by
Keith Gessen
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Mark laughed. He was not Mick Jagger either. Celeste was twenty-nine years old. In general, this was a pretty good age to be, a pretty happy age. But in Brooklyn in 2006, with every other weekend a wedding save-the-date from a college friend in her mailbox, it was less so. Celeste concentrated momentarily on her food as Mark watched her. You could hold out against the calendar of the system for only so long; you could remain steadfast for only so long. This was her last chance at something; Mark of all people was her last chance at something, before she crossed into a different phase of her life.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m some lost puppy you’ve taken in! Shithead.”
“Sorry.”
He kissed her. She kissed him back. They kept their lips closed—Gwyn was a nice girl, from Minnesota, and Mark was almost ten years older than she—but she kissed him with such an intensity of kissing, such an abandon to it, that he began to think that maybe he could just do it all over again. Gwyn was a little straitlaced, like Sasha, and she was a little awkward, like her, and also like Sasha and very much unlike Celeste she was meant, clearly, for existing with someone in the world—and perhaps all the things he’d done wrong with Sasha, all the mistakes he’d made, all the money he didn’t spend on taxicabs, on dinners, on better coffee, that of course in retrospect he should have spent (poor Sasha, and all those nights that they’d spent on subways instead), all the things he said no to that he should have said yes to, all the years in Syracuse they wasted, and all the words, yes, the unkind words that, because of his stupidity, his inexperience, his callowness, he’d allowed to slip through his lips—not to mention his sexual inexperience, had he neglected to mention this? He was just a boy! Boys should not marry! Oh. They should not marry. But now—he wondered now, as his lips unlocked from Gwyn’s and only their foreheads touched, looking down on her lips, her chin, he wondered if perhaps he couldn’t do right all that he’d once done wrong.
“Mark!” Arielle called after him. “Choose wisely!”
“Hey.” Toby cut in again.
“No, I need to say this,” Arielle insisted. “I’ve known guys like you, Mark. You think girls need to be saved. But we don’t. We’re OK. Save yourself!”
We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain. We don’t want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one’s hands—like some dancer, in a trance, just put out one’s hands—and touch all the people and tell them: I’m sorry. I love you. Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. But we can’t. We can’t. On the little life raft of Mark only one other person could fit. Just one! And so, thwarted, we inflict pain. That’s what we do. We do not keep each other company. We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we’ll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone.
He had left Sasha, he had allowed Sasha to leave, because he could no longer abide the person he had become with her. He lied and lied and when the lies had mounted festering in the corner he covered them with further lies. Then he had suffered in Syracuse alone. Or rather the loneliness was the suffering. He had dated. He had Internet dated. And even when he’d solved all these problems of dating he—well, continued to date. As if only the women he dated could tell him who Mark was. As if he would not be a full person, a full Mark, until he’d found the perfect complement. Except every woman he dated took a chunk of Mark with her. And vice versa. So that if you looked, if you walked around New York and looked properly, if you walked around America and looked properly, what you saw was a group of wandering disaggregated people, torn apart and carrying with them, in their hands, like supplicants, the pieces of flesh they’d won from others in their time. And who now would take them in?
[...] Of course in a way it was all pretty academic. The Bush years were winding down disgracefully, the Iraq war was lost, the Middle East was lost, the environment was lost: YOU DO NOT SUBJECT YOUR COUNTRY TO SIX YEARS OF MISRULE BY FANATICAL INCOMPETENTS AND EMERGE SMELLING LIKE ROSES. But what can you do? The trash was still getting picked up on Mondays, water came out of my faucets, hot and cold, and the subway trains ran through the night. In the mornings sometimes I saw pretty girls on those trains reading the New Yorker and opposing—too late— the war in Iraq.
There were so many things I’d once wanted to do! The trouble is that when you’re young you don’t know enough; you are constantly being lied to, in a hundred ways, so your ideas of what the world is like are jumbled; when you imagine the life you want for yourself, you imagine things that don’t exist. If I could have gone back and explained to my younger self what the real options were, what the real consequences for certain decisions were going to be, my younger self would have known what to choose. But at the time I didn’t know; and now, when I knew, my mind was too filled up with useless auxiliary information, and beholden to special interests, and I was confused.
Financial variables are a way of accounting for what’s going on in the real world. But the real world itself starts to react to financial variables if they’re extreme enough. And it’s funny—the financial system, all the big guns that have been wheeled out by the government and the monetary authorities, have in the last couple weeks kind of stabilized what gets called the “guts” of the financial market. There is short-term credit, there is a certain degree of lending between banks, corporates are able to get their commercial paper rolled over, for the most part. So it’s functioning—in a much reduced fashion, there are surprises and shocks every day, but it hasn’t ground to a complete halt. But now you are seeing the effect on the real economy. So what’s happening? We have the largest one-month drop in payrolls in twenty-five years. You’re starting to see real job loss. You’re starting to see actual companies going out of business, or high-profile default. [...]
Some of that impact is not a direct impact of the financial markets, but it’s the hangover from the misallocation of resources, which is the same thing that’s causing problems in the financial markets. Whereas a pure impact of the financial markets is where people look at their 401(k)s and say, “Gosh, I don’t want to spend.” That’s a pure impact of financial variables causing people’s attitudes to change, changing their risk tolerance, their propensity to consume.
I was in China, mostly Beijing, a couple of weeks ago, checking on a property investment. The property sector is important: A lot of the pressure on raw materials prices supposedly coming out of China was related to the property sector, to construction. The amount of building that had been going on was enormous and visible, all over Beijing. I saw one luxury housing development after another, most of them just in the process of construction, or recently completed, and…sales had last year just come to a halt. It was amazing, the physical reconstruction of that city. A lot of it had to do with the Olympics, but a lot of it also had to do with property speculation.
And Beijing really is not the city that had the most residential property speculation. The optimism that pumped up that sector was pretty incredible. Here you have a provincial city where there was maybe one 4-star hotel—suddenly there are four 5-star hotel projects under construction, and you just wonder who the heck is going to stay in them. A city that really didn’t have much in the way of luxury housing suddenly has tons of luxury projects sprouting up, a lot of those getting sold to speculators, with nobody at the end of the chain. Toward the end of last year people realized just how far supply had outrun real demand, and how far prices had run up.
this makes me think of the Fordist compromise, where workers were paid decent wages so they could afford to consume the products they helped create. that compromise, of course, is long over; the successor model in tech (the gig economy) may come undone for similar reasons. eventually, there may be no one at the end of the supply-side chain, or maybe even the demand-side chain. or there'll be an imbalance that will threaten the whole system. (think about this more)
[...] some of the banks have come out and said that their business in January and February and March was profitable—Citi was the first to do it, Bank of America said so, Goldman actually reported this week. Personally, I think it’s a load of bollocks. I mean, as a bank, you have a lot of freedom to mark your assets where you please, particularly the loan book. You can show a profit, you can show whatever profit you want. You have a lot of scope to manage your P&L [profit-and-loss statement]. In the emerging markets I’ve often seen banks showing quarterly profits until the day they go belly-up.
worth remembering. the valuations are arbitrary!! and unlike stock market valuations, they're decided internally, by fiat essentially
(think about tech billionaires' net worth)