Sparta (42 page)

Conrad raised his hands, palms out. “You guys fighting, or what?”

“No,” Mouse Hair said, moving away from him. “Sorry.”

“Careful where you're going,” Conrad said. His chest had become too small.

“Sorry,” said Black Glasses. He looked as though Conrad had suddenly declared himself Martian.

“Okay, okay,” said Conrad. He bowed his head, blinking, his hands still held high, to make some sort of formal ending to this. He felt sick to his stomach. The two students moved stiffly away ahead of him, awkward, watchful, as though they were not allowed to look at each other.

The adrenaline was still pumping through his chest. Around him everyone kept walking, flooding along the pavement. No one paid any attention to what had happened. Actually nothing had happened: these were just kids, roughhousing. Conrad stood motionless for a moment, his heart racing. He'd been hit from behind, he'd been ready to go. He wanted to shout, kick someone's ass, but there was no one to shout at. They were kids, fooling around. He stood still on the sidewalk while everyone flowed around him as though he weren't there.

*   *   *

Inside Mathematics Hall was a long corridor with a high, curved ceiling. The sound of voices bounced shrilly, high and distorted. Conrad headed down the hall to the stairs, in the midst of a milling crowd. They pressed around him.
Relax,
he told himself.
These are your people now.
They didn't seem like his people, they seemed part of another race. He suddenly had the feeling that he was wearing cammies, sweaty and filthy MARPATs. So everyone could see he wasn't one of them. He had to glance down surreptitiously to reassure himself.

The stairwell was large and square, open all the way up to the top floor. The steps were worn linoleum, and wooden handrails lined the walls. Conrad joined the throng going up. The stairway was the most dangerous place in any building. You could never see around the next corner. The point man on a stairwell was at greatest risk: the stairwell was where you got shot.

As Conrad went up, he found that he was holding his textbook in front of him, his arm tilted at a familiar angle. He was holding his book the way he would carry his rifle. Embarrassed, he lowered it. A few steps later he found he'd raised it again.

The classroom was empty when he arrived. It was a modern interior, a long, windowless rectangle with three projection screens. The room was lined with desk-armed chairs. There were about a hundred, he thought. There were eighty students in the class.

Conrad sat in the last row. He had planned to sit in front. He had planned to introduce himself to the professor, but now he didn't want to go up there. He was still feeling uneasy, and he didn't like the fact that there were no windows in the room. There was no way out except through the back door. At the end of class he'd introduce himself, but right now he wanted to stay where he was, with his back to the wall, near the door.

He watched the students as they came in. It was an advanced course—intermediate macroeconomics—so the students were pretty geeky. Most of them wore glasses, short-sleeved shirts, the proverbial plastic pen protector in the breast pocket. So did that mean he himself was geeky? Could you be both geeky and a Marine? He was pretty sure they were mutually exclusive. Still, he was here taking an econ class, and not in Afghanistan, climbing a mountain after
dushman
. He had to admit this was a swerve toward geekdom.

The students were mostly men, which bore out the stereotype. He wondered if women were really less good at math than men were. Or were they secretly really good at math but somehow intimidated by it? Or by engineering programs, physics labs, investment houses? This seemed unlikely to Conrad, since he thought that women were generally not intimidated by anything. Of course, you couldn't come out and say that women weren't good at math, because if you did, they would rip you limb from limb. Which would further demonstrate that they were unintimidated, but not that they were good at math.

A dark-skinned guy, maybe Indian, wearing black pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, turned into Conrad's row. He shuffled past to sit down on the far side. He nodded at Conrad. Definitely geeky: metal-rimmed glasses, a pen protector. Conrad nodded back, geek to geek.

Just before class time, someone who could only be Dr. Titchmarsh came in from the hall. She was plump and middle-aged, with a round head and short brown hair. She wore narrow glasses and carried a briefcase. She wore a red dress with a full skirt, and a dark sweater was draped over her shoulders. She was physically rather maternal, but her manner was brisk. She walked up to the podium. The room quieted. She took a few moments to take out her notes, adjust the microphone, and look around the room. Then she began to speak.

“Good afternoon,” she said. The room was now nearly full, the students silent, their notebooks open on their desks. “Welcome to intermediate macroeconomics.” She spoke with a slightly nasal Midwestern accent. “This semester we're going to explore some of the large issues that drive international economics. In order to understand them, we're going to develop models that explain relationships between such factors as national income, output, consumption, unemployment, inflation, savings, investment, international trade, and international finance.”

Professor Titchmarsh spoke into the microphone, looking up periodically at the students.

“Output, employment, and inflation,” she said. “Let's start with them.”

Conrad felt the headache hovering near him. For an hour and a quarter he listened, carefully taking notes. Most of the time he understood what she was saying and wrote it down, but when she began to explain a theory about international trade reciprocity, something went wrong in his head, as though a gear had suddenly missed a tooth and didn't connect. He couldn't get traction on the idea. He watched Professor Titchmarsh talking. She gestured with her right hand and pushed her glasses up on her nose. On the screen was a graph with an angular rising line. He knew the words she was using, but he couldn't make sense of them. He could feel them streaming over him as though he were lying in a river pool. As he listened and struggled with the meaning—as though she had begun speaking Chinese—he understood that he was losing these moments, losing forever whatever it was she was saying. He knew that the longer it took him to get back to the place of comprehension, the more he was losing. He fought the rising panic and kept writing down the words she was saying, though he didn't know what she meant. He kept writing in the hope that later he'd be able to make sense of the notes.

As he wrote, he made himself breathe slowly. Then he looked up and listened hard. He made himself focus on what the words meant. In a moment he entered again into the stream, to his immense relief, and he could understand it. She had switched back to English. What was frightening was that he could slip so easily out of comprehension. It seemed there was no safety net; he could slide over the edge, right off the mountain.

By the end of the class, Conrad had fifteen pages of scrawled equations and comments, and a pounding headache. He stayed at his desk, waiting for everyone to leave. He looked down at his notebook, flipping back and forth as though he were finishing up something. The Geek, beside him, was clearly waiting for him to rise. But finally the Geek stood up, nodded, and shuffled past. Conrad stayed. He didn't want to be part of the crowd bottlenecking at the door. He wanted to be the last to leave. He'd introduce himself next time.

 

20

Adam Turner wrote back:

We went to see Abbott's girlfriend, the stripper. Her act. We sat in the back and she did a kind of pole dance. I don't think she saw us, but now we know her tits. So now it's really weird seeing her. She's here all the fucking time. We come in to the house and she's lying on the couch watching Oprah.

Conrad wrote to Turner:

Dog, I think it's time for an intervention. All of you get together and meet with the stripper and tell her nicely that she can't be ly9ing there on the couch in the afternoon when you come in. At least nott with her clothes on.

Conrad emailed Go-Go and two weeks after classes started they had dinner together. They met at a small Italian restaurant in the East Sixties, near Go-Go's apartment. The restaurant stretched along First Avenue, though the entrance was on the side street. When Conrad arrived, the headwaiter stepped toward him from the bar. He was Romanian, thin and hollow-chested, with a bulging forehead and black vampire's eyes. He wore a black suit, a limp black tie, and an unpressed white shirt. His manner was both fawning and sinister, like an unctuous Dracula who'd be grateful for the chance to slit your carotid artery. A lock of heavy, dull black hair hung over the disturbing forehead.

“Good evening,” Dracula said with an awful smile.

“Good evening,” Conrad said. “My name is Farrell. I'm meeting Mr. Russell. I see him over there, thanks.” He waved to Go-Go, and Dracula bowed.

Go-Go stood up as he came over, stepping forward to clap his shoulder.

“My man! You're back!” he said. “How've you been?”

Conrad grinned and looked him up and down.

Go-Go had, spectacularly, morphed into the enemy. He wore round horn-rimmed glasses, a tweed jacket, and a gleaming silky white shirt from somewhere much fancier than Brooks Brothers. His khakis had a knife-edge fold, and his brown tassel loafers were polished and gleaming. He wore no socks.

“Who is this guy?” Conrad asked. “I thought I was going to see my old radical friend Gordon Russell, who so violently hated the Establishment. Where is that man, the one with the sixteen earrings and the grunge band?”

Go-Go grinned. “That man is no more.” They sat down. “He is no more. I have taken his place.”

Dracula appeared before them, his hands folded like a nun's. “Could I bring you two gentlemen something to drink?”

Conrad ordered a beer, but Go-Go leaned back and smiled at Dracula. He wanted a Bombay Sapphire martini, with three ice cubes and this much tonic, only this much.

When Dracula left, Conrad laughed. “Bombay Sapphire,” he said, shaking his head. “You are a new person, dude. So tell me, how's it going on Wall Street?”

“I have to tell you,” Go-Go said, “it's actually very cool. To my amazement. Very very cool. Cool as shit.”

“You love it?” Conrad asked.

“I love it. Love the action,” Go-Go said.

Go-Go had smooth skin, very pale, and thick dark brown hair. He had a short upper lip, which revealed, when he smiled, straight, large beaverlike teeth. The horn-rimmed glasses made him look like a professor in an old movie.

“What about the guys you work with?” Conrad asked. He couldn't imagine Go-Go hanging out with Wall Street guys. “Are you in the shark tank?”

“I am one with the sharks, dude,” Go-Go said solemnly, and they both laughed. “I swim with the sharks.”

“You always swam with the sharks,” Conrad said.

“Always.” Go-Go nodded.

Go-Go had been a kind of radical, but also kind of a weenie. He was too likable and friendly, too good-natured, to be a real radical. Hard to believe that he'd become a real shark.

“You still playing music?” Conrad asked.

“Not anymore, man.” Go-Go shook his head regretfully. “Sharks don't like it.”

“What do you actually do down there?” Conrad asked. He wondered if he was sounding contemptuous. Was he contemptuous? Was he actually jealous? Before Go-Go could answer—and he was too nice to notice it even if Conrad was being contemptuous—one of Dracula's minions arrived, a small, unshaven, balding fiend, and they ordered dinner.

Their dinner arrived, tepid risotto and congealed pasta. Go-Go said, “Sorry about the food. I told you, it's not a good restaurant. That's why it's so easy to get a table.”

“Gotcha.” Conrad nodded. “So, what's up on Wall Street?”

Go-Go explained, though Conrad followed only part of it: derivatives and bundling and mortgage-based securities.

“It's a gold mine, actually,” Go-Go said. “A license to print money.”

“So why didn't anyone do this before?”

“Securities law,” Go-Go said. “The Feds finally got smart and let the banks do what they're best at. Now everyone wins: anyone can get a mortgage, and we can lend them the money. You can't lose with it. It's genius.”

Conrad was only half listening. He was wondering if this was what he should have done, gone to B-school and then to a Wall Street bank or brokerage house and started printing money. And he was distracted by the noise and the people, the waiters moving back and forth through the crowded tables. He told himself to relax and get used to it. Walk the walk.

Wasn't something wrong with this picture, though? That Go-Go, whose ear still held all those multiple piercings, should be sitting across from him now, wearing a shirt made of Egyptian cotton, his handmade tassel loafer dangling from his bare foot while he talked knowledgeably about mortgage-backed securities, while Conrad was struggling with panic attacks, worrying about a single econ course, and trying not to dive under the table when a delivery truck backfired in the street? It wasn't Go-Go's fault that this was the way things were, but wasn't something fucked-up here?

When they were sitting over tiny cups of bitter, lukewarm coffee, Go-Go cleared his throat, and Conrad knew what was coming. In a different voice, slightly tense, he asked, “So, how was it over there?”

Conrad shrugged and smiled at him. “Hard to say.”

“You must have some stories,” Go-Go said.

“Yeah,” Conrad said. His smile now felt like someone else's, clamped onto his face.

Go-Go waited, his loafer jiggling, but Conrad said nothing more.

“Okay, sorry,” Go-Go said. He sent Conrad a serious look, to show he got it.