The 25th Hour (3 page)

Slattery narrows his eyes but continues to peruse the screens, refusing to acknowledge the taunts. Marcuse, far from being deterred, continues. ‘You’re not going to disobey a direct order, are you? That could get you thrown in the brig. They’ll have you on KP duty for years.’

‘You want to back off and let me work? Okay? I don’t come into your bedroom and tell you how to fuck your wife, do I?’

Marcuse mimes wiping a tear from his eye. ‘I thought you liked my wife.’

‘I do like your wife. The fact that she married you is a big strike against her.’

‘Getting a little testy, huh, Frank? Hey, I’m on your side. We’re all working for the same team, right?’

Slattery rolls backward in his chair and looks up at Marcuse. ‘I’ve got work to do, so do me a favor, would you? Just do me a favor and shut up. Whatever happens, happens; it’s got nothing to do with you.’

‘You got it, Frank,’ says Marcuse, winking. ‘Give ’em hell.’

If it all goes sour, thinks Slattery, I will jump that partition, break three of his ribs, and console myself pummeling him till the security guards arrive and throw me out the door. The others on the floor would never interfere. Marcuse is widely detested, from the receptionists to the vice presidents, though redeemed in the eyes of the firm as a proven profit maker. If Charlie Manson showed a knack for picking stocks or trading bonds, every house on Wall Street would lure him with extravagant offers.

Slattery closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. He knows this is fatal –
never allow personalities to distract you from a numbers game
– but how do you ignore a Marcuse, a man convinced that his rise depends upon Slattery’s fall? It would be so much easier to leap over the partition, seize him by the throat, demand respect. A little violence to alleviate the pressures of civilized behavior, that’s all.

Slattery has a hard time letting things go. At night he often dreams of avenging slanders real or imagined, wakes with a feeling of satisfaction, of justice, only to realize that the vindication is mere fantasy, the wrongs still unrighted. All the men he has not fought but should have. One time when Slattery was drinking at closing hour, a bouncer said, ‘Time’s up. Out.’

‘Let me just finish my beer.’

The bouncer knocked the glass from Slattery’s hand. ‘You’re finished.’ Two other large men came over, flanking their co-worker.

‘What the fuck was that for?’ asked Slattery.

‘Do something,’ said the bouncer. Slattery did nothing. He left the bar and walked home and has been cursing himself ever since.

Or the mad-eyed man on the R train, who cursed when Slattery accidentally stepped on the man’s foot. Slattery had promptly apologized but the man thrust his damp face inches from Slattery’s eyes. ‘You want to throw with
me
, motherfucker? You want to throw with
me
?’ Slattery had turned and walked away and the man hollered at his back, ‘That’s what I thought, motherfucker. You better run!’

That was ten years ago. Slattery was seventeen. Any rational New Yorker would have walked away from that fight –
never brawl on the subway: never brawl with a lunatic
– but Slattery is unconsoled by his rationality. He replays the encounter in his mind time after time, imagining the perfect response – the perfect right hook, the perfect double-leg takedown, the perfect head butt. But the mad-eyed man is gone, untouchable.

What Slattery wants is a ring painted on concrete in the empty desert. With no living spectator around for miles, just him and the grinning demons. A chance to fight them each, one by one – the bouncer, the mad-eyed man, all of them – to leave them broken and humbled, or even to lose the fights, but with nobility, and earn the respect of all the men who have showed him none. I want peace, he thinks to himself late at night. I want peace. But then he dreams of fistfights.

Even in the cool, sterile environment of the bank’s offices, these brute reveries disturb his concentration. By force of will he returns to the numbers, the endless quotes and codes of money abstracted. Working out the odds, calculating the percentages, slicing and dicing – you begin to forget the immensity of the transaction, that every fractional uptick or downtick represents a mansion by the Englewood cliffs. Slattery has no time for such considerations. Start admiring the vastness of the forest and a tree will surely fall on you, bashing your skull for the crime of perspective.

Slattery considers himself a code-breaker, spends his hours deciphering the endlessly scrolling information. Market performance, rate of inflation, economists’ predictions, politicians’ pronouncements, inventories, weather conditions, consumer mood swings – all play a role in determining the outcome. As a scholar of Cabala peruses the books of Moses, certain that a world of prophecy is contained within every letter, so Slattery scrutinizes his own chosen text. He refuses to believe that any other interpretation of the numbers can be valid. No one else is privy to his calculations, his formulae, his elaborate system for devising predictions.

Phelan, a new kid, eight months out of college, walks by with a cup of coffee, waving a fax sheet. ‘Sollie’s looking for a big number, two hundred, maybe two-twenty. That’s the word.’

‘Fuck Sollie,’ says Slattery.

Phelan pauses, blinks, looks down at the fax sheet and back at Slattery. ‘Fuck Sollie?’

‘Nobody’s looking to do us any favors, Phelan. They don’t give us anything they think we can use. You’re wearing a striped shirt and a striped tie.’

Phelan examines his outfit. ‘Yeah? Is that bad?’

‘You look like a fucking optical illusion. Go away.’

At eight-twenty the futures trading begins. The floor becomes frantic with activity, everyone barking orders into their phones, calling up numbers on computer screens, stealing quick glances at the bow-tied reporter on the television, the man who will release the employment number. Slattery picks up a telephone and begins speaking to the dial tone.

‘Slattery!’ Lichter stands in the doorway of his office, a real office with walls and windows. ‘We’re good?’

Slattery nods and gives the thumbs-up, continuing his bogus conversation. If the number comes out two-twenty, he calculates, we’re losing one and a half million. The equivalent of his father’s total career earnings, forty years’ wages, evaporated. He ignores the man on television reading from his script. The number will appear on Slattery’s primary monitor the second it is known. He stretches his left leg and feels the cartilage creaking; he hangs up the phone and waits.

Marcuse pops his head up again and Slattery longs to club the miserable bastard like a baby seal. ‘Good thing you got rid of those suckers. Looks like a huge number on the way.’

‘You want to bet on that?’

Marcuse smiles broadly. ‘I think we already have.’

‘A little side wager, just you and me.’

‘How much are we talking about?’

‘I don’t want your money,’ says Slattery. ‘The loser has to shine the winner’s shoes, right here on the trading floor, every Monday for the month of February. In front of everybody. Down on your knees, shining my shoes.’

‘For the whole month?’

‘You can handle it; it’s the shortest month of the year. In or out?’

Marcuse considers for a moment, chewing on his pencil’s eraser. ‘What’s the high/low?’

‘Call it one-ninety.’

‘Mm, no. I could see one-eighty-five.’

Slattery shakes his head. ‘You’re a cocksucker, Marcuse. You’re looking two, two-twenty, and you know it. Fine, call it one-eighty-five.’

Marcuse grins, extends his hand, and Slattery shakes, completely aware that he’s acting like an imbecile.
Never gamble angry
. Slattery wipes his monitors clean with a tissue, taps the side of his keyboard. He closes his eyes and wills a low number. One-ninety I’m fine, even if I lose this stupid bet. I’ll take a loss but it won’t be a bad loss; Lichter will chew me out but it won’t be a bad chewing out. Two-twenty and I’ll be lifting girders from the cab of my crane come summertime.

A commotion of shouts and groans riles the floor. Slattery opens his eyes and stares at his monitor, blinks, and checks the television screen for confirmation. From behind the partition he hears Marcuse hollering into his phone. Across the floor someone yells, ‘Stop out of that, Schultz, get the fuck out!’ And someone else: ‘We’re going for a ride!’

In the month of January, one hundred and thirty-eight thousand new jobs were created, some seventy thousand fewer than had been predicted. Slattery watches his computer screen, dazed, as the treasury prices gap up, screaming forward without stopping for breath. In nine minutes the bond contract jumps two points. Slattery makes a phone call and leans back in his chair, swallowing hard. One thousand contracts at one hundred thousand dollars a pop, a one-hundred-million-dollar position. Two full points. A two-million-dollar profit in nine minutes.

He stands and sways slightly, bright points of light swarming before his eyes. He can sense Marcuse cringing behind the partition, waiting for the gloating to begin, but Slattery is too grateful, too relieved, to care about Marcuse. He walks slowly from the giant room, leaving the hysteria behind, and makes his way to the far side of the building, to the eastern-aspect windows. Brooklyn is hidden by rows of tall buildings but Slattery knows it’s out there, coiled and waiting. He closes his eyes and kisses the plate glass.

Three

‘The Turks used to strap metal baskets on the crotches of their war prisoners. With a live rat in the basket. Can you picture it? What’s a rat to do? He chews his way to freedom, chews through scrotum, sinew, fat. Imagine his gut-wet head peeking up from the prisoner’s belly. Imagine that.’ LoBianco laughs. ‘Nobody wanted to wage war with the Turks.’

Jakob marks a 73 in red ink on top of a vocabulary quiz and copies the number into his grade book. He checks his watch, caps his pen, stacks his papers on the sofa, and turns to examine LoBianco, who sits on the far side of the faculty lounge beside an unlit lamp, his gray hair cropped close to the scalp, his long earlobes dripping down toward his narrow shoulders. A bulletin board behind him is posted with announcements: department meetings, requests for dance chaperones, reminders of bus duty, the weekly lunch schedule.

‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ Jakob asks.

‘To prevent me from reading,’ says LoBianco, brandishing a sheaf of blue-book student essays. ‘One more paragraph about the heroism of Atticus Finch and I’ll have an aneurysm.’ He sighs. ‘Thirty years I’ve taught that book. I’d like to sic the Turks on Harper Lee. That would be something to see. I’m sure they had special techniques for the women.’

Jakob runs an untrimmed fingernail between the wales of the beige corduroy sofa. He’s wearing his father’s old tweed blazer, a size too large, the elbows streaked with chalk dust. Thirty years, he thinks. Thirty years divided into trimesters and school holidays, thirty years of cafeteria lunches and bad coffee, afternoon detention and faculty meetings. A lifetime segmented into periods one through eight.

Outside the lounge the bell rings and the school building surges with noise, the percussion of boot heels on linoleum, the shouts of roughhousing boys stomping down the staircase, an impromptu choir of girls in the hallway singing the theme song from a television sitcom.

‘Listen,’ whispers LoBianco. ‘The little monsters are free.’

‘Tell me again, Anthony. Why did you become a teacher?’

‘The many opportunities for child molestation.’

Jakob laughs and shakes his head. ‘When I was a student I always wondered what you guys talked about in here. Something profound, I figured. Poetry. Deering hears you joking like that . . .’ He pantomimes throat-cutting with his finger.

‘They can’t fire me. I’m the only one here who knows how to teach grammar.’

The door swings open and a girl leans into the room, her eyes rimmed with dark makeup. ‘Hey, Elinsky. I have to talk to you.’

‘Did you hear a knock,
Mr
Elinsky?’

‘I certainly did not, Mr LoBianco,’ Jakob replies.

‘Miss D’Annunzio, you have not been invited to join us. Please depart.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ The door slams shut. Three knocks.

‘Who’s there?’ asks Jakob.

‘Mary.’

‘Mary who?’ Silence. Jakob sighs. ‘She can’t think of a punch line. Come in.’ Mary reenters the room and stands sullenly in the doorway. ‘Oh, Mary
D’Annunzio
. What a pleasant surprise.’

‘You have a minute, Elinsky?’ She looks over at LoBianco, who clears his throat dramatically. She rolls her eyes. ‘
Mr
Elinsky?’

Jakob stands, smiling. ‘Sure, of course. What’s up?’

‘I wanted to ask you about something.’

‘Okay. Let’s go to my office. Mr LoBianco, a cup of coffee in half an hour?’

‘Let’s make it an hour, Mr Elinsky. I need to speak with Mr Deering.’

Jakob’s office is a classroom he shares with another teacher. A rusted radiator gurgles under the window. Crooked words cover the blackboard – three years as an English teacher and Jakob is still incompetent with the chalk. A photograph of Mayakovski declaiming to the masses is pinned to the bulletin board above selected student writings.

‘All right.’ Jakob seats himself on the edge of his desk, gestures Mary toward a chair. He tries to assume a stern expression but knows it’s useless. LoBianco can silence a rowdy classroom with a raised eyebrow; Jakob wants to run for the door when his freshmen begin hollering and throwing paper air-planes out the windows. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I want to know why I got a B-plus on this story.’

‘Okay, first of all—;’

‘Nobody else in this class can write,’ says Mary, her fingers playing over the punk-rock band names written in silver marker on the binder she bounces on her knees. ‘You know it too; don’t start—;’

‘Don’t worry about everyone else. You’re not competing with them.’

Mary snorts. ‘Yeah, but I
am
, okay? I
am
competing with them. When I apply to colleges – you might have heard about this – they look at these things called grades. And if your grades aren’t good—;’