Limitless

There was a hint of desperation in his voice. I got the impression that he wasn’t so much talking to me as about himself. I also got the impression that he didn’t want me to leave.

I did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start day-trading and how within six months his wife had left him. He told me that he got restless and irritable whenever he couldn’t trade – like on Sundays, for example, or in the middle of the night – and that trading had effectively become his entire life. He went on to say that he was incapable of accumulating cash in his account and often didn’t even bother to open his brokerage statements.

‘Because you don’t want to face up to the extent of your losses?’ I said.

He nodded.

Then he went deeper into confessional mode and started talking about his addictive personality and how if it hadn’t been one thing in his life it had been another …

During all of this, the only thing I could think of was how sublime, how like a brief but intricate jazz solo that little fifteen-second passage of electronic commerce had been. Pretty soon, I couldn’t even make out what Holland was saying any more, not clearly, because I was gone, lost in a sudden, intoxicating reverie of possibilities. Holland, I realized, had been stumbling around in the dark, shaving off the occasional sixteenth of a point here or there, quite obviously getting it wrong more often than he was getting it right. But this wasn’t going to be the case with me. I would know what to do instinctively. I would know what stocks to buy, and when to buy them, and why.

I would be good at this.

When I eventually got away and returned to Tenth Street, my head was still reeling. But then, when I opened the door of the apartment and stepped into the living-room, I immediately felt oppressed, felt outsized – like Alice, like I’d soon be curling an arm round my head and sticking an elbow out of the window, just to fit in the place. I began to feel somewhat aggrieved, too, as though impatient that I hadn’t already made lots of money from day-trading – aggrieved and in desperate visceral need of things … another new suit, a couple of new suits, and shoes, several pairs of them, as well as new shirts and ties, and maybe other new stuff, a better hi-fi system, a DVD player, a laptop, proper air-conditioning, and just more rooms, more corridor space, higher ceilings. I had the nagging sense that unless I was moving forward, moving up, unless I was transmuting, transmogrifying, morphing into something else, I was probably going to, I don’t know, explode …

I put on the scherzo from Bruckner’s Ninth and marched around the apartment, like a one-man panzer division, muttering to myself, weighing up the options. How was I to move forward? How was I to get started? But I soon realized that I didn’t have too many options, because the money in the closet had dwindled to a few thousand dollars, which was about as much as there was in my bank account – and since, let’s face it, a few thousand dollars plus a few thousand dollars is still, for all intents and purposes, a few thousand dollars, all I had in the world, then, apart from a credit card, was a few thousand dollars.

Taking what was left in the closet in any case, I went out shopping again. This time I headed for Forty-seventh Street and bought two fourteen-inch TV sets, a laptop computer and three software packages – two for investment-analysis and one for online trading. Disregarding Bob Holland’s idea that too much information led to conflicting signals, I bought the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the latest issues of The Economist, Barrons, Newsweek, The Nation, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, Forbes, Wired, Variety and about ten other weekly and monthly titles. I also got a handful of foreign-language newspapers, ones I’d at least be able to take some kind of a stab at – Il Sole 24 Ore and Corriera della Sera, obviously – but also Le Figaro, El Pais and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.