“Okay.”

“And look really pissed off.”

“What?”

“Like you always do.”

“I always look pissed off?”

“Yeah. That’s half the reason I have you clerk for me. You think I need you to trade stock? I can use Edelman to trade stock.”

“You mean like this?” I make a frowny face.

“No, now you look like a retard. Just look like you always do.”

Whatever. I can’t believe I work somewhere it is a competitive advantage if you look like you can beat people up.

We talk about that sometimes, Girlfriend and I. She’s worked in the monkey house for three years, so she knows. We were chatting after sex, one of our first few times, when it was really fucking new and really fucking fun, to the extent that I could stay awake afterwards. She had just accepted my hog and hot deposit, which she hadn’t bothered to wipe off her stomach, and she was just yakking at me while my limp dilznik was twitching and I was fighting off the Zs.

“What do you guys do down there, anyway?”

“We trade.” You dummy.

“I know that,” she says, “but I don’t understand it.”

“We trade options,” I say, “options on stocks.”

“What is an option?”

So I give her the Natenberg answer, which is: “An option is the right but not the obligation to purchase an asset at a specified price before a specified point in time.”

“Quit messing with me,” she teases, poking my armpit, “what is it really?”

I think about this. “Um, it’s a derivative.”

“What’s a derivative?”

“It’s something whose price depends on the price of something else.”

“But what is it?”

“Um, it’s an agreement. A contract.”

“You guys are down there trading agreements and contracts?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That sounds pretty boring.”

“You’ve been down there. It’s not boring.”

“Look,” she says, wiping off the spoo with my discarded underwear, “I get what a stock is. A stock is a stock. It’s shares of a company. I know that. I just don’t get what an option is supposed to be.”

“You work at an options exchange and you don’t know what an option is?”

“Well, so do you, and you don’t seem to be able to explain it to me.”

I’m stumped. “Well, it’s not a thing, really,” I say. “It’s nothing of tangible value.”

She looks at me darkly with her narrow eyes. “So you guys are down there buying and selling nothing?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I thought,” she says. And rolls over.

* * * *

“Sell 5,000 shares of MSFT!” W83 yells at me.

I’m tapping at this piece of shit handheld with a pencil, trying to trade the stock, and nothing is happening. Fuck me in the goat ass.

“Dude!” he says, whirling around.

I give him the shoulder shrug, like, it’s the fucking computer.

“Wake the fuck up,” he says, scowling.

I am unaccustomed to being scolded by W83. I am starting to get the impression that Mr. Trader Coolguy is having a bad day, and I’m pretty sure it’s because he had a bad night. I’m not sure what he was up to, but the thought that he somehow got sucked into the exchange underworld was chilling. The frustrating part is that the kid is better than this, better than slamming and sweating around with a bunch of demented apes, this place is disease and filth personified. I’ve been coming down with some horrible flu every three months. I heard the year before I got here they almost had to shut the place down because people were getting the mumps.