Paradime (8 page)

Because one of the photos, the last one . . . bottom row, on the right . . .

It’s of
him
, of the guy . . . of
me
.

Fuck.

I’m about to lean forward to get a closer look when a lady with shopping bags shuffles along the car and blocks my view. The train is about to pull in at my stop anyway, and as I stand up to get off, I peer over the woman’s shoulder to try and get another glimpse of the cover, but it’s all too fast and I miss it. The next moment, I’m out on a crowded platform walking towards the exit, the train pulling away to my left.

Once I hit the street, I look around for the nearest news-stand. Ten minutes later I’m in Bryant Park with a triple espresso macchiato in one hand and a copy of
Business Week
in the other. I find a bench and sit down.

It’s definitely him.

The title of the article is ‘The Unusual Suspects: Nine Innovators with the Future in their Crosshairs’. I take a few sips of coffee, glance around at the bright, trafficky Midtown swirl, and then start riffling through the magazine, looking for the article. When I get past all the glossy ads for SUVs, watches, vodka, data storage and banks, I find it – and it is what it says on the cover, a survey of cool young business guys running cool, innovative companies. There is a two-page introductory spread, and then a page apiece for each of the so-called unusual suspects. I quickly flip to the one I’m looking for.

The first thing is the shock of the photo – this weird, dream version of me, posing, in a studio, in a suit . . . me looking handsome, confident, wealthy. And those differences I’d anticipated? Those subtle but significant variations in facial features? Not there, not visible, not that I can detect, not at all.

This really could be me.

In some fucked-up parallel universe.

I glance around me again, to make sure I’m still in
this
universe, and then I look back at the article. Scanning the text, I find it hard to concentrate, to process or retain what I’m reading, but two things stick.

His name is Teddy Trager.

And the company he runs is called Paradime Capital.

I look at the article again several times during the day, pulling the torn-out page from my back pocket and consulting it like it’s the fucking oracle at Delphi. I’d say I divide my time fifty-fifty between staring at the photograph and poring over the piece.

The photograph itself is wild because I look so much like Teddy Trager in it that every time I just
see
the image it’s as if memory cells start sprouting in my brain and I get a vague sense of having been at the photoshoot, of recalling it, of
feeling
it – the make-up retouches, the hair adjustments, the silky texture of the suit, the intensity of the lights, the constant click and whirr of the camera.
A little to the left, Teddy, chin down . . . eyes, eyes, that’s great . . .

But I wasn’t there, and I’ve never worn a silk suit, and my name isn’t Teddy. So is this how false memories form? And stick?

I don’t know.

When I reread the article there is no equivalent sense of familiarity or recognition. It’s all new to me, and alien. I mean . . . running a venture-capital company? Betting on technology start-ups? Making billion-dollar investment deals? Having significant shareholdings in Twitter, Tumblr, Paloma, Zynga, Etsy? Dating an impossibly attractive woman who runs her own tech company? I don’t think so. (The girlfriend’s name, by the way, is Nina Schlossmeier. She designs and develops mobile apps. Or her company does. Or something.) The weird thing is, the phrase ‘billion dollar’ appears three or four times in the course of the article, in connection with Teddy Trager, and yet I’ve never heard of the guy before, or his company. Can you be worth that kind of money and remain anonymous? I look him up on my phone and there’s a ton of information about him, and about Nina Schlossmeier too – but only, I suppose, if you go looking for it. The way you might go looking for information on Civil War memorabilia and find that there’s a thriving community of people out there passionate about Civil War memorabilia. Also, he’s lumped in with eight other people in this magazine piece, and I don’t know any of them either, not a single one.

I expect to see Teddy Trager in the restaurant that day. It seems like that would be fitting, that it
should
happen, but it doesn’t. And the later it gets, the less inclined I feel to look at the now crumpled-up magazine page in my back pocket, to take a hit from it.

At home, I’m tempted to pull my laptop out from under the bed (something I haven’t done since I got back from Afghanistan) and conduct an in-depth search on Paradime Capital (and its founder, and his girlfriend), but I hold off. I don’t know what this resistance is, if it’s a creeping resentment towards Teddy Trager, or just self-consciousness on my part, or embarrassment even, but the more I resist the easier it gets. In fact, before I go to bed, I tear the folded-up page into little pieces and throw it in the garbage.

On waking the next morning, however, my first thought is . . . where’s the photograph? I want to see it again. I
need
to see it again. Of course, I could conjure it up on my phone in a matter of seconds. I could print a large version out and stick it on the fridge with a magnet. I could show it to Kate and say, ‘Get a load of
this
guy.’ But I don’t do any of that. Instead, on my way to work. I stop at a news-stand and buy a replacement copy. By the end of the week I’ve bought and disposed of three more.

It’s on my next day off that I give in and pull my laptop out from under the bed. Kate is deep into her coding MOOC now – maybe using it to shut me out, maybe not, I don’t know – but I decide to give her a little space anyway. I take my laptop to a café on Third Avenue and get settled in with a sixteen-ounce latte. I put in earbuds and get started.

So.

Teddy Trager.

Right off the bat, I OD on Google images. I scroll through dozens and dozens of pictures of someone who could be me, but isn’t, and in settings – conference rooms, symposium panels, art galleries, yachts – that are too numerous and too diverse, too weird and too glamorous, for there to be any chance that my brain might trick itself into thinking I even
vaguely
remember them. Trager also looks great in most of the photos – he’s in good shape and is handsome (something I wouldn’t ever think in relation to myself). In a few of them, he’s with Nina, and they exude, I don’t know . . .
something
.

I click back to the search results and look for information, basic stuff – how old he is, for instance, his date of birth. And as soon as that thought occurs to me, so does the obvious follow-up: maybe we were born on the same day. We weren’t, as it turns out. But we are the same year. I’m April, he’s September.

Which makes me older. Technically.

Anyway, personal info on Trager is sketchy. He seems to have first appeared on the radar about ten years ago when he and a partner co-founded a tech start-up called Janus. Then they hooked up with an investor, private-equity ‘maven’ Doug Shaw, and two years later sold the company on for $1.9 billion. Trager’s original partner dropped out, and together Trager and Shaw went on to form Paradime Capital, which has since invested in countless start-ups, including some of the biggest names out there.

As I read through this stuff – articles, profiles, interviews – I find it hard to get a handle on where Trager is positioned, which side of the divide he’s on. Is he a money guy or an ideas guy? At a glance, it would seem clear-cut – Shaw is money, Trager is ideas – but I don’t think it’s ever that simple, because surely it’s a false dichotomy to begin with, surely the two sides are bound up with each other in ways that are inextricable and maybe even mysterious. But listen to Warren Buffett here, right? Because what the fuck do
I
know?

Nothing.

And what’s the best thing to do when you know nothing?

Watch some YouTube clips.

And there’s a ton of them. I’m wary at first, because with a photograph, if you see a likeness, okay, it’s there, it’s in front of you, but it’s frozen, it’s two-dimensional, you don’t really have to believe your eyes. With video – I’m assuming – it’s a different story.

Anyway, the first thing I watch is a two-year-old clip from
Real Time with Bill Maher
. Trager is on the panel alongside Nancy Pelosi and Ezra Klein, and it’s definitely him, but it’s a wide-angle shot at first. They’re talking about the economy. Maher says something I don’t catch, Pelosi laughs, and then Trager says, ‘But look, let’s not get started on these giant food companies, okay, the biotechs, and the way they’ve got everyone hooked on their trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup . . .’

After a moment or two, they cut to a close-up, and the effect – on
me
at any rate – is electrifying. I’m sort of used to the look by now, the strange familiarity of it, but there’s a density to this, a complexity, with physical movement, with his voice, that I hadn’t anticipated. If there are subtle but significant differences between us, they’re not in his appearance, they’re in his gestures, in how he sounds. When he’s talking, he does things with his hands that I would never do, little movements that make him look confident and assured. Same thing with how he uses certain words. And we have different accents too. Mine has traces of where I’m from, smoothed over but still detectable, his is Rich Person Neutral. It’s weird but in all the things that I’ve read about Trager I’ve never once seen it mentioned where he is from, but my guess is that it’s not anywhere near Asheville, North Carolina.

‘. . . and then, of course,’ he’s now saying, ‘there’s what my dad’s generation used to innocently call “the phone company”, the same people who are currently carving up any semblance of what we all once considered our private lives.’

Bill Maher smirks, throwing his hands up in mock resignation.

The clip ends, and the screen does that YouTube thing of showing the six or eight or ten relevant ones you’d maybe want to watch next, my reflection now visible against a grid of small and varied Teddy Tragers.

I hover over a couple of likely clips and pick one of Trager and his partner, Doug Shaw. They’re on the sidelines at some investment conference being interviewed by Bulletpoint.com journalist Ray Richards.

Shaw is older, mid-forties. I think I recognise him from that second time I saw Trager at Barcadero. The discussion is lively, but it’s technical, with lots of financial lingo, the kind of terms and acronyms I’ve heard a lot over the past few years but still don’t really understand. As I watch, I wonder if there isn’t a hint of tension between the business partners. Ray Richards certainly picks up on this and tries to stoke it, but Shaw sees what’s going on and quickly shuts it down.

In another clip, some money-honey type on MSNBC is quizzing Trager about his ‘passions’. He gives her what sounds like a standard spiel about how hard he works, and about wishing there were more hours in the day, but then he tells her what he’s into anyway – and what he apparently does have time for: collecting art, learning to play the cello, and white-water kayaking. ‘Another interest I have,’ he adds a little tentatively, ‘is space exploration.’

‘As in tourism?’ the interviewer asks.

‘Well, yeah, that too, but also from a business point of view . . . you know, the possibility of taking a closer look at the asteroid belt, for example. There are abundant resources out there and sooner or later we’re going to have to find a way to access them.’

I look up for a moment and glance around the coffee shop.

I’m transfixed now, and don’t want it to stop. In fact, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get enough of this shit.

I glug down some of my latte and return to the screen.

Over the next few days, I find that I really can’t stop watching and re-watching these and other clips I come across. It gets to be addictive, a compulsion, and whether consciously or not – I don’t know – I start to mimic Teddy Trager’s gestures and way of speaking.

It’s not hard either. Even the accent thing isn’t an issue. If you’ve lived in different places, if you’ve been in the military, if you’re circumspect by nature, then your accent is up for negotiation all the time. Put me in a room with my cousins or people I worked with back in Asheville and it’s only a matter of time before I’m dropping
y’all
s to beat the band. But on an FOB or in the kitchen of a fancy New York restaurant you wouldn’t know where the hell I was from. Trager’s cadence I can get pretty much with a little tinkering, and as for the gestures – there’s a hand roll, a head tilt, he’s big on eye contact – I just have to remember to include these, to space them out, and to not overdo it.

But it’s not as if there’d be consequences if I were to fuck it up. I’m alone here. I’m in a tiny bathroom. I’m looking in a mirror. No one’s watching. No one can hear me. In fact, there’s probably a clinical element to this, but who cares? As pathologies go, you’d have to consider it fairly benign. And it’s definitely making things a little easier with Kate. Maybe focusing so much now on Trager, on this strange likeness, this alignment, has quietened something in me, my anxiety, calmed the outward ripples of it. We’re not talking yet, not the way we should be – the elephant is still in the room, but he’s slouched in the corner and seems a little sedated. Kate and I are both busy, okay, we’re both working hard, and there’s a rhythm to that, sometimes a lulling one. But I’m also less tense, and therefore probably less
in
tense to deal with.

Anyway, time passes, and, inevitably, something starts to bother me, to gnaw away at my equanimity. Why is it that Teddy Trager and Nina Schlossmeier don’t show up at the restaurant any more? I can’t understand it. I take every opportunity that arises to scan the whole dining room and I even finally get to have a quick look at the bookings database. This happens one morning when I’m in the office. Stanley is outside, pacing the corridor, arguing with a supplier on his cellphone. I’m near his desk and see what’s on the screen, so I very discreetly scroll back through a few weeks of bookings. It’s only a matter of a minute or two, but I’m pretty sure I see Trager’s name all of three times, which is precisely the number of times I’ve seen him from my prep station in the kitchen – twice with Nina Schlossmeier and once with that pair of paunchy, middle-aged fucks, one of whom might have been Doug Shaw.

In one way I’m relieved to find this out. It means I haven’t missed anything, but it also means that Trager isn’t exactly a regular. Maybe he won’t be back for months. Maybe he’ll never eat at Barcadero again. Then something so blindingly obvious occurs to me that I have a hard time understanding why I’m only thinking of it now.

Teddy Trager – I’m assuming – exists independently of Barcadero. He goes to other restaurants. He has an office. He walks around. He interacts with people. He lives somewhere. So if I want to see him again, why does it have to be through the pick-up window of the kitchen where I work?

And, of course, it doesn’t.

With this in mind, I go back over all the web searches I’ve done on Trager, but this time with a slightly adjusted focus.

According to one website, Paradime Capital is a stalwart of New York’s Silicon Alley, which apparently isn’t a geographical location any more but a state of mind. Anyway, they’re based in Midtown, in an office building on Sixth Avenue somewhere in the low fifties. I track down the exact address with a quick search. Not surprisingly, Trager’s personal address is a different matter. There are references to his several ‘homes’, but nothing specific, no giveaways.

And what do I do with this information?

To begin with, nothing. I delay and vacillate, but it doesn’t take me more than a couple of days to reach the conclusion that either I forget about the whole thing and move on or I take some kind of action.

So the day after that I leave early for work and get an F train to 57th Street. The morning is sunny, and traffic is flowing along at an unhurried pace. I walk south for a few blocks and pass some of the vast corporate monoliths that line this part of Sixth. At the foot of one of these, in the middle of a small plaza, a tourist is leaning backwards, trying to comprehend – it would seem – the scale of the massive object before him. This is the Tyler Building, home to Paradime Capital. The next building along has a similar plaza in front of it with a fountain at its centre. I keep walking, and, as I get closer to the fountain, the sound of its gushing water gradually emerges from the blanket roar of the traffic.