Failure – Fantastic Planet

On an often-wobbly bicycle she would trudge up a hill to attend course codes 105, 214, etc. from eight o’ something to one o’ something else; at about one forty-five, she’d speed back on that jittery hunkajunk to her matchbox room for a lunch of boiled peas and an afternoon spent reading. Math school has always had its share of storytellers: among integrals, divs and curls, there have always been a few, like her, who found compelling narratives. 

If she were to turn to page 1 of the intro to topology class notes she’s preserved for a decade, for instance, she’d find one in her scribbles from when she was trying to keep herself awake in class. Hey Tony, the day spreads out before you like an empty canvas, and you hold in your palm no brushes, no paints. They’re all putrid to you: yellows, pinks, blues, all decaying. All minor variations on grey. Is it true that emptiness is loneliness, loneliness is cleanliness, cleanliness is godliness, and God is empty, just like you, Tony? Like your favourite band would have you believe? 

If she were to climb into the storage room and dig out Economics by Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, on pg. 218, she’d find another – The Mars Colony’s hottest new nightclub is Nu:Earth. This club has everything, pictures of Earth c. 1982, pictures of Mars c. 2032, vodka served in spherical blue-green glasses fitted with antennae-like straws that make them look like miniature Sputniks. Find yourself there at any given midnight, and you’ll find yourself at a strobe-lit jumping-stumping sort of place, off in the corner, dancing on your own, having an ad-exec-approved Good Time™.

Why just yesterday, she found one in an old college journal she dusted off for the first time as a working adult. In the backseat of an Uber on the way back from day 758 at Goldman Sachs – To imagine I might become one of them. The them versus whom the us assemble. Them: Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, but mostly Tony, who uses the model those two built to get paid inordinately large sums of money to inaccurately predict the direction of global markets. Us: idealists subsidised by the government and our parents, writers of convenient poetry and terrible prose.