Kapitoil (2 page)

“I can carry them,” I say. But Barron is already leaving. I follow him out of the automatic doors of the airport onto American concrete, and my lungs consume the cool air that is like the initial taste of a Coke with ice.

Barron drives a black car, but it is not a limo, and the interior leather is the color of sand and feels like Zahira’s stomach when she was an infant. A photograph inside the sun-protector over his head displays a little girl with braided hair, although it is unlike the fewer and less rigid braids my mother sometimes used to produce for Zahira when our father was at the store.

In the front mirror I see Barron has a small scar above his right eyebrow, which looks like his left eyebrow in the mirror. It is like debugging a program: Sometimes you do not truly observe something until you study it in reverse.

We are on the highway now, although there is not much to see and the sun has already descended. The speedometer is at 55, the optimal rate for consuming gas, so I recall the problem on the airplane. This car is probably not efficient enough with two people to be as efficient as the airplane, but I am curious.

“Excuse me. How much gas does this car guzzle?” I ask.

“Guzzle?” Barron says. “You mean its fuel efficiency? I don’t know.”

“It is not 42 on the highway, is it?”

Barron laughs, but it does not make me feel the way it did when Brian laughed. “Not even close. But if you find one like that, let me know. They make us pay for our own gas.”

The car zooms through the streets of Manhattan like a circuit charge, and the buildings maximize as we get closer. From a distance I identify my new apartment building, Two Worldwide Plaza. On its top is a glass pyramid, and pyramids intrigue me for four main reasons:

 


1.
The Great Pyramid of Cheops is one of man’s superior ventures, yet we do not know with 100% certainty how it was constructed.


 


2.
The perimeter of the Great Pyramid divided by its perpendicular height approximately equals 2
.


 


3.
The circumference of a circle divided by its radius also equals 2
, which may or may not be a coincidence.


 


4.
Pyramids are elegant images of best practice hierarchies for organizations.

Barron deposits me at my entrance. He exits the car and angles his head back to see the building, although his perspective is from the ground, which is inferior to an elevated view. “Not bad.”

“My company is paying for it,” I say.

He removes my luggage from the rear, and I give him a gratuity. “Thank you,” I add. “I hope I have not interrupted your dinner plans.”

“No, I’ve got dinner waiting at home,” he says. “Have a good night.” He reenters the car and drives away.

The material in the entrance is made of dark wood and brass or possibly gold. All the surfaces mirror light, and there is a guard in a suit of greater quality than Barron’s behind a desk. My room is 3313, which makes me think of the RPM of records, and the record to the CD is an analog for the pyramid to the skyscraper, and although the modern invention is of course more efficient, there is still something intriguing about the obsolete device. E.g., I have positive memories of my mother playing the few Beatles records she was able to acquire in Doha when I was a child and of the sound of the instruments merging with the interference and especially of how she played them at higher volume when my father was not at home, but I do not have any positive memories of CDs, possibly because I have little leisure time now to listen, and also I do not know anyone who loves music as much as my mother did.

ASAP = as soon as possible

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: OCTOBER 10

On Monday, when I exit the elevator on the 88th floor of World Trade Center 1 (the floor number there also delights me, because 88 has perfect symmetry, as the most elegant objects and ideas do), I immediately see the
S
and
E
and the black Schrub logo of the hawk attached to the wall, as if it were trying to fly away. In the Doha office the logo is not so large and it is merely painted on the wall. This is a three-dimensional plastic object, and before I enter the office I touch the hawk briefly when no one is nearby, although a sharp corner of its wing slightly pains my finger.

A hallway curves around the main circular laboring room, and there is a small nucleus in the center of six desks in a circle. The sides of the room have sections divided by walls like the lines connecting to numbers on an analog clock, and in fact there are 12 sections called pods. Each section contains four gray desks and workers arranged in the shape of a non-compressed staple. Therefore, the workers in the center, who are the superiors, can observe the other employees at all times.

My podmates are Dan Wulf, Jefferson Smithfield, and Rebecca Goldman. Jefferson stands up to shake my hand and Dan shakes my hand from his chair and Rebecca waves. The desk assignments are:

Jefferson is the pod leader. He is very short, possibly even shorter than Rebecca, although he wears shoes that have thick soles and when he took them off later that day I saw additional cushioning in the interior, so with them he equals her vertically. His pale face has acute angles and looks like it belongs on a sculpture and shares some features with Taahir’s from Doha Human Resources, and his hair is between blond and brown. His forearms are highly defined with muscles and he frequently rolls his sleeves up to type but I hypothesize also to reveal them. Multiple postcards on the wall over his desk display the posters of Japanese movies with translated titles such as
Akira
and
Seven Samurai
and
Ikiru
. Sometimes during work he writes in a small notebook and counts with his fingers five or seven times as he moves his lips and mutely reads it.

Dan is slightly taller than I am, potentially 75 inches, although he constantly minimizes his height by not standing 100% vertically, and his dark hair is already slightly voiding on the top. He is plugged into earphones most of the time. Over his desk a framed image of the top of a mountain displays:

THE
ART
OF BUSINESS:

A
NTICIPATE, DON’T WAIT

R
EACT TO THE FACT

T
HRIVE, NOT JUST SURVIVE

Rebecca wears glasses like a turtle’s shell I once located for one of my father’s customers and her black hair is not short or tied up like the hair of the other females in the office, although you can still see her earrings, which are in the shape of dolphins. One lower tooth is misaligned with the others. Her only desk decoration is a small photograph of her with her younger brother.

Jefferson and Dan complain frequently to each other about our “minor league bitch work,” which is partially true of the Y2K project because it is repetitive and Jefferson commands me to “piggyback” on the team’s previous work and not create anything original, although I believe it is inappropriate to complain in the workplace and demoralize your coworkers. They sometimes quietly discuss other programmers and financial analysts ranked above them that they believe they have superior skills to. Rebecca does not make any negative comments about the project or other workers except on the first day when she says, “Don’t expect to receive any kudos. We’re essentially vassals here.”

However, I can tell she is not stimulated because she frequently puts her lower face in her hands shaped like a V and stares at the divider wall above her monitor.

Jefferson and Dan also recreate with a game called fantasy baseball. When they arrive at work, they analyze the previous night’s performances of the players they “own.” Typically I do not listen to them, because I do not know the players and have difficulty understanding their jargon terms. Rebecca tells me they converse about it even more now than they did during the summer because they are in a special playoff fantasy baseball league and the winner receives more money. They also make daily bets of $10 with each other on the stock market’s performance.

But I do listen to one integral conversation on Wednesday as they are leaving.

“Book it,” Dan says as he clicks his mouse. “I just traded away Bernie Williams for Scott Brosius with Tim.”

Jefferson cleans his mouth with a toothpick from a box he stores in his desk. “You was robbed.”

Dan points to a newspaper article on his monitor. “Nope. The
Post
said Williams has never had a consistent playoff run—he always burns out. Brosius was consistent in every series last year. The data’s out there. Tim’s lazy, he never looks it up.”

After they leave, Rebecca rotates her chair to me. “Do you ever just sometimes genuflect and thank Jesus that we’re privy to such scintillating conversation?” she asks.

Although I can detect most of the idea from her voice and face, I do not know the definitions of some words, so I say, “I am uncertain what you mean.”

Her small smile deletes. “Forget it, dumb joke,” she says, and she leaves so quickly for the restroom that her chair makes a 270-degree rotation afterward.

I take the subway to the Museum of Modern Art after work to utilize my free access as a Schrub employee. The business section of
The New York Times
is on the plastic subway seat next to me, and I read about a merger on Tuesday between two start-up companies that raised their stock. A merger is similar to a mutually beneficial trade, although of course there is no way an investor could know about it before it occurs without insider trading.

But possibly there is a way to predict news like this without insider trading. E.g., what if I can decipher that a merger or another major transaction will take place, via public data, and then predict if the stock will rise or plummet? Dan performed normal research for his trade, but all financial workers do this for stocks and companies, so it is difficult to gain an advantage. I can merely hope my research is the most accurate.

My brain continues to evaluate this idea as I walk through the museum exhibits. The paintings of the Dutchman Piet Mondrian intrigue me, as they look like city streets, and one of his famous paintings is titled
New York City
. His lines are perfectly straight like geometric Islamic designs and would extend infinitely if the frames did not restrict them.

Then I enter an exhibit on the American Jackson Pollock. At first I do not enjoy his paintings. They are too chaotic and have no logic and organization like Mondrian’s. I could have painted the same thing, and so could many other painters, only Pollock was the originator and therefore he receives all the kudos. Paintings of this class make me feel like I do not understand why people appreciate visual art.

But then I see some quotations by Pollock about his paintings, such as: “I don’t use the accident—’cause I deny the accident.” And I reevaluate that possibly Pollock’s paintings have more value, because he has a philosophy similar to mine, which is that life is ultimately predictable. Many people believe it is science that controls life or Allah or some other spiritual energy, and in my opinion also we do not have true free will, e.g., my conscious decisions are the product of my neurons and not my will as an independent agent. Therefore, the variables that appear to be chaotic in fact exist in the environment for us to collect and analyze and make predictions from. This is how many systems function, like the weather, and, although some people believe it is impossible, the stock market.

When I was 11, my friend Raghid kicked a soccer ball through the window of our elderly neighbor Mamdouh’s apartment. All the other children, including Raghid, ran away, which upset me since my team required only one more goal to win. But I forgot about the score and remained because the pieces of glass on the ground looked like icicles, which I previously saw photographs of exclusively, and I studied their shapes for several minutes as well as the patterns of cracks in the window that looked like spiderwebs and the parallels between the cracks and the arrangement of glass on the ground, and that is how Mamdouh detected me. My father commanded me to labor at the store until I could pay for the window. He knew I hated laboring there. I frequently complained as a child that it was too small for me to run around in, and when I was older it always bothered me how disorganized the items were.

I said it was not my fault. He asked who kicked the ball. Raghid’s family was poorer than ours, so I said I kicked it. But I also innovated a clever explanation: I argued that because events are predetermined as Qadar in Al-Lauh Al-Mahfuz, where Allah writes all that has happened and will happen, it means that it was not truly my fault.

My father said that everything we do belongs to Allah and to us equally. He also said something that I have always remembered, because I read later that it was a strategic technique for parents, as it makes the child want to enhance his behavior, and I used it with Zahira on the few occasions when she did not perform well in school.

“I am not angry with you,” he said. “I am disappointed.”

Then he made me labor twice as long at the store so I could not only repay for the broken window but also buy new Korans for both Mamdouh and me.

But merely because something is predictable and destined does not mean it is logical outside the world of numbers, e.g., a scientist with infinite resources could have predicted my mother’s breast cancer by analyzing her biological properties and her environment, but she was not personally responsible at all for becoming unhealthy, even though my father argued we are responsible for everything.

In the museum there is another Pollock quotation that intrigues me even more: “My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.” I read it just after I notice that it is difficult to focus on his paintings.

And then I have an idea, and although the typical image to represent having an idea is a lightbulb powering on, for me I visualize the stars slowly becoming visible in the nighttime sky, because
(1)
like a strong idea they were always present; but
(2)
it requires the correct conditions to observe them; and
(3)
make connections between them. My idea is: I can use Pollock’s ideas about denying the accident and about there being no center for a stock market program. Everyone else who writes programs to predict the stock market concentrates on the most central variables and incorporates a few minor ones. But what if I utilize variables that no one observes because they seem tangential, and I utilize
exclusively
these tangential variables? I would have an advantage like Dan had in his fantasy baseball trade, where he used tangential data instead of central data. And because I am a tangential foreign banker in the U.S., possibly I will have a greater chance of locating these tangential data, e.g., as a parallel, because I am not a native English speaker I must pay closer attention to its grammar, and therefore I detected the error Dan made that most Americans also make when he used “data” as a singular noun.

And possibly I will predict events that other people consider random accidents.

On Saturday morning I have my first opportunity to call Zahira when I am not too taxed and she is still awake.

“Karim!” she says. “I was wondering when you would call.”

She is probably in our living room, next to the window that overviews our courtyard and the other apartments, and sitting on the brown cotton couch which we have had since I was a child and whose material needs to be repaired.

“I have been very busy. And I have emailed you,” I say.

“Yes, but that is not the same. It is nice to hear your voice.”

It is nice to hear hers as well. She does not remember it, but her voice sounds like our mother’s: clear but soft and loud simultaneously, like warm water poured over your head. I ask her how she is performing in school, and she tells me about her biology class. It pleases me that she is engaged although I do not understand most of the jargon terms and ideas and cannot respond, except when she discusses viruses, as I mostly self-taught computers by studying viruses at night for a year when I was 18, and I was always the employee at the Doha branch who healed viruses. Biological viruses are of course not perfectly equivalent to computer viruses, but they share some theoretical similarities, and I find it intriguing that they are all self-replicating, as if they have their own brains, and it is dependent on my brain to contain and destroy them.