This Is How It Really Sounds (7 page)

He bought the gear, all brand-new and top-of-the-line, getting advice from his friends on climbing skins and
randonnée
bindings. He bought an avalanche transceiver and a special backpack to keep him on the surface if things cut loose under him. Then he spent a week skiing his new gear inbounds and wearing his beacon strapped to his torso like it was the shiniest piece of bling in the universe. His friends wouldn't take him until he'd practiced with the beacon, and he became adept at reading the numbers on the display and following the arrows to the target that simulated a buried skier, though it was impossible not to imagine that buried skier as himself and to marvel at how long it took to find someone, let alone dig them out.

He did a shakedown run with Dave, one of the locals he'd befriended. They climbed for two hours to a nearby peak and skied it carefully, and a few days later they climbed a steeper one. He learned how to use an ice ax and practiced self-arrests by hurling himself backward down steep slopes. He did well enough that Dave invited him to join a trip to a much higher peak. It was a three-hour climb from the road, and in flat light or low visibility could be, in Dave's words, “sketchy.” They'd go with two other young men that Harrington had heard about and seen but never met, big dogs on the local extreme-skiing circuit. Harrington drove his rental car to the closest viewpoint, but it wasn't something you could see from the road. He mentioned it to another friend at the bar who knew how he skied and the fellow had looked at him with raised eyebrows. Along with its thousands of feet of untouched powder, the peak was well-known as an unstable south-facing area filled with narrow chutes that sucked you in and then cliffed-out disastrously when there was no longer any chance of retreat. “You're going there?” he said, then gave a single piece of advice: “Don't go first.” Harrington felt his heart speed up.

He never made the climb. A storm came in, and the snowpack became too fragile. They waited a few days for it to consolidate, but one of the men caught strep throat, and then it snowed again, and while they were waiting for that new dump to consolidate, a slide of another sort had begun.

He had spotted the possibility of Crossroads's collapse several months before, not as something that would necessarily happen, but as something that could happen given a confluence of various unlikely events. Despite its gigantic paper assets and its worshipful mentions in the financial press, Crossroads owned nothing and produced nothing: it derived its value from the arcane relationships it created between hypothetical streams of income that were cut and repackaged and repackaged again like a shipment of cocaine at a dockside warehouse. Vast flows of future money were claimed and in turn promised to others, minus a tiny percentage, while those others in turn shunted the flow in another direction, taking their cut along the way. It was a trillion-dollar balancing act, so highly leveraged and brittle that a few taps of precisely placed doubt could shatter its immaculate structure. And in that case, no one would escape alive.

A journalist at one of the lesser financial papers called to interview him for a story on the fund, and Harrington dismissed the man's assertions with a show of good cheer that had the reporter apologizing for his mistaken assumptions. Fifteen minutes after he hung up, Harrington quietly called his sister and mother and told them to sell their stakes. They rushed for the exit the next day, but most of the big entities, the ones that mattered, that could bring down the whole financial system, were locked into a kind of suicide pact with counterparties on the other side, and to them he preferred to say nothing. Sounding the alarm would itself precipitate the end, but as much as that, it simply embarrassed him. How could he admit to his investors and all the people who had lauded him for his brilliance that the whole foundation of their profits was, from another view, a gigantic greed machine? The fund was perfectly designed to prey on certain people's presumption that they should be able to flow millions of dollars their way, not because they had done something useful, but because they could, in turn, prey on people equally presumptuous further down the line. So he kept quiet, and waited for the avalanche.

When it came, it was nearly instantaneous. On Monday Crossroads was a trillion-dollar fund. By Friday the doors had been padlocked. With a swiftness that Pete Harrington the rock star might have envied, Peter Harrington the financier suddenly became famous. Not e-famous: infamous.

“Why?” Camille asked. “Simply because you guessed wrong?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “I think the bigger issue was that I hedged.”

After he'd cashed in the first time, he explained, he'd wanted to protect his remaining investment. “Don't forget; I still had a lot of money invested in Crossroads.” And so, knowing better than anyone the exact composition of his bond fund and its weaknesses, he began to take out insurance against its failure. Not a lot, at first, not something that could be called “betting against it,” but finally, as things began to change in the world and his partnership with Kell became closer, the hedging became a business venture of its own. When word came out that he was leading the charge against his own creation, Crossroads collapsed with a violence that shook financial markets all over the world, and he made more money on its failure than he had made on its success.

In the space of a few days, he became one of the most reviled figures in the country. The day his picture appeared on the front page of the
New York Post,
a busboy dumped a tray of dirty dishes into his lap, and within twenty-four hours he had changed all his phone numbers and hired a bodyguard. An army of accusers confronted him in every public place he showed himself. He learned the telltale signs: the change of expression as they recognized him, the angry conference with a nearby friend, the moment of hesitation, the determined crossing of the room. Even his bodyguard's cold glare wasn't always sufficient; he couldn't very well hammerlock a sixty-year-old sales clerk or a middle-aged woman who'd lost her retirement. He stopped going out publicly, relying on an assistant to do his shopping for him and cruising from his loft to each appointment in the safety of his limousine. The charitable organizations were still happy to have him around, but the dinner invitations became fewer, and the dinners more contentious. There was always the offhanded joke or the unexpected insult when he met someone new. At first he tried to defend himself, pointing out that he had merely hedged his remaining Crossroads holdings, just as any prudent investor would. It was useless: in some people's eyes, the fact that he still had a fortune was a mark of disgrace, rather than achievement. Month after month, a relentless assault was waged across the Internet and the financial pages. On late-night comedy shows, his name became a bitter one-liner about bottomless greed.

“Then you felt ashamed?” she asked him.

“No! I felt angry. I played the game according to the rules. They shouldn't blame me if the rules were inadequate.”

So when Kell relocated to Shanghai, and invited him to join him in his new venture three months ago, he'd jumped on it. Shanghai fascinated him. It reminded him of New York in its mixture of exquisite manners and rude hustle. The Chinese businesspeople he met were friendly and sophisticated—either they hadn't heard of him or they were too polite to mention it. The culture was strange and fascinating; the feel was fresh. The Chinese had never taken the advice of Wall Street's eminent pitchmen, so the global financial collapse was a distant shudder in Shanghai. He had over eight hundred million dollars, and few were worried about how he'd made it.

“So that's my whole shallow story,” he said.

“You don't hear stories like that all the time,” she said, nodding. “Thank you for telling me.”

He was starting to feel the Ecstasy now, a subtle rushing between his temples. He looked over at Camille, who sat in her white dress, watching him. He wasn't sure exactly how long it had been since either of them had said anything. “Where is the Other Life now?” she finally asked.

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“The mountain is massive. The mountain is mist.
”

“What's that mean?”

She leaned over and squeezed his arm, and her touch seemed to travel up to his head and make it vibrate for a moment, like a xylophone bar being struck. “It's just a poem. From Han Shan.”

She smiled at him. They were coconspirators now. He had no idea who Han Shan was, or who she really was, and he didn't want to know at the moment. The city had rearranged itself behind its façade of street scenes and traffic and become a secret world that they coursed through together, full of electric and alluring pleasures. He had a sense of distant hilarity, unattached to anything in particular. This girl, this taxi, these ringing, bending, liquid lights: this other life.

The Ecstasy was creeping up to his head now, giving everything a burnished feel. Ernie's black-and-white Shanghai of 1946.
Whatever you wanted, you could get it: women … opium … a passport.
Camille was that woman, and the cabdriver, with his big, crew-cut head, was actually a rickshaw driver, yes, from the last century, transmigrated into this car and this Shanghai. Peter had no idea which Shanghai that was anymore. Once he left the three or four neighborhoods and highways he frequented, every section of the endless city was interchangeable with any other. The driver dropped them at a street closed off by food vendors who had begun to pack up their stalls for the night. Steam was billowing from pots of boiling water, luminous in the lights that hung above the carts. The secret panting of a beast disguised as lumpy old women waving ladles through their bubbling cauldrons. He could have looked at the steam for hours, but he felt a tugging on his arm as Camille plunged them into the narrow file between the cauldrons and grills, past the skewers of barbecued pigeons, past the rows of glistening candied crab apples on sticks. The dumplings … and they were beyond it all, floating down the sidewalk within the clicking of her high heels.

The street seemed typical of nonforeigner Shanghai, small-scale shops selling hardware or food or inexpensive furniture, no logos in sight. The façades were brown brick or concrete, dulled by decades of pollution and resonant with the million small transactions of lower-tier lives. A strange place for a party. The line of buildings ceased and was replaced by a low white wall, which they followed for a long time before Camille stopped in front of a brown wooden door. She took out a set of keys and unlocked it, then pushed it open for him.

The space inside was dark, as if the light from the street couldn't enter. The only illumination in the murky little courtyard was a paper lantern glowing above them in red and white, and when he saw it there against the dark it seemed suddenly intensely important, like the original red and white lantern of the entire universe. As his eyes adjusted he could make out shrubs and rockeries. They stood in a tiny white-walled courtyard the size of a small living room.

“What is this place?”

“This is the Nan Lin garden,” Camille answered. “This was the estate of a very rich man during the Qing Dynasty. Like a hedge-fund manager. Like you. If you lived at that time, this would have been your life.”

The courtyard was bounded by pale white walls, and she led him through an opening shaped like a crescent moon, into another courtyard lined with jumbles of oddly shaped rocks rising as high as his chest. Their shapes suggested birds or strange animals. They made him uneasy and claustrophobic.

“Camille, what are we doing here?”

“
Shhh
 … You wanted the Other Life.”

They passed through an opening in the wall like a giant teapot, a narrow passageway, and then another door shaped like a vase. They were deep in the garden, among the teeming rocks and the fronds of bamboo and shrubbery that rose over their heads. He could hear, strangely, the sound of jazz, and he wasn't sure if he was really hearing it or if it was in his head.

“Do you know where you're going?”

Camille looked at him and her mouth twisted out of shape and her eyes narrowed. “This will be new for you,” she said, and she took him straight toward a high barrow of rock whose center collapsed into a vague black emptiness. A stab of dread went through him. He had a feeling that she was leading him to his death.

She felt him resisting. “Oh, are you afraid of the dark? Poor little boy! Hold on to me.” She grasped his hand and he entered into her shroud of jasmine fragrance as they plunged into the darkness. She seemed to curve to the left, and in seconds they had both disappeared. The smell was of moist earth and dead leaves, as if they were deep inside a cavern, or a grave. She stopped and stood there silently in the pitch darkness. Soft bursts of color and swaths of light swarmed across his vision. “Where are we?” he asked. He just wanted to hear her voice.

“Are you frightened?”

He didn't know how long he hesitated before answering, tumbling headlong through her question. It might have been one second or it might have been a minute. In the dark cave, there was no way to measure anything. “No. I trust you.”

“Good.”

She started moving again and took a turn to the right. He thought he could make out a change in the quality of the darkness, and with every step it seemed to become less uniform, to break into different shades of black, then charcoal, and then, to his surprise, they turned left again and were facing an opening whose large expanses and yellow luminosity seemed, after the cave, to be the most brilliant vision he'd ever beheld.

They were at the edge of a pond, and on the other side, rising from its own reflection, was a pavilion adrift in glowing light. Dots of red and white lanterns curved off to the sides, mimicking the upswept roofs that rose into the darkness. A confetti of gay voices wavered from across the water, the sound of jazz that he'd heard before, nicked by a shred of laughter, or an expression of surprise. Amid the glow were elegant men in ties and women with their shoulders wrapped in silk or cashmere shawls. It seemed less a party than a dream that he was entertaining.