There was order all around him. His undershirts were stacked by increments of seven. His books were arranged by color. His furniture was mostly Nordic, linear. He woke up at 5:00 every morning, including Sundays, not because he was an insomniac, but because there was work to be done. He checked the weather forecast along the Mediterranean Basin; measured the tropics of terror below the 35th parallel; the corn yield in Kansas; the price of Brent crude oil at $70 a barrel; the cases of missing forests, wholly uprooted, whittled and wasted, unreported. Nature. He disliked its prickly stems, its bramble and bush, the obstinate precision of its cycles, its preconfigured calendar, the coded tapestry of its patterns, the singular and undeviating smugness of its hills standing stubbornly in the way of human progress. Before going to work he studied the atlas under a desk lamp, passing his magnifying glass over deltas, oceans and valleys. From Kabul to New York, always drifting from the periphery to the core, in precise concentric circles. At the office he stared into a luminous screen, into his precipitous and fateful future. He was chained to his Gloomberg, yet to him, the Gloomberg was more than a processor of bad news. It was a repository of the outside world; a guardian of numerical itineraries; a facilitator of greater wealth and its destruction. They called him Wayne in the financial community, though no one knows for sure if that’s his real name. There have been unconfirmed sightings at the Odeon, where someone claims to have seen him once eating with his hands, even of pissing on his plate. They are not to be believed. Rumors. They are there to be denied, or if the market is open, to be traded on. at the midtown offices of the hedge fund a heavy downpour drummed
on the windows. Then, all of a sudden, the rain stopped and a streak of sunlight broke through a cumulus cloud. Wayne looked outside. The surrounding landscape was a concentration of glass and steel, vertical gulags lost in the clouds below. Facing his electronic terminal he felt like he was in the cockpit of a fighter jet, a creature of pure movement and speed.
150 Viken Berberian