Chirp. Gong. Ding-ding. Ocean waves, ding-ding.
The alerts were coming more frequently now, sounding from the overhead speaker system every few seconds. Something was happening, a lot of activity even for market close. It was perfect timing, a blessing; this barrage of sound was just the kind of quirk Foster might appreciate. I was always looking for ways to underscore our nerdy kind of brilliance, our rejection of the old maxims. In fact I’d had a banner made: Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Greenwich anymore. Milosz, my partner, told me to take it down. I knew he was right because he said anything at all. Milosz gave what could be called an opinion about twice a year. He spoke only facts, facts that could be backed up with more facts, a chain of unimpeachable logic that I assumed culminated in either the meaning of life or the number zero. They say the best person to start a quantitative hedge fund is someone who can both manage the hell out of other people and master any sort of math thrown their way. Milosz and I were that person, divided in two.
I hurried across the trading floor to the speaker, fiddling with some knobs as Peter, our receptionist, watched patiently. Do you want me to turn it off? he asked. I laughed, I couldn’t help it, my performance adrenaline was already spiking. Louder, I said, and he tapped at his computer.
Chirp, ding-ding. Cash register sound. It was a bit loud, that was okay. But a cash register alert was too on the nose—what did that one stand for, anyway? I told him to change it ASAP.
I turned around and saw Asja, Yuri, and Jake, three of our associate-level researchers, hunched over a table; their posture, their furtive glances, made them look like teens copying homework. I was about to send them back to their desks when I noticed the scrawl on the blackboard. It was a seemingly simple algorithm they’d been discussing for weeks, often for hours at a time, always with a piece of chalk in hand, although they never made a mark lest they disturb such an elegant formulation. Why don’t you three go to the board and have a lively discussion about the, uh—I drew my finger in a circle until Yuri said, The Baum-Welch algorithm. He didn’t mind that I could never remember the name, he was glad to teach me something new. Right, I said, and smiled. I looked at my watch, 4:01, and then at the door, where I saw Foster standing, his suit jacket over his arm, his hand flattening his hair. I renewed my smile and strode over, pointing to Peter and delivering our tired joke about gearing up the light show. He was game, Peter, his laugh sounded nothing like vocational obligation.
I opened the door and gave him my hand.
Ian? I asked, as if I didn’t know what he looked like.
The great Herschel Caine. He didn’t wait for an invitation to walk in; actually, I had to move out of his way.
Let’s head to my office, I said, stepping past him. I preferred we not loiter, I hardly knew who he was. Well, I knew almost everything about him, I’d scoured the internet—just not what exactly he was doing here. He wanted to invest, that was what he said in his email, but he had a way of phrasing things—I’ll be in the area Monday, might I stop by?—that suggested conspiracy. And was it just a coincidence that he was also invested in Webber? That part didn’t make sense. We had nothing in common with them, the whole point of our firm was to be the antithesis of Webber; in fact Milosz and I often made business decisions by asking ourselves what our old employer wouldn’t do. Of course I’d never say anything of the sort in a pitch, let alone mention Webber Group, unprovoked, by name. This wasn’t just because no investor wanted a David in a sea of Goliaths—they all wanted a Goliath with an excess return slightly higher than that of the other Goliaths—it was because vindication and the associated passions simply weren’t the stuff of moneymen. They preferred to hear something more along the lines of We’ve discovered a quantitative scheme that, we believe, once perfected, can generate untold wealth. This line I knew by heart; it was my opener no matter the audience, a nice balance between supper club restraint and carnal greed—Wall Street’s stereotypes for WASPs and Jews united at last.
I turned around to find him staring at the floor, as if to make a point of not seeing anything he shouldn’t. This only fed my paranoia, that he was so attuned to our need for secrecy. Actually I hoped he’d glimpse enough to see we weren’t another Dockers-and-beige-carpet hedge fund, some isolated campus with priority parking spots. We had designed our office for creativity, for thinking; we surrounded ourselves with plants: not ferns or cacti but fiddle-leaf figs, variegated strings of pearls, wandering Jews, Monstera obliqua. We had no dress code, official or implicit; employees were encouraged to come as they were. Yuri was our case in point: he didn’t even wear shoes, and I frequently found strands of his long, dry hair around the espresso machine or on the coffee table with the art books. It was with this mindset that we chose to rent three thousand square feet in SoHo, on Wooster off Broome, even though we could have spent the same amount for thirty thousand up Metro-North. It was why we mandated (and paid for) once-a-week therapy for each of our fourteen employees, myself included (Milosz was a harder sell). You had to be careful, though, not to fall on the wrong side of the obnoxious-tech-startup divide, so we forwent the furniture so modern you dared not sit on it, the murals, the liquor (I doubt our researchers even drank), and decided on Vintage seltzer over LaCroix.
Still or sparkling? I asked. He leaned in, he hadn’t heard. I told Peter to turn the alerts down and, with my hand on Ian’s back, shepherded him into my office.
Some people here think it sounds like a song, I said, walking behind my desk. Some say it’s like listening to a cartoon. But I think if you really pay attention, it starts to sound like language. He nodded and gave a perfunctory smile—rather, a smile meant to convey that it was perfunctory. Fine, so it wasn’t such a profound thought. I would have thought someone with a master’s degree in English from Harvard (earned at age forty-two, no less) would appreciate the grace note, but apparently he had more straightforward tastes. It sounds funny, gimmicky even, and yet, every time you hear, say, a studio audience clapping, that’s our algorithm telling us there’s a public stock that’s more than sixty-two point five percent likely to rise at least two percentage points by market close.
He gave a more genuine smile now. If only 62.5 were 100.
Of course, I said. And that’s why we hear a sound at all. Because we need someone with ears—albeit someone quite smart with ears—to hear that studio audience clapping and walk over to a computer and do something I certainly don’t understand, something they could have spent a dissertation on, something that, applied differently, might have made a real difference in the world, but instead it’s being used here, in this office, to generate guaranteed profits for people who are already too rich. I sat down, held my palm out, inviting him to do the same. Well, that was some kind of introduction. Let’s start over.
Ian Foster, he said. Nice to meet you. But perhaps I shouldn’t waste more of your time. By the sound of it you’re basically printing money, and money is all I come with. He didn’t sit. Was he for real? I took him in, matched him against all those preening men I’d met at Webber, at business school—no, surprisingly the best fits were from college; yes, he was a bit immature, insecure, he wasn’t at home in the world. He couldn’t act natural so he withheld himself, became someone else, covered his unease with affectation—like that hand, his right, which swam in front of him constantly.
Well, we’re not printing money just yet. We still need to raise enough to buy the printer. But once we’ve got it, once we can cover the ink and maintenance fees, et cetera, I promise I’ll let you walk out of here. In fact I’ll stop returning your calls.
Ah, taking a page from the RenTech playbook. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to use quantitative modeling, and still is an industry paragon. Decades ago, their Medallion Fund became so lucrative they kicked out their own investors, and now only employees and executives reap their unprecedented returns. You know I met Jim Simons, he said. Who hadn’t? I acted impressed. But let me be a bit more up front. I’m here to invest, yes, but I’m also here as a favor to a friend, Colin Eubanks. You know him, I assume? I nodded, as if it were some name that fell on my ears now and again—my dentist, my wife’s ex-fiancé—and not the Colin Eubanks whose support the firm needed to survive, $220 million, money he’d guaranteed was ours, guaranteed not in a promissory note, which I would have preferred, but with a firm hand on my shoulder and intense eye contact one night at the Harvard Club, a venue I didn’t know was taken seriously—let alone by British financiers who hadn’t attended Harvard—at least not $220 million seriously. But he was serious. I believed that, I’d already rewritten the clinching line of my boilerplate pitch: To date we’ve filled out most of a fund of $400 million, a line that had helped generate almost the additional $180 million, though this was all uncommitted, and assumed people wouldn’t drop out. They would, I knew how this went, I’d gone through the fundraising cycle end to end four times at Webber. But of course pitching Webber to investors was an entirely different proposition: In this market? You want tried and true. Webber had beat the market seventeen years out of the past twenty, and usually by a good margin. We, Atra Arca Capital Management, had beat the market zero years out of zero; we were exactly the kind of risky proposition I’d spent my past life warning investors against: a firm that relied on numbers and numbers only, a quant hedge fund that was truly a quant hedge fund, and not what firms like Webber claimed to be—a quant hedge fund wrapped in rationale. We didn’t want rationale, we wanted to build a black box so opaque, so dense with algorithm and data—50 petabytes of it, computed at 105 teraflops, eventually (we already had the servers, $1.5 million worth, so said the insurance we took out on them and the information they would hold)—that none of it could be explained, not with words or numbers or even overly abstract schemata (the currency of overeducated researchers). Yes, it was sexy, and investors loved to love it, but when it came to putting down a check they wanted to see historical returns, hopefully decades of them. In other words, I was plenty aware of the stigma, and it was my mandate to prove we were not just a room full of PhDs, data servers, and chalk. Hence the name Atra Arca, which means black box in Latin, a detail I thought might serve me well in meetings just like this, with people of the Ian Foster sort, the learned sort, the sort who, if they didn’t know Latin, at least revered it.
Colin, I said. He’s a good man. And I’m intrigued: What’s this favor?
Oh, he said, as if he hadn’t guessed I’d ask. Colin has superb taste, great instincts. But sometimes he needs help pulling the trigger.
Right, I said, and smiled. So you want a bit of due diligence. We’d start with an NDA, of course. A bluff of my own. The only nondisclosure agreement we had was for employees; it was needlessly punitive and meant for people who’d know our strategy inside and out—not something that would ever be on offer, even to Colin.
He waited a beat. No NDA, he said. I’m not here for due diligence. I’m not a numbers guy, I trust I know even less than you about—the hand wave again—all of this. And I’m not some fink, not that I’ve never been called that in so many words. It’s just that … Now he began talking at great speed, words that were mostly for himself, I could tell by the way he lit up, the self-sneer he couldn’t hide, he obviously enjoyed having a captive audience. He spoke about regulation, finance in the eighties, Den of Thieves and Barbarians at the Gate, books I grew up on that now seemed so outdated I doubt anyone in the office had even heard of them—and he clearly had a keen mind, his sentences were clever, unexpected, I found myself laughing, a real laugh, which I didn’t get every day, at least not at work. And every other character in these books is either tall, thin, and silent, or short, fat, and egregiously loud. No, I don’t think things are so cut and dried, and, likewise, I don’t know why exactly Colin trusts me. Probably because we think alike, so with me he gets an objective version of himself. So let’s say that’s why I’m here, to be Colin when Colin’s somewhere else. And we’ll proceed with that. He gave a quick nod, an abrupt end to his little soliloquy, and suddenly it felt like our meeting was all but over. Did he only need to be listened to, humored, flattered? That I could do. He smoothed his hair again, looked for his coat and found it already on his arm. I was going to say something, wind the meeting down with some formality, but that didn’t seem to be his way; from now on my only purpose with him was deference. He made to leave but stopped at the door. I have to ask: Why Atra Arca?
Ah, it means black box. As in—
No, he said. I know that. But I’d think it would be Niger Arca. Atra is more … gloomy, dismal even.
Really? I’d used Google Translate. I’d confirmed it with a friend. A Hail Mary: Do you know why they call economics the dismal science?
Something about population growth, limited resources—no?
Exactly. To profit in any market you have to take from others. But that predator-prey mindset presumes intent, which we’ve taken out of the equation. Only our algorithm knows why it does what it does, and so the dismal science is kept in a box.
He laughed. He shook his head. Herschel, he said, that’s evil.
* * *
I bought a six-pack at a grocery store outside the office and drank one in the Uber back to the house. I needed some sort of reset before the big dinner; that meeting had left me disoriented, in a mild stupor, as if I’d just woken up. When Ian left I’d felt good, that I’d done well, but by the time I myself left, about thirty minutes later, I wasn’t sure precisely what I’d done well at. I almost called Colin but thought better of it; when we’d spoken last week he’d made clear, in so many words, that he’d commit when he was ready. It didn’t help that there was a swarm of protestors just outside the office: next door was some tech company that had recently signed a deal with China that would, somehow, enable them to expand the tracking and surveillance of their Uighur population. They booed me as I entered the black SUV, even though I’d obviously come out of a different building, further proof that their protest was just an outgrowth of a more generic frustration; I was wearing slacks, that was the problem. They weren’t radicals, they just wanted to feel alive; their animus wouldn’t change the world outside, it only expressed a void within. I could forgive the young ones, they didn’t know how the world worked, but on those my age, almost two decades out of college, I let my spite exhaust itself, I needed it out of the way. After all, it was the twelfth of May.
May 12. Franny and I had used the date as shorthand more times than we’d ever admit to the evening’s guests. It was, by this point, a code name for our mission, one we’d been planning for months, a feat that would guarantee that our life here in Brooklyn, in Cobble Hill, would be all it needed to be: we would make new friends, best friends, in our late thirties. And we would do this by showing our neighbors, Philip and Clara (née Miller) Guggenheim (yes, that one; his great-great-etc. had founded the museum), that we were not only just as interesting as they were, but fun, good people, married with kids on the way, next year if everything went to plan, which they were shooting for, too—an intimate detail revealed on just our second rendezvous a few weeks ago, as both couples lounged in the narrow, shared courtyard that separated our (nearly identical; I’d found their floorplan on StreetEasy) brick townhouses. The similarities were uncanny: Jewish husband, gentile wife, none of us actually religious; we’d bought our homes within two months of each other; Franny a furniture designer, Clara an interior designer; husbands runners, wives in book clubs; both couples shopped at Trader Joe’s despite being rich. Even our differences were complementary. Outside the office there was nothing I liked talking about less than finance, and Philip was a film director (and actor, but only in his own movies), my secret (I don’t even think Franny knew this) dream profession. And their dynamic perfectly counterbalanced ours. Whereas Franny was our chief executive officer, it was clear from the first time we met that Clara was beta to Philip’s alpha. It wasn’t so much that there was an imbalance between them, just that their personalities produced a natural equilibrium: Philip was the consonants, establishing order, setting terms, and Clara the vowels, sliding through the indeterminate middle, applying her apparent vagaries to a neatly prescribed life. For the past few weeks, when we saw that they were outside, we would come up with an excuse to join them—claiming that the gardeners didn’t water the lilies enough but we were happy to do it, or noting that it was the only hour of the day when our thin patch got direct sun. We clicked, there was no denying it, but their social life seemed more than full (practically a dinner party a week, it appeared) and we wanted to be much more than casual acquaintances. We wanted, we needed, to impress them.
May 12 was also, not by coincidence, the night we were having over Franny’s freshman roommate, Bertie “Birdie” Barnes, a prominent British playwright, in town under the pretense of the opening of a friend’s show, but really because she was finalizing her (second) divorce and needed something to do—hence the contacting of old, lost connections. Birdie and Franny had been inseparable at Brown for exactly one semester; since then their relationship had consisted of a phone call every few years (albeit one that lasted half the day). I’d never met her but had the impression we wouldn’t share much common ground; Franny used the term outsized whenever she described her. But this was a perfect opportunity, kismet, Birdie was the whole package, a posh accent and a dazzling career in the arts, the idea came to Franny and me at the exact same moment: yes, May 12 would also be the night we’d finally invite Philip and Clara into our home. With Birdie’s charm coloring the evening, they would witness firsthand our lives, our taste, Franny’s artistry; while they ate they would sit on her trademark chair, the one featured in Architectural Digest not six months ago (did Clara subscribe?). The invitation was delivered offhandedly, as if Franny had just come up with the idea. Yes, Clara had said right away, that would be lovely. Franny gave me the news that night as though she were recounting a special at Paisanos; from then on we agreed, tacitly, to play it cool.
When I got home I found Franny in the kitchen wearing her teal linen dress, her hair shorter than I’d ever seen it. In fact she was trying and failing to tie it back while frowning at her laptop, which sat dangerously close to the lit stove. On the screen was an email written in her assistant’s signature blue font. Franny had worked from home to prepare for the evening, and it now seemed, as I’d expected but did not suggest, that she hadn’t been able to balance the two. I noticed steam rising from the trash bin: the still-hot memory of a false start. I stopped myself from asking how it was going, I knew the answer and anyway she was obviously in—as she herself called it—her do not fucking disturb mode. If she slid into that gear more often than she liked to admit, still she only did so when necessary, when there was too much to do in too little time. This penchant was so ingrained in her that I’d always assumed it was inherited from her family—until our wedding last year, when I met them, or rather, the few who chose to attend. That our ceremony was to be held in a temple was enough for most to decline the invitation. They were devout Lutherans, all living in or around her hometown, Fergus Falls, Minnesota. She still spoke of them as the spurned do, with vulnerability but also with the conviction that comes from forging a life of one’s own. Even her accent, an indistinct composite of Northeast modulations, had been fully scrubbed of its quasi-Scandinavian roots. But unlike most every transplant I’d met from that part of the country—all of whom seemed to view their lives through the eulogizing lens of their families—Franny had something indelibly New York about her. It was as if she captured the spirit of the city, embodying all those threadbare sayings. She unironically believed in the concept of making it, which both moved and inspired me, probably because to her it wasn’t a concept. She had nothing to fall back on, she couldn’t imagine any other life for herself than this one; for her, failure did not mean settling for something more realistic—there was no such thing.
I went up to the shower, taking another beer with me. Even in the bathroom I could smell the meal, a menu we’d finalized the night before: escarole with pancetta and hen of the woods, sweet potato and sage ravioli in parmesan broth (the idea shamelessly cribbed from Frankies, an Italian restaurant up the street), and bone-in pork chop saltimbocca (ditto); this last item had been subbed in at the eleventh hour for a needlessly complex and ultimately desperate beef Wellington.
After I got out, just as I was rubbing the mist from the mirror, I heard an unusual sound, a sort of siren. My first thought was that it was the new security system, which I’d nearly forgotten about despite the fact that it was almost as expensive as our home insurance. I opened the door and identified the source: Birdie. This was her God-given voice, one I’d previously heard only through a phone receiver across the room. It was clarion, there was no other word for it, I pictured those metallic statues on the covers of Ayn Rand novels. But after I got changed, finished my beer, and went downstairs, I found in our family room a woman who might have been the very inverse of those gilded musclemen. She was round and short, her hair ginger but darkened with age, with stubborn curls she forced into a high ponytail. On her person there seemed to be every color, every pattern, every fabric; against all that chaos her face looked like one big pinkish pearl. She turned to me, flashing her emerald eyes—they were so brilliant I inhaled, nearly a gasp.
Hersch-el. Darling. You’ve absolutely outdone yourself.
I glanced at Franny, whose face had fossilized into a genial smile. I’d seen that look before; she’d been taken conversational hostage. I tried to speak—to say what, I didn’t know, I didn’t have the slightest clue what she meant—but before I could, she said, walking over to me, Now listen. You take this. She disrobed her shawl, jacket, gloves, and sweater, and handed me the pile.
Thanks, I said, and she laughed heartily, a staccato triplet, pulling me in for a hug and then letting go only to appraise me, her hands on my shoulders, as if I were a nephew she hadn’t seen in ages. With the weight of her clothes in my hands I nearly forgot it was spring until I made it downstairs to the foyer, where I hoped to take a moment to regain my composure. But I never got the chance; through the glass of our front door I saw Philip and Clara. The dismay I felt at having them witness me in such a disoriented state was washed away by my pleasure in seeing that they too were treating this night as something special: he wore a turtleneck, she a beige blouse and red lipstick, each held a bottle of wine. I opened the door and extended my hand, an awkward enough maneuver, and on top of it I let Birdie’s shawl fall to the floor. I bent down to get it but Clara got there first.
Copyright © 2023 by Andrew Lipstein
