The procession of numbers painted a series of portraits. A Tokyo stock market that would sweat under the exertion of massive trading volumes in its opening hour. Currency markets in Singapore and Hong Kong that would take faltering initial steps in their pursuit of the previous week’s money trails. The luminous computer screens giving me windows into a day not yet arrived in the world. One window tumbling onto the next at the command of my impatient fingertips, like cards dealt from a deck.
The screens were alive with stacks of iridescent numerals that popped and jiggled like electric fleas spilled from an open box, and with fluorescent sticks of lightning undulating up and down on charts and graphs; all monitoring and measuring, in ceaseless statistics and averages and returns, the vital pulse of the money. In this through-the-looking-glass image of commerce and trade, there was no evidence of human life – only the outcome of harvests taken from fields or minerals hauled from mine shafts, loaded onto trains and ships, processed in plants and factories; sold; and repeatedly sold again; no sense of intent, no sense of labour, no sense of use – only a precise chronicle of the profit and loss that accrued at each stage.
Flipping through more screens produced a rainstorm of numbers and computations: bonds bought, stocks sold, currencies traded this day, wheat and corn to change hands next month, gold and silver promised for delivery at year end.
In the hyperactivity of the numbers there was a powerful pornography of betting and winning or losing, lurid and selfish and seductive. I drew the flow into myself, inflating my veins and arteries with the short-lived tension of profit and loss, an invalid plasma without sufficient substance to sustain life.
When I became aware of the telephone buzzing on the corner of my desk, I knew I had, within those moments, become so deeply entangled in the screens I had missed the initial trills. My direct line flashed. I reached quickly, awkwardly off balance from bending so deeply into my computer screen. Racing my gummy tongue across the day’s accumulation of coffee on my teeth, I scooped up the handset and closed it to my face.
“This is Paris,” I answered.
I listened intently, without interrupting, repeatedly pressing my upper teeth against my lower.
“Okay,” I replied. “Do it. Do it now.”
Without waiting for any response, I hung up.
And my hands?
I let them hang, jittery at my wrists, static in my fingertips.
I could not go away from who I was.
2
On weekends, I seemed to live a breath at a time.
Saturday and Sunday inched by in a downward spiral, making me increasingly edgy. Fickle. Channel surfing till dawn. Feeling it in some part of every minute, the need to reach the hurry of days with deadlines waiting in the coming week on the other side.
When I could no longer tolerate the inertia that accumulated, like a surely rising tide from the moment of leaving the office Friday night, I grudgingly sought the support of a familiar armchair and the distraction of whisky in my hand.
In my memory were weekends that flowed like a glassy river from Friday to Monday; the living room a tranquil anchorage, ripe with the indolence of fat newspapers, rich coffee, and flaky pastry crumbs.
Any more, I found I could only look outwards.
At my elbow, the panelled windows of my twentieth-floor condominium let in the last city views, wavering in the watery light of the late winter afternoon.
I swirled the glass in my hand, bringing forth the familiar and reassuring rattle of the ice cubes.
“It was even easier than I expected,” I announced above the knocking ice cubes, one thought present, all others absent. “All I had to do was be patient. Not run scared. Wait out the week, and give them just enough rope to hang themselves.”
I kept my eyes on a distant point where the chilly winter sky blurred with the skyline.
“You know what?” I asked her.
I pulled a trickle of Scotch off the rim of my glass, let it warm behind my teeth before I swallowed it slowly. “I knew they’d oversubscribe those bonds. I knew they’d see the dollar signs stacking up before their eyes like sugarplums. That bank has always been run from head office in Amsterdam by the greediest bunch of bastards I’ve ever seen. They’d sell twice as many bonds as they could get their hands on. Three times as many. They wouldn’t care. They’d do it just to keep the bidding juicy.”
Eagerly, I began to re-climb the steps of my success, the sensations free-flowing within me, the adrenaline of the risk, the elation of winning.
I sipped again. Barely. To add credibility to my opinion. “All I had to do last week was let them think they’d beat us and we’d rolled over and played dead. And then.”
Two shallow gulps that I swallowed hurriedly, appreciating the sensation of alcohol diluting my adrenaline.
“And then, bam! Friday night. Pull the plug on them. All I had to do was sit there and wait for one phone call from our guys in Singapore to let me know I’d gotten what I wanted. And that was it. Lock up the market and let them choke on their own greed. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Do not collect dollar fucking one. Do not – ”
I stopped at the centre of a breath, never fully drawing it for the next word.
I was doing it again.
The sudden realization caused my heartbeat to accelerate wildly as if I were fleeing from the recognition. I shook my head loosely, inhaled deeply, and tried to exhale as slowly as possible to disperse the fluttering in my chest.
Why did I keep doing it?
Talking to Judith.
3
Tuesday morning.
Intermittent flecks of snow driven across the chalky February morning; but mostly dust and grit from the salted streets carried by the biting wind off Lake Ontario as it streamed down the canyons between the office towers in Toronto’s financial district.
Twenty minutes after nine if you worked out your day in a single time zone; the day continuing without beginning or end, this side of the world or the other side, for myself and others who laboured in the global financial markets.
The sidewalks thinned by the wind-chill and final curtain of rush hour. I trudged across the concrete plaza between the office towers of the Toronto Dominion Centre. Despite running late, I persevered with my morning ritual of taking the stairs from the underground parking lot into the lobby of the tower opposite my office, and then walking outdoors across the plaza to my building, rather than flashing up in the elevator directly from my car to my office suite.
The controlled environments within the sealed glass office towers precluded me from touching the true rhythms of the day. Inside, I would be muffled by stale heat, re-chilled air, false, fluorescent light; insulated by my synthetic manipulation of money from an immense distance through computer impulse and intangible telephone words; never meeting the people I was dealing with or seeing the money I was trading. Without this exposure to a legitimate atmosphere, it was easier for me to get swept along in the frantic momentum of the markets; it was easier for my world, always seductive, always urgent, to lie to me.
The stiff wind tugged at me. I squinted, tucked my chin, glanced to both sides as I walked, trying to keep my eyes shielded from the blasts of grit. Noticed that, with the exception of a single kamikaze bike courier and a handful of shivering smokers hugging the revolving doors, I was alone on the concrete squares of the plaza. To someone looking down from the upper floors of the towers, I must have seemed like some forgotten chess piece struggling to cross the wind-blown board after the game had already been abandoned.
In my final steps to