Teddy Wayne: Kapitoil

But possibly there is a way to predict news like this without insider trading. E.g., what if I can decipher that a merger or another major transaction will take place, via public data, and then predict if the stock will rise or plummet? Dan performed normal research for his trade, but all financial workers do this for stocks and companies, so it is difficult to gain an advantage. I can merely hope my research is the most accurate.

My brain continues to evaluate this idea as I walk through the museum exhibits. The paintings of the Dutchman Piet Mondrian intrigue me, as they look like city streets, and one of his famous paintings is titled New York City . His lines are perfectly straight like geometric Islamic designs and would extend infinitely if the frames did not restrict them.

Then I enter an exhibit on the American Jackson Pollock. At first I do not enjoy his paintings. They are too chaotic and have no logic and organization like Mondrian’s. I could have painted the same thing, and so could many other painters, only Pollock was the originator and therefore he receives all the kudos. Paintings of this class make me feel like I do not understand why people appreciate visual art.

But then I see some quotations by Pollock about his paintings, such as: “I don’t use the accident—’cause I deny the accident.” And I reevaluate that possibly Pollock’s paintings have more value, because he has a philosophy similar to mine, which is that life is ultimately predictable. Many people believe it is science that controls life or Allah or some other spiritual energy, and in my opinion also we do not have true free will, e.g., my conscious decisions are the product of my neurons and not my will as an independent agent. Therefore, the variables that appear to be chaotic in fact exist in the environment for us to collect and analyze and make predictions from. This is how many systems function, like the weather, and, although some people believe it is impossible, the stock market.

When I was 11, my friend Raghid kicked a soccer ball through the window of our elderly neighbor Mamdouh’s apartment. All the other children, including Raghid, ran away, which upset me since my team required only one more goal to win. But I forgot about the score and remained because the pieces of glass on the ground looked like icicles, which I previously saw photographs of exclusively, and I studied their shapes for several minutes as well as the patterns of cracks in the window that looked like spiderwebs and the parallels between the cracks and the arrangement of glass on the ground, and that is how Mamdouh detected me. My father commanded me to labor at the store until I could pay for the window. He knew I hated laboring there. I frequently complained as a child that it was too small for me to run around in, and when I was older it always bothered me how disorganized the items were.

I said it was not my fault. He asked who kicked the ball. Raghid’s family was poorer than ours, so I said I kicked it. But I also innovated a clever explanation: I argued that because events are predetermined as Qadar in Al-Lauh Al-Mahfuz, where Allah writes all that has happened and will happen, it means that it was not truly my fault.

My father said that everything we do belongs to Allah and to us equally. He also said something that I have always remembered, because I read later that it was a strategic technique for parents, as it makes the child want to enhance his behavior, and I used it with Zahira on the few occasions when she did not perform well in school.

“I am not angry with you,” he said. “I am disappointed.”

Then he made me labor twice as long at the store so I could not only repay for the broken window but also buy new Korans for both Mamdouh and me.

But merely because something is predictable and destined does not mean it is logical outside the world of numbers, e.g., a scientist with infinite resources could have predicted my mother’s breast cancer by analyzing her biological properties and her environment, but she was not personally responsible at all for becoming unhealthy, even though my father argued we are responsible for everything.

In the museum there is another Pollock quotation that intrigues me even more: “My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.” I read it just after I notice that it is difficult to focus on his paintings.

And then I have an idea, and although the typical image to represent having an idea is a lightbulb powering on, for me I visualize the stars slowly becoming visible in the nighttime sky, because (1)like a strong idea they were always present; but (2)it requires the correct conditions to observe them; and (3)make connections between them. My idea is: I can use Pollock’s ideas about denying the accident and about there being no center for a stock market program. Everyone else who writes programs to predict the stock market concentrates on the most central variables and incorporates a few minor ones. But what if I utilize variables that no one observes because they seem tangential, and I utilize exclusively these tangential variables? I would have an advantage like Dan had in his fantasy baseball trade, where he used tangential data instead of central data. And because I am a tangential foreign banker in the U.S., possibly I will have a greater chance of locating these tangential data, e.g., as a parallel, because I am not a native English speaker I must pay closer attention to its grammar, and therefore I detected the error Dan made that most Americans also make when he used “data” as a singular noun.

And possibly I will predict events that other people consider random accidents.

On Saturday morning I have my first opportunity to call Zahira when I am not too taxed and she is still awake.

“Karim!” she says. “I was wondering when you would call.”

She is probably in our living room, next to the window that overviews our courtyard and the other apartments, and sitting on the brown cotton couch which we have had since I was a child and whose material needs to be repaired.

“I have been very busy. And I have emailed you,” I say.

“Yes, but that is not the same. It is nice to hear your voice.”

It is nice to hear hers as well. She does not remember it, but her voice sounds like our mother’s: clear but soft and loud simultaneously, like warm water poured over your head. I ask her how she is performing in school, and she tells me about her biology class. It pleases me that she is engaged although I do not understand most of the jargon terms and ideas and cannot respond, except when she discusses viruses, as I mostly self-taught computers by studying viruses at night for a year when I was 18, and I was always the employee at the Doha branch who healed viruses. Biological viruses are of course not perfectly equivalent to computer viruses, but they share some theoretical similarities, and I find it intriguing that they are all self-replicating, as if they have their own brains, and it is dependent on my brain to contain and destroy them.

“Certify that after you finish your introductory quantitative analysis course you first take microeconomics, as it is important to understand individual motivation, and then macroeconomics for the big-picture view,” I say.

“I know,” Zahira says. “You have told me a million times.”

“And if you enhance your English, we can converse in it more frequently.”

In English, she says, “You tell me one million times.”

“You have told me a million times,” I say. “But I can tell you are studying idioms. If you read and practice as much as I do, your skills will broaden.”

I talk about the airplane and the ways midtown reminds me of Al Dafna and the West Bay, and how rapidly people walk when transferring subways, especially the professional females, and that everyone’s aggregated earphones in the subway sound like machines striking metal. I inventory my apartment: a high-end television and stereo; a quality couch of black leather; a bed that could contain three of my bodies; a silver refrigerator of spacious storage capacity; a white carpet that feels like a horse’s hair; a square black table with four chairs; and an invisible glass coffee table that is elegant although when I arrived I did not observe it and crashed my knee on it.