Gods Without Men

2008

“I suppose,” said Jaz, “we’d better wait for Mommy.” Raj was standing at the foot of the lounger, staring at the sky and humming in a high-pitched wavering tone, usually a sign he was hungry. Jaz tousled his hair. Raj took a step back, out of range.

“Oh, to hell with it. I could use something to eat, too.”

He fixed a lunch of tuna fish and rye crackers. They ate together by the pool. Raj stood, clutching his food in a hot little fist. Daddy perched glumly on a folding chair. Raj drank apple juice. Daddy had a beer. Daddy had another beer. He crushed red Tecate cans under the sole of his flip-flop and threw them at the painted metal bucket that served as a trash can. What the hell was Lisa playing at? She’d made her point. He was more than ready to apologize. If he admitted his faults, then maybe they could all go look at scenery or something. She was the one who’d wanted to take a trip out to this godforsaken place. And until she came back with the car, he and Raj were stuck at the motel.

An hour went by. He coaxed Raj into the pool and held him while he splashed, feeling his wriggling body twisting about in his arms, a little seal cub, a porpoise. Afterward he smeared more sunscreen on the boy’s torso and tried to persuade him to wear the floppy-brimmed hat Lisa had picked up at a Walmart on the way out of L.A. Raj didn’t want to know about the hat. Even tying the strap under his chin didn’t work; his fingers deftly picked open the knot as soon as Jaz’s back was turned.

The more he thought about Lisa, the more the print on his paperback novel swam in front of his eyes. You people. Well, sometimes she was you people. A piece of string, for God’s sake. That’s all it was.

Another hour passed. Jaz took Raj’s hand and went out to look at the road, in the magical hope that this would conjure his wife and their rental car out of the shimmering blacktop. The air had a pink haze. He considered walking down the hill into town. How long would it take? An hour? With the boy?

He always defaulted to work when stressed or angry. The sun was low and he was failing to concentrate on a pile of reports when his cell phone started to vibrate in his pocket, playing a trebly polyphonic “Ride of the Valkyries.” Not Lisa. The ringtone was his bad-taste private joke on Fenton Willis, a man it was probably risky to make jokes about, even if he wasn’t your employer.

“Mr. Willis.”

“Jaswinder.” The firm’s CEO was the only person in Jaz’s life other than his parents who insisted on using his full name. He pronounced it Jass-whine-dur, a mangled sequence of syllables he emitted with such ponderous formality that Jaz sometimes felt like the object of a hearts and minds campaign. Step one: Look him in the eye and address him using correct honorific. Step two: Tell him why you regret calling in the airstrike on his village … Watercooler gossip had it that in Vietnam Willis’s job had been to clear Vietcong tunnels, crawling along in the dark with a flashlight and a.38. Sometimes, on the subway or waiting in line for a coffee, Jaz found himself wondering how many of the men around him had done such things. Which of the guys strap-hanging on the F train had been to war? Which of them, with their copies of the Post and their laptop cases, had tortured or killed?

“So, how’s the desert?”

“It’s just great, Mr. Willis. We’re all having a great time.”

“Glad to hear it. I stayed in a neat little place round there. Working cattle ranch. Help with the roundup, rope a steer, that kind of thing. I could get Linda to send you the details. Great place. You spend a night on the range. Eat beans out of a mess tin, Indian feller tells ghost stories. Mesquite fire, the whole nine yards.”

“Sounds awesome, sir. But maybe next time. Our itinerary’s kind of set.”

“I see. Look, son, I wouldn’t bother you on your vacation, but I had lunch with Cy Bachman yesterday, and he seems to think you aren’t happy.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly.”

“Well, how would you put it?”

“I think we’re working well together. And Cy’s a talented guy. No doubt about it.”

“But?”

“I think there’s too much exposure. If it goes wrong there could be consequences.”

“That goes without saying. We’ve got a lot of chips on the table.”

“Not just losses for the firm. Systemic consequences.”

“You’ll have to unpack that for me.”

“I just think we haven’t thought through the logic of what we’re doing with Walter.”

“Cy says you’re risk-averse. He says you pitched him some kind of candy-assed moral argument, told him you thought taking highly leveraged positions based on his model was against your conscience.”

“That wasn’t what I said.”

“So what did you say? If you think the model’s no good, then you need to stand up and say so. I’m not paying you to spot problems and keep them to yourself.”

“Well, I—”

“And you need to tell me what in hell’s name your conscience has to do with the price of rice.”

This was not a conversation Jaz wanted to have, not today. Preferably not ever, but particularly not today. He thought of asking Willis whether he could call him back, but that wasn’t really an option. If right now was when Fenton wanted to talk about Cy Bachman and the Walter model and all the rest of the shit Jaz had hoped to keep in a holding pattern over the fan for another few days, then right now it would have to be. It was obvious what Bachman had been saying. Their relationship had never been straightforward, and now — after their argument — he wanted Jaz off the team. Fenton was doing him a courtesy, allowing him to defend himself, but it was probably a fait accompli. He assumed his security pass had been deactivated. They were probably boxing up his personal effects for the courier.

This had been coming for a while.

He’d first set eyes on Cy Bachman two years previously, over lunch at a steakhouse in the Financial District, the kind of place Willis favored for meetings, where you could eat eighty-five-dollar Wagyu burgers and wash them down with bottles of Opus One. Bachman turned out to be vegetarian, a fact Willis evidently knew and had ignored when making the booking. While the CEO told a boring story about a horse he was thinking of buying from a stable in Saratoga, Jaz had watched an elegant, fiftyish, shaven-headed man shoot his French cuffs and tackle an enormous bowl of arugula, whose size appeared to be the kitchen’s consolation for the meal’s total absence of protein. It occurred to him the salad was a joke — the place was known for the “no rabbit food” motto emblazoned on its creamy letterpress menu. Bachman affected neither to notice nor to care.

When Willis finished the horse story, Bachman smiled at Jaz and complimented him on a paper he’d coauthored at MIT, outlining a simplified statistical technique for describing the behavior of certain assemblies of particles. Jaz was disarmed, but at the same time wary. Bachman had a reputation as one of the most talented financial engineers on Wall Street; it was an open secret that Willis had poached him from one of the big banks to head a new research team. He assumed the lunch was because Willis wanted him to work under Bachman. The comment was his new boss’s way of letting him know he had prepared. Later he’d discover that this care and meticulousness was carried through to every aspect of Bachman’s life, from his fastidiously stylish dress to his almost neurotic concern for the visual presentation of data. A trailing zero could drive him into a rage. He insisted his team was “properly attired” even if all they were doing was writing code.

Willis seemed untouched by Bachman’s aura, his WASP sense of entitlement and large personal fortune providing an effective shield against intellect. “Enjoying your meal, Cy?” he chortled.

Bachman made a face. “This is revenge,” he explained. “I took him to a raw-food place in the Village.”

“Bastards made me a coffee out of pistachio nuts.”

Jaz laughed heartily. He knew better than to be fooled by Fenton’s bluff manner. Behind the genial clubman’s mask, the oak-paneled three-martini smokescreen he put up to fool the credulous, a ruthless tactician lurked. When it came to the acquisition of money, he was entirely pragmatic, prepared to act without prejudice or sentiment. In this respect, he was quite brilliant. Jaz couldn’t help but connect this ability to suspend judgment, to take each new situation entirely on its own merits, with the image of a man crawling down a tunnel with a gun in his hand, feeling his way in the dark.

“So Jaswinder. Cy’s taken a look at your work and he thinks he could use you on Walter.”

“Walter?”

“It’s a new global quant model.”

“Goddamn theory of everything, isn’t that right, Cy?”

“If you say so, Fenton. Everything would be kind of a large dataset.”

Jaz was intrigued. “What stage are you at?”

“Personally,” interrupted Willis, “I think it’s just great already. If it was up to me I’d go live right now, start counting my winnings. But Cy says the bastard’s got a half-life of about twenty seconds, and if we go off all premature we’ll blow the chance of a bigger payday down the line.”

“But it is down to you, Fenton. Just say the word.”

“Cy. If you tell me I can have a dollar today or three tomorrow, I’ll take the three bucks. Deferred gratification — it’s what separates civilized man from chimps and children. We’re getting OK returns on the established models, so I’m happy to wait. Just as long as Renaissance or those bastards at Goldman don’t get there before us.”

“Fenton, I’d be very surprised if they had any interest in this strategy.”

“Well, I wouldn’t. Probably bugging the damn table decorations in this joint, paying off the sommelier. Speaking of which, let’s get another bottle.”

When Jaz presented himself at Bachman’s office the following day, he expected to be shown some kind of formula. The Walter setup was very cloak-and-dagger, a separate address, pin codes and biometrics to get through the door. Bachman had a view of the Hudson and a display case full of curios behind his desk that Jaz avoided scrutinizing too closely, in case it led to a conversation about basketry or ceramics or netsuke, topics that would quickly lead him out of his comfort zone. Luckily Bachman got straight to business. He told him the best way to understand the model was to work with it, which seemed sensible enough. When Jaz asked about its basic principles, he waved the question away.

Bachman’s model was conventional in that it relied on discovering certain predictable behaviors in the market — regularities, trackable cycles — and using that knowledge to trade. But as far as Jaz could grasp from the initial presentation, which took almost three hours and left him feeling like he’d been sparring with some kind of higher-dimensional gorilla, the type of regularities Walter sought were particularly fleeting and unstable. The model was being trained not simply to exploit some temporary price disparity but to identify and track entirely ad hoc constellations of five, six, seven variables, brief but dazzling phenomena, lightning flashes of correlation. The math, Jaz thought, was some of the most beautiful he’d ever encountered. The problem that would come to tug at him like an importunate child was something else. Something about Walter’s responsiveness, its voracious thirst for data. It was more like an organism than a computer program. It felt alive.

For the first few months he had little to do with Walter’s guts, the software that identified patterns and executed trades. His job was to take certain datasets and hunt for statistical relationships, what Bachman called “rhymes.” The material (prepared according to some arcane process Bachman refused to discuss) came in discrete clusters, little clots of seemingly unrelated numbers. Some of it was familiar: commodity and share prices, government bond yields, interest rates, currency fluctuations. But there was other data: on shopping-mall construction, retail-sales figures, drug-patent applications, car ownership; on the incidence of birth defects, industrial injuries, suicides, controlled-substance seizures, cell phone tower construction. Walter consumed the most esoteric numbers: small-arms sales in the Horn of Africa; the population of Gary, Indiana, between 1940 and 2008; the population of Magnitogorsk, Siberia, for the same years; prostitution arrests in major American cities; data traffic over the TPE trans-Pacific cable; the height of the water table in various subregions of the Maghreb.

Some of the data were so bizarre that Jaz couldn’t help but feel that Willis’s quip about a theory of everything was close to the mark. It was as if Bachman were trying to fit the whole world into his model. What was external to Walter? Was there anything it didn’t aim to comprehend? When Jaz tried, hesitantly, to frame this question, Cy launched into a convoluted monologue, at the end of which things were no clearer than before. Walter, he said, pacing his office like a prisoner exercising in his cell, didn’t rely on the opposition between external and internal. It wasn’t some tin-toy simplification of the world, which chose a few variables and ignored the rest. Conversely, it didn’t need to know the state of “everything” at some initial time t in order to find the patterns it sought. Walter worked in a different way. “It’s like plunging your hands into a river,” he said, “and pulling out a fish.”

Despite Jaz’s skepticism, he soon had to admit that there were rhymes, and they existed in the weirdest places. One day he found a periodic cycle in a cluster of figures for CPU transistor counts since 1960, IQ test scores for African American boys from single-parent families and an epidemiological analysis of the spread of the methamphetamine drug ya-ba through Thailand and Southeast Asia. Not only was there a strange harmony to the movements of this grab bag of statistics, but it seemed to track a certain popular measure of volatility in currency markets. He checked and rechecked the figures. He hadn’t miscalculated. Filled with an odd sense of foreboding, he presented his findings to Bachman, who nodded appreciatively.

“Perfect,” he said. “I told Fenton you had the knack for this. I wasn’t wrong.”

Jaz spoke carefully, not sure where his words would lead him. “I’m not sure I understand, Cy. Surely this is meaningless coincidence. There’s no link between any of these things.”

Bachman’s hands fluttered to his neck, checking the perfect Windsor knot of his tie. He swiveled his chair toward the window and looked out at the river, a dull gray band between the sleek black faces of the towers. It was early February and rain was smeared against the glass, the outside world a barely recognizable blur.

“Get your coat. I want to show you something.”

They took Bachman’s car uptown through heavy lunch-hour traffic. Bachman fiddled with his cuff links, idly leafing through a stack of reports. Jaz sent texts, half aware of the rubber-booted pedestrians swarming the crosswalks, wrestling their umbrellas into the wind. It was a bad day to be selling gyros or hailing a cab. Trucks plowed furrows through the curbside puddles, sending waves of dirty water arcing into the air. Office workers scurried for cover; die-hard smokers jostled for position in sheltered doorways. Any heavier and there’d be kayaks, people clinging to floating wreckage.

The driver let them out at a town house in the east eighties, facing the park. A discreet plaque announced the place as the Neue Galerie, a museum Lisa had talked about, but Jaz had never been inside. Bachman appeared to be known to the staff; the security guard greeted him by name as he waved them in. They climbed the stairs and entered a room hung with paintings. Bachman steered him past a flashy Klimt, ringed by tourists, toward a vitrine containing various small decorative objects, clocks, glassware and jewelry. Like a waiter gesturing at a particularly good corner table, he extended his hand toward a silver coffee set, sleek and plain and scientific-looking, pots and jugs with big geometric handles and rows of studs around their bases, arranged on a little tray, complete with a set of tongs and a spirit burner to keep the coffee warm.

“Do you enjoy the Wiener Werkstätte?”

Jaz would probably have used the word deco to describe the things in the case. Bachman frowned, picking up on his discomfort. “I’m sorry. I didn’t bring you here to lecture you about art history. This was made in Vienna just before World War One by a man called Hoffmann. A very brilliant man, an architect and furniture designer, founded a sort of Viennese arts and crafts movement. I don’t know why I find it so moving. It’s such an unserious thing. What a lot of effort and skill to lavish on something as ordinary as making coffee! And when you think about when it was made …”

He trailed off, staring gloomily into the case. After a moment, he shook his head in the abrupt manner of a sleeper trying to wake himself up. Jaz realized he knew precisely nothing about Cy Bachman, about how he thought, the things he loved. He had a sudden image of a man for whom the present day was no more than a thin crust of ice over a deep cold lake. Disturbed, he turned around, pretending to examine a painting on the wall behind him. Bachman touched his arm, gently repositioning him in front of Hoffmann’s coffee set. He spoke under his breath, as though imparting a secret.

“When I come here, I always find myself wondering what happened to the people who owned this. I feel they must have been Jews. Wealthy Viennese Jews. How long did they survive? First, their country vanishes. Then the Anschluss, the deportations. How many years could the family maintain a life that included such luxuries?”

He sighed deeply. Jaz wondered if he expected a reply.

“Have you ever been to Vienna, Jaz?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“It’s a very unsettling city. At least I find it so. The main cemetery is vast. They say it has a larger population of the dead than the city has living. All very well kept, very neat, until you come to the Jewish section, which has been completely neglected. There’s no one left, you see. No relatives, no descendants, to tend the graves. All those families, with their possessions and their big houses and their servants and their taste, all vanished. Ashes floating out of a crematorium chimney.”

He went on, speaking urgently now, gripping Jaz’s arm with one hand and describing little arcs and circles with the other, like a concertgoer following a score.

“As with most art, this is an attempt to stand outside time. That’s perhaps its most luxurious quality — one could even say a sign of decadence. What a moment to deny history! When it was about to trample over everything, not just the ritual of coffee and cake, but everything! The whole culture! There’s a tradition that says the world has shattered, that what once was whole and beautiful is now just scattered fragments. Much is irreparable, but a few of these fragments contain faint traces of the former state of things, and if you find them and uncover the sparks hidden inside, perhaps at last you’ll piece together the fallen world. This is just a glass case of wreckage. But it has presence. It’s redemptive. It is part of something larger than itself.”

“I see.”

“No, I don’t think you do. Not yet. What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can’t just rummage about like you’re at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That’s what we’re doing with Walter, Jaz. We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It’s not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It’s certainly not a theory of everything. I don’t have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.”

“What’s that?”

“A sense of humor.”

Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such — what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man that brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs.

“We’re hunting for jokes.” Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. “Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.”

“Discover what?”

“The face of God. What else would we be looking for?”

Perched on the lounger, pushing one of Raj’s plastic toys around with his toe, Jaz tried to form sentences for Fenton Willis, trying to explain why he’d come to be afraid of Cy Bachman and the face of God. “It’s not a question of conscience, Fenton. I know you have no time for that — and of course neither does … Well, yes, I am kind of going on my gut.… No, Walter’s robust. I’m not disputing that. It’s a very powerful model.”

That was the problem: Walter’s power. The power to affect the things it observed, to alter the course of events with its predictions.

It seemed impossible. After the visit to the Neue Galerie, Jaz started to suspect Bachman was a crank. He’d call Jaz into his office and initiate esoteric and largely one-sided discussions of recursivity, noncomputability, the limits of mathematical knowledge. At times he was openly mystical, wanting to discuss the Fibonacci sequence, Kondratiev waves, predestination. He’d make gnomic pronouncements (When price meets time, change is imminent) and read aloud from books that appeared to have nothing to do with finance: the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching. For a man who worked with computers he had a strong taste for pen and paper. His desk was frequently covered with hand-drawn charts, often hexagons, plotted with tiny numerals. Once he showed Jaz a graph plotting the Dow Jones Industrial Average against phases of Saturn, claiming that he was “tinkering” with the idea that all significant cycles in stocks and commodities were either multiples or harmonics of something called the Jupiter-Saturn cycle. Occasionally, he’d mention his house in Montauk, imagining his retirement there, or proposing to sell it and buy somewhere in Europe, possibly Berlin. “I think that’s the only place I could truly understand the past,” he said once. “But what about the future? Is the future even possible there? Maybe Mumbai or Beijing?”

Why he chose him as his interlocutor, Jaz couldn’t tell. There were surely other people in the firm better able to follow the forking paths of his conversation. Sometimes he seemed manic, staring out his window at the forest of lighted bank-tower windows like a cartoon supervillain in his mountain hideaway. At other times he could be despondent, slumped in his chair, muttering about the world being a hall of mirrors, a puzzle with no solution. Once Jaz found him at the window with his arms outspread, a silk-suited Cristo Redentor blessing Broad Street.

“Why do you do this work, Jaz? Strange I’ve never asked you before.”

“No mystery. I have a wife, a son. I want to give them a good life.”

“Is that all?”

“And of course because it’s interesting.”

“Oh, come on, that’s one of your dishwater words. A map of Brooklyn is interesting. A documentary on penguins is interesting. Not a life. Interesting isn’t the reason you get up in the morning. Tell me, do you believe in God?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?” He paused. “I see. Well, aren’t you going to ask me the same thing?”

“OK. Do you believe in God?”

“Interesting you should ask, Jaz. I think the real question is whether God believes in me.”

He began to laugh, a shrill ascending scale. Jaz was irritated. Raj had kept him awake much of the night, and the previous day the latest in their long series of nannies had quit. He had no patience to spare for Bachman’s metaphysical jokes.

“Look, Cy. You want to know why I’m doing this? Because with luck it’ll make Fenton a lot of money, and he’ll give some of it to me. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Walter is profound, but you know what? I don’t care. I just want to build a trading model, I don’t need to save the world.”

Bachman sat down at his desk. For a long time, he was completely silent, rocking slightly from side to side on his chair, steepling his long fingers.

“I’m sorry, Cy. I’m sleep-deprived. My son — I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“Next month we’re going to go live with Walter. Small volumes initially, but if it works as it’s been doing in testing, we’ll soon step up.”

“OK. Right.”

“That’ll be all.”

Jaz left feeling angry. Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? That night he tried to explain to Lisa what had happened. Having never met Bachman, she’d formed a romantic picture of him as some kind of unworldly scholar, toiling away in his office like a medieval alchemist. Jaz would remind her of the custom-tailored suits, the handmade shoes, but she couldn’t shake the image of a banker who wasn’t primarily motivated by money.

“Did you really shout at him?” she asked.

“I told him I wasn’t interested in his theories.”

“Oh, Jaz, why? He sounds like the most interesting guy in the place.”

“Interesting? Christ.”

“Are you going to get fired?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe he’ll just find someone else to rant at when he’s bored. I’m not sure he’s got any kind of home life. There’s no wife, no kids. It’s possible all he does is think up new ways to look for God in unemployment figures.”

Bachman didn’t fire him. The stream of data continued. Gas volumes pumped through the BTC and Druzhba pipelines, racial assaults in Australia, coltan mining yields in the DRC free zones, incidence of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in those same zones, hourly volume of technology stocks traded on the Nikkei … Jaz was no longer analyzing these clusters himself, just feeding them into Walter, which was unearthing connections at an alarming rate. Everything seemed to be linked to everything else: the net worth of retirees in Boca Raton, Florida, oscillating in harmony with the volume of cargo arriving at the port of Long Beach, Southwestern home repossessions tracking the number of avatars in the most popular online game worlds in Asia. At first Jaz had wondered whether the model was a hoax, something that existed only in Cy Bachman’s imagination. Now he found himself disturbed by its power. What would happen when they started trading? Like dipping your hands into a river and pulling out a fish, Bachman said. What ripples would Walter create?

Almost in passing, Bachman told him that he was already preparing for what he termed Walter 2. The firm had paid to install equipment inside the New York Stock Exchange, a necessity for high-frequency trading, in which a few milliseconds’ lag could destroy competitive advantage. In what seemed to be a gesture of reconciliation, Bachman invited him to watch the technicians connecting their system at a high-security data center in New Jersey, which also housed the NYSE matching engines, the computers that sorted through bids and offers to complete trades. The windblown site was on a bleak industrial park two hours outside the city, a low shed whose anonymous construction was designed to prevent its becoming a target for terrorist attack. As the limo waited in the parking lot, they walked between racks of humming machines, accompanied by a nervous NYSE employee who would evidently have much preferred it if Bachman didn’t run his fingers caressingly across the hardware as he passed, like a small boy trailing a stick along a fence.

He asked Jaz to imagine a Walter whose time horizons were in the order of milliseconds. A pattern could be identified on the first cycle, matched with others on the second or third, used to trade on the fourth and then would vanish back into entropy. The speed of light itself, the ultimate physical horizon, would be part of their daily lives as traders. As the data center manager hovered behind them, he began to talk about Walter’s ability to split trades into thousands of pieces, to disguise the positions the firm was taking from their competitors. “It has an effect we’ve not properly understood. We’re inducing stable feedback in the markets, propagating the trends we want, dampening down the others. It’s not just reacting, Jaz. We’re making the market, creating our own reality. And when we use Walter at high speed, the effect will be profound. Of course, when the regulators catch up, they’ll say we’re gaming the system. And they’ll be right. We are gaming the system. After all, there’s no social value to it. Markets are supposed to allow us to allocate resources efficiently. They’re supposed to be useful. But it’s nothing to do with allocating resources anymore. We’re not turning around container ships or varying toothpaste production at the speed of light. It’s a glass-bead game, and I sometimes think I’m the only one who has a worthwhile reason for playing it.”

When Walter went live, Jaz had an attack of nerves. He wasn’t sure what he was more afraid of: that the model wouldn’t work or that it would. He missed the first few minutes of trading, locked in a bathroom stall. When he came out everyone was celebrating. The rate of return seemed to surprise even Bachman. By the time the U.S. markets closed, Fenton Willis could barely conceal his glee. The traders were high-fiving one another and opening bottles of Krug ’95. Around him, ties were being loosened and plans made to hit a new lap-dancing club. He rang Lisa and told her he was on his way home.

That week people bought cars, ran up ten-thousand-dollar checks at Per Se. Jaz went to Harry Winston and chose Lisa a necklace, a delicate chain of platinum links that coiled in the hand like a very expensive snake. The returns continued to surpass everyone’s wildest dreams, and without waiting for further risk analysis Willis authorized the Walter traders to make much larger bets. Jaz got caught up in the general enthusiasm. His worries appeared ridiculous, the effect of stress and overwork.

Soon afterward, Bachman invited them out to Montauk. It was a beautiful May weekend and Jaz couldn’t wait to get out of the city. The plan was to drive out on the Friday night, but at the last minute Lisa decided she couldn’t leave Raj. Jaz told her she was overreacting, which precipitated a bitter argument.

“Don’t you see?” he yelled. “We have to have a life. We can’t be shackled to him forever.”

“But we are shackled to him. He’s our son.”

“A weekend. It’s just one fucking weekend.”

He lay awake in bed, trying to control his anger; he could feel her body beside him, her back turned to him, walling off her space.

The next morning he finally persuaded her that the highly credentialed new nanny was capable of looking after the boy for one night. They threw their weekend bags into the car and headed out of the city to join the unbroken stream of traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Lisa checked her BlackBerry every few minutes, as if willing some disaster to arise so they had an excuse to go home.

Bachman’s house wasn’t easy to find, even with a GPS. On the third pass they spotted it, a narrow gravel drive leading off the Old Highway, terminating in an automatic security gate, which slid open to let them through. They parked outside an unremarkable modernist villa, low and almost squat, as if it were trying to sink into the earth beneath its sharply pitched roof.

The door was opened by a strikingly good-looking young man, dressed like a J. Crew catalog model, all linen and espadrilles and sandyblond hair. He introduced himself as Chase, took their cases and told them that “Mr. Bachman and Mr. Winter” were outside on the deck. Lisa let out a little gasp when she saw the interior. Even Jaz could tell there were some exquisite things: Bauhaus lamps, a plinth displaying a piece of abstract sculpture that looked like it might be a Brancusi. Most spectacular was the view. The house was built on the cliffside, and the entire rear elevation seemed to be glass, a frame for the gray Atlantic Ocean.

Chase showed them through to the deck, where a table was laid for lunch. It was the first time Jaz had ever seen Bachman dressed in anything other than a suit. He was wearing a pair of tennis shorts; beneath them, his legs poked out like two white twigs. With him was a considerably older man who was introduced as Ellis, his partner. It was clear Ellis was not in the best of health. With Chase’s help, he stood up to greet them. His handshake was a frail, featherlike thing, but his eyes were alert and humorous. Jaz felt like a fool. Why would Cy never have mentioned this man, his lover (apparently) of more than thirty years? Was it because he expected him to disapprove? He could almost hear the conversation. Yes, they’re very prickly about these things, very conservative.

Feeling sweaty from the long drive, they made a little conversation. Ellis had been a plastic surgeon, doing facial reconstructions on burn victims and car-crash survivors. “Never anything cosmetic,” he insisted. “I was an idealist in those days.” Later, when they’d been shown their room, Jaz tried to explain to Lisa why he was annoyed. It wasn’t that he had a problem — not even with Ellis being so much older, or with the fey boy floating about, smirking behind his hand. It was just that he hadn’t known. He’d worked with Bachman for a long time.

“Well,” said Lisa, hanging her evening dress in the closet, “you’ve never been the most observant person.”

They went back down to the pool, where Chase poured iced tea. Fenton Willis and his third wife, Nadia, made their way up from the beach, carrying towels and bottles of water. Willis looked slightly absurd in his weekend clothes — salmon-pink pants printed with a pattern of whales, a yellow silk ascot tied at the neck of his shirt. According to company gossip, Nadia, who was several years younger than Lisa, had been a hostess at some downtown restaurant when they met. She wore a sarong over a shiny silver one-piece swimsuit that looked like it wasn’t really designed for getting wet. Jaz couldn’t help but notice her gym-toned body, which was, he supposed, the point. Cy and Ellis greeted her like a long-lost sister, affecting to find her amusing, instead of trashy. This outburst of camp was another unexpected side of Bachman, and Jaz wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Chase served a lunch of lobster rolls and chowder, accompanied by an excellent white burgundy. Jaz talked to Nadia about a foundation she was starting to benefit orphans in the Ukraine. She intended to host a gala in the fall, “with many celebrities, an atmosphere for people to feel comfortable to open their checkbooks.” Music was piped out to the deck from a system somewhere indoors, a man warbling German songs accompanied by a piano. Lisa identified it as Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert, which led her into a long conversation with Ellis about some Austrian director who’d used the music in a film. Lisa was clearly a hit with both their hosts. After lunch, Cy found her admiring a Schiele drawing hanging in the living area, and insisted on taking her on an art tour of the house. Jaz tagged along, mainly so as not to get stuck with Willis, who was telling some interminable story about a helicopter safari in Kenya. Each chair, each ornament, appeared to have a rich history. How long must it have taken to assemble such a collection? How much longer to gain the knowledge that lay behind it? Cy appeared particularly proud of an unabashedly sexualized painting of a young man dressed in overalls and an urchin cap, leaning against a brick wall in some kind of expressionist alleyway. Privately Jaz thought it was hideous, the sludgy greens and browns, the offensive bulge at the crotch. It was apparently the work of a noted 1930s black artist, a New York communist who’d worked with the WPA.

That afternoon he dozed by the pool, half listening to Cy and Fenton discussing America’s trading links with China. Fenton had been spending a lot of time in Shanghai, and had developed a sort of obsession with the mutual interdependency of the two countries. Lisa and Nadia were discussing a new boutique that had opened up in SoHo. Jaz knew for a fact that Lisa had never shopped there, but she discussed it as if she were a regular. Back issues of New York magazine, he supposed. Ellis was swimming, bobbing up and down in the water with the aid of two polystyrene floats. Chase was helping him, supporting his legs, retrieving his sun hat when it slid off his head into the water. Jaz watched them from behind his dark glasses, the old man’s frailty, the younger one’s tenderness. There was something about the intimacy of the scene he found upsetting. Where did it end, this paid companionship? Where was the line drawn?

As they dressed for dinner, Lisa rhapsodized about their hosts, their culture, their aesthetic sense. “If only you’d told me!” she said.

“Well, I didn’t know. We work together. We talk about work.”

“Oh, come on. You said he took you to see some Wiener Werkstätte silverware.”

“What? Oh, the museum. Yes, that’s right.”

“You must have realized he’s not like the others. Everyone else I’ve met from your firm is like Fenton.”

“Don’t you think it’s kind of strange, Ellis being so much older than Cy?”

“I think it’s beautiful. They fell in love when Cy was in his early twenties. Ellis saw him in the street in Greenwich Village and followed him home. Cy was very handsome and very aloof. Ellis had to woo him. It was like a nineteenth-century courtship — flowers and fans and handwritten notes.”

“How do you even know this? You only met them today.”

“Cy told me.”

“My God, one afternoon and they’re telling you this.”

“You probably never asked. Also — well, Jaz, I realize this is a little out of your comfort zone, but—”

“My comfort zone?”

“You might want to let your guard down a little. They know you belong to me. It’s not like anyone’s going to leap on you and deflower you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been rigid with panic all day.”

“I have not.”

“Suit yourself. I just want you to have a good time.”

“Hello? I was the one trying to persuade you to come out here. By the way, have you phoned home in the last five minutes? How’s Bianca coping with Raj?”

“You can be a real prick, you know that.”

“You’re the one accusing me of being homophobic.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it.”

“Let’s just drop it, Jaz. And stop raising your voice. They can probably hear us downstairs.”

Two other couples joined them for dinner: a hedge-fund manager and his wife, who were renting the house next door, and another gay couple, a well-known artist and his partner, who had a studio in East Hampton. The food was beautiful — Blue Point oysters, a whole fresh salmon, fine wines that Ellis had collected on various trips to Europe. Everyone except Jaz appeared to be enjoying themselves, particularly Lisa, who was radiating a social energy he hadn’t seen in a long time, holding forth to the table about art and books and music, making everyone laugh. On another day, he would have been proud of his wife, overjoyed to see her so happy. Now he just felt sour. The conversation had little to do with finance, though Fenton occasionally tried to turn things back in that direction. The artist described his latest work, which involved artificially distressing thrift-store paintings and mounting the results in wooden boxes. Cy told the story of an acquaintance who’d been conned by a dealer selling fake Joseph Cornells. There was a lot of talk about travel, trips to Italy, Iceland, the Maldives. Only then did Lisa fall silent. It had been a long time since they’d gone on vacation.

Jaz brooded on what Lisa had said upstairs. Could she be right? Was he a bigot? He had to admit he didn’t really understand the way Bachman lived. There was the age difference. Perhaps it was no different from Fenton and Nadia, but Cy as a trophy husband? Surely he was the wealthier of the two? They certainly weren’t a family, not in the way he thought of one. What was the purpose of all this wealth and culture if not to be passed on? Perhaps that was where Chase fitted in. A surrogate son? He wasn’t sure why he’d taken such a dislike to the boy. It had something to do with his poise, the ease with which he carried his good looks. Chase looked somehow invulnerable, golden, as if the Long Island sun had warmed him right through to the marrow. Watching him languorously pour wine and serve salad, Jaz wanted to scream: Get a real job! Stop being a parasite!

Despite the evening breeze, the air on the deck felt close and humid. Jaz mopped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. When the party left the table for liqueurs, Cy and Lisa slipped off to the study. Feeling like a spy — or a jealous husband — Jaz followed them, knowing he was making himself ridiculous, yet still irritated by his wife’s look of surprise as he poked his head around the door. He clasped her proprietorially by the waist as Cy showed off yet more treasures, his collection of early printed books of Jewish mysticism. Here was a text of the Zohar printed in Antwerp in the 1580s. Here was Isaac Luria’s Tree of Life in an eighteenth-century Polish edition.… Cy held the Luria open to a page of diagrams of interconnected circles, like molecules in an organic chemistry textbook. Lisa emitted little oohs and aahs of wonder. It was more than politeness; she seemed moved. Jaz tried to infuse his hug with meaning, hoping to transmit an intimacy he didn’t feel.

“They’re great, aren’t they, darling?” he murmured. She didn’t even nod.

Cy was talking with his usual fevered intensity. “Of course there are so many things I don’t have. I’d love to own a copy of the 1559 Mantua edition of the Zohar. I have a bid in at an auction in Moscow next week for an edition printed in Lublin in 1623. I already have printings from all over, Salonika, Smyrna, Leghorn — such evocative place names, don’t you think? A whole diasporic history.”

“It’s a beautiful collection,” purred Lisa.

“Thank you. It’s always nice to show it to someone who can appreciate it. When you talk about Kabbalah now, people just think you mean Madonna and red strings. Even Jews.”

“Terrible.”

“I’ve been trying to persuade your husband that he’s working in this tradition, but I don’t think he believes me.”

Jaz shrugged, cautiously pleased he was being linked to a topic that impressed his wife. From behind, he couldn’t see Lisa’s expression, but it obviously amused Cy, because he arched an eyebrow and grinned. “How much,” he asked her, “has he told you about Walter?”

“Your computer program? A little. He says you’re making the firm a great deal of money.”

“That’s true enough. But I like to think we’re doing more than that. You know we work with data, Lisa. We’re in the business of comparing disparate things, finding links. For a Kabbalist, the world is made of signs. That’s not some postmodern metaphor — it’s meant literally. The Torah existed before the creation of the world, and all creation emanates from its mystical letters. Of course the modern world is terribly broken. Its perfection has been dispersed. But I like to think that in our small way, by finding connections between all these different kinds of phenomena, Jaz and I and the rest of our team are reading those signs, doing our part to restore what was shattered.”

“What a beautiful way to put it.”

“I’m not sure Jaz thinks so.”

“What? Sure, I think it’s beautiful. I just — well — I prefer to think in more concrete terms.” He trailed off, furious at the look of scorn that flashed across Lisa’s face. Sensing the complicity between them, he was reminded, for the first time since all the crap about circumcising Raj, that his wife was a Jew. This mystical hocus pocus was another thing she had in common with Cy. Absurdly, he felt as if this — this queer—was excluding him deliberately, stealing her away.

He was sweating profusely and couldn’t trust himself not to lose his temper, so he muttered an excuse and went back to the main room. At the bar he poured himself a large vodka, brushed off some bonhomous comment from Fenton and went out onto the deck to drink alone. His head was throbbing. The back of his shirt clung heavily to his skin. What was happening? Was he having a panic attack? He asked himself what he was doing there. He had nothing in common with those people — not really, not deep down. What did he have to stand against all their art and culture, all those books and paintings and bottles of Grand Cru Chablis? He was a single generation away from the village, mud bricks and country liquor and honor killings. He was nothing but a jumped-up peasant.

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.

“Gershwin,” he explained, taking off the headphones. “I do it every so often. You know, with the buildings? I’m sure I shouldn’t. It’s probably fattening. What can I do for you?”

“I need to talk.”

“So go ahead.”

“Cy, you once told me we were cheating, gaming the system.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I think we should stop. Walter’s — well, it’s very deep in the guts of the financial markets. I feel as if it has the power to — I mean — I don’t know what I mean, Cy. But I’ve been thinking a lot. Walter has the potential to be very disruptive. I can’t help being worried. About consequences, unintended effects.”

“These unintended effects being what, exactly?”

“Instability. Increased volatility.”

“We’re properly hedged, Jaz. You don’t need to worry about the firm.”

“I don’t just mean us. I’m kind of tired, so I’m probably not expressing myself too well. Take the Honduran thing, for example. Walter crashed their currency. Just like that, in a morning.”

“Walter didn’t do any such thing. Sentiment moved against the lempira.”

“We fucked their country.”

“That’s a little dramatic, Jaz.”

“And at the same time, the BRVM and Thai stocks moved in the same way. If Walter can do that, what else can it do? And it’s getting better. More sophisticated. What happens when we use the same techniques at high speed? Too fast for actors in the market to respond?”

“It’s operating exactly as we built it to. It’s a heuristic trading engine, Jaz. It’s learning as it goes along.”

“I know Fenton is authorizing larger volumes. What if Walter does something else like that? What if it does something systemic?”

“Systemic? You think we’re about to crash the global economy? And you get this from a medium-size win for our currency arbitrage strategy? When I last looked, this wasn’t the Fed, Jaz. We’re a hedge fund, not the People’s Bank of China.”

“I just think we should consider pulling back.”

Bachman laughed. “Don’t let Fenton hear you talk like that.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“Trust me, I understand. You feel a little queasy about that trade. On corporate social responsibility grounds, whatever you want to call it. But we didn’t cause anything elsewhere. Shit happens, Jaz. If it wasn’t us, it would have been someone else. You won’t feel so bad when you get your bonus. I expect we’ll soon be neighbors up in Montauk. Perhaps your wife could get on one of the museum boards.”

“What happened to the face of God? You usually talk as if we’re about to discover the secret of the universe.”

“Are you all right, Jaz? Is everything OK at home?”

“Yes, everything’s OK at fucking home. Why won’t you listen to me?”

“Calm down. It’s a model. It’s not causing anything. You’re mistaking the map for the territory.”

“We’re trading on the model. We’re acting.”

“Jaz, Walter won’t even exist in two years’ time. At least not in this iteration. The market is going to adapt. When that happens, we’ll need a new tool. All we’re doing is contributing to market efficiency, and as efficiency increases, our profits will drop. We’ll move on. Life will go on.”

“Why don’t you understand? I’m trying to say I believe you! I think I finally get what you’ve been trying to tell me all along. That it isn’t about money. That we’re messing with something — something fundamental.”

“I don’t know what to say. You’re talking like some villager waving a pitchfork in a Frankenstein movie. You want to burn the witch? Tie old Cy Bachman to a stake?”

And then he started using stock phrases. Take a few days. Get some rest. It was only when Jaz was riding the subway back to Brooklyn that he realized he’d just walked the plank.

The sun hammered down. The pool was glittering blue glass. Behind the roofline of the motel cabins, the sawteeth of the mountains rose up against the sky like a graph of profit and loss. Fenton Willis’s braying voice came through his cell phone as a tinny rasp, as he watched Raj trying to stack plastic chairs by the hot tub. The sound of New York. You can run but you can’t hide. Well, every blocked drain and pretzel vendor and gala fund-raiser and overpriced apartment in the whole fucking city could go to hell. This was as much as he could cope with: an almost-empty world, a jumble of rocks and sand.

“I’ve got to go, Fenton. I’m sorry.”

He ended the call, stared down at his BlackBerry like a gun that had accidentally gone off in his hand. No one hung up on Fenton Willis. No one. So that was it. No more Walter. No more firm. That was him done. He felt, for the first time in months, a profound sense of peace.