A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (39 page)

At the end of the tour, back aboveground, Gabriel and his mother wandered into the blinding square, where a barefoot and toothless old woman begged, groaning, her knotted gray hair askew. She smelled of hay and urine and looked like an exile from a previous century. Gabriel could see the structure of her skull under her skin. Her gums had receded so badly that he could see where her long narrow teeth, the color of molasses, entered her jawbone. He and his mother picked up the pace until they were practically jogging. The woman gave up. When he turned around, Gabriel watched her approach another tourist, her dirty hand outstretched and empty, shaking. Clusters of pigeons waddled around too, scavenging, all of them.

His mother looked at him. "What do you think?"

He shook his head, as if he didn't know. He was supposed to be outraged, of course.

On the far side of the square, a few paramilitaries were eating sandwiches by an armored vehicle mounted with a fifty-caliber machine gun. Alberto Fujimori, then president of Peru, wanted to discourage angry constituents from misbehaving, no doubt. The eight years of his presidency had, in fact, been a relatively prosperous and peaceful era, at least on the surface of things. In two years, he'd be chased out of the country amid accusations of corruption and human rights abuses. But, as they had with Pinochet, the people would remain conflicted about his reign and hesitant to prosecute him, pointing out that he had brought enduring economic stability after decades of chaos and turmoil. Gabriel's mother would never accept such a discordant perspective. While Gabriel admired the certainty of her viewpoint, he couldn't bring himself to the earnest embrace of her cause. The answers were just not that simple. Despite what his mother—and her fiercest opponents, for that matter—wanted to believe, this was not algebra. The numbers just didn't cooperate.

Back in their bus, its air conditioning hissing, they rode along a cliff beside the sea. It was twilight, and the sun melted into a ribbon of gray at the horizon. The Pacific Ocean was fetid and streaked with silt. It belched up clouds of brackish sewage.

Now, years later, back in Lima again, he stood at the window of his suite at the Four Seasons and gazed at that same stretch of sea. A bank of pink foam undulated on the tan water just past the breakers. A city of eight million, but there was not a single person on all those miles of tropical beach. He hadn't spoken to his mother since she'd sent him that e-mail in Bolivia. He hadn't even sent a reply to the e-mail.

That afternoon in Lima, he left the Four Seasons and wandered around the nearby open-air shopping mall. The mall had been built into the ridge of the cliff face. He found nothing of interest in the mall, so he walked south along a balustrade perched at the edge of the precipice. Seagulls hovered nearby in a steady southerly breeze. Hours passed, and when the sun slumped, he headed back to his hotel.

He stepped under the perfunctory awning, and a bellhop hurried to pull open one of the heavy, brightly polished doors. He continued to the swank bar, which was called poco. The self-consciously lowercase name was stamped, in a faux-modest Helvetica, on the door, the napkins, and a melon-colored sign embedded above a large fake fireplace.

Gabriel no longer drank alcohol. He had given it up a couple years ago, but he still liked to visit bars, particularly when traveling. He usually ordered a fragrant malt whiskey and just smelled it. At poco, he ordered sparkling water and a ten-year-old Laphroaig. He lifted the glass of whiskey and sniffed it. It reeked of saline, iodine. It smelled medicinal. He drank the water. The bar was quiet and unexpectedly had the atmosphere of an old church. Small groups of people huddled at mini tables at the edges of the room, whispering among themselves, but no one else sat at the bar. The place was swish in a vulgar way that reminded Gabriel of Miami. Everything was made of cold stone. Muted light emerged from improbable places: tabletops, large panels in the walls, beneath a thin sheet of polished sandstone on top of the bar.

From the background, Gabriel picked up a familiar voice. He turned to see who it was. There, he saw Fiona. Her hair was shorter, above her shoulders now. Otherwise, she looked much the same. He hadn't seen her since the night of Evo's party. She was in the lobby, talking on her mobile. She approached but still hadn't see him. He briefly considered trying to conceal his presence and sneak out, but he saw that it wouldn't be possible. Instead, he'd have to pretend that he was excited to see her. She made it almost all the way to the bar before she noticed him and squealed with a mixture of undisguised horror and pleasure.

"Let me call you back," she said into her phone, and she hung up, dropped the phone into her handbag, stretched her arms out for a hug. He stood, hugged her. She was still using the same pricey shampoo, a scent that would be branded into his memory for life, no doubt.

They sat down. "It's great to see you," she said.

He smiled and said, "You too."

"Sorry, I can't linger. I'm meeting someone at the restaurant in ten minutes," she said. "What are you doing here?"

He shrugged.

"Oh," she said when it dawned on her that he probably couldn't explain. "Well..." She took a deep breath, staring at him and shaking her head, still surprised. "Wow."

"Wow, indeed." He could see that she was staring at his scars. She had sat down on his scarred side and had full view of his ear, which hadn't healed well. He turned his head to face her so she wouldn't be broadsided by it. "You still keeping an apartment here?" he said.

"I'm here full-time now. I bought a house last year. A mile south, in Buenaventura, a beautiful neighborhood."

"No more New York City?"

She shook her head. "I sold my place." She seemed pleased, even happy. She shrugged, and he noticed her very strong shoulders, not at all like Lenka's—too brawny, but nonetheless attractive. She was more relaxed than before. She wore an easy pleasure in her attitude. In fact, she was delighted in a way that reminded him of Grayson slightly, minus his sleaze. During the ensuing pause she stared at him eagerly, as if taking in a cherished and long-misplaced memento. When he still didn't say anything, she said, "So?"

"I heard that you quit the
Journal?
"

She nodded. "Two years ago."

"Murdoch?" Rupert Murdoch had bought the Dow Jones Company, which owned the
Wall Street Journal,
in the summer of 2007, and some
WSJ
reporters had resigned in protest.

"I just didn't want to participate," she said. She lit a cigarette. "Been with the
Times
bureau for the last year."

"Ah, sleeping with the enemy—"

She batted her eyes gamely. The gesture didn't quite carry anymore. She had no more enthusiasm for so much lunging and parrying. Gabriel sympathized. He didn't either. When he glanced at her fingers, he saw they were stained like new leather. And he wasn't sure if he'd noticed this before, but he now saw that her lips had thin cracks cutting directly perpendicular to her mouth from years of bunching up around narrow filters. He saw her complexion was grayish, as if, in exhaling all that pale smoke, she had somehow leached the color out of herself. Imagining her lungs, he visualized a chainlink fence he'd seen on the beaches of São Paulo a few months earlier, which had plastic bags embedded in it. The bags were blackened with sand and dirt, repositories for all manner of wind-borne garbage: plastic straws, cigarette butts, fragments of mystery items worn down to tiny nubs by the sand and the sea. Still, the burly fence stood there, sinking gradually, a vertical trash receptacle.

He'd given up cigarettes too when he'd quit drinking. He'd also quit coffee and all other drugs. But he knew he didn't look especially well either. Despite all the exercise and the mainly vegan diet, his complexion was sallow. His hair had thinned on top and was streaked with gray. He had lost even more weight. He had permanent dark bags under his eyes. All of this he blamed on a combination of circumstances, including perpetual jet lag, unpredictable diet, the fact that he could never get accustomed to a bed, also the wages of aging, chronic stress, watching too much hotel television at night, and relentless loneliness.

"How do you like the
Times?
" he said, for lack of anything else.

She shrugged, picked up his untouched whiskey and sniffed it, grimaced. She put it back down. "You offering me something better?"

"Like a job?"

"Yes."

Astonished, he furrowed his brow and shook his head. "But you can drink my whiskey."

"You don't think I'd be useful at Calloway?"

"No. I don't think you'd be useful. Or, I wouldn't want to be responsible. You have too much—" He wanted to say
heart,
but that wasn't accurate. "Maybe it's too little?" he wondered aloud. He thought about it. "Too little appetite, maybe? I don't really know."

She stared at him dubiously. Still, she seemed clearly lighter, more amused.

"Anyway, you're too old," he said. He'd said that just to test this placidity of hers, to see if she'd snap back and lavish him with abuse. But she didn't flinch.

After a pause, she said, "You have Oscar's job now?"

He nodded.

"He quit?"

He shook his head. "Fired. Now he's at Fortress. I run Calloway's direct-investment program."

"That sounds impressive."

He shook his head. It wasn't impressive—or anyway, not as impressive as it sounded. But he couldn't explain that. "Our portfolio has been radically redistributed."

"Calloway's been doing well though, right? I heard you've managed to not lose money."

"That's true."

"It's remarkable."

"Well," he said. In fact, it wasn't remarkable, but he couldn't explain that either. When the market cratered in 2007, Priya had simply stopped making directional bets (that is, betting on prices going up or down) and started using options strategies to bet on increased volatility. From then on, it didn't matter to her where the market went, just as long as it went there with uncommon violence. D. E. Shaw had done the same thing and had also profited every quarter of the downturn. It wasn't remarkable and it wasn't artful. It was just business.

He had a sip of the sparkling water and then, using his cotton coaster, mopped up the little ring of condensation on the glowing bar top. He put the bottle back down in the same spot. He said, "You know, Priya kept trying to hire these forty- and fifty-year-olds as political analysts—this is before my time—but they never lasted."

Her attention perked up. "Really?"

"Yes. It kept happening until she changed her applicant pool and started hiring younger people. Oscar was one of the first of that new batch, the late-twenties applicants."

Her expression hardened slightly and she said, "Okay, I get it."

She had misread his point, had thought he was making another dig at her age. He wanted to tell her that she didn't get it at all. He wanted to lash out, yell at her about how little she understood it, but he held back. He said, "I'm starting to get too old for it now too."

"Nah, you're still a kid," she said, but the lie didn't hold up. There was no getting around it: he was anything but a kid. Only three and a half years had passed since their adventure in Bolivia, but almost all trace of youth had been rubbed out of him.

Neither one of them said anything for a while.

She stubbed out her cigarette. "Whatever happened to your plan? Weren't you going to retire once you'd made a few million?"

"Did I say that?"

"Yes, you did."

Then he remembered it, the fantasy about wanting to be "done with the issue of money forever." He could have retired a couple years ago by that measure. But then what? It had been beyond naive. In hindsight, it was embarrassing. Specifically, it had been naive to think that life offered a broadening spectrum of possibilities when clearly the reverse was true. Life was funnel-shaped. There was only one way out. The breadth of possibility shrank every single day until there were no possibilities left, and then life was over.

She had a sip of the whiskey, kissed him on the forehead, and said, "I should get going."

He could feel the ghost of her lips on his skin and he knew the impression would last hours, maybe days. "I'll see you around."

She stood. "How long will you stay there?" she asked.

"At Calloway? I don't know. Maybe I'll replace Priya one day?"

She chuckled for a second and then said, "I'm sure you will."

She walked away. He watched her go. Once she was gone, he turned back and sniffed the glass. He could smell peat and kelp, the saline breeze. Seeing her lipstick imprint on the rim reminded him of that night near Christmas in 2005, when she showed up at his room with a bow around her waist. He couldn't quite believe that he'd been there that night. It didn't feel like a memory; it was as if he'd watched someone else be there with her. He felt no ownership of the experience. He looked at it and it looked absurd, fake.

Up in his room that night, he ordered a grilled vegetable sandwich from room service. Street vendors ten stories below hollered out the prices of their wares while he ate his sandwich in bed, watching the same shows he would have watched in his new condo in New York.

The condo was a two-bedroom on the Upper West Side. For many years, it had belonged to Roy Scheider, the star of
Jaws.
Gabriel had bought it in January. He had hired an interior decorator straightaway, and the place was repainted, the floors redone, and the light fixtures replaced. The decorator had purchased art, furniture, and identified the places those objects should reside. Gabriel had said he could take it from there, but he still hadn't managed to unpack any of it. The items all stood around, swaddled in huge sheets of plastic or bubble wrap, waiting to be put to use. Whenever he was there, he slept on his mattress on the living-room floor. To stop the pillow from slipping off at night, he pushed the mattress up against the wall. There were no curtains or blinds on the windows, and light streamed in at dawn, so he wore a sleep mask that he'd picked up on a flight. His kitchen supplies were still confined to their cartons as well, and the new stove hadn't even been attached to the gas line, so he ate carryout while sitting on the one armchair that he'd managed to unwrap. He got bored and went for long walks often. He watched DVDs on his laptop, either lying on the mattress or sitting in the armchair. He left his passport in the small pocket of his Tumi suitcase, which was always packed and stayed in the empty closet by the door.