Page 58 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper

Oliver

Oblivious to what was happening on The Today Show , Oliver stood on stage at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. There were several hundred people in the seats in front of him, and he had nowhere to wipe his sweaty palms—it was certainly a faux pas to use his suit that way.

He shouldn’t be nervous; he had given talks at conferences before. It wasn’t the topic, either. On any normal day, Oliver could explain the intersection of mathematics and the financial markets in his sleep.

So what the hell was going on?

Chloe, that’s what. Or rather, the lack of Chloe. She hadn’t texted him at all since after the gala three days ago.

Maybe she had chosen Zac. And why shouldn’t she?

Zac Billings was a dashing Brit with a suave Oxford accent.

He and Oliver clashed at the office, but if Oliver was being honest, part of it stemmed from Oliver’s jealousy.

Zac never had trouble making small talk with people; his smile alone could charm the King of England to grant him knighthood on the spot.

Oliver was quicker with numbers, but Zac was incredibly smart, too.

Perhaps most of all, though, Zac didn’t walk around lugging the baggage of his life like Oliver did.

Maybe Zac had grown up with a perfect family or maybe he just dealt with his problems better.

Oliver regretted the fight on the gala rooftop, too.

He wished Chloe hadn’t seen him like that.

Sure, Zac was the one who’d come out swinging, but Oliver could still see the horror in Chloe’s eyes as Oliver locked his arms around Zac and held him immobile like nothing more than a doll.

The Oliver she knew had been a lanky, shaggy-haired teenager; she almost looked scared that night at the powerful version of Oliver who had tight control over every muscle in his body, and his emotions as well.

But control over his emotions was just a facade, wasn’t it? Behind the numbers and the cool logic, Oliver was a mess of fears and regrets and pain and yearning.

The woman who was in charge of logistics hurried out from the wings, onto the stage, and pretended to fiddle with his mic. But what she really did was turn it off for a moment while she said, “Mr. Jones? We’re ready to begin whenever you are.”

Right.

She turned his mic back on and exited stage right.

Behind Oliver, a screen displayed the title of his talk, “Quantifying the Future: Predicting the Markets and Exponentially Growing Client Net Worth.” He tried to smile at the audience, but it probably came out looking like he was being tortured.

“Hello, welcome. My name is Oliver Jones, and I’m the Director of Quantitative Analysis at Hawthorne Drake. This morning, I’m going to talk about…”

His mind went blank.

Oliver gripped the podium, palms about to slip off. He could hear his pulse whooshing in his ears. He was too hot and also shivering at the same time under the blast of the AC.

Someone in the front row coughed loudly.

That jolted Oliver enough that he gathered himself sufficiently to let out a self-deprecating laugh and wave at the screen behind him. “I’m going to be talking about that .”

A few chuckles peppered the audience. He seemed to have convinced at least a few of them that he’d intended that pause as a joke, albeit a poorly landed one. He’d take it, though.

Oliver cleared his throat and tapped the clicker to advance to the next slide. Thankfully, he had speech notes on his computer in front of him. Otherwise, he had no idea how he would make it through the next hour.

“In the past, financial advisors were limited in the tools at their disposal, but nowadays, we’re lucky that…”

Part of his brain kicked into autopilot and began to give the speech he’d practiced umpteen times in the past week. In the background, another part of his brain took the liberty of churning up the memory of the gala.

For all Oliver knew, Chloe had blocked his number now. He couldn’t even be upset if she’d decided against him. He’d pretended three separate times that he didn’t know her, before she figured it out. And even then, he’d refused to tell her why.

“What we’re innovating at Hawthorne Drake is…” he found himself saying, but as soon as Oliver became aware again that he was giving a speech, his autopilot turned off and his words stopped and ran into each other, like a pileup during rush hour on I-95.

“Um…” He smiled again at the audience, but it must have been even worse than his first attempt at smiling at the beginning of the talk, because this time, a man in the front row winced.

“What we’re innovating at Hawthorne Drake is a revolutionary way of approaching quantitative modeling, taking everything the industry has known in the past and turning it on its head.” Oliver got himself back on track, but he couldn’t help thinking, Why does anyone care about this?

The only thing firms like his did was help the rich get even richer.

But numbers aren’t pointless, he thought.

They had helped him get through some of the worst times of his life.

Some kids had teddy bears or favorite books they escaped into.

For Oliver, it had been numbers and logic.

He’d taught them to Ben in the back seat of the car as Jennifer drove them to yet another city.

He’d memorized more than a thousand digits of pi and recited them to fall asleep.

And to counter the unreality in which his mom lived—her endless “this time it’ll work” cons—Oliver had found solace in math puzzles, where there was always a definite, incontrovertible answer.

Oliver stumbled again on whatever he’d been saying out loud. The audience audibly sighed in annoyance this time, and a dozen or so got up to leave.

“I-I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind is somewhere else today, and frankly, this talk is boring.”

Caught by surprise, a good portion of the crowd laughed. The people exiting stopped to listen.

“I’ve been thinking,” Oliver said. “Why do we care about numbers?” He shut the lid of his laptop and abandoned his planned presentation.

“Because they’re tangible,” the man who’d winced earlier said.

“Exactly,” Oliver said. “They’re something solid to hold on to. We know a number’s value. And complex mathematical calculations make us feel secure, like a safety net beneath our biggest financial decisions.

“For me, I’ve always clung tightly to numbers, because they meant order in a world I otherwise couldn’t control.

But you know what? We can’t predict the future, whether through tea leaves or tarot cards or math.

The financial models we make are not guarantees; they’re simply hypotheses played out, no more a sure thing than anything else in life.

“True, the numbers are based in reality. But I think that if we lean too heavily on them, we deceive ourselves. There’s always an element of the unknown, even in math. And we have to learn to be comfortable with that. I have to learn to be comfortable with that.”

Oliver realized something that had been a long time coming—he didn’t want to work at an investment bank anymore. He’d accumulated enough savings to undo the traumatic insecurity of his youth, and now he needed a purpose greater than making financial models just for money’s sake.

Maybe he could find a way back to his pure love for math. Like, teaching at a university. Or even better, at an elementary school with students who needed a little extra attention, as Ben had when they were kids and their family was on the run.

Maybe Oliver would move to Virginia to be closer to his family. Or maybe he’d find his place elsewhere in New York.

He didn’t know. But maybe that was okay, too.

Oliver thought of the most recent message in the paper rose that had appeared on his hotel room dresser this morning: On the other side of risk is the very real possibility of happiness.

Maybe his pen pal was onto something.

“We can’t always cling tight to numbers or the things we think give us certainty,” Oliver said to the audience.

“We have to be willing to jump off cliffs. Sometimes we’ll belly flop into the ocean below.

But sometimes, we’ll meet the water just right, and it will be the most beautiful, worthwhile dive. ”

The audience stared at him in silence. This was not at all the standard for a Neo Fintech talk.

Then one woman in the back began to clap.

Slowly, others joined in. It wasn’t everyone, like in the movies. It wasn’t even most of them.

But it was enough, and Oliver smiled, easily and for real this time.