Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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******

”I wondered,” he said, without greeting, his voice the measured baritone of a man who had conducted enough important conversations to understand that preamble was not always necessary, ”when you would call.”

---

There was a sound on the line that Irving recognised — not quite a laugh, not quite a breath, but something in between. The particular sound Marvin made when he was pleased with something but was exercising restraint about showing it.

”Good morning, Grandpa.”

”Good morning.” A pause. ”I’ve been reading the *Financial Times*.”

”I imagine a lot of people have been reading a lot of things this morning.”

”The baht.” Irving said it the way he said the names of rivers — a thing that existed in geography before it existed in finance. ”The Bank of Thailand has floated it.”

”They had no choice left,” Marvin said. ”They burned through approximately twenty-three billion dollars in reserves trying to defend a peg that was already compromised. The speculators knew the number. When you know a man’s last dollar, you know when he breaks.”

Irving was quiet for a moment. Through the telephone line, across the twelve miles between Laurel Canyon and Pasadena, the old man turned that sentence over in the way a jeweller turns a stone — examining each facet for the quality of the cut.

”Your great-great-grandfather used to say something similar,” Irving said finally. ”About water rights. He said if you know how deep a man’s well is, you know how long you can wait him out.”

”He was right.”

”He usually was. Stubborn old man. Correct most of the time, which made the stubbornness considerably more tolerable.” Another pause, longer this time. ”How long have you known this was coming today? Specifically today?”

”I didn’t know the specific date,” Marvin said. ”I knew the shape of it. The baht had been under sustained speculative pressure since May of last year. The Thai current account deficit was running at about eight percent of GDP. The short-term foreign debt was approximately double the country’s usable foreign exchange reserves by late 1996. Those numbers only resolve one way.” He paused. ”The only variable I couldn’t precisely time was the Bank of Thailand’s tolerance for pain. Central banks are institutions, and institutions have ego. They hold on longer than the mathematics says they should because capitulation is public and expensive. But they always break eventually. The math always wins.”

Irving set down his coffee cup. He heard it make the small sound of china against the mahogany surface of the desk, and found himself suddenly and acutely aware of the texture of the moment — the morning light coming through the south-facing window, the *Financial Times* folded on the desk, the smell of the study, and the voice of his grandson on the telephone speaking about sovereign debt ratios and speculative pressure with the matter-of-fact clarity of a man who had been doing this for thirty years.

He felt the same thing he had felt in November.

The shadow.

It moved across the edge of his consciousness the way it always did when Marvin spoke about money and markets and the logic of large-scale events — not a supernatural sensation, nothing the old man would have allowed himself to describe as mystical, but a pressure in the room that he associated with one other person and one other person only. His father. Samuel Meyers, dead these forty-two years, who had sat in a chair not entirely unlike this one and spoken about the railroad land grants and the water rights and the slow inexorable consolidation of Western capital in a voice that had the same quality Marvin’s had now — the quality of a man who is not explaining something but simply describing something he has already seen.

”The crisis won’t stop at Thailand,” Marvin continued. His voice was even. Unhurried. He was not performing certainty for effect — he was reporting it, the way a navigator reports a position fix. ”Indonesia is already under pressure. The rupiah has been overvalued for years and the short-term corporate debt situation there is considerably worse than the official numbers suggest. Malaysia is next in the sequence. Mahathir will blame currency speculators, which is partly true and mostly beside the point. The Philippine peso will follow. And South Korea —” a brief pause ”— South Korea is where it gets genuinely systemic. The chaebol debt structure is extraordinary. When the IMF eventually publishes its full accounting of what’s sitting on the books of those conglomerates, the numbers will be difficult to believe.”

”When the IMF eventually publishes,” Irving repeated. ”You’re already assuming they’ll be involved.”

”They’re the lender of last resort for sovereign governments that have lost access to the international capital markets. Thailand will be the first. Indonesia will be larger. South Korea will be the one that tests the limits of what the Fund can actually deploy.”

”And the timeline?”

”Months,” Marvin said. ”Not years. The contagion moves fast because it’s fundamentally a confidence crisis, and confidence is not a slow-moving commodity. By October you’ll have a clearer picture of the full geography of it. By year end you’ll know the body count.”

Irving reached out and placed one finger on the folded edge of the *Financial Times*, not turning the pages, just resting there. A habit. A small act of contact with the physical world when the conversation required it.

”You told me this in November,” the old man said.

”I told you the shape of it in November.”

”You told me the baht would collapse. You told me to watch George Soros. You told me that Southeast Asia was sitting on a currency architecture that was structurally incompatible with the capital flows the region had been attracting through the mid-nineties. You were not vague about it, Marvin. You were specific.”

”I had access to information that suggested a high probability.”

”You had access to information.” Irving’s voice carried something that might have been amusement and might have been something older and more complicated than amusement. ”Your father says you read too much.”

”My father is not wrong about many things. He’s wrong about that one.”

The old man made a sound in his throat — the same sound he had been making since Marvin was small enough to sit in his lap, a sound that meant *that’s my boy* in a language that had no other words for it.

”How are your investments?” Irving asked. His voice shifted into the register he used for business — not colder, exactly, but more precise. Sharper at the edges.

”The Yahoo position is performing beyond the original projection,” Marvin said. He could hear, even through the telephone line, the almost imperceptible change in his grandfather’s breathing that meant he was paying close attention. ”The equity block — the original shares — is valued at approximately one point two million at current prices. The options program has generated realised profits of roughly three point seven five million across different cycles. I currently have three active options structures running simultaneously, totalling approximately one point one five million in deployed capital.”

”The trust account?”

”Scarlet Capitals has a total Yahoo exposure — equity plus live options — of approximately three point two million as of this morning. The portfolio has compounded from the original near-million dollar investment to that figure in roughly nine months.” A brief pause. ”The entertainment income from the literary work added an additional four million in cash.”

Silence.

Not the silence of a man who has nothing to say. The silence of a man who is choosing very carefully which of the many things he could say he is going to say first.

”You doubled it,” Irving said finally. His voice was quiet. It had a quality in it that Marvin had heard only rarely — not surprise exactly, because Irving Meyers was not easily surprised, but something adjacent to it. Something warmer and more private. ”You more than doubled it. And that’s before the entertainment payments clear.”

”I told you I would.”

”You told me you would. You also told me the Thai baht was going to collapse, which has now occurred, on a timeline broadly consistent with what you described to me on a November evening when I was, I will admit to you now, approximately forty percent convinced that I was watching an eleven-year-old boy engage in an elaborate performance of precocity.” Another pause, shorter this time. ”I was wrong.”

”You were appropriately skeptical,” Marvin said. ”I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t been.”

”Your grandfather is many things, Marvin. An easy mark is not among them.” The warmth was audible now, fully present, not masked by the precision of the business register. ”Now. Tell me about the hundred million.”

---

Marvin shifted in his chair. Outside the window the canyon was bright and dry, the scrub oak on the ridge casting short shadows at this hour. Somewhere down the hill a mockingbird was working through its repertoire with the methodical creativity that made the species both impressive and exhausting as a neighbour. He had been sitting at this desk since six in the morning. The notebook in front of him was open to a page covered in his own handwriting — the close, precise cursive his second-grade teacher had described as unsettlingly neat for a child — and in the margins, in a different ink from the main text, were a series of numbers and arrows and abbreviated country names that he had been updating since the wire began running the Bangkok story.

”You know why I need it,” Marvin said. Not a question. A position statement.

”Tell me anyway. I want to hear you say it.”

There was a brief silence on the line, not of uncertainty but of selection — the particular silence of someone deciding not which argument to make but which version of the true argument to lead with. Then:

”The Asian Financial Crisis is going to move in a sequence,” Marvin said. ”Thailand is the first domino. But a domino that falls in Bangkok has counterparts in Jakarta, in Kuala Lumpur, in Manila, in Seoul, and eventually — with a different mechanism but the same essential cause — in Hong Kong and might be in Moscow. The contagion moves through currency channels first, then equity markets, then sovereign debt, then banking systems.

The full cycle, from today’s announcement to the moment when the IMF has deployed its last emergency package and the regional currencies find a new equilibrium, will take between twelve and eighteen months.”

”And in that window,” Irving said, not as a prompt but as a confirmation that he was following, ”there are positions to take.”

”Substantial ones. The currency component is the most immediate — short positions against the regional currencies as they progressively lose their pegs or experience forced devaluations. The equity component is more complex because the timing of the equity bottoms is harder to predict than the currency moves, but the directional thesis is clear. There’s also a sovereign debt dimension as the crisis deepens into the financial systems — distressed debt opportunities that won’t manifest for another six to nine months but that will be of the kind that come along perhaps once in a decade.”

”Soros,” Irving said.

”Soros is already positioned. He’s been positioned for some time. The Quantum Fund’s footprints in the baht market going back to May are not subtle if you know what you’re looking for. He’ll make an extraordinary amount of money from this crisis. He is not the cause of it — the cause of it is a decade of dollar-pegged exchange rate regimes combined with rapid short-term capital inflows into economies that lacked the regulatory infrastructure to manage that volume of foreign capital efficiently. Soros identified the structural fault and applied pressure to it. The fault was already there.”

”You’re not Soros,” Irving said. The tone was not critical. It was precise.

”No. I’m not deploying at sovereign scale and I’m not looking to move markets. I’m looking to take well-structured directional positions in instruments that will perform predictably as the crisis progresses through its sequence in his shadows. Currency exposure through options on the rupiah and the ringgit as they reach their next critical pressure points. Short positions in selected regional equity indices through derivatives. And when the time comes — and I can be more specific about timing once the Indonesian situation becomes clearer — distressed positioning in certain Korean financial sector securities that will be pricing outcomes considerably worse than the eventual resolution.”

A long silence. Through the line Marvin could hear, faintly, the sound of his grandfather’s study — the particular quality of silence in a room full of old books, which was not empty silence but something denser and more inhabited.

”A hundred million dollars,” Irving said.

”Yes.”

”That is a great deal of money, Marvin.”

”I’m aware.”

”You’re an eleven-year-old child.”

”I’m aware of that as well.”

Another pause, and this one had a different texture — not evaluative but something more internal, the sound of a man having a conversation with himself that ran parallel to the one he was having on the telephone. When Irving spoke again, his voice had shifted slightly. Not softer exactly, but more present, more directly aimed.

”Do you know what it took to accumulate that money?”

”Tell me.”

*****

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