The Mark and the Void Read Online Free Page B

more circumspect. ‘Some bloke following you around, writing down everything you do?’
    ‘What’s
weird
is that it hasn’t happened before,’ Kevin says. ‘When you think about it, there ought to be a lot more novelists wanting to write books about banks.’
    ‘But he’s not planning to slag us off, is he?’ Ish says. ‘You know, say we’re all wankers and fat cats and so on.’
    ‘He told me it was going to be a balanced account of life in a modern investment bank,’ I tell her. ‘He said he wanted to find our hidden humanity.’
    ‘It is about time bankers were recognized by the art world,’ Jurgen says. ‘Given that we buy most of the actual art, it is frustrating to be continually misrepresented by it.’
    ‘So are you going to do it?’ Ish asks.
    ‘I haven’t decided,’ I say.
    ‘You have to do it!’ Kevin expostulates. ‘Tell him I’ll do it if you don’t want to.’
    ‘As your superior, I think you should do it, Claude,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘Though of course the final decision remains with you.’
    He adds that, while I am making up my mind, he will ‘get the ball rolling’ by running it by the Chief Operating Officer; before
I can protest, he has trundled away. Maybe Rachael will say no; I decide to put it out of my mind until I hear back.
    I return to my desk, feel the familiar thrill in my viscera as I sit down in front of the terminal. Here is the market: the whole world represented in figures, a tesseract of pure information. The media like to portray bankers as motivated purely by greed, but this is not quite accurate. There are those who do it for the money, it’s true – who like miners or deep-sea divers bury themselves miles below the surface of things, far from the light and everything they love, in order to return laden down with riches. But there are others who do it for the god’s-eye view; those for whom the map has become the territory, for whom the market’s operations as represented on the screen appear more complex than life itself, deeper and more intricate, bringing their own vertiginous intelligence to the brute facts of the world in the same way that a painting of a landscape magnifies its beauty by placing in a frame of consciousness the thoughtless doings of nature. For these latter sort, the highs of the best drugs are shadows next to the exhilaration they get from the shifting fields of numbers: rice growers in Henan, car manufacturers in Düsseldorf, pharmaceutical research firms in Cork and Montevideo, condensed, compressed, interacting with each other in ways of which they themselves have no conception, like molecules hurtling and dancing and colliding under a microscope.
    Ish is an anomaly – not of the god’s-eye-view sort, but not especially interested in money either, other than what she needs to pay for her apartment, which she bought off the plans during the boom at a price she now admits may have been extravagant even for an investment banker.
    ‘Any word from the Uncanny Valley?’ she asks me now.
    ‘You are sitting here beside me, you know there is no word.’
    ‘Oh, right.’ A moment later she pipes up again. ‘Hey, Claude?’
    ‘If this is again a question about the book, the answer is “I don’t know.” ’
    ‘It’s not about the book, it’s about the movie of the book.’
    ‘…’
    ‘Well, if they make a film of it, will I get a say in who plays me? I mean, I don’t want them to pick some old boot?’
    The morning drags on with no response from Rachael. Shortly before noon, however, a shadow looms up behind me.
    ‘Crazy Frog, what the cock are you telling custies about Tarmalat?’
    ‘I am telling them that Tarmalat is carrying heavy exposure to Greek sovereign debt,’ I reply, ‘and there’s no way they’re going to hit their target.’
    ‘I’m trying to
sell
them Tarmalat, you fucking dunce!’ The muscles in his neck, which are extensive, bunch out like the mast lines of a ship at full sail. ‘I’ve got two