The Fogged Clarity Interview

Author Tom Matlack discusses the passion and purpose behind his Good Men Project.

You can purchase the book here.

Ryan McCarl

Every day for ten years Robert had come to this café on the second floor of the Borders on North Michigan Avenue. He was a talented day-trader, fluent in the language of the market. He saw candlesticks and skylines in graphs where those with less training saw only the patternless movement of a line; in cloud-clusters of data points he saw writing as clear as Times New Roman type, with outliers dotting and flourishing the letters.

Some of his peers embraced the label “speculator,” but Robert rejected it – he was an investor, a finance professional. In earlier days, he had meticulously showered and donned a suit every morning, combed his hair and been out the door with a nod to the morning doorman and a swinging briefcase by seven-thirty – but that was only to visit Ahmed’s news-booth on the corner of Clark and Adams to purchase his cluster of morning papers, and then it was back to the office he kept in the corner of his small studio apartment. Dressed every bit as keen as if he had been entering the Board of Trade with a badge on his label and a firm behind him, and incoming calls on a cellular phone.

He did keep a phone, but it rarely rang. He was a broker for himself, and worked full-time on behalf of the same. His habits were rigorous: six morning papers (and the Journal read twice), several newsweeklies, and then the messages of the market. When necessary he would carefully consult the shelf of experts that sat above his trading desk: Fabozzi, Graham and Dodd, and others, and the great 20th century economists – Hazlitt, Hayek, and Von Mises, whom he loved, and Keynes and Galbraith, whom he abhorred but kept around just in case.

Now seventy, he still worked and would work until forbidden by the seal of the casket. But for the past ten years he had not worked from home; his practice was based out of the café in Borders. To his great impatience, the store did not open until 9:30, long after the market’s opening bell. (He had struggled with himself and with his sister over whether to move to New York to be more in tune with the schedule of the market, had several times packed the contents of his apartment into a few boxes and vowed to make the move that very weekend before the markets opened on Monday, but never seemed to be able to finalize things, to bring that decision to its lonely conclusion).

When the Borders manager-on-duty turned the lock of the first foyer door, Robert would be waiting without fail – the two exchanged a familiar nod and good-morning, and Robert quickly made his way up the escalator to claim the first cup of coffee poured that day, which he drank black. And then he sat at the very same table as the day before, the one with the best view of the old Water Tower through the trees and the horse-and-carriages stomping at the side street. After a sigh and an unlidding of the coffee he would fan his morning papers out across the table and pile a stack of books and company prospectuses high upon an adjacent chair and get on with his business of underlining and graph-reading, finding pictures heavy with meaning in the dimensionless points of the scatterplots and the suggestive starts and stops of the trend-lines.

It was the seventh of June, one of those rainy and sixty-degree days so familiar in the early Chicago summer. He knew the date well, and paused a moment with his pen hovering over an underlined section of a page. His hand trembled with a tremor he carefully ignored. The branches of the fir trees in the plaza stirred, and he paused to reflect: it had been ten years since he made his last trade.

Events in the window and in the café were different and the same – the other regulars, the eternal students, the homeless, and the businessmen seeking refuge from their offices in the Loop, had aged and changed their wardrobes, and many familiar faces were gone, having moved on to other cities and other lives. But Robert was a fixture of the place. On the rare occasion that a traveler with a bit of fondness in his heart for the café would stop by and look to Robert’s table and find it empty, a moment of disorientation and even sadness would follow: a reminder that even the most permanent things of this world must pass.

Ten years since his last trade, and ten years since he moved his daily operations to this table in the bookstore café. He permitted himself only a moment to reflect – this was one memory he could not stand to look at for long, and anyhow there was much to get done before lunch, and he could not afford to fall behind. But the anniversary of that day forced itself into his consciousness, will it away though he might.

One day, when very recently he had begun to dabble in short-selling, that is, betting that a stock would fall but assuming unlimited liability in case it should rise, he had misjudged the direction of a stock. A grave, grave misjudgment – his books and papers had failed him, and it was all he could do not to burn them and burn his apartment and trading desk down on top of them.

The next day, he was sick and missed the morning bell for the first time since his first day on the job as a mail-sorter and clerk for a small brokerage operation in his Indiana hometown. And the day after that, he had been lured away from his desk for a breakfast with his brother-in-law; his sister, who by order of some long-ago court supervised his accounts for reasons of a diagnosis he refused to name as he knew it to be false and a lie, begged off and was unable to attend. He ate anxiously with the brother-in-law and thought of the markets and how he might climb back to where he had been; he thought also suspicious thoughts, thoughts of betrayal – the food tasted strange and the tone of his brother-in-law’s voice was strange. His eyes were strange. Some of the more ominous messages that one finds in the chart of a stock-price may sometimes be found as well in the eyes of a man; this, too, Robert understood.

But it was too late. He returned from the breakfast to find his trading desk empty of its most prominent feature – the array of computers and monitors that surrounded and cradled him as he sat in his hard-backed chair. He always, without fail, locked his apartment door; for Robert to forget to lock his door would be for to the sun to forget to set or for Kant to forget to take his afternoon walk through Königsberg. Besides the landlord, only his sister had a key.

He searched the apartment and opened every cabinet five or six times over, threw his books and papers around the room, kicked his treasured copy of Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis sprawling spine-broken into a corner, pounded with his fists on the imperturbable plexiglas of his floor-to-ceiling thirtieth-floor window overlooking the desolate landscape of the West Side. The computers, and his livelihood, were gone. Stolen by his sister, his one link to the non-economic world.

His was a blue-chip firm, and he had read much about companies bouncing back from crises. His business, too, would recover from this setback. It must go on – there was meaning in it, it mattered. And within days he had moved his operations to the table in the Borders café, the one with the best view of the old Water Tower through the trees and the horse-and-carriages stomping at the side street. The computers were gone, but in the end he had never thought much of that method of trading – had found it effeminate. The old paper-traders knew how to do things right after all.

Enough of such thoughts: Robert turned back to his papers and began furiously underlining the latest intelligence about the movement of copper prices – it was serious business, it would affect the summer production schedules of many firms in which Robert had an interest.

Eventually he finished his first reading of the morning Journal and, with a sigh and a cracking of his knuckles, turned his attention to the Tribune. Familiar headlines; then he unfolded it and his heart broke as he read, and read again:

BORDERS TO CLOSE FLAGSHIP MICHIGAN AVE. STORE

Susan Levi Wallach

I was nine years old when I killed the boy, pushing the knife between the soft bones of his chest with both my hands. I pulled it out slowly, not realizing at first the finality of what I’d done. “What’s your name, boy?” I whispered.

He had been playing in the woods behind the motel, just beyond the barbecue grills and picnic benches, out of sight from the pool where both our mothers lay sunbathing with their heads tilted up and eyes closed against the heat. They had no interest in us.

“Go on, find something to do for a little while,” my mother had said. I was nine after all, no longer in need of constant attention.

I had been the one who had begged for this one last weekend out of the city as a family before my sister’s wedding. Because then everything would change.

“I want to go to the farm,” I’d said to my father, who like me was tired of looking at table settings and bridesmaid dresses. “You promised we’d go someday. I want to see where you grew up.”

And so, on the Thursday before school started, we went — a four-hour drive out of the city and onto two-lane back roads.

My mother’s indignation at being dragged away from bridge games and deviled eggs was reason enough to keep away from her. My father had left us on our own for the afternoon to visit old friends. My sister, twelve years older, was in our room with the home decorating guides and bride’s magazines her mother-in-law-to-be had given her. She had drawn the chain across the door, so even though I had my own key there was no getting in.

I had gone around to the back of the motel, where there was a battered swing set, a picnic area and a thicket of trees. That was where I saw him.

He was younger than I and slight, with straight hair like mine, but darker and cut very short. I thought that if I had been a boy I might look like that.

At first, I really just wanted to touch his hair. He had a stick in his hand and was poking at the blackberry vines, their tough, thorny canes twisted around the surrounding bushes.

“You won’t be able to cut those vines with that stick,” I informed him.

“It’s not a stick,” he said, holding it up in the air. “It’s a light saber.”

“But it doesn’t have any lights on it.”

“You just can’t see them,” he said, turning back to the vines, which were thick with fruit.

He must have been pulling off berries and eating them — his hands and lips were streaked with red.

I thought for a moment. It was so still where we were, no one else around and no one to see us. “I have a real light saber in my room. Would you like to see?”

He looked at me, then, gauging whether he could trust me, “Sure. Go get it. I’ll wait.”

I ran back to the pool, slipping out of my sandals before I reached the pavement so I could sneak up behind my mother’s lounge and take her key from the table beside her. When I left the enclosure, I went back to the end of the parking lot. I looked to the boy, relieved to see him still occupied with the berries, pulling a couple off a vine and chewing as he thwacked the stick against the bushes and tables, calling out to foes only he could see.

My parents’ room had a kitchenette and I’d seen the knife there that morning, short and thin, with a sharp tip and fine edge. I rolled it up in the newspaper, centering it across one of the corners the way the florist rolled up the flowers when my father and I went to get my mother’s weekly bouquet of peonies and mondo grass or, for special occasions, white roses and snapdragons. I left the knife in the tall grass outside the pool gate while I snuck the key back onto the table.

The boy, still where I’d left him, pawed at the dirt with his sneaker and shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That’s no real light saber. That’s just a roll of paper.” Already he had started back toward the motel, slashing the stick from side to side. It was as if I wasn’t even there.

“No, wait,” I said. “I wrapped it up so that no one but you would see. Come here, I’ll show you.”

I moved off a little, so that I was standing by the thickest of the trees. It was easy to maneuver so that the boy was leaning against it while I carefully unwound the newspaper, hoping the anticipation would keep him distracted and silent. I could feel the cool weight of the haft as I let the newspaper fall away and lifted the knife high above both our heads, his eyes following it until the very last moment.

When my father found me, I had the boy’s stick, using it to make overlapping circles in the dirt. He turned my bloodied arms this way and that, looking for the wound.

“Did you do something, Anna?” he said, agitation rising in his voice. “Show me what you did.”

I pointed to where the picnic tables were.

“Wait here,” he said as he started to walk past the tables, stopping for a moment a little farther on, then turning and walking swiftly back.

He pressed his lips together and didn’t say anything, just grabbed the stick out of my hand and took me hard by the elbow. There was a spigot at the back of the motel, and he pulled me over to it. The water was icy enough to make me gasp. But he held my arms under, rubbing with his hands until my skin looked pale again, albeit chafed from his determination. When he was done he stepped back and looked me over from head to foot, his countenance locked in such concentration that I feared even my breathing would be an interruption.

My blouse was a deep rose with small orange and pink flowers — the small red flecks barely showed, but he told me I’d have to give it to him later, after I’d changed for dinner. For now, he said I should just ball it up and put it in a pillowcase as soon as I’d undressed. “Go on now. Don’t talk to anyone. Tell your mother that I forgot something in town and will be back soon.”

I’d started to skip away when he called me back. He bent down and scratched up a fistful of dirt, then rubbed it onto my hair, blouse and capris with both hands. “Tell your mother that you fell, that you need a good hair wash too.”

My mother had gone upstairs and changed into a bright yellow and white sundress. I could see her through the window as I walked past her room. She was standing in front of the mirror putting her earrings on while swaying to the music from the television set. I knocked on the door to my room and waited until my sister opened it. She immediately stuck out her hand, “Oh no you don’t. Not looking like that. What happened to you?”

“I fell,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, sure now that it was the boy’s blood she’d seen.

“You fell? Not likely. Looks like you rolled. You’re not coming in here. Go knock on Mom’s door. You need a shower. I’ll bring you something to wear.”

“And a pillowcase,” I said, before realizing it.

“A pillowcase?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me ready to pounce, to pick apart any reason I might offer. I rocked anxiously from foot to foot. “Dad said to. He said to put my clothes into a pillowcase because they’re so dirty. He doesn’t want them mixed up with yours.”

“Yeah. Sure. Anything. Just go.”

My father still hadn’t come back. It was another hour before he did. I had on a new dress, bought just for the weekend, and I twirled around slowly for him. But he did not seem to notice me. He just looked at my mother as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. He had a bag of groceries and a six-pack.

“Arthur, what’s all this? You don’t think I’m going to cook dinner here I hope,” my mother jabbed.

“Nope.”

“I hope not.”

“Thought I’d try one of those grills in the back. You know the restaurants around here aren’t any good. Anna, do you have your muddy clothes? Let’s get them into the trunk.”

He twisted the cap off one of the beers and carried the grocery bag out with him. I followed. But we didn’t go to the car. When we got to the foot of the stairs he stuck the pillowcase with my clothes inside into the grocery bag and shooed me away. “Go help your mother with the plates and things,” he said. “We’ll eat at one of the picnic tables. Tell your sister I said to help too.”

Instead of going right upstairs, I watched him as he settled the food on one of the tables. He shoveled some charcoal into the bottom of the grill, sprinkled it with lighter fluid, and threw in a match. I didn’t see that pillowcase again.

Even as we were eating, we could hear voices out in the parking lot. Cars came and went. A woman sat by the pool, crying with a towel around her shoulders. Later, when we started up the stairs, we saw people moving through the woods, their flashlights like fireflies filling the warm night. Every so often a man shouted a name I couldn’t quite make out over the air conditioning. At one point, I heard a siren and started to tremble, fearing they had found him. But the siren passed.

In the morning, I heard my parents talking in low, urgent voices outside the door to my room. It was my father who knocked, and my sister who answered. “Your mother wants to get going back now,” he said. “A little boy disappeared here yesterday, and it has her spooked. So get your things together and be quick about it.”

He looked tired, as if he’d been out there too, one of the men searching the woods.

“What about breakfast?” my sister asked. “It’s so early.”

“We’ll stop once we get on the road,” my father said.

Instead, we stopped in town. My father told us to wait in the car and crossed the street to the police station.

“Oh, I could tell you stories about your father and his brothers,” my mother said. “How on Saturday night the town police would round up half the boys in town. They’d have them sleep off their poor judgment in the jail cells so they wouldn’t get into any real trouble. Everyone looked out for everyone else then. Those boys are probably running things here now.”

After a while my mother got out of the car and bought us all sodas. We had the windows open, the breeze just cool enough to keep us comfortable. My sister and I played hangman and tic-tac-toe over and over. My mother closed her eyes and leaned back on the headrest, as if she were still at the pool.

When he finally came back, my father didn’t offer any explanation, just slid onto his seat, started the engine and pulled carefully into the light weekend traffic. “Too bad about that boy,” he said. “The way these woods are, they don’t think they’ll ever find him.”