Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

Breathe. Get it right this time. ‘BUY $200 MILLION JPY vs. USD’. Buy. Not sell. Actually, let’s make it a hundred and ninety-one point five. Looks more like a real MRI trade. The bid-ask is wide but who cares. Quote. Execute. Filled. Confirmed. Done.

As soon as the new trade feeds into his spreadsheet, the yo-yoing numbers settle down. He freezes the live data-feed for a moment, to savour their fat blackness. For reasons unknown, copper has moved in his favour too. Month-to-date profit: +$27,744,550. Year-to-date profit: +$33,030,898. Not bad for a night’s work.

‘Who’s got a yen position?’ snaps the big boss, the Generalissimo, as the trading floor begins to fill. Some traders look smug, some vaguely disappointed to have missed the action, a few pale and staring at their screens. ‘Rocket?’

‘The MRI was short,’ says Mike, brightly but without betraying any of the post-traumatic elation he feels. ‘It’s decently up.’

‘Good. Now you’re going to tell me it wants to double up. Underreaction effect, right? You seriously think this market’s underreacted? Underreacted, my arse.’

‘No — it’s cutting the position. I’ve already worked over a hundred bucks at seventy-eight fifty. It’s the risk model kicking in.’

The Generalissimo, whose largest positions are measured not in millions of dollars but billions, looks momentarily impressed. ‘For once your Crispin-o-matic contraption is actually thinking like a trader.’ Then the spotlight of his attention swings off elsewhere.

Mike slowly, stealthily opens the MRI’s virtual bonnet, tweaks a few well-buried risk parameters and hits a re-calc. Fancy that: the black-box supercomputer wants to trim positions across the board. Very sensible, this system of his. His contract entitles him to a twelve per cent cut of profits, which, as even he can calculate, currently amounts to more than two million pounds for the year.

A ray of autumn sunshine, having entered the atrium’s pinball machine of architectural glass somewhere high above, lays its hand miraculously on his arm. He’s the Rocket Jesus: the chosen one.

By eleven, the Japanese dust has begun to settle and Mike takes a break, dodging the cabs to cross Park Lane. His daily constitutional is mocked by market-obsessed colleagues, but contributes to the semblance of self-assurance, of trusting the Box, on which his act depends. He shields his phone from the low sun and checks for personal emails. There is one.

Dear Mike,

At least I have hope. What hope do you have? You’ll always be a parasite. A gambler who doesn’t even have the guts to gamble with his own money. You invent nothing, you produce nothing, you inspire nothing, you facilitate sweet nothing. Your industry is specifically designed to contribute nothing positive to the world. You already know this.

Mike frowns, then smiles blandly. He wouldn’t expect a waster like James to understand concepts like price discovery, liquidity provision and market efficiency. Should he try to explain? Could he? Something about peaceful civilisations being built on systems of fair exchange? The challenge does not appeal. He pockets his phone and walks on.

Dan Mock is getting cold hands on his morning ride. His heavy gloves have seen him comfortably through the last few winters, but maybe the insulation has become compressed, or air is leaking through the stitching. Or maybe the vibration is doing something to his circulation. Working the throttle and brake has become hard work, and when he gets to work his hands feel weak for the next hour or two. One morning, he tries to help his technician disassemble a shielding rig but the nuts won’t budge. ‘Which gorilla tightened these?’ he asks, straining on the spanner. ‘You did,’ is the amused reply. Dan sighs and returns to the beam-modeller on his computer. He’s not employed for his spanner skills, after all.

The next morning, on the bike, he becomes aware that not only his hands but his toes are playing up. Definitely a circulation problem. The cold, posture and vibration might all be playing a part. He decides to make a few changes, as an experiment: extra liner gloves and socks; no coffee or alcohol and keep hydrated; stretch before and after each ride and at a halfway rest. If this basket of changes does the trick, he’ll withdraw them one by one to identify the true remedy.

But the changes don’t seem to help. After a week, Dan reinstates the much-missed glass of rosso and puts up with the uncomfortable ride. He lets the technicians deal with nuts and bolts, and works instead on some calculations in six-dimensional phase space, and his strategy for changing Nat’s mind about having a baby.

She described Chris as a dead end. She won’t settle for another dead end in her life — she’ll come round.

At the age of thirty, James F. Saunders has discovered the art of sexting. Brenda is less enthusiastic and often sends dismissive replies like, Glad to hear it, thinking of u too, sleep well xxx , but once in a while she humours him with a single explicit response (his persistent follow-ups are patiently ignored). One favourite, which he saved in his phone’s tiny memory, was: wetter than a scottish summer right now, got all 4 fingers in there but its not the same. ps. ur a writer, dont get rsi xx

When he’s not risking RSI — so much for the sublimation of desire — James is making progress on the novel. He thinks constantly of the great writers who have trodden this love-path before him. Sappho, by all accounts. Catullus, Ovid, Chaucer. The fair youth and dark lady. The Metaphysicals, Emily B., Tolstoy. La Moustache had a few fine moments in his fleuveroo but got hung up on jealousy — universality lost. The Exile, faithful married man branded a perv the world over, made heroic attempts culminating in Molly’s heavenly rant. Colonial love-merchants like E. M., Larry Durrell and the bondage queen. And of course, the Americans: Miller, Mailer (those two sound the same here in the north-east), the Bellower, the Upstart. A parade of masters, but they all missed the mark. Thank god.

Yes, James shares Montaigne’s tendency to write — or at least think — like a dictionary of quotations. Adrift in a sea of these prophets’ words. The essayist notes wistfully that Epicurus did not introduce a single quotation into any of the three hundred volumes he left behind him . Bully for the old glutton. In 300 B.C. you could read everything there was in a couple of weeks — Homer and whatnot — and then forget about it. Twenty-three centuries later, the human race is drowning in its written excreta. But this time, somehow, James must build an outcrop of words he can claim as his own.

If he sexts Brenda on her lunchbreak, will she respond?

Unlikely. Brenda is running. While her brother hits the Mayfair treadmill, and again ogles, and again contemplates his oblique reflection, Brenda jogs up to the unmarked deer path that does a lap of Ben Tee, just below the snowline. Four hilly miles is just right to sharpen the dinner appetite, and with Brenda’s job no shower is required — a quick vest-and-sock change in the van will suffice.

She jogs lightly over the rough, wet ground. Above her, a dozen deer hinds race a cloud-shadow across the mountainside. The low sun lights up a puddled morass in dazzling monochrome, and later, as she ducks and blinks in a gloomy stand of spruce, a single, soft beam drapes itself over a bough.

Brenda was six years old when she challenged her grandfather, Old Vickers, to chase her round the bandstand in the local park. He was a big, red-faced man, like her father, and he worshipped her. ‘Alright, Brennie,’ he gasped after a token lap. ‘That’s enough for Grandad.’