A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (12 page)

In the United States, where the system flourished unfettered, the average workweek got a little longer every year, and the average person's debt grew a little bigger, his vacation shrank, and, in general, the quantity of his time and energy devoted to the acquisition and spending of money grew steadily, persistently. Which was not to say, Gabriel believed, that capitalism was bad and something else was good, but the frame of the system necessitated an illusion of meaning and order that broke down at the margins, in the most destitute parts of the world.

The stratum that Gabriel had been eyeing in the United States, the one he'd worried about his placement within, was, it turned out, a small section of a small section of an immeasurably large canyon. He was fretting over his position, measured in centimeters, at the upper rim of the Grand Canyon. And now that, by traveling to Bolivia, he'd seen this—the narrowness of his perspective, of everyone's perspective—the taut ambition that had been pulling across his throat since he was born slackened, and he could breathe right, at last, and it felt incredible. For a little while. It didn't last. It couldn't last. He had to deal with the life in front of him, not some theoretical life. So he was pushed, daily, a few inches further from his beatific moment, a little further back into a miasma of worry about "making it." Soon, he was trying to keep pace with everyone else, struggling to suppress a spike of envy when a smarmy acquaintance lined up a megabucks job at Amazon over winter break during their senior year.

Caps flew at graduation, and then Gabriel was in New York writing about international finance for
IBI.
In the morning, he shivered on a subway platform, a large coffee scalding his fingers. During work hours, he occupied a taupe cubicle. In this way, a day occurred. And another. Life proceeded. He noticed that he'd become a sidelines man, a commentator. He met the players, wrote about them. He had lunch with them sometimes too, and he never went for the bill, even though it would have been on his expense account. He liked to watch them pay.

After two years at
IBI
he'd developed a tic of Googling himself almost daily. He sought some low-grade immortality. A sign of his own footprint in the desert everyone was wandering.

Another two years like this in New York and any trace of his revelation from that trip to Bolivia was gone. Whatever he'd escaped in that first trip to Bolivia had caught up to him again and was sitting on him now. And it was heavy. And he was suffocating.

So he sent off his résumé to Calloway Group and prayed—silently, obsessively—that they'd call. He checked his e-mail every five minutes. He checked his cell-phone reception regularly, just in case. At last, on a Thursday morning, he had a message in his in box. It was from someone named Oscar Velazquez and the subject heading read simply
Calloway Group interview.
Sitting there in his cubicle, Gabriel emitted a short joyous screech.

"Everything okay?" someone nearby asked.

"Yeah, yeah," he said and bit his knuckle. He clicked on the message with his free hand.

Lenka left in the middle of the night and then Gabriel finally managed to drift to sleep. His body felt well tenderized when he awoke at seven. Though he had not slept more than a couple of hours, his mind zinged with such energy that when he stepped into the shower that morning he might as well have just freebased a two-carat marquise of methamphetamine. Her body was not skinny. It was powerful, athletic; she had an authoritative bearing.

After washing, he dressed and thought about her, about that body, the square shoulders, the wonderful ass, too grand to find its way comfortably into white-girl clothes—it was an ass that in itself made a good argument for settling down once and for all. When she walked, it swung like the pendulum of a clock in need of winding.

Breakfast was spartan: fresh fruit and a glass of purified water. He passed on the coca tea and the coffee—no need. He pissed. He shaved. He wore an incandescent yellow tie, a bright blue shirt. They had not used a condom and he had not asked her if she was on birth control, and, thinking about the various dangers he had exposed himself to, he felt dizzy with terror and pleasure, in exactly equal measures.

He went down to the business center. The computer took a long time to power up, but he wasn't impatient.

There was only one e-mail. It was from Priya, who wanted to know what the fuck he was up to, and did he have any new information to give her yet?

Yes, he wrote to her, he did. He said he'd send her a report that afternoon.

One thing he did know was that he and Lenka would make a strange couple. But so did most worthwhile couples. He was who he was, and she was who she was—an oblique but apt statement. She was, more specifically, press attaché to the future president of Bolivia, a single mother, and a woman who lived with the father of her child, that man's new wife, and her own parents. Life was complicated. Without even stepping inside that messy house of hers, he knew that she ruled the roost. She was tougher than Gabriel by a margin, but so were all of the women he had ever cared about. It wasn't that he was flimsy; it was just a somewhat predictable Oedipal event: he fell for women who, like his mother, were sturdier than he was. In fact, it was their very ability to run roughshod over him that he found alluring.

She was energetic in bed. The sex seemed to replenish her, somehow, as if the act were her photosynthesis, daylight to a sprawling kudzu. She bit and she scratched, she screeched and pinched, she kicked his backside with her heel as if he were a steed in need of encouragement. For Fiona, it had been a more straightforward thing, a brisk workout. Lenka put everything into it, body and soul, and expected nothing less in return.

A midmorning drizzle misted the window. Tiny droplets banded together into bigger drops, which succumbed to gravity and occasionally avalanched into rivulets as they approached the sill. Working on his laptop, he scoured the Internet for some agenda he could push on Priya to distract her. If he continued to produce nothing, she would fire him within a week, he thought—maybe less.

A quick tally of his track record since he came down was discouraging. So far, Fiona was the only person who had given him anything useful, so he saw little hope that he'd beat the press to the punch on the identity of the finance minister. He needed something else.

Popping around financial blogs, he found an angle that seemed promising. It was a medium-sized Brazilian natural gas company called Santa Cruz Gas. The company had sprung up in the late 1990s. In the aftermath of the privatization, a little more than half of the Bolivian gas operations had been bought up by Repsol and Petrobras, immense companies based in Spain and Brazil, respectively, but Santa Cruz Gas had a 9 percent stake in the market too. It had been founded by a mining magnate based in Singapore. Created with the hope of drawing fast dollars from international speculators, it went public six months after being incorporated. The gas was pulled across the Bolivian border to be refined and consumed by Brazilians. If Evo seized all the foreign gas operations in Bolivia, as he'd promised to do, the company would be eviscerated.

The stock, which traded on the São Paulo market, had been brought to the NYSE on a scantly traded ADR (ticker: SCZG) that waggled around $9 a share now, down $4 since Fiona had published her article about how Evo was going to win the election. The fate of the company had everything to do with Evo's decision regarding the expropriation of foreign gas.

On the phone with Priya later that day, he said, "I'm looking at Santa Cruz Gas. They have one hundred percent of their fields in Bolivia and one hundred percent of their refinement in Brazil. Expropriation would completely destroy them."

"Are you sure that Evo will expropriate the gas?"

"I don't know yet. That's what I'm trying to figure out."

"Right. I'm going to look at this."

She hung up on him.

Twenty minutes later she called back and said, "Okay, Gabriel, if you find out for certain what Evo's going to do with the gas before anyone else does, I'll double your salary this year."

He inhaled slowly, deeply. He sat down on the side of his bed.

"Really?" he said. He had just been trying to placate her and now she was hurling around ludicrous incentives. And, like any good economist, Gabriel knew there would be no free lunch, particularly with someone as astute as Priya.

"People are speculating on Bolivian gas?" he said.

"In a way." She didn't elaborate. He had to assume that she had looked into it and found that Santa Cruz was, in fact, an ideal candidate for speculation. It was that, or it was something else, probably something that he did not, or could not, fathom, some complex mathematical model generated by Paul that hinged on the outcome of Bolivian gas. There were mysteries in the fund's mathematics that Gabriel, despite his training in economics and his experience as a financial reporter, could not begin to grasp.

"You'll double my salary?" he said.

"Yes, if you get it before anyone else does. A full year's wage delivered in January."

"Okay then, um—" He tried to collect himself, think of the best way to handle the situation. It sounded bad. He didn't like the way the potential upside had doubled so quickly. It just didn't bode well for the potential downside.

When he didn't say anything else, she cleared her throat and said, "So, I want an update soon." And then she hung up on him again.

THE ELECTION TOOK PLACE exactly one week before Christmas, on a gusty Sunday. Clouds bunched up, appropriately dramatic, and scrolled across the sky too quickly. Rain occasionally splattered the window, and the sun emerged once in a while to ignite the drops clinging to the glass. By the time the voting booths opened, Evo's victory was beyond a given. The press gathered at Hotel Presidente to report on the great anticlimax. Potbellied cameramen in cargo pants and baseball caps consulted quietly with unshaven sound engineers, while comely reporters in heavy coats of matte makeup glowed nearby, scanning notes beneath painfully bright lights and tilting their satellite-dish-sized umbrellas into the wind. Meanwhile, small clusters of men with machine guns and full riot gear patrolled downtown, looking for signs of unrest. Some police loitered briefly on the corner by the Casa Cultura, beneath Gabriel's window, eating pink ice cream cones and chatting among themselves. An atmosphere both surreal and abrasively real, almost mundane, pervaded. Still, the city's mood, if such a thing could truly be identified, was hopeful, even joyful.

In Bolivia, voting was compulsory but—in what must have been a practical joke played on the electorate by the elected—driving was illegal on Election Day. So the entire country was out on foot, walking around and searching for their polling places. Absent the automotive section of the orchestra below his window, a very different tune emerged from the city, Gabriel found. Voices, separated from their snarlier accompaniment, came through much clearer. Listening to it upstairs, he noticed it sounded like a stadium just as the team took to the field.

He kept his television on a local channel all day, the volume off. The results came in resoundingly in Evo's favor. At one point, Gabriel turned the volume up and flipped through some channels. Although it had been obvious that Evo was going to win for more than a week, the reporters seemed unable to hide their lingering disbelief. All of them at some point reminded their viewers that Bolivia, which had been an independent republic since 1825 and was over 65 percent indigenous, had never elected an indigenous president.

At dusk, Gabriel watched from his window as the foreign cameramen wandered the streets, collecting stock footage that could be used in future broadcasts about "the situation in Bolivia," whatever that might be, while the rest of their crews got down to drinking Pisco Sours de Señorita Fiona, as they were now officially called, at the Lookout.

For his part, Gabriel stayed in his room, looking on from his window. He had wearied of the press corps in the past two weeks and was spending less time at the Lookout, much more time with Lenka. He could see the lights of the Lookout from his room, could see how much smoke was up there, and from that smoke he estimated that the bar was as crowded as he'd ever seen it. Fiona had probably returned from Lima; she'd be up there leading the charge. He considered going over, but quickly decided against it. He hoped Lenka would come around later, once the hullabaloo died down. They could eat room service, screw, and talk about the day.

In the two and a half weeks since they'd first slept together they had seen each other every night. They'd found a routine. He didn't reveal to her the details of Priya's challenge, but he did mention more than once that he was trying to find out more specific information about Evo's plans for the gas industry. She didn't offer anything, but that made sense to him. He believed that if his situation became dire enough, she would give him something—enough to enable him to keep his job.

Priya, fortunately, had mostly kept her distance since he'd unveiled his investigation into Santa Cruz Gas. According to Paul's calculations, the region's gas industry was pricing in a 60 percent chance that Evo would expropriate foreign gas outright, but Santa Cruz's price was buoyant, reflecting something closer to a 50 percent chance of expropriation. Paul had run the numbers in different ways and hadn't been able to figure out a cause for the discrepancy. It was precisely for situations like this that they had hired Gabriel. The math didn't make sense, so the solution had to be in a human element that they couldn't see from Weehawken.

By seven o'clock, Plaza San Francisco was packed, and the windows of the Lookout were fogged up. Gabriel glanced at the television and saw Evo speaking in front of a lectern in a square in El Alto. He was garlanded in coca leaves and flowers, wearing a black collarless jacket. Lenka was there too, in the background under bright sodium lights. It was windy in El Alto, and she squinted at the back of her boss's head, then glanced around at the crowd as her hair flapped in the gusts. She had recently applied her makeup and looked magnificent. She tried pulling strands of hair out of her eyes and tucking them behind her ears, but it was no good. Evo's microphone picked up the blaring wind in the pauses between his words. It sounded like a bonfire.