Read our Winter roundup of novels
Read our essay on a year of migrant fiction
Don DeLillo is one of America’s greatest writers. His politically engaged fiction has tackled a broad range of subjects from nuclear war to terrorism. In this compelling and very funny short story, “Hammer and Sickle,” DeLillo satirises the world of high finance. We follow the life of a hedge fund manager who has been imprisoned for crimes reminiscent of those committed by the fraudster Bernie Madoff.
We walked across the highway bridge, 39 of us in jumpsuits and tennis sneakers, with guards front and back and at the flanks, six in all. Beneath us the cars were blasting by, nonstop, their speed magnified by our near vantage and by the sound they made passing under the low bridge. There’s no word for it, that sound, pure urgency, sustained, incessant, northbound, southbound, and each time we walked across the overpass I wondered again who those people were, the drivers and passengers, so many cars, the pressing nature of their passage, the lives inside.
I had time to notice such things, time to reflect. It’s a killing business, reflection, even in the lowest levels of security, where there are distractions, openings into the former world. The inmate soccer game at the abandoned high school field across the highway was a breezy departure from the daily binding and squeezing of meal lines, head counts, regulations, reflections. The players rode a bus, the spectators walked, the cars zoomed beneath the bridge.
I walked alongside a man named Sylvan Telfair, tall, bald, steeped in pathos, an international banker who’d dealt in rarefied instruments of offshore finance.
“You follow soccer?”
“I don’t follow anything,” he said.
“But it’s worth watching under the circumstances, right? Which is exactly how I feel.”
“I follow nothing,” he said.
“My name’s Jerold.”
“Very good,” he said.
The camp was not enclosed by stone walls or coiled razor wire. The only perimeter fencing was a scenic artifact now, a set of old wooden posts that supported sagging rails. There were four dormitories with bunk-bed cubicles, toilets and showers. There were several structures to accommodate inmate orientation, meals, medical care, TV viewing, gym work, visits from family and others. There were conjugal hours for those so yoked.
“You can call me Jerry,” I said.
I knew that Sylvan Telfair had been denied a special detention suite with audiovisual systems, private bath, smoking privileges and a toaster oven. There were only four of these in the camp and the man seemed, in bearing alone, in his emotional distance and discreet pain, to be entitled to special consideration. Stuck in the dorms, I thought. This must have seemed a life sentence wedged into the nine years he’d brought with him from Switzerland or Liechtenstein or the Cayman Islands.
I wanted to know something about the man’s methodology, the arc of his crimes, but I was reluctant to ask and he was certain not to answer. I’d been here only two months and was still trying to figure out who I wanted to be in this setting, how I ought to stand, sit, walk, talk. Sylvan Telfair knew who he was. He was a long-striding man in a well-pressed jumpsuit and spotless white sneakers, laces knotted oddly behind the ankles, a man formally absent from his slightest word or gesture.
The traffic noise was a ripple at the treetops by the time we reached the edge of the camp complex.
When I was in my early teens I came across the word phantasm. A great word, I thought, and I wanted to be phantasmal, someone who slips in and out of physical reality. Now here I am, a floating fever dream, but where’s the rest of it, the dense surround, the thing with weight and heft? There’s a man here who aspires to be a biblical scholar. His head is bent severely to one side, nearly resting on his left shoulder, the result of an unnamed affliction. I admire the man, I’d like to talk to him, tilting my head slightly, feeling secure in the depths of his scholarship, the languages, cultures, documents, rituals. And the head itself, is there anything here more real than this?
There’s another man who runs everywhere, the Dumb Runner he’s called, but he’s doing something obsessive and true, outside the margins of our daily protocols. He has a heartbeat, a racing pulse. And then the gamblers, men betting surreptitiously on football, engaged all week in the crosstalk of point spreads, bunk to bunk, meal to meal, Eagles minus four, Rams getting eight and a half. Is this virtual money they’re betting? Stand near them when they talk and it’s real, touchable, and so are they, gesturing operatically, numbers flashing neon in the air.
We watched TV in one of the common rooms. There was a large flat screen, wall-mounted, certain channels blocked, programs selected by one of the veteran inmates, a different man each month. On this day only five places were occupied in the eighty or so folding chairs in the arched rows. I was here to see a particular program, an afternoon news broadcast, fifteen minutes, on a children’s channel. One segment was a stock market report. Two girls, earnestly amateurish, reported on the day’s market activity.
I was the only one watching the show. The other inmates sat half dazed, heads down. It was a matter of time of day, time of year, dusk nearly upon us, the depressive specter of last light stirring at the oblong windows high on one wall. The men sat distanced from each other, here to be alone. This was the call to self-examination, the second-guessing of a lost life, no less compelling than the believer’s call to prayer.
I watched and listened. The girls were my daughters, Laurie and Kate, 10 and 12. Their mother had told me, curtly, over the phone, that the kids had been selected to appear on such a programme. No details available, she said, at the present time, as if she were reporting, herself, from a desk in a studio humming with off-camera tensions.
I sat in the second row, alone, and there they were, sharing a table, speaking about fourth-quarter estimates, first one girl, then the other, a couple of sentences at a time, credit quality, credit demand, the tech sector, the budget deficit. The picture had the quality of online video, user-generated. I tried to detach myself, to see the girls as distant references to my daughters, in jittery black and white. I studied them. I observed. They read their lines from pages held in their hands, each looking up from the page as she yielded to the other reader.
Did it seem crazy, a market report for kids? There was nothing sweet or charming about the commentary. The girls were not playing at being adult. They were dutiful, blending occasional definitions and explanations into the news, and then Laurie’s eyes showed fleeting panic in her remarks about the Nasdaq Composite—a mangled word, a missing sentence. I took the report to be a tentative segment of a barely noticed show on an obscure cable channel. It wasn’t any crazier, probably, than most TV, and anyway who was watching?
My bunkmate wore socks to bed. He tucked his pyjama legs into the socks and lay on his bunk, knees up and hands folded behind his head.
“I miss my walls,” he said.
He had the lower bunk. This was a matter of some significance in the camp, top or bottom, who gets what, like every prison movie we’d ever seen. Norman was senior to me in age, experience, ego and time served and I had no reason to complain.
I thought of telling him that we all miss our walls, we miss our floors and ceilings. But I sat and waited for him to continue.
“I used to sit and look. One wall, then another. After a while I’d get up and walk around the apartment, slowly, looking, wall to wall. Sit and look, stand and look.”
He seemed to be under a spell, reciting a bedtime story he’d heard as a child.
“You collected art, is that it?”
“That’s it, past tense, collected. Major museum quality.”
“You’ve never mentioned this,” I said.
“I’ve been here how long? They’re somebody else’s walls now. The art is scattered.”
“You had advisers, experts on the art market.”
“People used to come and look at my walls. Europe, Los Angeles, a Japanese man from some foundation in Japan.” He sat quietly for a time, remembering. I found myself remembering with him. The Japanese man took on facial features, a certain size and shape, portly, it seemed, pale suit, dark tie.
“Collectors, curators, students. They came and looked,” he said.
“Who advised you?”
“I had a woman on Fifty-seventh Street. There was a guy in London, Colin, knew everything about the post-Impressionists. A dear sweet man.”
“You don’t really mean that.”
“It’s something people say. One of those expressions that sound like someone else is talking. A dear sweet man.”
“A loving wife and mother.”
“I was happy to have them look. All of them,” he said. “I used to look with them. We’d go picture to picture, room to room. I had a house in the Hudson Valley, more paintings, some sculpture. I went there in the autumn for the fall colours. But I barely looked out the windows.”
“You had the walls.”
“I couldn’t take my eyes off the walls.”
“And then you had to sell.”
“All of it, every last piece. Pay fines, pay debts, pay legal fees, provide for family. Gave an etching to my daughter. A snowy night in Norway.”
Norman missed his walls but he was not unhappy here. He was content, he said, unstuck, unbound, remote. He was free of the swollen needs and demands of others but mostly disentangled from his personal drives, his grabbiness, the lifelong mandate to accrue, expand, construct himself, to buy a hotel chain, make a name. He was at peace here, he said.
I lay on the top bunk, eyes closed, listening. Throughout the building men in their cubicles, one talking, one listening, both silent, one sleeping, tax delinquents, alimony delinquents, insider traders, perjurers, hedge-fund felons, mail fraud, mortgage fraud, securities fraud, accounting fraud, obstruction of justice.
Word began to spread. By the third day most of the chairs in the common room were occupied and I had to settle for a place near the end of the fifth row. On screen the girls were reporting on a situation rapidly developing in the Arab Emirates.
“The word is Dubai.”
“This is the word crossing continents and oceans at the shocking speed of light.”
“Markets are sinking quickly.”
“Paris, Frankfurt, London.”
“Dubai has the worst debt per capita in the world,” Kate said. “And now its building boom has crumbled and it can’t pay the banks what it owes them.”
“It owes them 58 billion dollars,” Laurie said. “Give or take a few billion.”
“The DAX index in Germany.”
“Down more than three percent.”
“The Royal Bank of Scotland.”
“Down more than four percent.”
“The word is Dubai.”
“This debt-ridden city-state is asking banks to grant six months’ freedom from debt repayments.”
“Dubai,” Laurie said.
“The cost of insuring Dubai’s debt against default has increased one, two, three, four times.”
“Do we know what that means?”
“It means the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down, down, down.”
“Deutsche Bank.”
“Down.”
“London—the FTSE One Hundred Index.”
“Down.”
“Amsterdam—ING Group.” “Down.”
“The Hang Seng in Hong Kong.” “Crude oil. Islamic bonds.” “Down, down, down.”
“The word is Dubai.”
“Say it.”
“Dubai,” Kate said.
The old life rewrites itself every minute. In four years I’ll still be here, puddling horribly in this dim waste. The free future is hard to imagine. I have trouble enough tracing the shape of the knowable past. This is no steadfast element, no faith or truth except for the girls, being born, getting bigger, living.
Where was I when this was happening? I was acquiring meaningless degrees, teaching a freshman course in the dynamics of reality TV. I changed the spelling of my first name to Jerold. I used my index and middle fingers to place quote marks around certain ironic comments I made and sometimes used index fingers only, setting off a quotation within another quotation. It was that kind of life, self-mocking, and neither the marriage nor the business I briefly ran seems to have happened in any fixed consideration. I’m 39 years old, a generation removed from some of the inmates here, and I don’t remember knowing why I did what I did to put myself in this place. There was a time in early English law when a felony was punishable by removal of one of the felon’s body parts. Would this be an incentive to modern memory?
I imagine myself being here forever, it’s already forever, eating another meal with the political consultant who licks his thumb to pick bread crumbs off the plate and stare at them, or standing in line behind the investment banker who talks to himself aloud in beginner’s Mandarin. I think about money. What did I know about it, how much did I need it, what would I do when I got it? Then I think about Sylvan Telfair, aloof in his craving, the billion-euro profit being separable from the things it bought, money the coded impulse, ideational, a kind of discreet erection known only to the man whose pants are on fire.
“The fear continues to grow.”
“Fear of numbers, fear of spreading losses.”
“The fear is Dubai. The talk is Dubai. Dubai has the debt.
Is it 58 billion dollars or 80 billion dollars?” “Bankers are pacing marble floors.”
“Or is it 120 billion dollars?”
“Sheiks are gazing into hazy skies.”
“Even the numbers are panicking.”
“Think of the prominent investors. Hollywood stars. Famous footballers.”
“Think of islands shaped like palm trees. People skiing in a shopping mall.”
“The world’s only seven-star hotel.”
“The world’s richest horse race.”
“The world’s tallest building.”
“All this in Dubai.”
“Taller than the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building combined.”
“Combined.”
“Swim in the pool on the 76th floor. Pray in the mosque on the 158th floor.”
“But where is the oil?”
“Dubai has no oil. Dubai has debt. Dubai has a huge number of foreign workers with nowhere to work.”
“Enormous office buildings stand empty. Apartment buildings unfinished in blowing sand. Think of the blowing sand. Dust storms concealing the landscape. Empty storefronts in every direction.”
“But where is the oil?”
“The oil is in Abu Dhabi. Say the name.”
“Abu Dhabi.”
“Now let’s say it together.”
“Abu Dhabi,” they said.
It was Feliks Zuber, the oldest inmate at the camp, who’d chosen the children’s program for viewing. Feliks was here every day now, front row centre, carrying with him a sentence of 720 twenty years. He liked to turn and nod at those nearby, making occasional applause gestures without bringing his trembling hands into contact, a small crumpled man, looking nearly old enough to be on the verge of outliving his sentence, tinted glasses, purple jumpsuit, hair dyed death black.
The length of his sentence impressed the rest of us. It was a term handed down for his master manipulation of an investment scheme involving four countries and leading to the collapse of two governments and three corporations, with much of the money channelled in the direction of arms shipments to rebels in a breakaway enclave of the Caucasus.
The breadth of his crimes warranted a far more stringent environment than this one but he’d been sent here because he was riddled with disease, his future marked in weeks and days. Men were sometimes sent here to die, in easeful circumstances. We knew it from their faces, mainly, the attenuated range of vision, the sensory withdrawal, and from the stillness they brought with them, a cloistered manner, as if bound by vows. Feliks was not still. He smiled, waved, bounced and shook. He sat on the edge of his chair when the girls delivered news of falling markets and stunned economies. He was a man watching an ancient truism unfold on wide-screen TV. He would take the world with him when he died.
The soccer field was part of a haunted campus. A grade school and high school had been closed because the county did not have the resources to maintain them. The antiquated buildings were partly demolished now, a few wrecking machines still there, asquat in mud.
The inmates were glad to keep the field in playable condition, chalking the lines and arcs, planting corner flags, sinking the goals firmly in the ground. The games were an earnest pastime for the players, men mostly middle-aged, a few older, two or three younger, all in makeshift uniforms, running, standing, walking, crouching, often simply bending from the waist, breathless, hands on knees, looking into the scuffed turf where their lives were mired.
There were fewer spectators as the days grew colder, then fewer players. I kept showing up, blowing on my hands, beating my arms across my chest. The teams were coached by inmates, the games refereed by inmates, and those of us watching from the three rows of old broken bleacher seats were inmates. The guards stood around, here and there, watching and not.
The games became stranger. Rules were invented, broken and abridged, a fight started now and then, the game going on around it. I kept waiting for a player to be stricken, a heart attack, a convulsive collapse. The spectators rarely cheered or moaned. It began to feel like nowhere, men moving in the dreamy distance, linesmen sharing a cigarette. We walked across the bridge, watched the game, walked back across the bridge.
I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players’ hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn’t some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?
This is one of the things I think about that I never had to think about before.
The notable thing about Norman Bloch, my bunkmate, was not the art that used to hang on his walls. What impressed me was the crime he’d committed. This was itself a kind of art, conceptual in nature, radical in scale, a deed so casual and yet so transgressive that Norman, here a year, would be spending six more years in the camp, the bunk, the clinic, the meal lines, in the squalling noise of the hand dryers in the toilets.
Norman did not pay taxes. He did not file quarterly reports or annual returns and he did not request extensions. He did not backdate documents, establish trusts or foundations, open secret accounts or utilize the ready mechanisms of offshore jurisdictions. He was not a political or religious protester. He was not a nihilist, rejecting all values and institutions. He was completely transparent. He just didn’t pay.
It was a kind of lethargy, he said, the way people avoid doing the dishes or making the bed.
I brightened at that. Doing the dishes, making the bed. He said he didn’t know exactly how long it was since he’d last paid taxes. When I asked about his financial advisers, his business associates, he shrugged, or so I imagined. I was in the top bunk, he was in the bottom, two men in pyjamas, passing the time.
“Those girls. Pretty amazing,” he said. “And the news, especially the bad news.”
“You like the bad news.”
“We all like the bad news. Even the girls like the bad news.” I thought of telling him that they were my daughters. No one here knew this and it was better that way. I didn’t want the men in the dorm looking at me, talking to me, spreading the word throughout the camp. I was learning how to disappear. It suited me, it was my natural state, day by day, to be phantasmal again.
Best not to speak of the girls.
Then I spoke of them, quietly, in six or seven words. There was a long pause. He had a round face, Norman, with a squat nose, his bushy hair going gray.
“You never said this, Jerry.”
“Just between us.”
“You never say anything.”
“Just to you. No one else. It’s true,” I said. “Kate and Laurie. I sit and watch them and it’s hard to understand how any of this happened. What are they doing there, what am I doing here? Their mother writes the reports. She didn’t tell me this but I know it’s her. She’s masterminding the whole thing.”
“What’s she like, their mother?”
“We’re legally separated.” “What’s she like?” he said.
“Fairly smart, like in a cutting-edge way. Sneaky sort of pretty. You have to pay attention to see it.”
“You still love her? I don’t think I ever loved my wife. Not in the original meaning of the word.”
I didn’t ask what he meant by that. “Did your wife love you?”
“She loved my walls,” he said.
“I love my kids.”
“You love their mother too. I can sense it,” he said.
“From where, the lower bunk? You can’t even see my face.”
“I’ve seen your face. What’s to see?”
“We fell apart. We didn’t drift apart, we fell apart.” “Don’t tell me I’m not right. I sense things. I read into things,” he said.
I looked into the ceiling. It had rained for several hours and I thought I could hear traffic noise on the wet highway, cars racing beneath the overpass, drivers leaning into the night, trying to read the road at every flex and bend.
“I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like they’re playing a game,” he said. “All those names they’re saying. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong. That’s funny to a kid. And when kids say it, it’s funny to us. And I’ll make you a bet. Plenty of kids are watching that report and not because it’s on a kids’ channel. They’re watching because it’s funny. What the hell’s the Hang Seng in Hong Kong? I don’t know. Do you know?”
“Their mother knows.”
“I’ll bet she does. She also knows it’s a game, all of it. And all of it’s funny. You’re lucky,” he said. “Terrific kids.”
Happy here, that was Norman. We’re not in prison, he liked to say. We’re at camp.
Over time the situation in the Gulf began to ease. Abu Dhabi provided a 10-billion-dollar bailout and relative calm soon moved into the Gulf and across the digital networks to markets everywhere. This brought on a letdown in the common room. Even as the girls showed improvement in their delivery and signs of serious preparation, the men stopped coming in large numbers and soon there was only a scatter of us, here and there, sleepy and reflective.
We had TV but what had we lost, all of us, when we entered the camp? We’d lost our appendages, our extensions, the data systems that kept us fed and cleansed. Where was the world, our world? The laptops were gone, the smartphones and light sensors and megapixels. Our hands and eyes needed more than we could give them now. The touch screens, the mobile platforms, the gentle bell reminders of an appointment or a flight time or a woman in a room somewhere. And the sense, the tacit awareness, now lost, that something newer, smarter, faster, ever faster, was just a bird’s breath away. Also lost was the techno-anxiety that these devices routinely carried with them. But we needed this no less than the devices themselves, that inherent stress, those cautions and frustrations. Weren’t these essential to our mindset? The prospect of failed signals and crashed systems, the memory that needs recharging, the identity stolen in a series of clicks. Information, this was everything, coming in, going out. We were always on, wanted to be on, needed to be on, but this was history now, the shadow of another life.
Okay, we were grown-ups, not bug-eyed kids in tribal bondage, and this was not an Internet rescue camp. We lived in real space, unaddicted, free of deadly dependence. But we were bereft. We were pulpy and slumped. It was a thing we rarely talked about, a thing that was hard to shake. There were the small idle moments when we knew exactly what we were missing. We sat on the toilet, flushed and done, staring into empty hands.
I wanted to find myself in front of the TV set for the market report, weekdays, four in the afternoon, but could not always manage. I was part of a work detail that was bused on designated days to the adjacent Air Force base, where we sanded and painted, did general maintenance, hauled garbage and sometimes just stood and watched as a fighter jet roared down the runway and lifted into the low sun. It was a beautiful thing to see, aircraft climbing, wheels up, wings pivoting back, the light, the streaked sky, three or four of us, not a word spoken. Was this the time, more than a thousand other moments, when the measure of our ruin was brought to starkest awareness?
“All of Europe is looking south. What do they see?”
“They see Greece.”
“They see fiscal instability, enormous debt burden, possible default.”
“Crisis is a Greek word.”
“Is Greece hiding its public debt?”
“Is the crisis spreading at lightning speed to the rest of the southern tier, to the euro zone in general, to emerging markets everywhere?”
“Does Greece need a bailout?”
“Will Greece abandon the euro?”
“Did Greece hide the nature of its debt?”
“What is Wall Street’s role in this critical matter?”
“What is a credit default swap? What is a sovereign default? What is a special-purpose entity?”
“We don’t know. Do you know? Do you care?” “What is Wall Street? Who is Wall Street?” Tense laughter from pockets in the audience. “Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy.”
“Stocks plunge worldwide.”
“The Dow, the Nasdaq, the euro, the pound.”
“But where are the walkouts, the work stoppages, the job actions?”
“Look at Greece. Look in the streets.”
“Riots, strikes, protests, pickets.”
“All of Europe is looking at Greece.”
“Chaos is a Greek word.”
“Cancelled flights, burning flags, stones flying this way, tear gas sailing that way.”
“Workers are angry. Workers are marching.”
“Blame the worker. Bury the worker.”
“Freeze their pay. Increase their tax.”
“Steal from the worker. Screw the worker.”
“Any day now, wait and see.”
“New flags, new banners.”
“Hammer and sickle.”
“Hammer and sickle.”
Their mother had the girls delivering lines in a balanced flow, a cadence. They weren’t just reading, they were acting, showing facial expression, having serious fun. Screw the worker, Kate had said. At least their mother had assigned the vulgar line to the older girl.
Was the daily market report becoming a performance piece?
All day long the story passed through the camp, building to building, man to man. It concerned a convict on death row in Texas or Missouri or Oklahoma and the last words he’d spoken before an individual authorized by the state injected the lethal substance or activated the electric current.
The words were, Kick the tires and light the fire—I’m going home.
Some of us felt a chill, hearing the story. Were we shamed by it? Did we think of that man on the honed edge of his last breath as more authentic than we were, a true outlaw, worthy of the state’s most cruelly scrupulous attention? His end was officially sanctioned, an act welcomed by some, protested by some. If he’d spent half a lifetime in prison cells, in solitary confinement and finally on death row for one or two or multiple homicides, where were we and what had we done to be placed here? Did we even remember our crimes? Could we call them crimes? They were loopholes, evasions, wheedling half-ass felonies.
Some of us, less self-demeaning, simply nodded at the story, conveying simple credit to the man for the honour he’d brought to the moment, the back-country poetry of those words. By the third time I heard the story, or overheard it, the prison was located decisively in Texas. Forget the other places—the man, the story and the prison all belonged in Texas. We were somewhere else, watching a children’s programme on TV.
“What’s this business about hammer and sickle?” “Means nothing. Words,” I said. “Like Abu Dhabi.” “The Hang Seng in Hong Kong.”
“Exactly.”
“The girls like saying it. Hammer and sickle.”
“Hammer and sickle.”
“Abu Dhabi.”
“Abu Dhabi.”
“Hang Seng.”
“Hong Kong,” I said.
We went on like that for a while. Norman was still murmuring the names when I shut my eyes and began the long turn toward sleep.
“But I think she means it. I think she’s serious. Hammer and sickle,” he said. “She’s a serious woman with a point to make.”
I stood watching from a distance. They passed through the metal detector, one by one, and moved toward the visitors’ centre, the wives and children, the loyal friends, the business partners, the lawyers who would sit and listen in a confidential setting as inmates stared at them through tight eyes and complained about the food, the job assignments, the scarcity of sentence reductions.
Everything seemed flat. The visitors on the footpath moved slowly and monochromatically. The sky was barely there, drained of light and weather. Families were bundled and wan but I didn’t feel the cold. I was standing outside the dormitory but could have been anywhere. I imagined a woman walking among the others, slim and dark-haired, unaccompanied. I don’t know where she came from, a photograph I’d once seen, or a movie, possibly French, set in Southeast Asia, sex beneath a ceiling fan. Here, she was wearing a long white tunic and loose trousers. She belonged to another setting, this was clear, but there was no need for me to wonder what she was doing here. She’d come up out of the drowsy mind or down from the flat sky.
There was a name for the outfit she was wearing and I nearly knew it, nearly had it, then it slipped away. But the woman was there, still, in pale sandals, the tunic slit on the sides, with a faint floral design front and back.
The ceiling fan turned slowly in the heavy heat, a thought I didn’t want or need, but there it was, more thought than image, going back years.
Who was the man she was here to see? I was expecting no visitors, didn’t want them, not even my daughters, not right for them to see me here. They were two thousand miles away in any case, and otherwise engaged. Could I place the woman in my immediate presence, face to face across a table in the large open space that would soon be filled with inmates, wives and kids, a guard at an elevated desk, keeping watch?
One thing I knew. The name of her outfit was two words, brief words, and it would make me feel the day was worthwhile, the full week, if I could remember those words. What else was there to do? What else could I think about that might yield a decent measure of completion?
Vietnamese—the words, the tunic, the trousers, the woman.
Then I thought of Sylvan Telfair. He was the inmate she was here to see, a man of worldwide address. They’d met in Paris or Bangkok. They’d stood on a terrace in the evening, sipping wine and speaking French. He was refined and assured and at the same time somewhat reticent, a man to whom she might be attracted, even if she was my idea, my secret silken vision.
I stood watching, thinking.
By the time the words came to me, much later in the day, ao dai, I’d lost all interest in the matter.
We were grouped, clustered, massed, paired, men everywhere, living in swarms, filling every space, arrayed across the limits of vision. I liked to think of us as men in Maoist self-correction, perfecting our social being through repetition. We worked, ate and slept in mechanized routine, weekly, daily, hourly, advancing from practice to knowledge. But these were the musings of idle time. Maybe we were just tons of assimilated meat, our collected flesh built into cubicles, containered in dormitories and dining halls, zippered into jumpsuits in five colours, classified, catalogued, this colour for that level of offense. The colours struck me as a kind of comic pathos, always there, brightly clashing, jutting, crisscrossing. I tried not to think of us as circus clowns who’d forgotten their face paint.
“You consider her your enemy,” Norman said. “You and her, blood enemies.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“It’s only natural. You think she’s using the girls against you. This is what you believe, down deep, whether you admit it or not.”
“I don’t think that’s the case.”
“That has to be the case. She’s attacking you for the mistakes you made in business. What was your business? How did it get you here? I don’t think you ever said.”
“It’s not interesting.”
“We’re not here to be interesting.”
“I ran a company for a man who acquired companies. Information got passed back and forth. Money changed hands. Lawyers, traders, consultants, senior partners.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was my father,” I said. “What’s his name?”
“He died quietly before the fact.”
“What fact?”
“The fact of my conviction.”
“What’s his name?”
“Walter Bradway.”
“Do I know that name?”
“You know his brother’s name. Howard Bradway.”
“One of the hedge-fund musketeers,” he said.
Norman was searching his memory for visual confirmation. I pictured what he was picturing. He was picturing my uncle Howie, a large ruddy man, bare-chested, in aviator glasses, with a miniature poodle huddled in the crook of his arm. A fairly famous image.
“A family tradition. Is that it?” he said. “Different companies, different cities, different time frames.”
“They believed in right and wrong. The right and wrong of the markets, the portfolios, the insider information.”
“Then it was your turn to join the business. Did you know what you were doing?”
“I was defining myself. That’s what my father said. He said people who have to define themselves belong in the dictionary.”
“Because you strike me as somebody who doesn’t always know what he’s doing.”
“I pretty much knew. I definitely knew.”
I could hear Norman unravelling the improvised cellophane wrap on his little jar of fig spread and then using his finger to rub the stuff across a saltine cracker. On visitors’ days his lawyer smuggled a jar of Dalmatian fig spread into the camp, minus the metal cap. Norman said he liked the name, Dalmatia, Dalmatian, the Balkan history, the Adriatic, the large spotted dog. He liked the idea of having food of that particular name and place, all natural ingredients, and eating it on a standard cafeteria cracker, undercover, a couple of times a week.
He said that his lawyer was a woman and that she concealed the fig spread somewhere on her body. This was a throwaway line, delivered in a monotone and not intended to be believed.
“What’s your philosophy of money?”
“I don’t have one,” I said.
“There was the year I made a shitpile of money. One year in particular. We could be talking, total, easy nine figures. I could feel it adding years to my life. Money makes you live longer. It seeps into the bloodstream, into the veins and capillaries. I talked to my primary-care physician about this. He said he had an inkling I could be right.”
“What about the art on your walls? Make you live longer?”
“I don’t know about the art. Good question, the art.” “People say great art is immortal. I say there’s something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.”
“All those gorgeous paintings, the shapes and colours. All those dead painters. I don’t know,” he said.
He lifted his hand toward my bunk, up and around, with a splotch of fig preserves on half a cracker. I declined, but thanks. I heard him chewing the cracker and sinking into the sheets. Then I lay waiting for the final remarks of the day.
“She’s talking directly to you. You realize this, using the girls.”
“I don’t think so, not even remotely.”
“In other words this never occurred to you.”
“Everything occurs to me. Some things I reject.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sara Massey.”
“Good and direct. I see her as a strong woman with roots going back a long way. Principles, convictions. Getting revenge for your illegal activities, for the fact you got caught, maybe for joining your father’s business in the first place.”
“How smart I am not to know this. What grief it spares me.”
“This sneaky-pretty woman in your words. She’s reminding you what you did. She’s talking to you. Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi. Hang Seng, Hong Kong.”
All around us, entombed in cubicles, suspended in time, reliably muted now, men with dental issues, medical issues, marital issues, dietary demands, psychic frailties, sleep-breathing men, the nightly drone of oil-tax schemes, tax-shelter schemes, corporate espionage, corporate bribery, false testimony, Medicare fraud, inheritance fraud, real estate fraud, wire fraud, fraud and conspiracy.
They started arriving early, men crowding the common room, some carrying extra folding chairs, snapping them open. There were others standing in the side aisles, a spillover of inmates, guards, kitchen staff, camp officials. I’d managed to squeeze into the fourth row, slightly off-centre. The sense of event, news in high clamour, all the convergences of emotional global forces bringing us here in a wave of complex expectation.
A cluster of rain-swept blossoms was fixed to one of the high windows. Spring, more or less, late this year.
There were four common rooms, one for each dorm, and I was certain that all were packed, inmates and others collected in some odd harmonic, listening to children talk about economic collapse.
Here, as time approached, Feliks Zuber rose briefly from his seat up front, raising a weary hand to quiet the settling crowd.
I noticed at once that the girls wore matching jackets. This was new. The picture was sharper and steadier, in colour. Then I realized they were seated at a long desk, a news desk, not an ordinary table. Finally the scripts—there were no scripts. They were using a teleprompter, delivering lines at fairly high speed with occasional tactical pauses, well placed.
“Greece is selling bonds, raising euros.”
“Markets are calming.”
“Greece is moving toward a new austerity.”
“Immediate pressure is relieved.”
“Greece and Germany are talking.”
“Votes of confidence. Calls for patience.”
“Greece is ready to restore trust.”
“Aid package of forty billion dollars.”
“How do they say thank you in Greek?”
“Efharisto.”
“Say it again, slowly.”
“F Harry Stowe.”
“F Harry Stowe.”
They exchanged a fist-bump, deadpan, without looking at each other.
“The worst may be over.”
“Or the worst is yet to come.”
“Do we know if the Greek bailout will do what it is designed to do?”
“Or will it do just the opposite?”
“What exactly is the opposite?”
“Think about markets elsewhere.”
“Is anyone looking at Portugal?”
“Everyone’s looking at Portugal.”
“High debt, low growth.”
“Borrow, borrow, borrow.”
“Euro, euro, euro.”
“Ireland has a problem. Iceland has a problem.”
“Have we thought about the British pound?”
“The life and death of the British pound.”
“The pound is not the euro.”
“Britain is not Greece.”
“But is the pound showing signs of cracking? Will the euro follow? Is the dollar far behind?”
“There is talk about China.”
“Is there trouble in China?”
“Is there a bubble in China?”
“What is the Chinese currency called?”
“Latvia has the lat.”
“Tonga has the ponga.”
“China has the rebimbi.”
“The rebimbo.”
“China has the rebobo.”
“The rebubu.”
“What happens next?”
“It already happened.”
“Does anyone remember?”
“Market plunges one thousand points in an eighth of a second.”
“A tenth of a second.”
“Faster and faster, lower and lower.”
“A twentieth of a second.”
“Screens glow and vibrate, phones jump off walls.”
“A hundredth of a second. A thousandth of a second.”
“Not real, unreal, surreal.”
“Who is doing this? Where is it coming from? Where is it going?”
“It happened in Chicago.”
“It happened in Kansas.”
“It’s a movie, it’s a song.”
I could feel the mood in the room, a pressing intensity, a need for something more, something stronger. I remained detached, watching the girls, wondering about their mother, what she had in mind, where she was leading us.
Laurie said softly, in a lilting voice: “Who do we trust? Where do we turn? How do we ever get to sleep?”
Kate said briskly, “Can computer technology keep up with computerized trading? Will long-term doubts yield to short-term doubts?”
“What is a fat-finger trade? What is a naked short sale?”
“How many trillions of dollars pledged to bleeding euro economies?”
“How many zeros is a trillion?”
“How many meetings deep in the night?”
“Why does the crisis keep getting worse?”
“Brazil, Korea, Japan, Wherever.”
“What are they doing and where are they doing it?”
“They’re on strike again in Greece.”
“They’re marching in the streets.”
“They’re burning banks in Greece.”
“They’re hanging banners from sacred temples.”
“Peoples of Europe, rise up.”
“Peoples of the world, unite.”
“The tide is rising, the tide is turning.”
“Which way? How fast?”
There was a long pause. We watched and waited. Then the news report reached its defining moment, do-or-die, the point of no return.
The girls recited together:
“Stalin Khrushchev Castro Mao.”
“Lenin Brezhnev Engels—Pow!”
These names, that exclamation, delivered in rapid singsong, roused the inmates to spontaneous noise. What kind of noise was it? What did it mean? I sat stone-faced, in the middle of it, trying to understand. The girls repeated the lines once, then again. The men yelled and clamoured, these flabby white-collar felons, seeming to reject everything they’d believed all their lives.
“Brezhnev Khrushchev Mao and Ho.”
“Lenin Stalin Castro Zhou.”
The names kept coming. It resembled a school chant, the cry of leaping cheerleaders, and the men’s response grew in volume and feeling. It was tremendous, totally, and it scared me. What did these names mean to the inmates? We were a long way from the funny place-names of earlier reports. These names were immense imprints on history. Did the inmates want to replace one doctrine, one system of government with another? We were the end products of the system, the logical outcome, slabs of burnt-out capital. We were also men with families and homes, whatever our present situation. We had beliefs, commitments. It went beyond systems, I thought. They were asserting that nothing mattered, that distinctions were dead. Let the markets crash and die. Let the banks, the brokerage firms, the groups, the funds, the trusts, the institutes all turn to dust.
“Mao Zhou—Fidel Ho.”
The aisles, meanwhile, were still and hushed—guards, doctors, camp administrators. I wanted it to be over. I wanted the girls to go home, do their homework, withdraw into their cell phones.
“Marx Lenin Che—Hey!”
Their mother was crazy, perverting the novelty of a children’s stock market report. The inmates were confused, stirring themselves into mindless anarchy. Only Feliks Zuber made sense, pumping his fist, feebly, a man who was here for attempting to finance a revolution, able to hear trumpets and drums in that chorus of names. It took a while before the energy in the room began to recede, the girls’ voices becoming calmer now.
“We’re all waiting for an answer.”
“Accordingly, analysts say.”
“Eventually, investors maintain.”
“Elsewhere, economists claim.”
“Somewhere, officials insist.”
“This could be bad,” Kate said.
“How bad?”
“Very bad.”
“How bad?”
“End-of-the-world bad.”
They stared into the camera, finishing in a whisper.
“F Harry Stowe.”
“F Harry Stowe.”
The report was over but the girls remained on-screen. They sat looking, we sat looking. The moment became uneasy. Laurie glanced to the side and then slid off her chair and moved out of camera range. Kate stayed put. I watched a familiar look slide into her eyes and across her mouth and jaw. This was the look of noncompliance. Why should she submit to an embarrassing exit caused by some dumb technical blunder? She would stare us all down. Then she would tell us exactly how she felt about the matter, about the show itself and the news itself. This is what made me want to get up and leave, to slip unnoticed out of the row and along the wall and into the dusty light of late afternoon. But I stayed and looked and so did she. We were looking at each other. She leaned forward now, placing her elbows on the desk, hands folded at chin level like a fifth-grade teacher impatient with my snickering and fidgeting or just my stupidity. The tension in the room had mass and weight. This is what I feared, that she would speak about the news, all news all the time, and about how her father always said that the news exists so it can disappear, this is the point of news, whatever story, wherever it is happening. We depend on the news to disappear, my father says. Then my father became the news. Then he disappeared.
But she only sat and looked and soon the inmates began to get restless. I realized that my hand was covering the lower part of my face, in needless parental disguise. People, a few at a time, then more, then groups, all leaving now, some crouching down as they moved between the rows. Maybe they were being careful not to block the view of others but I thought that most were slinking out, in guilt and shame. Either way, the view stayed the same, Kate on camera, sitting there looking at me. I felt hollowed out but I couldn’t leave while she was still there. I waited for the screen to go blank and finally, long minutes later, that’s what happened, in streaks and tremors.
The room had emptied out by the time a cartoon appeared, a fat boy rolling down a bumpy hill. Feliks Zuber was still in his seat up front, he and I in lone attendance now, and I waited for him to turn and wave at me, or simply sit there, dead.
I opened my eyes sometime before first light and the dream was still there, hovering, nearly touchable. We can’t do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins. A woman is standing beneath a ceiling fan in a tall shadowy room in Ho Chi Minh City, the name of the city indelibly webbed within the dream, and the woman, momentarily obscured, is stepping out of her sandals and beginning to look familiar, and now I realize why this is so, because she is my wife, very weirdly, Sara Massey, slowly shedding her clothing, a tunic and loose trousers, an ao dai.
Was this meant to be erotic, or ironic, or just another random package of cranial debris? Thinking about it made me edgy and after a moment I lowered myself from the end of the top bunk, quietly. Norman lay still, wearing a black sleep mask. I dressed and left the cubicle and went across the floor and out into the predawn mist. The guardpost at the camp entrance was lighted, someone on duty to admit delivery vans that would be arriving with milk, eggs and headless chickens from local farms. I cut across to the old wooden fence and ducked between the rails, then stood awhile, staring into the dark, aware of my breathing, surprised by it, as if it were an event that only rarely and memorably takes place.
I felt my way slowly along a row of trees that lined one side of a dirt path. I moved toward the sound of traffic and reached the highway bridge in ten or twelve minutes. The bridge itself was closed to traffic, with repairwork in perennial progress. I stood at a point roughly midway across and watched the cars speed below me. There was a half moon hanging low and looking strangely submerged in the pale mist. Traffic was steady, coming and going, pickups, hatchbacks, vans, all carrying the question of who and where, this early hour, and splashing the unwordable sound of their passage under the bridge.
I watched and listened, unaware of passing time, thinking of the order and discipline of the traffic, taken for granted, drivers maintaining a distance, fallible men and women, cars ahead, behind, to the sides, night driving, thoughts drifting. Why weren’t there accidents every few seconds on this one stretch of highway, even before morning rush? This is what I thought from my position on the bridge, the surging noise and sheer speed, the proximity of vehicles, the fundamental differences among drivers, sex, age, language, temperament, personal history, cars like animatronic toys, but that’s flesh and blood down there, steel and glass, and it seemed a wonder to me that they moved safely toward the mystery of their destinations.
This is civilization, I thought, the thrust of social and material advancement, people in motion, testing the limits of time and space. Never mind the festering stink of burnt fuel, the fouling of the planet. The danger may be real but it is simply the overlay, the unavoidable veneer. What I was seeing was also real but it had the impact of a vision, or maybe an ever-present event that flares in the observer’s eye and mind as a burst of enlightenment. Look at them, whoever they are, acting in implicit accord, checking dials and numbers, showing judgment and skill, taking curves, braking gently, anticipating, watchful in three or four directions. I listened to the air blast as they passed beneath me, car after car, drivers making instantaneous decisions, news and weather on their radios, unknown worlds in their minds.
Why don’t they crash all the time? The question seemed profound to me, with the first touch of dawn showing to the east. Why don’t they get backended or sideswiped? It seemed inevitable from my elevated perspective—cars forced into the guardrails, nudged into lethal spins. But they just kept coming, seemingly out of nowhere, headlights, taillights, and they would be coming and going all through the budding day and into the following night.
I closed my eyes and listened. Soon I’d be going back to the camp, sinking into the everydayness of that life. Minimum security. It sounded childlike, a term of condescension and chagrin. I wanted to open my eyes to empty roads and blazing light, apocalypse, the thundering approach of something unimaginable. But minimum security was where I belonged, wasn’t it? The least possible quantity, the lowest degree of restriction. Here I was, a truant, but one who would return. When I looked, finally, the mist was lifting, traffic heavier now, motorcycles, flatbeds, family cars, SUVs, drivers down there peering, the noise and rush, the compelling sense of necessity.
Who are they? Where are they going?
It occurred to me then that I was visible from the highway, a man on the bridge, at this hour, in silhouette, a man standing and watching, and it would be a natural response for the drivers, some of them, to glance up and wonder.
Who is he? What is he doing there?
He is Jerold Bradway, I thought, and he is breathing the fumes of free enterprise forever.
