Billy Weimar was called before an ad-hoc committee of several partners at Goldman Sachs. On the surface, it was to account for his unexplained absence from work for ten days. But it had been more dramatic than an absence from work: when Goldman's in-house security had come up empty, the police had been called on the third day and a missing person report had been filed. In the search for Billy it was discovered that he hadn't lived in his shabby studio apartment on West 125th for over two years; his landlord said he just stopped paying his rent, left a room full of thousands of dollars of computers and "hundreds of books about black holes and the big bang and way out there shit like that" and disappeared. The landlord sold all the computers, kept the deposit, and had no hard feelings about the "quiet little geeky guy" who "never slept" and "lived like a monk". It was also curious that neither Goldman's security nor the police could find any cyber trace of Billy. It was known he had an iPhone, but if he did, there was no record of him with AT&T or any other carrier. Nor was there any sign at all of Billy on the web, his IP addresses drew blanks. Although it was known he emailed in-house with his work associates, his Goldman account, when entered, displayed nothing but a photo of the iconic Rolling Stones 'tongue' album cover, with the tongue moving back and forth. His fellow Quants on the 7th floor shrugged at all this, as if cyber-invisibility was no great achievement. They expressed no particular concern for Billy's welfare, but were clearly at a loss without him in terms of the HFT (High-Frequency-Trading) or "Black Box" secret program they had all been working on. Some wondered if he had taken the algorithmic recipe for HFT to another firm, or gone rogue with it. One of the few female Quants said without raising her eyes from a screen that she wouldn't be surprised if he had jumped off the George Washington Bridge. His mother, who lived in Larchmont, said he hadn't come for his last bi-weekly visit, and had no other information to offer, other than that "her son was as a man the opposite of his father", who she informed them several times had been until his death a well-known Ford Motor Company specialist on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a President of the American Libertarian Society, and a personal friend of Ayn Rand.
*
Billy was sitting outside the meeting room with his hands on his knees when the double doors opened and he was ushered in. Those who had known him on sight were surprised by his dress, not that his dress was in any way surprising at first glance. For today, he was wearing the corporate suit of armor, a pinstriped suit with a striped rep tie. Several of the partners recognized it as a Harvard tie, which made some sense, as Billy had gone to Harvard before dropping out of a PhD program in theoretical physics at MIT just months before his thesis. He was also wearing a small American flag in the left lapel of his suit, as had become in the last few years a necessary Masonic-like symbol for politicians and others who want to send a signal of corporate conservatism. On the one hand, it was all sort of semi-normal, as it was a suit and a tie and a little flag, but the whole assemblage was also off in a theatrical way, the most noticeable being that the suit was a size or two too big, and the cuffs were rolled up once at the ankles, and the tie ended near Billy's navel. And the suit itself was striped in the wide chalk way that was a more Al Capone than Timothy Geithner. In someone perhaps more socially and mentally normative, it would have been read as a clownish mockery of the Wall Street uniform, but as Billy Weimar was known as the Quant of Quants at Goldman, the eccentricity was overlooked today to a degree as a helpless geek's stab at normalcy, and all things considered even noted in the plus column, as Billy had been known to show up to work week after week in the same ratty Goldman Sachs t-shirt and dorky khaki pants without a belt, and his BO was infamous.
*
When questioned about his ten day disappearance, Billy was all contrite, almost strangely simpering apologies, again very odd for Billy, who was known for his awkward abrasiveness. He said in his nasally voice that in recent months he had been working 24/7 on the Black Box project, and that he just had lost it, and decided to drop out a little while, and that he had "gone to the desert like Jesus when he was tempted by Satan with all the riches of the world", to "steal some R & R personal time", and "get his mojo back", so he could come back and take the "Black Box project over the finish line ASAP".
The phrasing was so false and odd, and so clearly said with mental quotes, that all the members of the committee sat silently for a few moments.
Then Billy spoke into the silence, almost in a whisper, "The Black Box is almost ready."
It was as if Billy had said "a Midas machine that prints money by the billions is now on the seventh floor", for the change in the mood in the room was remarkable. The partners took a deep breath and smiled at each other and leaned back in their chairs and nodded benevolently at Billy. The partners had planned not only to rake Billy over the coals about his absence, but since it had been believed the Black Box project was floundering, they were also prepared with a list of complaints about him compiled just for this meeting. His general disorder of person and workplace, his arrogant attitude when questioned, his seeming disdain for anyone at Goldman including his fellow quants, how when John Burns, a Senior Vice President had reached out and tapped him on the shoulder in the elevator to ask him to press the button for the 9th floor, Billy had slapped his hand and yelled 'don't you ever touch me again' in such a hostile way that Burns was barely able to describe it. "He's a very angry man," said Burns in an email to the committee. "I suspect he might be dangerous in a sort of Ted Kazinski way, and I am not exaggerating. He scares me, and I think for the safety of all at Goldman Sachs he should have a psychological evaluation immediately." Burns was not alone in saying, in so many words, that Billy gave off the scent of a sulfurous rage burning just below the surface of his bad skin. Several of those tapped for opinions on Billy said things like "the guy could lose it and open up with a Glock someday in the Goldman cafeteria" or "our Rain Man needs to be on meds and in anger management therapy" but one email came in anonymously and unsolicited, from a fellow Quant, and said "Goldman Sachs is shorting his phenomenal mental gifts. He is a deeply sad little man."
*
But all worries about Billy had evaporated in the committee room with the word that the Black Box project was a go. The word had been spreading among certain parties at Goldman Sachs that the project had met obstacles that although not insurmountable, had thrown the project's timetable back many months, and even questioned if it was plausible that one could ever 'see the market's movement in advance' through the use of algorithms.
After a great deal of good cheer and very basic small talk by Billy about algorithms, he headed off, without taking a breath and in his nasal voice, into a soliloquy on how a black box full of these equations could be used to sniff out large market orders before the orders were placed by bouncing packets of small orders in a infinitesimal fraction of a second off the large order, like fingers quickly touching a face in the dark, getting a sense of the expression of the order, in order to scrape say $30,000 in profit in a milli-second from this secret fore-knowledge of the upper limits of the buy orders of fund blockbusters like Fidelity or TIAFF-CREF. Billy lost them all as he then headed into the minutia of algorithms, and finally one of the partners interrupted and asked Billy, when, exactly, he projected the Black Box might be operational?
Billy seemed not to hear the question.
The partner repeated the question and everyone looked at Billy, who with half closed eyes seemed to be in a sort of trance and gazing at a spot above and far beyond the heads of the committee.
Ellen Furnal, a Junior Partner, stood and walked over to Billy and gently shook him by the arm and said, "Mr. Weimar, are you still with us?'
Without lowering his head or opening his eyes Billy said in a whisper, "For no one knows my little game, that Rumplestiltskin is my name."
And then Billy erupted in laughter. He found Grimm's fairy tales hilarious, and had memorized a dozen word for word in their final 1857 edition form. He liked and thought right and just that at the end of the 1857 version, Rumplestiltskin "seizes his left foot and tears himself in two", as opposed to earlier versions in which he falls into an abyss, or simply runs off.
Before the committee members could react to this Rumplestiltskin oddness, Billy snapped open his eyes, sat up straight and said, "Excuse me, I haven't slept a lot in the last few days. You were asking about the Black Box? It should be ready to rock and roll within a week or so."
A few of the committee members shook their heads, as if to say, have you ever seen such a weird little man, but then the good news about the Black Box washed over them again like a golden wave, and there were a few laughs, and when a Senior Partner stood up and told Billy they didn't want to keep him any longer, and that all the committee asked was he try and smile a bit more around Goldman, the meeting was over.
*
Billy still didn't go back to work up on the seventh floor. Instead, he ran down six flights of stairs, leaping the final three steps of each landing. Ever since he was a boy in Larchmont, he had always jumped the final three steps of any set of stairs. He wasn't sure why he did it, but had a deep sense of horror of the implications of not following this ritual: there was the terrifying fear that something might steal from him his mathematical capacities, and thus leave him without any pleasures in this world. His two front teeth, now yellowed with hundreds of cups of Bewley's tea, were fake from when he fell face first onto a landing of his dormitory at Andover. But today Billy had the delicate sensation of flying, and a few times he jumped from the fourth and even, at the ground floor, the fifth step up, as if in celebration.
He was celebrating not his continued employment at Goldman—he knew the partners wouldn't fire him as long as the Black Box was coming along--but that he was going to attend a conference on theoretical physics at the Sheraton at Madison Square Garden, and in particular, listen to a talk by his best friend the Norwegian physicist Viveka Karlsson on CERN's search for the dark matter that held the universe together.
Viveka Karlsson had been a few years ahead of Billy Weimar at MIT, and Billy had spent many late nights with her in discussions over string theory and black holes. To Billy, as every year passed, those days with Viveka had been the happiest of his life. Billy had not, as he told the committee, been in 'the desert', but had flown to Switzerland at the invitation of his old friend Viveka, and spent days by her side at the giant particle accelerator, and looking over data. Billy had slowly realized while he was there that Viveka wanted to know more about how he, Billy, interpreted certain data that had running against expectations and against the Standard Model of the Universe. In emails with Viveka over the last few months, Billy had seen samples of this data, and had provided an explanation that was so far-fetched that Viveka had simply sent back three letters in response: LOL. But then Viveka had bought him a ticket to Switzerland, put him up in an expensive hotel, and quizzed him to expand on how the slivers of data fit his napkin doodled conjectures on why the invisible dark energy and dark matter that made up ninety-six percent of the universe was never diluted as the universe expanded. In a bar in Geneva, Billy drank ginger ale and fomented to Viveka on a theory (one that left the 'joke' of the idea of super-symmetric particles way behind) of why this invisible other 'stuff'--that could only detected by its non-localized gravitational effect--was always homogenous in space and time, and spittle jumped off his lips in his excitement to convey the necessary geometric shapes of the strings he saw rattling in the fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions. He added with a sort of snickering and somewhat pleased afterthought that the multi-billion dollar LDC accelerator at CERN would also never detect dark matter, because although it was comprised of particles, they were particles that were not created in the first instant of the big bang, and thus were not 'hot', but infinitesimally later, and were thus 'warm', which the detector was not built to detect. In short, the twenty mile oval of a multi-billion dollar machine would never be able to answer the question it had been asked about dark matter and dark energy; but Billy's cerebral cortex could.
And now Viveka was suddenly here in NYC to give a talk billed as revolutionary and shocking—although she had never told Billy about the talk and in fact had shut down communications since that night of ginger ale and dark matter and energy-- and Billy (who had read about the talk on a CERN discussion board) ran up Fifth Avenue, after sitting on bench near Central Park lost in new visions of strings vibrating in the 5th and 6th dimensions, a change in the breeze and the dying light in the leaves awoke him to his lateness. He raced into the Sheraton, ran up the stairs (taking them like a musical scale: half whole half half whole as was his ritual), and was stopped at the door to the conference by security. For some reason, they had his photo, and he was escorted out of the Sheraton. The guards told him as they left him that Viveka Karlsson had said he was stalking her, and asked him to be kept out, or risk arrest.
It was impossible. Billy crossed Fifth Avenue and then stopped cold. He was still standing when the green light flashed, and cars and taxis honked and veered and zoomed around him. He started to flap his arms, as he did when severely stressed, and looked like a small man-bird trying to take flight up and out of Fifth Avenue at rush hour. He suddenly dashed back toward Madison Square Garden, and back into the Sheraton, and up to the conference floor, where he spied around a corner at the guards at the door. He walked across the hall and felt the knob of another door, and hoping it opened to the same conference room, he stepped inside and slid into a seat in the back.
*
When the talk began Billy was still thinking about his interpretation of the dark matter and energy data from CERN and how it exploded the conservative physicists "Standard Model" of the 'realistic' universe in favor of the mysteries of quantum mechanics, other dimensions, and the delicious-to-ponder explosive possibilities of the fundamentally impossible. Then the first speaker came out and it was not Viveka Karlsson, nor was it remotely a talk on dark matter or dark energy. It took a while for Billy to zero in on what this grey haired man, tall and thin with an awful face was saying, but Billy sat up straight when an old Polaroid photo of four Ecuadorian Indians flashed on the wall behind him. The Indians were no bigger than Billy, and naked except for a small cloth, with sticks in their noses, standing before the jungle, armed with spears more than twice their length. These were the Huaoroni of Ecuador, and the minister hectored on how four Christian missionaries had been killed back in 1956 when they tried to make contact. Billy's senses sparked. The missionary said how his own father, John Seacrest, was one of the missionaries killed, but how others missionaries had gone back again, despite the danger. Slowly the cannibal Indians, some of the most violent and murderous Indians in Latin America, had been Christianized and civilized. The audience of two hundred broke into loud applause, and Billy found himself standing and cheering wildly in his braying voice. Christian hymns were sung, and looking at the photo of the four Indians remained on the screen, Billy found himself opening up for the first time to strange, exhilarating, almost violent emotions.
The talk ended with an appeal to join SCM in their missionary work, and Billy suddenly felt like a man possessed by a stranger. For the minister was standing on stage pointing for those who were willing to join them to join him on the stage right now, and Billy was pushing past the others in his row to get to the aisle. As he passed people were patting him on the back and yelling things like "Praise the Lord" and "Amen, brother, you have heard the call!" When Billy looked down on the stage, it looked like the minister was pointing his finger right at him, and it was like he was being pulled out of his life, this stranger within him was magnetized by some force up on that stage. As Billy descended the aisle, people turned to smile and cheer and clap for him, as if he was a hero. There were a few others around the auditorium also making their way to the stage. And as Billy walked he found that he was looking past the missionary, and it was as if the four Indians in the photo were the true force pulling him to the stage, calling to him from the edge of the jungle where they stood with what looked like spears but might have been blow guns, decorated in river mud paint, and Billy was seized by a strange terror, and turned and tripped and ran up the aisle and out of the auditorium.
*
That night, Billy took the bus from Penn Station out to Larchmont, and walked in his distinctly toe-bouncing geek-gait from the station to the huge old house at 11 Woodbine Ave, where his mother Bippy (born Beatrice) still lived. He visited her every other Sunday. Once it was every Sunday, but Billy found the experience so mentally draining that for twenty-four hours afterwards he would lose interest even in his algorithms back at Goldman. How hard he worked was Billy's chief, and perhaps only, virtue, to his mother.
When he walked up the brick walkway to the three story twelve bedroom house he hated—a mansion by any normal definition except on this street in this town where all the houses were this large—he knew she would greet him from the top of the stairs as he stood under the dusty chandelier with the words, "My son William is here from the city to take me to lunch at the club." She would be dressed for tennis in a short white skirt, white Tretorn sneakers, and a tight white LaCoste shirt that displayed the size and firmness of her sixty year old breasts. She was a gin and tonic alcoholic and had slept with every available "powerful" Wall Street man in Larchmont, although to Billy she liked to pretend she was a virgin saint to the memory of Billy's father, who had held a seat on the floor of the NYSE he inherited from his father, and was a market maker for Ford.
Bippy had lost most of the millions she was left to one stockbroker after another. All they had to do was call her at cocktail hour and flirt and she was ready for any churning in her account. She told her sister in La Jolla she had fucked in eleven rooms and lost eleven million, and there was one room and one million left, and no servants, which in part accounted for the petrified dog shit to be found in many rooms on the third floor. She collected Pekinese dogs (in the flesh and in porcelain) because they were once owned by the Emperor of China, and as Billy watcher her come down the stairs, seven of (to Billy, ugly little mops with smashed faces) nipped and growled at his heels, and Billy kicked them gently and surreptitiously away.
Billy took out his Blackberry, as he used it as a shield against his mother. She believed when he took it out he was checking the market, and when he typed she was sure he was making market-making trades of a "brutal" nature. His father had loved words like "brutal" and said a "killing" of a trade was where everyone on the NYSE floor could hear his balls clang together like the closing bell.
Of many things that stood between mother and son, the most obvious was that Bippy had never asked Billy to take over her dwindling trust fund, as she thought him, as he once heard her say to Ann Cabish at the Club when he was in 11th grade, 'a bit of a fluff, and an embarrassment to his father'. He was able to hear her rattle about her disappointments with her only child because Billy, in those years, and to escape the torments of his peers at the Club, would crawl under the slatted cedar deck and sit for hours until cocktail hour was over and Bippy would drive the Mercedes drunkenly back to Woodbine asking Billy if her shoulders looked burned.
One day Billy sat by accident directly beneath his mother at her "official" table near the pool. "We don't know where he came from," said Bippy in a loud confidential whisper above to her friend Margaret Earle, "My brothers are all big, aggressive Alpha males, Billy's father was almost a cannibal he was so virile, but somehow we ended up in the baby lottery with this changeling. His father is sure he'll be eaten alive if he ever tries to work on the Street. Frankly, if I knew the goods we were being sold, I would have had an abortion."
As Billy mused on the word cannibal while staring intently at his Blackberry as his mother took her the final step of the palace stairs, two things happened. It started to rain, slashing on the leaden windows with the stained glass random coat of arms, and a basso profoundo voice called from the hallway, "Bippy? Bippy?"
It was one of his mother's 'friends', a brick-faced, nose-veined, shiny bald Managing Partner at Morgan Stanley. The Club date with his mother was off due to rain and Charles Holsten. Which was good for all, as in truth they never made it to the club when Billy came to visit. Something always happened to keep Bippy from having to enter her sacred grounds where her alpha-husband once strode with her weasely son. Billy ran off as Bitty embraced Charles, and headed to the kitchen, and then scooted down the maid's stairs to the basement.
In the distance he could hear Charles Holsten's voice as if in competition to fill the whole house, and Bippy's laugh, which sawed through the floor. Billy stood in the dark with his arms wrapped around his sunken chest and hyperventilated, until finally he felt his heart slow. He stood in the musty darkness, as he had for hundreds of hours as a boy escaping from the eyes of his father, eyes so iron-pike like in their severity Billy always had the sense he might stab his son, break off a leg, gnaw on it like a ham bone, all the while discussing the day's moves in the market in the parlor.
Billy slowly reached out until his hands in the darkness until he his fingers felt the rough wood of an old wine box, and he sat on it safe and content within the four walls of darkness for the next four hours with his hands in his lap. He wondered as he sat there about how his favorite place to be was in the dark with four walls around him. He was the same way at Goldman, he spent many hours alone thinking in dark of the men's room. The lights went off automatically thirty seconds after someone left, and sometimes he sat so long on the toilet seat his legs went numb, and he imagined himself just a maglight of consciousness, a small spark of pure wonder, considering from a nearly empty corporate headquarters in Manhattan the gorgeous hypothesis of dark matter, the mysterious stuffing that might just hold everything together.
*
Several partners—especially those who knew the basics of what Billy Weimar and those quants working with him were up to with their 'black box' project—were apt to downplay his oddities as the eccentricities of a genius level-quant, and a few liked to toss around the movie "A Beautiful Mind" and tell all he was a sort of John Nash, and that as long as he builds the Black Box for Goldman, who cares if he falls, like schizophrenic Nash, into a series of imaginary relationships with Chinese spies and ends up tied down in a psychiatric hospital later.
The floor the quants worked on was called by a few The Ant Farm, as if the quants were insects busily working while being watched safely from behind glass by actual humans, who marveled at their strange incomprehensible, obsessively algorithmic industry. Those partners who had tried over the years to talk to Billy Weimar always found the talk circling back to CERN and the particle accelerator and the search for the origins of the universe. Weimar's friends at MIT were mostly all now working at CERN, and when his mind wasn't on the black box it was on gluons and nuons and the nature of the dark matter of the universe. When he spoke about CERN his face lost its snear, and took on almost a holy glow, along with a deep and pained look of loss. Over time, others tried to talk about CERN with him, but he refused to talk about it. Sometimes people looking over his shoulder reported seeing CERN websites open on his desktop.
It was understood by the few who cared to unravel the heart of Billy Weimar that one of the great regrets of his life was that he was not involved in theoretical physics. And it was also guessed that his dropping out after his junior year at MIT to count cards in Vegas was part of it. One partner, Edgar Lloyd, knew Weimar's father, and said Weimar's whole problem was that his father hated him for wanting to go into pure science over using his mathematical gifts on the street, and that it was when his father dropped dead on the floor of the NYSE as he executed one of his largest buys of Ford Motor stock that Wiemar dropped out of his physics program at MIT where he was the top student, and headed to Vegas to count cards. He counted alone, moved from hotel to hotel, never won too much, and used his money and comped rooms as a sanctuary to consider the fundamental questions of theoretical physics without the restrictions of the academy.
When Vegas finally sniffed out that he was beating the house up and down the street, and he was banned, the same Vice-President who banned him at the Mirage said he would pay for his room, if he would work on a program to facilitate fair trading on something called the Hollywood Stock Exchange, and this in turn led Billy to a contract to develop "Virtual Specialist Trading" that would make impossible illegal front-running, or black-box trading, in the 'Dark Pools" of hundreds of millions of dollars of stock-trading that were happening off the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. What used to be done by Billy's father as a 'specialist'—the matching up of buyer and seller on the floor of stock exchange in a particular stock—was now happening by computer. Billy sold most of the rights to the program that would banish front-running to Cantor Fitzgerald, who sold it to Goldman Sachs. The paperwork regarding the sale was lost in the twin towers on 911. Goldman took the software that was meant to stop front-running, and asked Billy to tweek it into a Black Box for stripping millions a day from an unsuspecting market.
© 2013 Tom Paine
