Two hours after Peter first entered Stenman Partners’ building, the warm rays of dawn lanced through the trading room windows. He felt like an unarmed Don Quixote surrounded by fire-breathing dragons, knee deep in trash. It wasn’t exactly a bad mix of emotions that washed over him—more a jumbled mass of confused fascination. The room—his new workday home—was a pigsty of coffee cups, paper scraps, greasy brown bags, leftover fast food, and soda cans. The smell was a combination of a packed McDonald’s restaurant, burnt coffee, and sweat. Accompanying this stink was bedlam. Shuffled, scrunched, and torn paper coated every surface. Bodies popped up and down. A pen was flung against a computer screen. The place could have been a ward for the attention deficient.
Three steps in, Peter halted in petrified fascination. A pyrotechnical voice echoed from a skull scaled to a body twice the size of the one it sat on. The face was a vast oval with Aryan eyes framed by a brow running in a single unbroken bush over the nose-bridge. In his late thirties, the man with flapping lips was at least six-four. He had out-of-kilter ears—tiny, like apricots—almost no more than holes in the side of his head. His looks— the sum of scary, mean, and downright weird—intimidated Peter more than his foghorned vulgarities. The man stood at the door of the only office on the floor and was clearly in charge of the other hyperactive traders. Peter realized this person had to be Howard Muller, his new boss.
“Hit the damn bid, Numbnuts!” Muller yelled. “This is a no brainer— I could get a signpost to do your fucking job.”
The trader, looking to be about Peter’s age, seemed unfazed by the bizarre man’s assault. Numbnuts had a day-old shadow and, like Peter, his scruffy brown hair was too long. He was physically average, with corneas that darted every which way. Numbnuts nodded as Muller slammed the office door. A moment later, Peter heard the young trader scream into his phone, “Hit the bid! I don’t give a rat’s ass about squeezing an extra nickel on the trade. Do it!”
Peter stood, his spine rigid, grateful he had been far enough away that Muller’s angry spittle hadn’t doused his face. Peter’s reactions went unnoticed, however—he might as well have been part of the atmosphere since not one of the twenty or so bodies paid him an ounce of attention.
The office area looked to be a four-thousand square-foot rectangle, running some sixty- by seventy-feet. Through the glass wall of a conference room, Peter saw what he assumed was sophisticated teleconferencing equipment and a fifteen-foot table. In a corner, there was a sink, refrigerator, built-in bar, and microwave. Interrupting this survey, from across the room, a tiny man with a beet-red face yelled, “Shut the fuck up you shit- for-brains!” He then slammed his phone against the desktop three times. When he finished, he pulled the shattered mouthpiece out of a plug, dropped it into his trashcan, and reached into a drawer for a replacement. Once he’d plugged the new headset in, he punched a button and began speaking to someone else as if that outburst had not just occurred.
Peter’s sight line next roamed down the tight rows of traders. Littering the desktops were computers and flat-paneled slaves packed with stock, commodity, currency, and worldwide market indices. Each piece of data flashed in real time, overwhelming Peter’s senses in the way that a planetarium awes those trying to make sense of the universe.
Every individual, including assistants at smaller desks, had phone banks with at least thirty incoming lines, a dozen or more pulsating at any one time. The bodies sat elbow-to-elbow without so much as a divider between desks. But the intensity of the players precluded anyone from attending to anyone else’s affairs. No time to waste on office intrigue, he realized. This seemed like professional Mardi Gras, and, feeling his own pulse racing, Peter sensed an overwhelming desire to understand and belong.
“Report to Howard Muller,” Stenman had said. After weaving through piles of crap and bodies in motion, Peter studied the nameplate mounted on the glass door:
Muller leaned into a speakerphone, his back to his door. Beyond where his new boss sat, Peter noticed a wall’s worth of Civil War memorabilia, locked in glass cabinets. Tattered Union and Confederate flags hung alongside unsheathed swords. The display also included muskets, pistols, war photos, belt buckles, and even a Confederate uniform with what looked like bullet holes and blood stains.
When Peter opened the door, Muller sensed the intrusion and spun around.
The CIO hit the hold button, cutting off an agitated voice in mid-sentence. He glared at Peter. “Nobody comes into my office unless I tell them to.”
Muller sat behind the biggest mug of coffee—more like a German beer stein—Peter had ever seen. The aroma filled the air, an indication that this was a stiff brew. As if this guy needs artificial stimulation, Peter thought.
“Sorry,” Peter began in a respectful-to-your-new-boss voice, “but I’m—”
“I know who you are, Asswipe. Go sit with Numbnuts. He’s the one I yelled at when you came in. He’ll teach you what little he knows—that should take all of twenty seconds. Now, get out.”
“Should—”
“What word didn’t you understand? Out!”
The words hit him like sucker punches and Peter sagged from the pounding. He dutifully backed up, afraid to turn his back, and not sure he still had a job. Once the office door shut, granting him some measure of safety, he worked his way back through the room.
When Numbnuts turned, Peter said without thinking, “Hello. I’m Asswipe. The anger management dropout told me to come sit with you.”
The trader’s intensity melted into an involuntary smile. He held out his hand. “For new meat, that’s damn funny,” he said. “Hope you last longer than the last four or five losers. I’m Stuart Grimes, a. k. a. Numbnuts. I’m jammed up my ass, so just watch. When the markets close, we’ll review things . . .”
Stuart’s voice sounded adenoidal, as if he had a sinus condition. Abruptly, the trader must have caught something through his peripheral vision because he spun around, turning Peter off. He punched a flashing button labeled
“There. You happy?” he asked. “The stock’s ticking at three-quarters. If you hadn’t noticed, that’s last sale—a zero-plus tick—and the company can pay, so do it! Hit their damn bid before some other bright boy beats you to the punch.” Stuart paused. “Fine,” he added. “Eight cents a share, you greedy bastard. Put it up, on the hop.”
Peter began to write
When Stuart grabbed a red-bordered ticket and slid it into a machine that thumped, Peter felt encouraged. He had figured out—on his own— that this was a timestamp. When Stuart wrote
A moment later,
“I hope this job doesn’t require mind-reading,” Peter said below audibility.
He added,
Sitting back for the next few hours, Peter listened as much as he could, all the while studying thousands of numbers and symbols looking like energetic fireflies. As people continued to ignore him, the tidal wave of stimulus overload threatened to crush him. No wonder the last four or five employees had failed. He gripped his stone and thought of his father. His mother. His cat. Unemployment.
A voice yelled, “The bid’s been raised! Get ready to sell. Nobody’s gonna pay a higher price than these flaming assholes—not for this piece-of-shit company.”
Peter’s head whipped from face to face in an attempt to understand. Failing that, he pressed pen to paper, adding yet another item to his endless list of questions.
After taking a gulp, Jason Ayers placed the decanter under the sink and made his way across his office. Two fingers of scotch glowed through a crystal tumbler pressed between his white knuckles. Leaving a message wasn’t
