Martin spilled into his office chair at 3am. He could have found another place to go to after he had closed the bar down with Garry- who had to go home to his very silently annoyed younger wife. It was midtown Manhattan after all. But there was something sad about drinking at a bar alone, and he didn’t want company. Not to mention, his personal bar on the trading floor had much better booze than the swill they were charging him $40 a double for.
Drink in hand, he leaned back, the fluorescent lights dancing on his closed lids. He thought to himself that the change in atmosphere from the lack of employees on the trading floor made the room feel different. If there was a client nearby he may have been able to parlay that pedestrian insight into some kind of deal. Unfortunately, he was alone with his brilliance, as his fingers traced the ostentatious embossing from his soon to be ex wife’s lawyer’s firm.
Twenty-seven years of experience had taught him to trust his instincts. The market was easy. It was all about patterns, and no matter how much chaos hates order, when you filter it by a set of metrics patterns are bound to appear. He’d gotten good at spotting them.
Life? Life wasn’t like the markets. But those same instincts were screaming at him, even through the bourbon bath. He just had to learn to decipher what the hell they were trying to tell him. But all he kept picturing as he closed his eyes was Rachel dancing through his life effortlessly. How could he have let such chaos in voluntarily? Or had it been? He hadn’t even noticed her until that weirdo Jake had taken an interest.
“Jake Gibbons. I wonder what that asshole is up to now?” This hadn’t been the first time Martin had looked up Jake, with growing smugness from Jake’s apparent inability to leave a mark anywhere. But, if that was the case, why did his name feel more and more like the water line of debris after a flood?
Outside the window, Manhattan glittered with the indifference of a futures chart. He typed the name into LinkedIn, muscle memory from what must have been dozens of similar late-night searches. The same kind of searches he’d done on Bradley Morrison (reliably selling sub prime real estate) and Peter Hammond (reliable basement dweller turned elderly care innovator on Nobel shortlist). Small victories in the ledger of life had a way of reversing themselves.
Facebook yielded the same void. Instagram. Twitter. Each empty search felt like a miscalculated trade, the kind that makes you question your own logic. He could remember Jake rolling perfect joints behind the gymnasium, could see him watching the other kids from a distance. The memory had the same texture as his recollection of yesterday’s closing prices – certain until you tried to write it down.
His phone showed 3:17 AM. Tommy would remember Jake. Tommy remembered everything from high school, mostly because he’d peaked there. Martin poured two more fingers of Vinnie [his pet name for Van Winkle] and dialed the number.
“The fuck, Martin?”
Martin hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until he heard Tommy’s voice. “Remember Jake Gibbons?”
A pause stretched between them like plastic putty about to break. “Man, are you okay? Is this about… you know, that time senior year?”
The words hit Martin’s skull with a roller coaster ring. “What time senior year?”
“Look, maybe you should call Rachel. Or… shit, I don’t know. But we all agreed not to bring up the window thing. You were under a lot of pressure back then. We all understood that.”
The window thing. Something in Martin’s head shifted, like watching a reliable metric suddenly go haywire. He had a flash of being high up, looking down at patterns. But that was now, wasn’t it? Or was it then? He got that feeling at the pit of his stomach when an options bet was about to go south, and there was no reversing it, but time hadn’t yet given you the gift of failure.