The Gap of Time Read Online Free

seemed to notice that Leo was unemployed too.
    It was the unfairness of it all that Leo resented as he paid his fine and court costs. Leo hadn’t invented capitalism—his job was to make money inside a system that was about making money. That meant losing money too; the crash was really a game called musical chairs—while the music was playing no one cared that there weren’t enough chairs. Who wants to sit down when you can dance? In the past he had lost amounts the size of a small country’s GDP but he always had time to get it back and more. When the music stopped he had—temporarily—leveraged all his chairs.
    After three months drinking himself into a rehab clinic, and three weeks drying himself out, he had been advised to seek counselling for loss of self-esteem.
    For six months twice a week he took a cab from his home in Little Venice to a well-known Eastern European analyst in Hampstead. He hated the soft-clicking door into the therapy room. He hated the kelim sofas and the clock and the box of tissues. He hated the fact—two facts actually, one for each foot—that the analyst wore black socks and brown sandals and kept talking about what he pronounced as AMBI-VAYLENCE.
    “You love your mother and you hate her,” said Dr. Wartz.
    “No,” said Leo. “I hate her.”
    “It is a metter ov the gud brist and the bad brist.”
    Leo thought about breasts while the analyst was talking about Melanie Klein. The following week Leo brought a copy of
Nuts
magazine to his session. He gave Dr. Wartz a Sharpie and asked him to circle the good breasts and put an X across the bad breasts.
    “Objectification of the simultaneously loathed and loved object,” said Dr. Wartz.
    Leo remembered that Dr. Wartz had written an important book called
Objectifying the Object
. He began to drift over a brief History of the Object in History because he was learning that a word has to be used twice over to sound smart.
    First there were no objects—just energy. Then after Big Bang or Creation, depending on your point of view, the world itself became an object (a meta-object?) filled with other objects. These needed to be named—the Naming of Objects. Later on, quite a lot of objects were invented: the Invention of Objects. Then, he supposed, with wars and general human idiocy, there was the Destruction of Objects.
    And there were Objects of Desire. His stomach tightened.
    Then he thought of inventories, archives, stock sheets, catalogues, lists, taxonomy: the Index of Objects. There was a book his wife liked, by some American writer, called
The Safety of Objects
. Leo himself knew all about the Status of Objects, by which he meant Objects of Status, like his helicopter (sold). Since quantum theory there was the Oddness of Objects, and, if you were a deep thinker, the Meaning of Objects. And what about the Meaninglessness of Objects?
    Yes. When you had so much money that you could buy anything, everything, then you could know what Buddha and Christ knew: that worldly goods were worthless. It entertained him that this knowledge could be got by going in exactly the opposite direction to the great spiritual traditions of the world.
    He said, “Can you ever really know another human being?”
    “You cannot separate the observer and the observed,” said Dr. Wartz.
    —
    But you can
, thought Leo, back in his office.
That is what a surveillance system is for.
    —
    Soon Leo realised that he did not need to pay £500 a week for two sessions of fifty minutes to understand that he had not been loved as a child. Or that he had filled the emptiness with “Grosz Gain,” as the doctor put it.
    “We all self-medicate,” said Leo to Dr. Wartz. “I do it with money. The drinking was a reaction. I’m over it now.”
    Leo left therapy, gave up drinking and started his own hedge fund specialising in leveraged brokered buy-outs of businesses that could be asset-stripped and loaded with debt, making a good profit for his investors, and, of course,