And youre right, the SEC did fix it so that internal causes couldnt pull the rug out again. But protection against external events is virtually impossible. What are they going to do, tape that damn analysts mouth shut? Trading limits cant stand up to massive redemptions from mutual funds. They can slow it down, maybe; but once its got momentum, they cant stop it. On top of that, there was some kind of atmospheric interference today, sunspots or something, that caused safeguard equipment to fail. Just a lot of bad luck, basically. Probably because I was so heavily invested.
When Belford had admonished you for taking the crash personally, you laughed as if youd been joking-but you had been partially serious. There are people, you have noticed, who have money genes. Posner, for example. Even Belford. It isnt that they always inherit fortunes, although they are inclined to do that, too; but that they are genetically disposed toward wealth, connected to it on a molecular level. Theres an extra, golden chromosome attached to the helix of their DNA, and it attracts money the way that a chipped or blemished chromosome will attract disease. You were not born with it, alas, and attempts to have it implanted have inevitably resulted in rejection. The grafts wont hold. Therefore, in order to keep your system green, you are forced to have regular, frequent, painful injections. Might it have been different had your daddy been Ferdinand Marcos rather than Ferdinand Mati, had your mom cared less for poetry? Maybe. As it is, however, you relate to cash the way a diabetic relates to insulin: absorb it artificially at a particular rate or run the risk of shock. Even then, you experience periodic allergic reactions, as if your white corpuscles have been mobilized to fight dollars off.
In any event, talking about the crash in a broad, somewhat objective fashion had made you feel better. Inspired, youd been ready to treat Belford to a rehash of the Gwendolyn Mati theory of economic riptide-what happens when the push and pull of concentrated wealth collides with the stagger and swoon of excessive poverty and why it is imperative that you in the middle class swim like hell toward the channel of prosperity-but the Lincoln had arrived downtown, and its driver had become distracted by the very real, nontheoretical spectacle of poverty in the streets.
You had kissed your fingertips-a totally safe practice since your nails are chewed down to the quick-and touched them to Belfords busted lip. What color was the striping on that mallet, did anybody notice? Would it ever be employed again in a sunny Sunday afternoon of croquet on the duplex lawn, the postman and his wife paired off against in-laws or friends, calm now, reconciliated, concentrating on wicket angles; while half a block away, hunkered down behind the wheel of a parked car, her lover glowers through dark glasses; and high up in the spire of a cedar, his eyes burning like joss sticks, his carat-sensitive fingers parting his fur in a silent harvest of fleas, a monkey also is spying?
You had wanted to share this vision of AndrEs whereabouts (a premonition-or have you been made silly by your association with Q-Jo?), but Belford had been busy, cooing to the underprivileged as if they were his own baby kin, so youd slipped away and rounded the corner of Union Street to rummage for one more frayed piece, perhaps, in the solid gray jigsaw puzzle of your destiny.
Now, as you near the Bull&Bear, a banks digital reader board informs you that the temperature is forty-nine degrees, the hour exactly midnight. The watershed hour. The volatile stroke. Superstitions chime. Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smoky honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign.
TWELVE OH-ONE A.M.
The affable Sol Finkelstein and the even more affable Phil Craddock are standing on Sixth Avenue, in front of the Bull&Bear. If they have been out here for a while, it would explain why they didnt come to the phone. It is hard to imagine what would keep them in the night air so long, but happily, as far as you can tell, neither of them is barking at the moon.
Great! you think. Now you wont have to go inside, breathe more tobacco fumes, face Posner, or encounter that Larry Whats-his-name, that geek who has managed to ingrain himself in your bladder so that every time you take a pee (pardon your French), his portrait wafts up from between your knees.
Hi, guys.
Phil nods to you, but Sol looks away. Thats odd, but then it is apparent that they are both quite drunk.
Listen, Ive been tied up at my PC, you lie, correlating historical performance rhythms with debt levels to see if I can get a higher resolution on a recovery scenario, and I guess I worked right through the Nikkei close, silly me. Can you tell—
How long you been in this business? Phil interrupts.
Me? In the business?
Uh-huh.
Four years.
Phil grins at Sol. Sol rolls his eyes.
When youve been in the market four years, you think you know everything there is to know. When youve been around twenty years, you realize you dont know shit. Am I right, Sol?
Never knew shit. Never will.
Where is this coming from? Must be whiskey, the great ventriloquist. You force a smile. Okay, Ill bear that in mind. But Im still understandably anxious for the numbers from—
Ill tell you something, little lady. Sol and me are the only ones in the firm who can stand you.
Right, says Sol. He looks you in the eyes for the first time. And we hate your guts.
TWELVE OH-THREE A.M.
As you hurry away, lips trembling, eyelids slapping down every teardrop that pokes its head out of a duct, you hear a voice call after you, the voice of Ann Louise.
Churn and burn, baby, she calls. Churn and burn.
TWELVE OH-SEVEN A.M.
Folded like a sack of kittens over the wheel of your Porsche, you sob until you can sob no more. Then you sob some more. You havent cried like this since your mother died. Not even the kiss-off from Harvard and Wharton pumped this much tearwater. When at last you feel composed enough to drive, you squeal out of the parking garage, your nose in a Kleenex, your blurry eyes on the road. You head straight home, monkey mission aborted, as far as you are concerned.
You do telephone Belford as soon as you let yourself in. Hell worry when you dont show up at the rendezvous point, and you dont want him calling you, catching you unaware and detecting pain in your voice. As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the call of nature will be answered by a machine. For the time being, however, one must attend to it personally, but you wait until you have brushed your teeth and creamed your face before you brave that final pee of the day and the name that it surely will sing in the bowl. Just back from Timbuktu.
You dig out your old flannel pajamas for the comfort that is in them, put them on, and pad to the bed, stopping en route to empower the TV set and switch its channel to CNN. Good grief, Gwen! There is something in you that just wont let go.
Sure enough, before five minutes have passed, there is a report on the market crisis. You feel embarrassed and amateurish, you feel marginal, to be relying on public media for market information, but at least youre no longer in the dark. Hong Kong suspended trading, you learn, Singapore and Taipei remained active and were beaten to a pulp. The news from Tokyo is as oddly inconclusive as it had been earlier. Down, yes, but still not lower than Godzillas kneecaps. What to make of the Nikkeis relative buoyancy? The announcer quotes an analyst as guessing that it could be because of the revenues expected to be generated by Dr. Motofusa Yamaguchis cancer cure, revenues that the good doctor has promised to spread evenly throughout the Japanese health sector (drug companies, hospitals, medical suppliers), and from which other stocks (transportation, hotels, banks, etc.) are bound to benefit.
Well, there you have it. Rather indefinite, but it could be worse. Whether or not Tokyos relative resilience will help ease our own financial crisis remains to be seen, the announcer says. We wont begin to know before Monday morning-and thats a long Easter weekend away.
Mea
nwhile, in Seattle, Washington, Dr. Yamaguchi met the American press on Thursday evening, and the suddenly famous Hokkaido clinic director had something, ah, unusual to say. Stay tuned.
You switch off the television and slide into bed. Ah! No sweetness like the sweetness of smooth, clean sheets. No protection quite so arrow-proof as a fluffy quilt. Hardly has your head dented the pillow, however, than you slide out and turn the set back on.
ONE OH-SIX A.M.
When news seeped out nearly nine months ago that a physician at an obscure clinic on Japans northernmost island was curing colon cancer on a routine basis, the word quack was pronounced so often, the international medical community sounded like a duck farm. Eventually, as more and more cures were documented and as Motofusa Yamaguchis theories, if not his methods, were made public, experts conceded that there was some scientific validity to the program at Fugetsudo Clinic but insisted that Yamaguchis work was only experimental and that the marketing of experimentation as approved treatment was unethical, constituting as it did a profit-motivated exploitation of the desperate and the ill. The fact that Fugetsudo translates as the wind and the moon reduced nobodys suspicions, although why a simple reference to the natural world should foster mistrust in a profession founded upon observation of nature was a mite unclear.
Nevertheless, the healings continued. The tabloids were full of them. Should Princess Di give birth to a three-headed baby, the story would play second fiddle to the latest Yamaguchi miracle-unless one of the heads belonged to Elvis Presley, of course. The reticence of The New England Journal of Medicine on the subject was exceeded only by the reticence of Yamaguchi himself.
It turned out that Dr. Yamaguchi was not marketing his cure, nor was he refusing treatment to those without means. In a rare interview granted to Texas Monthly-he had received his medical training in Houston-he professed a willingness to share his discovery with the scientific world as soon as it was technically feasible to do so: it was not quite as easy, he said, as chalking a secret formula on a blackboard or handing over the blueprints for some machine. Paradoxically, he hinted that his treatment was so straightforward that a layperson could comprehend it. If his former patients understood it, however, they were as inscrutable as their physician. Not one of them had anything revealing to divulge to the prying press, although this may well be attributed to the opium with which Yamaguchi admittedly anesthetized them. A gentleman from Kyoto did make reference to a ninja enema, a phrase that delighted tabloid editors as much as if they had invented it, but serious parties dismissed the reference as further evidence of the inadvisability of opium as a clinical sedative. Or else something that got terribly lost in translation.
In time, Fugetsudo Clinic was overrun, the town of Kushiro was overrun, the island of Hokkaido was overrun. The genuinely afflicted were exceeded in number by the self-diagnosed and the hypochondriacal, and those were exceeded by reporters and entrepreneurs. Logistical problems became so immense that they forced the clinic to shut down altogether. Yamaguchi said he would confer with his nations leaders about what to do next.
Meanwhile, people were dying. Colon cancer is the second most common deadly form of malignancy; only cancer of the lungs takes more lives. Victims and their families put pressure on the U.S. government to import Dr. Yamaguchis technology but the National Institutes of Health turned a plugged ear, and the Food and Drug Administration would only cluck about Yamaguchis regrettable use of smokable opium. As for the highly politicized, highly competitive American Cancer Society, it seemed openly pleased that Fugetsudo Clinic was out of business. Out in Seattle, however, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center took a more positive, open-minded approach. They were impressed both with Yamaguchis results and his expressed knowledge of MCC, a newly discovered gene that, in its normal state, produces the protein that regulates colo-rectal cell growth, but when defective, acts as an impetus to polyp and tumor formation. Hutchinson gambled and sent a team of investigators to Japan. When it returned the previous month, it proclaimed, with only token hesitation, what even the Japanese Health Ministry, although increasingly enthusiastic, was reluctant to admit: Motofusa Yamaguchi could cure cancer of the colon.
How? Well, the Hutchinson researchers were not completely certain. There were still many questions. However, Dr. Yamaguchi had consented to appear at a conference to be hosted by Hutchinson in early April-yes, the man who would leave his clinic only for late-night walks in the woods was coming to Seattle!-and perhaps he would explain everything then. Meanwhile, let us rejoice.
And now here he is. Meeting the press upon his arrival at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. A heros welcome. Strobe-flash fireworks. City fathers jostling to get into every picture. Lots of American flags, as if America is so desperate for something to feel good about, it will try to transform a foreigners medical breakthrough into an excuse for a patriotic rally.
Not much to look at, you think, as a man, short, fiftyish (about your dads age and height, though lacking your dads ponytail), in a nondescript business suit, blinks and smiles shyly at the big bouquet of microphones that is being shoved stem by nodding stem in his face. When he speaks, his voice is as strong as his build is slight; his reasonably fluent English is lightly barbecued with a Texas drawl. His front teeth, now revealed, are the size and color of sugar cubes, and he has the odd habit of periodically tapping them with a Bic lighter that he seems to carry for no other purpose.
ONE OH-SEVEN A.M.
(Prerecorded and rebroadcast)
Thank you, thank you. I am happy as catfish in muddy water to visit in U.S. again. Thank you. Dr. Yamaguchi taps his teeth with the Bic.
You are having many questions. As time pass, I will try best, my best, to answer them each one. Pause. Tap, tap. But we must bear in our minds that best of answers is not always reliable. Answers can be open to interpretation. Answers are tricky things. Yamaguchi says things the way a Texan would. Thangs. It is rather disconcerting.
Yamaguchi widens by a centimeter or two his almost painfully shy smile. Please indulge me to tell a small story. In the eighth century there lived Joshu, a great patriarch of Zen. One day, a monk ask Master Joshu, Does a dog have Buddha-nature, Master? Pause. Tap.
Does a dog have Buddha-nature? To that, Master Joshu was said to answer, Wu.
Now, please, wu is in Chinese language a negative response. Negative. No, yes? But the word have many fine shades of meaning. Many nuance. So, depending upon inflection, subtle nuance in pronunciation, wu could mean absolutely not or probably not or possibly not or usually not. Could mean emphatic no or could mean Am rather incline to doubt it.
So, for twelve hundred years, scholars have argue. Exactly what did Master Joshu intend by wu? What inflection, what shade of meaning? Twelve hundred years, they argue and argue. But I am here to tell you. Long pause. No tap. Dr. Yamaguchi is, in fact, gripping the Bic with both hands.
When ask if dog have Buddha-nature, master did not answer, Wu. That is big misunderstanding. When ask if dog have Buddha-nature, master answer, wuf!
For a second, Dr. Yamaguchi beams merrily at the reporters and dignitaries. Then he throws his head back until the slits of his eyes are pointing toward the ceiling. Wuf! he barks. Wuf! Wuf! Wuf! Wuf! Wuf!
FIVETHIRTY A.M.
Sears, Philip Morris, Merck, General Electric, American Express, Coca-Cola, International Paper, AT and T …
You are sitting on the side of your bed, eyes closed, breath shallow, little titties still rising and falling to the tempo of sleep, but you are reciting the Dow Jones Industrials just as you have first thing every morning since you were a sophomore in college.
… Alcoa, Du Pont, McDonalds, Exxon, General Motors, Texaco, Woolworth, Boeing, Goodyear Tire …
On the West Coast, stockbrokers must begin work early in the day in order to be in sync with Wall Street time. At the university, you trained yourself to awaken at five-thirty a.m., even though your first class was not until nine. Wake. Swing bare feet out and plant
on floor. Chant.
… Union Carbide, United Technologies, Chevron, Three M, Eastman Kodak, Westinghouse, Walt Disney, Procter and Gamble …
You were strict from the start. The morning after you lost your virginity-you were a junior then-it was, Sears, Philip Morris, Merck, General Electric, etc., while the boy, a rugby star (you would have preferred a golfer, frankly), lay there dumbfounded, wondering if he had deflowered a saint or a kook: he was young enough to think there was a difference. At Exxon, you felt a warm trickle down your inner thigh, and for a moment you were dumbfounded, too.
There was a time when recitation of the list expressed a sacred passion. Behind the pennaceous curl of your long lashes, you entertained visions of golden smokestacks, taller than the Himalayas, saluting the heavens with holy smoke; of tires that turned like prayer wheels, of cash registers that chimed like temple bells, of vats of molten metals illuminating the void. The incense of distant pulp mills enlivened your pious nostrils, your being was enveloped by that Buddhistic calm that only a substantial line of credit has the power to sustain. Today, you remain in awe of the Dow and its throbbing green aura, but, like Grandma Mati running laps around her rosary beads, you have come to invocate its pantheon by rote.
Caterpillar, J. P. Morgan, Bethlehem (in whose steel manger an exalted profit was born), I … B … Mmmmmm. You always save IBM-poor old Big Blue-for last, because of its long-held position of honor in the hagiographic hierarchy and because the energizing manner with which its mantric syllable reverberates in your diaphragm serves to alert the frontiers of your consciousness and shake you fully awake. I … B … Mmmmmm. As the final droning m rumbles out of your torso and into the ether, your eyes slowly open, and you face the world. But not for long.