Semmant

For Mancini, I earned my wages in full. He found himself the owner of a dozen gadgets, each of which possessed its own style. They gained popularity and followers, passionate supporters who remained faithful even when the markets changed and the tactics that had previously worked suddenly led to huge losses. This was precisely what Lucco was hoping for, and his hopes invariably materialized into profit. As for me, I was indifferent. I had no concern for the fate of others. However, the market as such – and not just its currency sector – suddenly aroused my genuine interest.

It unexpectedly reconciled me again with people and realities full of imperfections. I wanted to comprehend its laws – as if peering into the secrets of the world which, I felt, were still hidden from my probing eye. I sensed an unbreakable link – between the syncopes of the trading rhythms and the nervous convulsions of human souls. In the interlacing of intentions and desires, I saw the most sophisticated of patterns. The scribbling of countless charting pens, like the autographs of a terrifying force, beckoned with their own special code. It suddenly seemed to me: here it is, the abstraction of all abstractions. The transcendence of the best and the worst – of hope, futility, desperation...

Furthermore, the disarray of the universe dominated the market space, sounded at the top of its voice, but, at the same time, it was locked in a confining cage. There it raged, but could not escape through the bars. Its territory was localized. Everyone knew its boundaries; and therefore, it – the disorder – could be subject to scrutiny from the outside. I finally had the ability to study it, dissect and classify it, break it down into its smallest components. This was my chance – if not to settle the score, then at least to challenge it to a duel.

“Insolence!” everyone would say, but I trusted in myself and knew: I had something to depend on. I believed in my habit of brushing off simplifications. It was clear to me why so many were caught in enterprising Lucco’s net: it seemed there was nothing simpler than currency charts and diagrams. Everyone thought he really understood them well. The disorder bound up in the graphs and schemes seemed to rear its recognizable head, a visage of the chaos of nature all around us – in the clouds, in the windblown trees, in the waves of the sea. The beginners were enticed by the market’s familiar, almost tame appearance; they rushed into predictions, being mistaken about the very same thing. The illusory orderliness beckoned to them like a phantom; they wanted simplicity, smooth sailing – and that’s when they encountered a fiasco. The market punished them severely – like nature herself punished those who planned to subdue her, restrain her, force her to serve.

As for me, I knew how this happened. How the tiniest differences in estimates and opinions would quickly lead to a non-linear explosion, to a complete reversal of outcomes, to a quick and brutal loss of money. I saw this and surmised the problem could be approached differently. The chaos did not destroy me, though it showed its strength. By the same token, it gave more strength to me. I knew I had a weapon, and I was eager to put it to use.

Once I finished off the next automatic trader, I cut the project short and declared I was leaving. Lucco was inconsolable and promised me the moon, but my interest in him had already dissipated. To his credit, he gave me a solid bonus and very nearly shed a tear when we parted ways at the airport. I explained my departure with personal reasons – and quite by happenstance, one of the twins, whom I had forgotten to think about, appeared out of nowhere to announce she could not live without me. I was cold and somewhat rude, having not forgiven her for the Marseille saga, but she endured it and spent a few months with me – as far as I know, she didn’t cheat on me even once. We probably would have kept living together – and then everything might have turned out differently – but her cruel Siberian father tracked us down on the seacoast of Spain, and simply took her by force while I was playing tennis two steps from the house.

I wasn’t very upset at first; rather, I was surprised by these patriarchal mores. But then, after a couple of days, I felt a relentless yearning, and did not recover for a long time, totally ignoring other women. I could see her body standing before me – slender, obedient, ready for anything. She had a weakness for perfumery, and I, as if to poke fun, would make her wash off the creams and deodorants to the last drop every evening. For her this was like throwing off another layer of clothes. She snuggled up so adorably, grew aroused so abundantly, and became ever more submissive… I was now climbing the walls as I remembered her; I hurled the furniture to the floor and ripped the sheets to pieces. Then I calmed down and just hated – her father, Siberia, injustice.

I don’t know what cry she shouted at the sky over the frost-covered Taiga; whether she wished her father’s death, where she is now, or what became of her. I will never reveal her name, but this, the last of my losses, seemed to say to me: It’s time. After spending an awful month in solitude and somehow regaining my senses, I set to work without delay.

I got sick of the coast, and relocated to Madrid – a dirty city, stinking of pork cocido, permeated with the smells of dust, soft asphalt, and the acerbic juice of South American whores. I found an apartment on the Paseo de Recoletos, furnished it carelessly – and forgot about the city, focusing on what was most important. I had to figure out the matters that many before me had lost their minds over.

First, I said to myself, no half measures. It was clear: any insincerity, any attempt to win with minor casualties would inevitably lead to failure. To get into another’s soul, one has to open one’s own all the way, and I did this without batting an eye. I started to invest real money – not yet knowing the laws or the rules. Lucco Mancini’s bonus, which I could have lived on for a couple of years, was nearly all put into the project – and, in the beginning, everything went well. For a week or two I was certain that from the very first attempt I had grasped the correct path – or at least that beginner’s luck was on my side. However, these illusions were quickly shattered. The market just did not notice me at the time. Then it took notice, lifted its little finger – and all my theories and schemes, all my strategies, which yesterday had seemed so clever, were scattered like a house of cards. The digits on the screen were painted bright red. That color later pursued me for a long time in my dreams. My capital began to melt away, and I plummeted into genuine terror.

No, I wasn’t sorry about the money itself. I knew I could always earn more. I panicked before the blind force, before the power of the random, the inscrutable. The phantom of defeat loomed in the distance – and grew nearer each day. Stocks and bonds, currencies, metals, oil – nothing behaved as it was supposed to. It hadn’t been like this before; I studied the past down to the smallest details. But this was happening now, in front of my very eyes, and I understood that history teaches nothing. Retrospection and prior experience was all in vain. Only animal instinct, perhaps, might save you sometimes – the instinct and nothing else… I sat for hours in front of the monitor, grinding my teeth, holding my head in my hands, and thinking, thinking! Next I just looked indifferently, whistling something off-tune. And then I didn’t even look anymore; I lounged in my armchair with my chin on my chest, afraid to move lest it become even worse.

Once again I realized: the aura of Indigo does not save and does not protect. It can become a magic carpet, turn into seven-league boots or a heavy cross – but it’s not a guardian angel to deflect troubles with its thin hand. A girl with a searching glance and her toy frog will not appear at the first call – or the second, or the third either. Nobody will come at all: with blind forces you’re always one-on-one.

Having lost almost half of my investment, I finally believed the market was seriously rising against me. This, in a strange way, almost calmed me down; I regained the ability to reason soundly. Soon I got rid of the shaking in my hands and began to take the right steps.

First of all, I shut myself off from outside opinions. The voices of all slackers, fool analysts, arrogant soothsayers of the hour – they did not exist for me any longer. I tossed dubious calculations and indicator charts into a far corner. I now only took in the main facts every day – just those, and the price fluctuations. I did not take my eyes away from the streaming quotes and blinking digits. My head was spinning; my concentration was extreme. I grew gaunt, slept little, wandered around the apartment like a sleepwalker without turning on the light. The telephone was silent. The whole house was silent. In the entire world, there was no sound for me. I remembered only that tomorrow would come, and the daily watch would commence anew: watching and listening to myself – listening, listening…

Then, finally, something moved; my own vibrations began to resonate with the vibrations of the market. In the din of the exchanges, in the confused chorus from the innumerable multitude of strings I began to sense the obvious dominants. The abstruse voice pounded my ears, drawing its melody from the market’s bowels. At times it soared to the highest note – which was a cry of fear. Then, on the contrary, it would drop down – seething with human greed. Only those two forces reigned there – whimsically switching places with each other, snatching the palm branch of primacy and a laurel wreath from each other’s hands.

I began to draw totally different schemes, of the sort that would not smooth out any peak. In my notebook appeared the strangest of mosaics – Peano Lines and Von Koch Islands, Sierpinski Arrows and Cantor Dust. Carefully, meticulously, I probed various scales – from minutes to months and years. I sought hints and traces of order, and I marked similarities, signs of symmetry. Soon I noticed that I was not surprised anymore by sudden jumps. They were not sudden; they were explainable. Not all of them, of course, and not always, but the vast majority, anyway. I realized a breakthrough had occurred, and the only thing keeping me from taking a decisive step was my memory of recent losses. This was my personal fear, and greed did not feed into it: I did not know greed, just as I don’t know it now. That’s why it was surmountable, and I overcame it, forcing myself to take risks again. I risked and won; then risked again and won again. After that, I shut down the computer and left for the sea – to wander along the shore, breathe in the salt air and get my nerves in order.

The money came back to me quickly – during the next couple of weeks. I wanted to leave the market alone, but something pushed me to continue – a feeling of incompleteness, a desire for verification. The resonance of vibrations did not betray me; I was growing increasingly wealthy. Over the next half a year I earned a lot – enough for a comfortable, worry-free life. Only then did I allow myself to stop; the project could be considered finished. I got in a new car and drove to Tyrol – to Thomas, my roommate at the School, who had long been inviting me for off-piste skiing. It was there the fragments cohered into a whole, the component parts took their places...

Listen! This was like an explosion. Like a dazzling lightning bolt that ices your blood. Thomas, a thirty-year-old youth with the face of an old man, noticed nothing, which wasn’t his fault. He did enough as it was, and I’m forever in his debt. I am a debtor to the glacier and the peaks of Tyrol, and to all the serene grandeur of the Alps!

We met in the evening, took a seat in a bar, and got to reminiscing. I let him know about Anthony and the ill-fated syringe, while he told me of Dee Wilhelbaum, who had removed himself from the public eye, permanently. Then Thomas asked cautiously, “Well, you’ve heard about her, haven’t you?” And, seeing my bewilderment, he uttered with a sigh, “Little Sonya, she’s not with us anymore either.”

This was a shock – greater than all the rest. The walls spun; there was a lump in my throat – I tried not to let it show. Soon we got drunk, and I cried in the lavatory. Then my tears dried, and we drank some more. I couldn’t shake the sense of terrible danger which we both had the luck to escape. An avalanche of time shuffled past, without touching Thomas or me. Some got unfortunate, but we were protected. He by the Tyrol mountains to which he returned after leaving a banking career. I by my co-workers and partners – sea captains and cynical medics, lab assistants and bearded chemists, even rockers from Manchester and twins from Siberia: everyone who fed me currents of real life, pushing me away from abstractions. It’s to their credit that I, tied by a thin thread, did not fly off like an unfettered balloon.

“What bothers me,” Thomas sneered, “is that things happen so fast, you don’t have time to even say good-bye.” This simple thought shifted some more elements in my brain. Like a few years ago, in the smoke and smog of the city scorched by the sun, I now recognized again how little time there is – for each and for all. But for some there is more. Me, for example – and I, it seems, don’t appreciate it as I should. Slices of time, they’re for making progress, not for complaining and griping. I must do my job – and it looks like I still haven’t started!

In the morning we went up to the glacier and skied until midday on the untouched, virgin snow. Then we stopped to rest at Mount Wildspitze, on its south peak. To the left was Brochkogel – unreachable and formidable, it was gorgeous. And its younger brother, Brunnenkogel to the right, was striking just the same. The sun’s rays were blinding even through the mask. The snow was dry and utterly pure.

I realized then: this is an eternity which denies the meaning of all goodbyes: there is no one to say it to. This is victory over chaos, the disarming of disorder, harmony of the utmost precision. The best things that could happen in life happen here; I could climb up and live this over and over again... I felt like loving the whole world – that real world, which had probably saved me. I wanted to bestow on it something precious in return.

“A dream!” I thought, and I decided to give the world a dream. It was clear to me what it should be. “Semmant,” I thought. The name came of its own accord. And it never left.

 

Vadim Babenko left two "dream" jobs - cutting-edge scientist and high-flying entrepreneur - in order to pursue his lifelong goal to write full-time. Born in the Soviet Union, he earned master's and doctoral degrees from the Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology, Russia's equivalent to MIT. As a scientist at the Soviet Academy of Sciences he became a recognized leader in the area of artificial intelligence. Then he moved to the U.S. and co-founded a high-tech company just outside of Washington, D.C. The business soon skyrocketed, and the next ambitious goal, an IPO on the stock exchange, was realized. But at this peak of success, Vadim dropped everything to set out on the path of a writer and has never looked back. He moved to Europe and, during the next eight years, published five books, including two novels, The Black Pelican and A Simple Soul, which were nominated for Russia's most prestigious literary awards. His third novel, Semmant, initially written in Russian and then translated with the author's active participation, is published exclusively in English.

 

Find out more at vadimbabenko.com

 

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 04.02.2014

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