The Mark and the Void Read Online Free PDF

highly successful employee at a highly successful bank. There is no reason to fear that he will find my life boring or empty.
    The lift doors open. The security guards glance over, then away again almost immediately. Outside, the air is perfectly still. Workers clip back and forth in the windows of the buildings around me, a silent image of productivity. Yet across the river, the grey shell of Royal Irish Bank is populated only by seagulls, and just last week a German bank two floors below us imploded; we watched from above as the erstwhile employees filed out through the double doors – blinking in the light, clinging to cardboard boxes full of mouse mats and ficuses, casting up their eyes at the bright opaque windows as if to a land that was lost to them …
    Paul answers on the second ring.
    ‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘Claude.’
    There is a curious echo to the line, as if someone is listening in, and I have the strangest sense he already knows what I am going
to say … but the sound of his voice is warm and human, not the voice of a god or an omniscient overseer. ‘How are you, buddy?’
    ‘I am well, thank you. I’m calling to tell you that my boss has given the green light for your project.’
    ‘Fantastic!’ His delight sounds genuine, which produces a proportionally opposite effect in me, as I consider the fall for which he is setting himself up.
    ‘So what exactly do you need me to do now?’ I say.
    ‘Like I told you, Claude, I don’t need you to
do
anything. Just be yourself.’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘I promise, it won’t be intrusive. You’ll barely notice I’m there.’
    ‘Very good.’
    ‘You don’t sound too excited.’
    ‘No, no, I am,’ I say; but then, impetuously, add, ‘It is not very dramatic, you know.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘What we do in the bank, it is quite complex and technical. If you are looking for colourful characters, for exciting things to happen, it may seem rather … I do not know if it will give you what you need.’
    Laughter comes back down the line. ‘Don’t you worry about that. I’m the artist, okay? It’s my job to go in there and find the gold, wherever it’s hidden.’
    ‘You think there will be gold?’ I say.
    ‘I’m sure of it, Claude. I’m sure of it.’

To me, of course, it is unquestionably dramatic; to me, to anyone working in banking, the last two years have been like the Fall of Rome, the French Revolution, the South Sea Bubble and the moon landing, all rolled into one.
    For half a decade – since, in fact, the previous financial crisis, which at that point represented the greatest destruction of capital in history – the world had been living on borrowed money. Wages went down, but credit was cheap; you were getting paid less, but borrowing the money to replace your car, take a holiday, buy a new house, was easy. The banks themselves were borrowing money at enormous rates, taking it from megabanks in Europe and lending it out again at a nice margin to you with your car, to the entrepreneur with his start-up, to the developer with his housing estate. As for the governments, they were content to let this happen, because everyone was so happy with their cars and holidays and houses; and of course the governments too were borrowing hugely to fund the services that workers’ taxes no longer paid for.
    In short, the whole world was massively in debt, but it didn’t seem to matter; then, suddenly, almost overnight, it did. Someone, somewhere, realized that the global boom was in fact a pyramid scheme, a huge inflammable pyramid waiting to catch light. Investors panicked and began to pull their money out of the megabanks; the megabanks desperately began to call in loans from the regional banks, the regional banks called in loans from their customers, the customers called in loans from their trading partners, or tried to, though all of a sudden no one was answering their phones.
    The consequences of this cataclysmic freeze-up of credit are still