya and he, deathless, indestructible, gazing on each other always a moment away from contact, floating silently above the surface of a barren moon.
The girl, the English Rose, the reporter asking him questions, the interview, the online comments on the piece he glanced at, the sneering, the attacks, some more cogent and informed than others of course, the scrum and babble of dissenting voices, the tumbling vibrant, rambunctious marketplace of ideas. The most consistently upvoted comment pilloried his “messiah complex” and the “ludicrous hubris” and “folly” of his interests in geoengineering, his “market fundamentalism”.
He was almost tempted to respond to the commentators, but had learned his lesson from some of Fisk’s disastrous engagements with social media a few years ago. He understands the need for caution, has always understood it, caution or rather perhaps dissimulation. What the philosopher king sees cannot be adequately communicated to those in the cave, transfixed by the shadow play. This is the oldest lesson of all. Since one cannot help but sow confusion, one may be best served by its maximisation.
Yes, markets. He is a market fundamentalist.
He breathes out slowly and feels excitement course through him, hotly up from his guts a cool wave down from his brain and the eddying confluence around his heart that feels much like love must feel, he imagines.
And for what except for you do I feel love? What does that come from? He tilts his head almost imperceptibly to one side. A poem, yes, but by whom? Never mind for now, he knows and soon his mind, having been set the task of recalling it, will provide him with an answer. In this way he sees the homology between the market and consciousness that his mindfulness life coach insisted on, the market
as
consciousness, he sees his own relationship to his brain as that of the individual to the market, his brain knows vastly more than he does and if he can simply trust it and not get in its way it will work for him in ways he cannot consciously exploit or know, its processing power attached to but not under the control of his meagre I. But that was last year, now he is in therapy and everyone is reading
Lacan for Busy Execs
.
Markets, always more markets, always greater more endlessly ramifying complexity, yes, death, the shredding of the self in the infinitesimally graduated crystalline flows of the markets, the self nothing but some impulse to surrender to risk and chance, god does not exist but if he did he would have invented the universe purely to play dice with, yet that doesn’t capture it. Imagine the self naught but a whisp; a divine, aspiring afflatus enmeshed within an ineffable, omniscient, multi-directional order.
He has read these critiques of his interest in the culture of retro and antiques as a repudiation of futurism, but this is a misunderstanding. He has not forgotten the future, quite the reverse; this is about markets, this is about taking a resource, taking inert matter, and making it vibrant through the power of the market, it is this, yes, holy power that he sees at work, this power to resurrect in a sense. Take this current Curectorial pursuit, the minor, marginal, unknown Vernon Crane, this poor lump of cold, dead clay. Already he is a figure in people’s lives, his and the other Curectors searching for his work, the gophers, those who hold or know about his output, those who will now come into contact with it and be influenced by it, how it will become a shared passion, retrospectives and so on. It is not nostalgia, or backward looking, but rather this, the giving life to the dead and inert, creating a site of power.
He calls up some music, Robert Leiner’s
Visions of the Past
. 1993. What a year that was. Was, and will be, again and again and again.
Johannes is suddenly hungry, he checks the time, yes he’s due to eat in forty minutes or so but is feeling small, glinting pangs already, which is unusual, his diet quite precisely timed in its glycaemic profile. He should never become hungry as such, nor feel especially full, but move smoothly along an arc of productive, sensorially discrete satiety. Perhaps he has burned more calories today than he anticipated, though his gym-routine and recovery meals are constructed for maximum efficiency, a strict, punishingly intense forty five minutes followed by a post-workout savoury brown rice smoothie with raw egg and natto. Well, he is hungry, perhaps
peckish
as they say over here, a sensation he hasn’t felt in several years. Interestingly and now a little disruptively, images of food are flashing into his mind, Japanese food, primarily, he has always loved it, some of the best food he has ever had. He has a little craving suddenly for a simple, plain rice and salt Onigiri and he calls out to the wall screen to bring up a list of the best Japanese restaurants nearby.
This is why he has arranged to have his diet so perfectly calibrated, to cut out these kinds of interruptions, this endless obsessing over food and being driven to pursue particular types of foodstuff. He dislikes hunger, thirst, tiredness, illness, libido, the constant background noise, the niggling away of the body, the way it channels and diverts thought. Libido he accepts, the chemicals, the testosterone are vital to well-being and clarity of thought and he has always accepted that some of his time will be lost to sexual reverie, to masturbation, to developing sexual obsessions and pursuing them; but hunger, thirst, he has quashed. It has been good to excise these intrusions from his life. Years ago he had electrolysis on his face and torso so that he need never waste time shaving again and when this information became public he was ridiculed and held up to be the kind of detached, billionaire obsessive who could never understand real human needs and wants. The amount of column space it generated seemed to him absurd and he understood more clearly the hippy-liberal mindset then, that this permanent removal of the possibility of growing a beard, this absolute rejection of the natural, the burdensome imposition of nature on the body and the technological means to supervene it was for them a fearful act of hubris.
One must be a slave or the gods will punish us. In this age still, with so much achieved, with the stars within reach and death almost expelled, with these ancient, impossible hopes almost realised, these secular priests of an ancient fear will draw us back into the mud and wallow of our prehistory. Yes, that was the lesson of the Sixties.
He could have his cook prepare him his prescribed Saturday 8pm dish, an organic Walnut and Goji berry smoothie enhanced with spirulina and green tea, mixed leaf salad and tuna sashimi, along with eight of his thirty five daily supplements a little earlier than usual, but there is a Chinese restaurant a few floors down and he calls up the menu. He has time perhaps to eat a quick, small meal and still make it out to meet his gopher, better still, he should re-arrange for his gopher to come here, to Hutong on the 33
rd
floor.
He sends a message.
Please come to Hutong restaurant, the Shard at the appointed time.
This will throw his dietary schedule out and, irritated, he makes a note to speak to his nutritionist, to ask him why after such a time-consuming and demanding series of consultations the plan has failed to fulfil his express requirements. His phone vibrates against his thigh. A message from Nastya, she is in a bar somewhere in Stoke Newington with, she says, a group of fascinating young artists whose work she insists he sees and sends a photo of herself draped around two bemused and excited looking young girls with dreadlocks in a colourful, harlequinesque patchwork of retro clothing. Tomorrow, he messages back.
I am still in the process of collating everything for our current project. He gazes at the photo for a moment. She has gone for a rock-chick look, hair scrunched, heavy eye liner, wearing her The Derivatives t-shirt, the all-female, ex-model covers band that she played bass for, girlfriends of various financial hotshots, who turned up as the main attraction at some banking conference after-party he went to. Instantaneously he knew he had to have her. That may turn out to be your most expensive acquisition yet, DuHaine quipped.
He has found himself in the elevator, dropping smoothly down to the restaurant. The doors open and a young Asian girl is standing waiting for him, iPad poised. He notices a discrete silver A-monitor attached to her crisp white blouse and after a few questions and an introduction, her name is Amy, she draws his attention to it, saying, this is my pleasure-in-service reading which is displayed here and also recorded for training purposes, some customers prefer it if we turn off the display while waiting on them, would you like the display off or on.
I would like you to keep it on please, he says, watching the monitor, a constantly flickering numerical display like a stopwatch; it stalls for a moment then pushes higher, a reading of 9.2.
He smiles at her. You are very good, he says.
She smiles back. 9.3.
Actually, he almost says to her, I am responsible for this little piece of hardware, for its dissemination, for the massive boost in value of BioX’s market cap. It was my last really profitable venture before I started to Curect. She leads him to his table. Attractive girl, if Nastya was here she would be alternately scolding and flirting with her, generating as much sexual tension as possible, the evening opening up perhaps in all kinds of unexpected directions or shutting down suddenly, leaving a cloud of unresolved affect clinging to everything like static.
Ah yes, Nastya and he in Tokyo, Kabuki-Cho, extraordinary evenings. It was here of course that he first encountered the Affective Monitoring Service being put to use: a group of seven grimly determined men fucking a beautifully blank and pliable, baby-faced, large-breasted Japanese girl of sixteen, bending her into all kinds of positions and applying all kinds of devices to her as she stared shell shocked at them all through perfectly round, surgically adjusted, baby-blue eyes, each one trying to get her monitor score up to 100, the readout displayed above her head on a retro
LCD
screen, the room gaudy, almost like an art-deco circus tent, and indeed it was reminiscent of the lines of strong men queuing up at the town fair for the test-your-strength machines. It was almost comical to watch, the mordant theatre of it, the way the younger men allowed themselves to be pushed out of the way by these sagging corporate samurai, who showed them how to really do it, the girl instinctively observing the age-hierarchy and through whatever means she could pushing the Affective Monitor reading higher for the middle management and the higher ranks, so no one lost face. Never beat your boss at golf used to be the key to corporate success; never out-perform on Affective Monitor readings with a teenage whore seemingly its modern equivalent.
Beep. He checks his phone. The Gopher.
Shard at 10, may be a bit late.
They were taken there by a group of business associates of Nastya’s whom he believed, though he never sought to confirm it, had been supplying them with blonde Russian and Ukrainian hostesses for several years. This was where his investment in affective management began, it had yet to creep further into the Japanese service industry at that stage but of course he immediately saw the potential, imagined if this became standard issue to everyone working in customer service worldwide. Certain professions have resisted it of course, teachers most notably, but eventually they too will succumb. He believes the market applications of these products, now prerequisites in many prenuptial contracts, will be far reaching, that they will permanently alter relations between people. No Affective Monitor? What have you got to hide? What we want least is to be deceived, we crave truth and authenticity, to see our effect on others truly, to seek congruence, to banish doubt. Or perhaps that night in Tokyo revealed a certain truth to him, that what one craved most of all in making love to a woman was to obliterate all the other lovers she may have had, to be seen to be good at, better at fucking by other men. No doubt if Calvert were here he would say perhaps, to destroy one’s father, to finally heal the wound that our father gave more pleasure to our mother than we ever could, that in the end she chose him, that you had to reject your mother, give her up, while your father got to enjoy her in unthinkable ways. Yes, yes, this will of course be Calvert’s thesis; he is starting, he thinks, to get a sense of where Calvert will try to lead him.
As a consequence of all his time spent in Tokyo he speaks more Japanese than Chinese but he can read a menu and his pronunciation is excellent. He has, he was told, a good ear for tones, he thinks of his musical training as a child and he takes pleasure in his waitress’ surprised smile and the polite, unenforced reverence in her bow as she turns crisply to place his order. The duck he was tempted by, but then the fat content. Instead he has ordered the famous Dim Sum. There are only two other tables occupied, disastrous for a Saturday evening, surely, even at these prices, both couples Asian, though he guesses the couple nearest to him are Singaporean, the others across in the booth are definitely mainland.
He is a notorious China bear, there have been some successes thus far certainly, he accepts that, but this century is American, as was the last, as every century will be. The Chinese themselves, he thinks, view China as something to escape from, a resource to exploit, land and labour, in the quest to live elsewhere. The ecological degradation, the unbreathable air, the extraordinary cost, the endless worry about falling out of favour with the men at the top, the arbitrariness of law. To live there, in Beijing or Shanghai, how could that compare with the deep and burnished satisfaction of being driven through New York or Paris or London, of running in the deep grooves of history, of being inducted into those profound and venerable continuums of power for which London will always be the epicentre. That sense of cleaving cleanly through sedimented layers of history that a man in a black
BMW
with blacked out windows edging through a mob might feel, hearing the sirens cutting open the night, the distant fires, the rolling news reports and helicopter footage.