A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism by Peter Mountford

Author:Peter Mountford [Mountford, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

When Gabriel arrived at the Lookout, he recognized no one. Fiona was not there yet, so he made his way to the bar. Severo poured him a Pisco Sour de Señorita Fiona as soon as he sat down, and Gabriel thanked him, aware that Severo was staring. The nurse had unceremoniously, if effectively, affixed a huge piece of gauze to the ear with a couple of yards of white medical tape. It looked bizarre, like an enormous homemade earmuff. Underneath it, his face was swollen and bruised, several puncture wounds had been sewn up with black sutures. His ear had been more or less ripped in half horizontally. They had sewn it back together with black sutures, which now looked like tiny crushed spiders in the moist red lesion.

"What happened to you?" Severo waved a hand around his own face.

"An accident," he said.

Which was true, in a sense, but so much seemed accidental or arbitrary. Of the many overly simple assumptions built into economics, the most egregious, as Gabriel saw it, was the idea that individuals were rational and aware of the costs and benefits of their decisions. It simplified the mathematics but could not allow for reality's madness. All the integers were shimmering, skewed in ways no one could comprehend.

Fiona entered and crossed the room briskly, stopping to greet a table of journalists on her way. When she sat down beside him, she said, "Yuck."

He didn't say anything.

"That's dynamite?" she said.

"Sort of." He didn't feel like talking about it with her. He didn't feel like dealing with her reaction. "So, how did your meeting with Evo go?"

"What did you say?"

"What did I say?"

"Yeah, what did you say?" she repeated. Severo put a cocktail in front of her.

"I said, what happened with Evo?"

She slapped her hand on the bar and laughed a bit too hard. "Wow!"

He looked away from her. This wasn't starting well. He'd known it might get messy, but he hadn't expected her to get punchy so quickly.

"Well, that's my Gabriel!" She patted him on the back, very friendly, very sarcastic. "He may be wounded, but his focus is laser sharp!"

He wasn't sure how best to proceed. It would be fruitless to backtrack, since he planned to break it off with her anyway. The best way forward, the only way, was to plow ahead with cold honesty. "Fiona, I have to ask—"

"Right, right, right, right, okay, I know, my little darling. It's fine, please don't get sensitive. Really, of all things: sensitivity? It doesn't suit you, Gabriel." She lit a cigarette. "The truth is that I didn't get anything for you. It slipped my mind. Sorry! Maybe next time. No, actually, I won't. I don't know why I'd ask something on your behalf."

"Fair enough," he said.

"No—really, why would I?" She put the cigarette down. It smelled good. Gabriel had never liked the smell of cigarettes before, but he liked it that night. Normally, it was as though he could smell the poison in the smoke, but that night it smelled soothing, satisfying.

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