A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  "The Nation, I think."

  Lenka thought about it and then sighed, shook her head. "I would have to look it up. Maybe? That's crazy. You know, I'll probably meet with her. Does she know about—"

  "Oh yeah. She's thrilled about you. Me, she could do without, but you sound like a dream come true to her."

  She smiled.

  "But I still haven't told her about Calloway," Gabriel whispered.

  "Eek." Lenka screwed her face up. "Maybe you need a Scotch?"

  He nodded in mock solemnity.

  "This way."

  She poured him a whiskey and they went to the entranceway where they could talk in peace for a minute while he drank up.

  "When does she arrive?"

  "Tuesday. Two days."

  "Evo and I will be gone then."

  "I know. She's here for a while, then leaves Friday, before the reception."

  "Maybe it's good that you'll have a chance to be alone with her for a couple days before we return?"

  "Maybe." He drained the rest of his whiskey. "You want to introduce me to anyone I might have missed?" The way she looked at him then, he swore he could see love in her eyes. He leaned in and kissed her on the mouth, once. "Thank you," he said.

  Hours later—after Gabriel had met another dozen people, had let their names enter his mind and then leave; after he had eaten a plate of the shredded pork, an ear of smoky corn, and a couple of chalky wedges of boiled cassava—he and Lenka sneaked off to Ernesto's room for some privacy. Maybe it was the Percocet working its way out of his system, or maybe it was all the small talk, but he was weary.

  "Do you regret coming here today?" she said. They were sitting side by side on the bed. Ernesto's room was a tidy rectangle, like all of the rooms in the house; a plain rectangular window offered a view of a row of boxy properties across the street.

  He shook his head. "I love it here. I love your family." Battered, brightly colored toys—Buzz Lightyear, Thomas the Tank Engine—had erupted across the floor near the closet. Ernesto'd made his own bed, Gabriel guessed: the sincerity of the attempt was matched only by the awkwardness of the execution. He felt woozy, but he knew he needed to snap to attention, she was trying to talk about something of importance. He needed to convey, most of all, that he adored her and her family. "You know that this isn't"—he gestured in the downstairs direction—"it's not me. The charming guy who buys toys for your son, comes over to dinner all the time. That's not me, but I like it here, and I was thinking that I shouldn't be so, you know, limited."

  "Are you going to start coming around for dinner every night?"

  "No. But, I mean—" He scratched his stitches and wondered how he could say what he thought he should say, that all the sweet norms of romance—the bashful presentation of flowers, the holding of hands in a dim cinema—did not seem appropriate for them. But their relationship was alive and passionate and it thrived especially in the absence of any of that pro forma schlock. Their place was up in his hotel room, with cake and wine, at a slight remove from the messy world below. Still, there was more—or there was potential for more. He loved her and she loved him and he was even falling for her family, and if they—he and Lenka—were an unconventional couple, so be it. Maybe it could be strange and wonderful. But he didn't know how to say these things. Instead, he said, "I really like it here. I really do." And he nodded earnestly as he said it, staring at the toys on Ernesto's floor.

  She draped an arm over his shoulder and they sat in silence. His wandering attention settled on a crucifix above the bed. He'd seen it when he entered, but he took a moment to stare at it now. Like other crucifixes he'd seen in Latin America, it presented a much gorier picture of Christ than you'd find in the North. Jesus was pulped, scored with oozing lacerations, his emaciated body painted in blood. The seam of skin at the lower edge of the wound in his chest sagged open like the bottom lip of an idiot's mouth, exposing the pale ribs beneath.

  Lenka, aware that he was staring, stood up and retrieved it from the wall. And from the way she held it—cradled it, really—he could tell she was a true believer. She handed it to him and sat down.

  He held it, not sure what to do. Did she want him to talk about religion? He didn't believe and would rather not lie about it. He preferred to lie only out of necessity. He blew some dust off the cross. "It's intense," he said, for lack of anything else. He handed it back to her.

  "Yes," she said. This was disappointing to her, maybe. She stood up and put it back on the wall.

  "I don't mean any offense," he said.

  She sat back down. "You know, this is supposed to be a very happy holiday."

  "Christmas isn't happy for you?"

  She shrugged. "He was born to suffer so horribly, so brutally. His gift to us is his suffering. You know, in four months, Paceñas will be dragging crucifixes through the city streets on the anniversary of his death. Some of them crawl—and by the end of the day their knees are raw and covered in blood." She shook her head. "The suffering continues. We do it to ourselves. Did you know that they say that Bolivia is a donkey on a gold mine?"

  "I've heard that. I don't think of it that way."

  "I know, Gabriel," she said. She was trying to be kind to him, but something was wearing thin for her. She shook her head and he wished that he could explain better what he meant and how he felt. He wished he could explain how much he adored her family, and how crazy it was for him to care that much about them, considering what he'd come to Bolivia to do.

  "I just found out that I will probably be fired from my job," he said. "And my mother told me she's coming, and—I wanted to tell you that the most remarkable thing of the day has been spending this time here. I really—I don't know how to say this..."

  "It's okay, Gabriel, you don't have to," she said.

  That would have to do. He couldn't bring himself to explain the rest.

  She leaned in and kissed him on the eyelid. "Thank you," she said. "I love you."

  He nodded and stared at the toys on the floor, feeling awful.

  Lenka helped Gabriel sneak out of the party without all the goodbyes. He asked her to apologize to her mother for him, and to say that he'd bring his mother around.

  Kissing slowly around the corner from her front door, he ran his hands down the back of her pantsuit and felt where the coarse fabric grew taut across her hips. He leaned in to her ear and said, "Will you wear this tonight?"

  Staring at him, she nodded slowly, her mouth open. He could see that her lower lip was wet from their kissing. He leaned in and kissed her beneath the eye.

  When he got back to Hotel Gloria, he stopped at the front desk and asked the petite woman if he had any messages. Yes, he did. Catacora had already left a message saying that he wanted to meet at his office the next morning.

  "Did he say anything else?" Gabriel asked the woman.

  "No."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  "Ugh." Vexed, he lingered. "Okay. Thanks."

  He went to the Lookout, half hoping to find Fiona, half hoping not to find her. She wasn't there. She probably wasn't even in the country anymore. He sat in a booth in the corner, near the window that looked across at Hotel Gloria. There were a handful of journalists at the bar, none he knew. He gazed out the window and tried to figure out which window in the Gloria was his. He narrowed it down to two, but he wasn't sure which floor was which.

  Then he opened his notepad and glanced over his notes on Santa Cruz. He had nothing so far. He'd never been fired before, and he didn't look forward to the experience.

  He dialed Oscar, whose phone was off. It was, after all, Christmas evening. He didn't leave a message. He knew he was supposed to call his mother, but he couldn't bear to do it. The conversation would go on and on, he knew. And the last thing he wanted that evening was to talk to anyone for a long time.

  Severo wasn't there that night. It was another bartender. The bartender came over to the table and asked what Gabriel wanted.

  "Coffee w
ith cream, please."

  When the bartender brought him his coffee, he took the cup downstairs to the casino and quickly burned through two hundred dollars at the blackjack table. He tipped the dealer his last two chips and left his coffee, tepid and untouched, on the table and went back to his hotel.

  That night he and Lenka didn't order any wine or any trout. He wasn't in the mood for trout or wine and she wasn't talking. He wasn't in the mood for sex either. They just sat on the edge of his bed, fully clothed. He had cleaned the ashtrays out, but the smell lingered.

  Eventually she said, "When are you going to leave?"

  She and Evo would be in Sucre for a few days that week, but back on Thursday, the day before the party in honor of Vincenzo D'Orsi, the Italian former vice president of the World Bank. Evo wanted to portray the man—and, by association, any sympathetic European or American—as a heroic rebel. The narrative, which Lenka was helping to sculpt, went that D'Orsi was the kind of person who was prepared to put his personal needs aside in favor of the greater good. The man had deliberately lost a very plum job because he'd been a stoic defender of the Bolivian people. Gabriel knew it was more complicated than that. Everything in life was more complicated than that. The day after the party, Evo and Lenka would set off on Evo's world tour. Gabriel would probably leave then too. In a week, he'd be back in New York and she'd be off touring the globe with Evo.

  Seeing no need to adorn the truth, he said, "I'll leave when you leave on that tour with Evo, next Saturday." He pushed his fingers through his hair. "Unless my boss fires me first."

  "I'm sorry about that. I wish I could help you."

  He nodded. Time was running out for him. He didn't want to ask anything else of her, but he was short on options. In a sense, he was looking forward to getting fired. He was ready to be liberated from the stress.

  Neither one of them said anything for a while. They just sat beside each other staring at the other twin bed, where he had thrown his medical supplies, including the large box of gauze, the white medical tape, three boxes of adhesive bandages, the antibiotic ointment, both bottles of pills, and an ice pack, now at room temperature. The boxy and colorless flotsam of the wounded.

  "Would it be so bad if you lost this job?" she eventually said.

  He was about to shake his head, but stopped to think about it. He envisioned New York and his life there, impressions flashed of late-night subway rides and of a glistening breakfast in Greenpoint at the Polish deli that smelled of old dishwater and was always full of cops and of the annual IBI staff party at Faddo's, a tiny Irish bar in Chelsea. He remembered walking backward into a cold wind one winter night with some friends, all of them were walking backward and emitting a chorus of groans at the gusts. They had ended up in the loft of a friend of a friend of one of Gabriel's suddenly wealthy college friends—Vic, a quant at D. E. Shaw. The woman who owned the loft looked like a young Yoko Ono. Her husband was a bigwig at Geffen Records. She served them cashews and champagne and they talked about a recent rash of exploding manholes. Gabriel wanted to take the subway home afterward, but Vic insisted on their taking a taxi. Gabriel gave in, and when he got out of the cab he handed Vic fifteen dollars, and Vic, who no longer thought about money in the way that mortals did, accepted the bills absent-mindedly. Then Vic continued to his new brownstone in Park Slope, and Gabriel walked up to his studio apartment.

  So to Lenka he said, "Yes, it would be bad if I lost my job." It was lovely to be in Bolivia and to stand comfortably outside the local class structure, but he wasn't going to be in Bolivia forever. Sooner or later, he would be back in New York. He didn't want to lie to her any more than was necessary; actually, he didn't want to lie to her at all, so he didn't say anything else.

  "Is your job that satisfying?" she asked.

  "Satisfying?" He shook his head. "No, it's not satisfying. I'm afraid it's only rewarding in one way: the most straightforward way."

  This last part wasn't quite true; there were more perks to it than that—the thrill, the illicitness, its espionage quality, to name a few—but the spirit of the point remained. Working for the hedge fund might even be as exciting as working for Evo, but in the end a very large part of the allure had to do with the crazily outsize paychecks.

  Understandably, she didn't like what he was saying. And that was the problem. She didn't respect people who would work for the sole purpose of making heaps of money. Not many people did. It seemed to require a base value structure, something that was, if not outright corrupt, at least a little cold and nihilistic. And while that position did resonate on a deep level with Gabriel, who was, after all, his mother's son, he believed that there was more to it than that.

  Assuming, for the sake of argument, that he was pursuing profit to the neglect of everything else, at least the work wasn't as harmful as people seemed to believe. For one thing, the profit in question wasn't coming at the expense of the inhabitants of any poor countries, as his mother had claimed in her opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. It turned out that the point of his work was not to extract money from Bolivia—there was, frankly, not enough money there to attract his employer's attention—but to find some way to outgun the competing hedge funds. He was in Bolivia because it was an angle the others weren't pursuing. The point was to somehow achieve better gains than the other hedge funds did. It was a straightforward race, but it was sprints, all the time. There were four sprints per year, one each quarter. The object was to beat the others on your quarterly statement. Ultimately, the goal was to generate a record of such impressive gains that risk-friendly people seeking a place to plant a few million would be willing to accept your high fees. The fees themselves were nice, but it was imperative to always lure new clients to your shop. With those kinds of small hedge funds, there was no point in marketing, really. Anyone with the means to participate was not going to look at the company's logo. Interested parties would study the quarterly results alone. The best hedge fund generated the best results, and, in so doing, did the best job of appealing to the greedier instincts of those in the position to play with millions of dollars.

  Gabriel had noticed that of all the cardinal sins, greed was the most uniformly maligned. A glutton might be merely an overzealous bon vi-vant, a lustful person might be too passionate; and a slothful person could be simply over-mellow. Envy, wrath, and pride flared once in a while in everyone, and so they were easily appreciated. Greed however held purely pejorative implications. Unlike the rest, it wasn't seen as spawned of heart—of passions. It was seen as a cold and cerebral sin, a schemer's sin, one that had to be committed knowingly. But Gabriel didn't see it that way. To him, it was just as complex and obsessive a vice as lust, envy, or wrath.

  When Hernán Cortés encountered Montezuma's emissaries, in 1519, he reportedly said, "Let your king send us more gold, for I and my companions have a disease of the heart, which only gold can cure."

  Crucially, he spoke of the heart. What else but passion would propel a group of men on such a journey? What else could enable them to commit such deeds? A look at the many swelling and popping financial bubbles of the past century indicated a culture overcome with fits of mass hysteria and delusions, a culture passionately obsessed with the acquisition of wealth. It was all heart. And the enemy of wisdom was a taste not for vice but for certainty. This was Lenka's failure, her unambiguous moral clarity and the attendant proclivity for judgment. It was what made her a brilliant spokesperson for Evo, and it was what made her incapable of understanding why Gabriel sincerely wanted to work for the Calloway Group. Lenka's own mother, though, seemed to stand at the distant opposite end of this spectrum. The wise aura she emanated implied not an adamantine moral confidence but an acquaintance with (and an appreciation of) human frailty.

  Gabriel was hoping to appeal to something similar in Lenka when he said, "My job is not about the things my mother told me mattered. It's about money."

  "But you think that money does matter."

  "Look around you, Lenka. What do y
ou think?"

  "I believe that life can be about more than that."

  "I do too. Or, I hope so. My problem is that I am in a very strange situation, and it's a good situation. It's a great situation, actually. I have a job right now that, if I can manage to keep it for a few years, will put me within striking distance of very early retirement."

  "Right."

  He took her hand. "I just need to survive at this job for two or three years and then I will be done. This is my chance. If this doesn't work, I'll go back to some other job, and I'll be a slave to some paycheck. And that's not the end of the world, it's normal, obviously, and it's what I'd expected life to be like. But I've managed to locate a secret passage out, and I've just entered that passageway."

  She looked at him and, in the next moments, he watched as she gave in. The part of her that had been resisting—he could practically see it collapse. "Fine," she said.

  "Fine?"

  She took a deep breath. "Yes, fine. I'll ask Evo what he has planned for Santa Cruz Gas."

  "Thank you," he said. He said nothing else. He wanted her to speak next.

  Eventually, she said, "I'll do it tomorrow."

  There was no harm in her asking, of course, but if Evo told her something major and she told Gabriel, she would be committing a serious breach of Evo's confidence. Giving information about the president-elect's economic plan to an agent of a hedge fund would be nearly an act of treason. Evo would almost certainly never find out. Even if his administration figured out that a hedge fund had been betting on Bolivian gas, it would be more or less impossible to locate the source of that hedge fund's information. Still, she was risking everything that she had achieved for Gabriel's future in an industry she reviled.

  "Thank you," he said again. There would be no way to thank her sufficiently.

  She kissed his forehead, stood up. He pulled her back down.

  "Thank you," he said, once more. He kissed her shoulder.