Tom Paine's short story collection, Scar Vegas, was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" and a Pen/Hemingway Award finalist. His stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Playboy, The Boston Review, the New England Review, Zoetrope, the Oxford American and Story as well as in the award anthologies The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize. A graduate of Princeton and the Columbia MFA program, he is an assistant professor in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.

The Black Box

posted May 14, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2

After three straight nights of chocolate bars and testing algorithms Weimar wandered the trading floor at Goldman as if he was Moses come down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments (except they were inscribed in code not stone), and he looked out of his good eye at the traders with the same look Moses wore when he saw the Sodomites worshipping the golden calf. He stood there, hands on his hips, little chin elevated, and slid a hand in his tight shirt and pinched his right nipple; twisted it erect as he considered with evident disdain the prolish men and women before him feverish with fear and greed as they in so many ways humbled themselves before the market god. He struggled to adjust his chin higher, to project the might of his certainty that he was a superior being now; that the coming perfection of his algorithms was elevating him beyond them.

In the hand not pinching his nipple he carried a folder brimming over with equations, the symphonic scribblings of his sleepless nights in his tiny office, and as he found he could not raise his chin any higher he slowly raised the folder of algorithms over his head and waved it like he was a semaphore signaling nothing but: I, William Weimar, quant, am better than all of you greedy, hustling fucks.

It was a yellow folder, and a few traders glanced over at little Billy fanning the air, and then Carl Holman stood from his desk and circled behind Billy and cuffed him with cupped hands over both his ears. He did it just as Billy's arm was on an upswing, and the algorithms flew into the air. Deaf, Billy dropped to his knees and crawled around, clutching his papers to his chest madly, and crying out in a strange guttural language.

Ben Phelps, a trader closest to Billy at the time, and who had grown up the child of charismatic Christians in Pasadena, told some traders at Royce's later over shots that he was sure Billy was 'speaking in tongues' like those sort of people do and that it was probably Aramaic, or some old Biblical tongue, but that it sure as fuck was something that wasn't 'Wall Street English'. Standish Clemson, who had been forced to listen to Harry Potter on the way to Stratton Mountain from Darien last weekend with his three kids as they sat in the back of his Cadillac SUV, said it was Parseltongue, the language of the Slitherins, and of snakes.

This last view took hold as the dominant meme, for three reasons: Billy wore black round thick glasses like Harry Potter, and he also had a scar. Not on his forehead, but on his nose, from when a group of boys had silently jumped him on the way home from Larchmont Junior High, and Curt Stephens (who later died in Afghanistan) had smashed his face against a telephone pole so badly the nasal bone had to be rebuilt.

The third reason was the recognition that Billy Weimar was doing some sort of mathematical magic so alchemical and arcane that he might have been dabbling in the Dark Arts. But, Clemson pointed out, Billy Weimar, despite the scar and the Potter glasses, was a dead ringer with his chalk skin and dark straight, greasy hair for Malfoy, the acolyte in the movies of 'he who must not be named'. And with his look of snearing disdain, and when some got worried about their email threads of whacking Billy Weimar getting out of hand, it slowly became code at Goldman to call him "Mini-Malfoy", or MM.

*

Things went steadily to shit at Goldman. There was something Tourette's-like about his spastic need to let other high-level Goldmanites, from Partners, to Traders, the Economists, know how he disdained their calculating, their guesswork, their market manipulation, their hedging and spreads and percentages, puts and shorts and calls; he had to let them all know in his stuttering nasal voice that he, Weimar, had not time for plays or forecasting or sales or politics or deception or thievery; for he was the one who owned the market's mind, before him and his black box filled with perfect algorithms she had at last submitted. He knew what the market wanted before she knew; he had jumped on Einstein's back and pierced the space time continuum with his algorithms to send golden trades back from the future to the foolish, desperate mortals screaming on the trading floor.

One morning when he snorted in an equine way at a managing partner by the name of Ramos Costalani in the elevator, who had just nailed 10 million on a play on Romanian leu against the French franc, it was clear something had to be done. There had always been jokes about what to do with the quants, but it was always a grey area: so many at Goldman were number geeks, arithmetic eunuchs, that it was hard to say someone was over the line, off the reservation, when Asperger's morphed into an entitled, obnoxious and grandiose in-your-face Rain Man. You wouldn't allow a shit-smelling schizophrenic homeless person to camp out with their shopping cart swearing on the trading floor. And for years it had been building at Goldman, the distant communal sense that Weimar was a quant gone progressively feral, and that something had to be done. There were fantasies of tossing him late one night out a trading floor window; or sending him an overweight hooker with the murderous gifts of La Femme Nikita to sit on his face and smother his geekhood into a righteous submission. There was an email thread: "Ways to Whack Billy Weimar". Someone sent around a crude drawing of Weimar with head and feet in a magician's black box, and a man who looked like the head of Goldman raising a saw as if to cut him in two.

And then Billy Weimar flipped the on switch of his magic Black Box and a Niagara of money unheard of in the history of the street was released: for one hundred days in a row Goldman Sachs made one hundred million dollars a day. Weimar's Cray-computer of a brain had indeed invented a machine that was the holy grail of greed: a way to look at the other guy's poker hand and even pluck away his aces. Every partner, every employee at Goldman owed it all to Weimar: bonuses that year from 100 million down to $50,000 for some secretaries were courtesy of the metro geek with the laugh like a mule and the lazy right eye that drifted when he calculated.

And maybe it was that: the idea that this midget of a man with the pubic-hair attempt at a Van Dyke beard was flaunting his superiority; that this boy-geek with the encephalitic head had bigger cojones than all of them in terms of being a different sort of rain-man; it couldn't help but produce testicular contortion in the elephantine egos of the sociopathic Goldmanites. Somehow his black box took their own proudly-mafioso white collar financial ledergermain and made it lilliputian; for little Billy Weimar had made the Delphic bitch goddess of the market kiss his scrawny ass.

At the end of the golden run of 100 million dollar days it became clear that others now understood the recipe to Billy Weimar's secret algorithmic sauce. And everyone from Partner down who ever talked to Billy Weimar for five minutes at the Ant Farm wanted to take credit for the Golden Shower (for that's what it was called by some), and Billy's sneering presence around Goldman made it hard to rewrite history and grab some credit. So talks were held, and when it was clear Billy had shot his wad—when it was clear that Billy's genius had now been taken over by other quants with new ideas, the words came down to send him packing. It wasn't hard to do: Billy's right to a percentage on the software had gone down in the rubble of the Twin Towers, and he had signed a joke of a contract with Goldman when he came onboard. He was oblivious about these things anyway. He was on contract, and made a few million a year, but had no golden parachute, no pension, so security, no alternative.

And so his keys were taken away, his photos of CERN stripped from his workspace, and he was told not to come back on Monday. Goldmanites loved this firing, it was too perfect: the guy who conjured billions for the firm with his big head and his black box was kicked in the ass into the street. It was cannibalistic and almost immediately mythic: "You heard what they did to little fucking Weimar?: They. Kicked. His. Ass. Out." And it was made that much better to how little Weimar had taken the news that he was terminated: he groveled and begged and refused to go and said crazy shit like Goldman was his life, until security had to bodily carry him from his office and place him a few blocks from the doors to Goldman near the 37th street subway. That a security guard had to gave him money for the subway, and that after he gave the little fuck money, Weimar said, "Where should I go?"

And the guard said, "Go home, Weimar."

And Weimar looked so blank the guard said, "Are you telling me you don't have an apartment in New York City?"

And Billy Weimar said, "I lived at Goldman. I was there all the time anyway." And the guard said, "Man, you got a credit card and you must have millions in the bank, right?"

Billy nodded.

And the guard said, "Then you got the world by the balls. Be glad you got away from those fucking jackals."

Billy was suddenly listening.

And then the guard said, "You get on a plane tonight, go anywhere in the world, stay in the best hotels, and live like a little fucking Midas for the rest of your born days."

*

The plane left Newark for Quito at six pm after sitting on the runway for an hour with the air conditioning off. He was still wearing the blue Goldman Sachs t-shirt he had worn to work the day he was fired. There was a womb-like, cosseting warmth to the 747, and while others sat sweating, complaining on cell phones in Spanish, and drinking, Billy Weimar pushed up the center arm rest and curled into a fetal position and had a nice sleep for the first time in days.

When he awoke, he was at 35,000 feet. A NASCAR race was on the TV ahead of him. Billy watched the stock cars whipping around the oval and was awash with a pain that threatened to pull him down to earth, for the cars whipping the oval reminded him of the LHC particle accelerator at CERN, and his former friend Viveka Kaarlson. He thought of his childhood home on Woodbine Street in Larchmont, and how as a boy he had taken apart the family's old cathode ray TV in the basement at age ten, when he became curious about how particles moved in a vacuum. For Billy it hadn't been far from a Cathode Ray TV at ten to his theories on Dark Matter to Viveka in Geneva, although somehow Billy felt he had taken a wrong turn, and now it was all just darkness.

After a few ginger ales, Billy unbuckled and made his way to the back to go to this bathroom. He saw the man in the last row of the plane, and the two locked eyes. Billy stopped before him and the older man said, "You heard the call."

Billy shook his head.

The missionary took his hand in his cold grasp and said, "They called to you, didn't they."

At that moment the sunset entered the cabin and bathed Billy in golden light.

"Who?" Billy said, although he knew exactly. The Indians had called to him, he was on the plane because he hadn't been able to get the image of those four Indians with spears from his head. He stumbled on to the bathroom, but when he came out and tried to pass the missionary reached out and took his hand, and pulled him into the seat next to him.

Neither spoke another word until they landed in Quito, but once an hour the missionary reached out and patted him on the head and repeated, "They called to you."

Billy and the Missionary travelled together on a bus from Quito to the city of Puerto Francisco de Orellana, and from there by taxi to the River Napo, a tributary of the Amazon. There they boarded a 'Rumba Nautica', a motorized barge with the body of a jet humorously welded above the waterline as the cabin. Billy looked out at a blank riverscape punctured miles beyond with the red flares of natural gas.

When they docked at Pompeya, the minister asked his name and wrote it on some official government paperwork, and they were waved through the oil company's security checkpoint. A soldier stretched and yawned, raising his submachine gun above his head. For the next two hours the missionary and Billy sat in the back of a flat-bed truck on a gravel road, and as the road crossed the Rio Tiputini, the missionary pointed out the settlements of the Waorani people. Billy understood this was the name of the Indians he had seen in the photo, but here they were wearing Western clothes, and working with machetes.

When Billy asked, the Missionary said, "These Waorani have already been saved."

The truck stopped by a muddy river, and the two set off down a narrow river in a small boat, with the forest close on either side.

The minister leaned close to Billy and said to his ear, "Tell those in your heart that called to you that you are almost there, with the good news of their salvation."

Billy saw a sign for RESERVA COMMUNITARIA KICHWA, and the missionary said, "We are in Yasuni National Park now." The river bent like a serpent, and Billy saw giant trees that arose from the forest. He spotted a turtle on a log that turned its head to look at him with its ancient eyes, and right then Red Howler monkeys shrieked from the forest, and Billy jumped like he was shocked, and the Missionary laughed and slapped his knee.

The driver of the boat pointed out an anaconda back in the foliage, and as he spun around to give them a better view, explained that the Waorani believed when you died you were on a trail in the jungle and came face to face with a giant boa. Jump it, or return as a termite. The missionary frowned. Soon they docked at the Mission, and stepped ashore. Right away it was clear to Billy something was wrong. The Mission, a complex of a dozen thatched houses around a church and school and a few other corrugated metal buildings, was silent and seemingly empty, and the Missionary looked shocked and angry. The missionary had told Billy they he was always greeted with great affection by his 'children'.

Billy was told to follow the missionary, who strode across the dirt of the compound calling in Waorani to his missing children. Then the Missionary said something like, "we shall see what 'Baby Ima' has to say", and yanked Billy along a jungle trail. In an hour, Billy was seated in the grass long hut of Waorani clan leader Babae Ima, who seemed no friend of the missionary, and shook open a bag until a skull covered in silken black hair rolled across the floor to stop against Billy's shoes. The minister closed his eyes and mumbled a prayer, while Billy reached out and lifted up the skull by the temples as if holding the head of a friend, and had the strange feeling that he was meant to be here.

The minister jumped up and yelled at Billy, who placed the skull back in the bag held open by Babae Ima.

On the way back to the mission village, the two heard a helicopter, and soon after met Inspector Juan Suarez, who told the Missionary, who told Billy, that a few days earlier a group of Waorani men, led by Babae Ima, had gone three days deep into the million acre "Intangible Zone", a preserve of the fierce Tagaeri, one of the world's most reclusive tribes, and armed with rifles had slaughtered several dozen Tagaeri, including a dozen women and children. Suarez had already interviewed Babae Ima once, and said Ima claimed it was in retaliation for the Tagaeri killing their tribal member Carlos Omene ten years earlier. And since the Waorani have no sense of past and present, the killing was arguably reasonable. But Suarez said Babae Ima was paid in Spanish lumber by Columbian loggers for the killing of the Tagaeri, and that the loggers had been paid by oil companies, who wanted to drill under the "Intangible Zone" and needed the last hundred Tagaeri, known by the Equadorian government as the "People Who Lived In Voluntary Exile", sent down the river of history.

Billy was giddy on the helicopter ride up the Tiguino river. He loved the sound of "The People Who Lived in Voluntary Exile" in the "Intangible Zone". Suarez had invited the Missionary and Billy (thinking he was a new missionary) in his helicopter as he flew with two other large military helicopters filled with thirty soldiers, to the site of the massacre. Suarez wanted the Missionary along as the Missionary was an expert in speaking Waorani, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of these tribes who had met their first cohuori, or outsiders, in the 1960s, when they were still shooting peccaries with curare tipped arrows from canopy trees. It was Suarez' first visit to the massacre, as he said he had a respect and a sympathy for the fierceness of the Tagaeri, who had marched into isolation in 1950 led by a warrior Taro, and were, he said, the last 'free people' on planet earth, so he had taken his time to gather information and soldiers before flying in.

For a few minutes they flew in silence, and Billy craned his head in all directions and saw nothing but jungle. Suarez yelled over to him that 'the Indians here believe the entire world was once forest' and that 'only in the forest were they safe from the witchcraft of cohuori', and with that he pointed to himself and Billy, as if to say: they were both cohuori guilty of witchcraft in the world outside the forest.

The helicopters circled around an opening in the jungle as everyone craned to look for living Tagaeri in the jungle. The dead Tagaeri were visible strewn around the dirt and grass of the jungle floor. A long hut had been burned. The helicopters landed, and the soldiers raced into a circular position and quickly began to dig in some shallow trenches in which they lay with their rifles pointed toward the jungle. The dead lay all about, and they were almost all women and children. There was one old man decapitated in a hammock.

"If the oil companies murder the women and children," said Suarez to Billy, who marched by his side as he examined and photographed each corpse. "They know there will soon be no more Tagaeri. It's biology."

Inspector Suarez took time with the decapitated body of the old man. As well as headless, the man had been left speared by a Waorani spear. Suarez pulled it out and said it probably belonged to Babae Ima, and was left as evidence this was a clan on clan killing, and thus probably subject to tribal law, which meant in the end nothing could be done by the Equadorian government.

He handed the serrated fifteen foot spear to Billy and said, "How would you like to be hunted by one of these terrible things?"

According to the report of Inspector Suarez, Billy said something like, "I won't die a termite", and then for the next half an hour walked around with the spear in his hand. But when Suarez yelled for everyone to get back on the helicopters, Billy stood still as a primitive idol, the sword upright in his hand. The helicopters powered up, the dust flew around the opening, and Billy for a second was lost to sight as everyone clambered aboard the helicopters.

It was at the moment the dust cleared that Billy turned, and dropped the spear, and walked across the grass and into the jungle. Inspector Suarez jumped out of the helicopter and ran across to where he had disappeared as the helicopters powered down and the soldiers poured out.