Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

Convinced something terrible was about to happen to him, something abject and physical, he followed the path down to the beach. The moon was almost full and it was easy enough to pick his way. The vodka was gone. He wished he’d thought to bring the bottle. Disgusted, he threw his empty glass out into the darkness, hearing a dull thud as Cy’s expensive crystal hit the sand. Sure, there were the glories of the Khalsa, the Sikh heroes. But what was that to him? India wasn’t his country. He’d been there only once, a family trip when he was fourteen, three weeks of heat and disorientation and stomach upset. The noise and smell of Amritsar; the homicidal confusion of the roads; the family village, just a few whitewashed huts surrounded by endless green fields. It was another planet. His cousins called him Tom Cruise and tried to teach him cricket. As the family drank sweet tea and ate pakoras in his uncle’s living room, painted a kind of undersea blue-green and decorated with cheap calendars and garlanded pictures of dead relatives, little kids jostled for space in the doorway to stare at his sneakers. He spent most of the vacation in that room, watching Indian movies on an old TV set whose wood-effect case was covered with a lace doily.

No, Baltimore boy, India doesn’t belong to you. He slouched along the beach, trying to name one thing he really owned, one card to play against Cy and Lisa and their Schubert and their old books. Why did a woman like that even want to be with him? What did she see? Nothing, at least not anymore. She’d obviously finally worked out the truth. That’s what it felt like. Palling around with his boss, making little remarks, talking all that intellectual Jew shit.

And there it was. The very bottom. A few drinks and out it came, a little diarrheic trickle of hate. Queers and Jews: He was no better than his uncles. A couple of years of college, a veneer of culture, but still just a boor, a frightened village boy with a chip on his shoulder. And so it went on, as he trudged all the way down to the rocks at the point, turned around.… When he made it back to the house, he pretended he was tired and went to bed. He could hear the others, talking and laughing downstairs. The sound of piano music filtered under the closed door. He wound the sheet about himself like a shroud, praying for sleep. Lisa came to bed very late. In the morning, as they packed to go home, he felt so worthless he could barely look her in the eye.

A few weeks went by. The Walter profits continued to mount. One day he was monitoring the system, doing risk assessments, when he noticed that several figures had deviated from expected values. Certain trades were becoming marginally more profitable. The deviations were tiny, barely noticeable, and he would have discounted them, but they came at the same time as a flurry of news about the currency and bond markets. For a couple of days Walter had been betting heavily against several small currencies in Asia and Latin America. It had shorted the Honduran lempira, which had now plunged in value, making the firm several tens of millions of dollars. Walter’s position, disguised as it was in thousands of small trades that appeared to come from all over the globe, had led many other investors to think that something substantial was wrong. The Hondurans were now facing a national crisis, as offshore capital fled and creditors started to call in their obligations. As Jaz watched, they suspended trading and went into talks with officials from the International Monetary Fund.

We did that, thought Jaz. We went in there and turned it over, like robbing a bank.

That was the game, he knew. He’d always tried not to think too hard about that side of things. What was it Bachman had jokingly called himself at that dinner, replying to yet another sycophantic question of Lisa’s? A haruspex . The priest who read the sacred entrails for the emperor. The emperor being Fenton Willis, who’d turned his thumb down with a regal flourish. The slave must die . The traders were celebrating their big win. Jaz went with them. There were jokes about quants and pointy heads. They wanted to get him drunk and he let them. He called Lisa from a club on the Lower East Side, not realizing it was already one in the morning. The next thing he knew, he was waking up in a Midtown hotel room, mercifully alone. He headed straight back to the office to check the newswires.

Throughout the next day the lempira carried on sliding. The Honduran government looked shaky. People were on the street in Tegucigalpa. Jaz chugged coffee and looked over Walter’s advice to the trading desk. The lempira didn’t figure. It had turned its attention to another asset class, another region. Everything was now U.S. mortgage-backed securities. He was relieved. At least Walter wasn’t telling them to twist the knife.

In the following days Walter built up a huge holding of Australian mining stock, and made some obscure bets in the West African government bond market. Bachman ordered the team to plug in figures on financial institutions in the region, and Jaz’s screens were filled with the activities of the Banque de Développement du Mali, Banque Internationale pour l’Afrique Occidentale, the Bank of Africa, Banque Sénégalo-Tunisienne, Compagnie Bancaire de l’Afrique Occidentale, Ecobank.… He wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary, had he not opened the wrong file on his desktop and found himself looking at a graphic illustrating the performance of the Bourse Régionale in Abidjan. The pattern of rise and fall looked familiar. He compared it to a graph of the value of the lempira during the crash and found it tracked almost exactly. That was a coincidence, of course. There was no reason for those two things to be linked. But there also seemed to be no reason why stocks on the Abidjan Bourse should fall so catastrophically just at that moment. There had been no major announcement, no rumor of war. Unlike the lempira, recovery was quick. Three days later trading was at its old level.

He was developing a strange rash on his eyelids. Lisa was barely speaking to him. Though he was exhausted, he was having trouble sleeping: All night Walter’s scatter-pattern visualizations pulsed behind his closed eyes like a swarm of malign insects. He spent several nights in front of the computer in his office upstairs at home, eating chips and salsa by the light of a desk lamp and running comparisons between time-series data on the performance of the lempira and every African variable he could think of — exchange rates, balance of payments, international liquidity, interest rates, prices, production, international transactions, government accounts, national accounts, population. When he was done with Africa, he moved on to East Asian countries.

He found it in Thai banking stocks. The same sudden crash. The same period of time. He couldn’t help asking himself: Had they done this? It seemed contrary to reason, one of those ideas, like quantum superposition, that defied common sense. Was Walter having some kind of echo effect? Or was this something else, one of Cy Bachman’s sparks, a trace of divine intellect? Jaz’s neck was spasming. He riffled through the bathroom cabinet, looking for something to help him sleep.

The next morning, before he left for work, Lisa asked if he could take some time off. He stared at her as if she was insane, even as he realized he probably could. No one else at the firm was worried about the Honduran trade. It was only him. He told her he’d see what he could do and phoned Bachman’s assistant, asking to be notified when he was next in the office and free to talk.

Bachman seemed to be in Bangkok. It was almost two weeks after the lempira crash when his assistant finally phoned to say Bachman could give him a few minutes. Jaz hurried over and found him staring out of the window, wearing noise-canceling headphones, big black cans clamped over his bald head like parasitic beetles. The sun had just set, and the skyline was performing the trick it had of dissolving, three-dimensional buildings becoming shimmering planes, then checkerboards of light. Jaz didn’t want to startle him. He stood there for a full minute, waiting impatiently, until Bachman swiveled round in his chair.