Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky

Pre.

Chapter 1

When it rains, it pours, and pouring it was and had been, for too long.

Marguerite Veel sat at her parents’ vintage computer and stared at the kitchen window’s glass bricks, which obscured heavy rainfall in the same way they obscured everything else. On sunny days, especially midsummer days, only purest light, celestially distilled, passed through the bricks with clarity, and even that was censored, as if the patterned thickness of the glass functioned as a fortress against realism, including realism’s impressionism. After rain, the glass bricks became prisms for that distinctive silver luminosity that heralded a storm’s passing and a rainbow’s birth.

Marguerite’s life to date had been very much a performance metaphorically interpreted through these very glass bricks in the house of her childhood. How filtered, though not sheltered, Marguerite’s life had been, most of it her own doing, until she had been summoned home a year and six months ago by her father’s illness, followed by her mother’s illness and death after her father’s death. All windows of Marguerite’s life had transformed into the thin, transparent glass of life’s fragility to be completely shattered by death as one event of the two lives that had created Marguerite’s own life, literally.

Marguerite suddenly caught herself in her dark reverie, shaming herself out of it like a teacher catching a school girl in daydreaming, in this case, nightmaring.

Returning her attention to the computer screen, Marguerite focused on the bi-colored candelabrum arrayed before her. She concentrated, not easily, but intently. She struggled to look into the candelabrum, not just at it, through the Windows of the computer screen and through the opaque window of each candle in the candelabrum. Marguerite was eager, but unfortunately not inspired, to decipher the code in front of her in order to understand an overt secret message, a pattern: she knew that the pattern of things was everything.

For three months Marguerite had been studying an online course to learn how to use technical analysis to swing trade as well as make long term investments in the stock market. Three weeks ago, she had reached the point in the course that taught candlestick analysis, a method based on ancient Japanese war strategy, which had been applied to the rice trade in the 1800’s. Each candlestick in a particular time frame and in relation to other candlesticks contained a wealth of information about the price action of a stock, which itself contained a wealth of information about the events, emotions, actions, and reactions of the small world at large.

In studying the candlesticks before her, which looked like red and green Christmas tinsel strung across the dark computer screen, Marguerite did not perceive a wealth of anything, at least not yet. Primarily she saw a distraction from her mother’s death three weeks ago and from her own acute awareness of having been unemployed for too long while having no practical skills in a poor economy.

All Marguerite’s talents, including sewing, which could be practical, depending on how it was applied, seemed dependent on the mentality and prevalence of une belle époch: Marguerite had been trained, if not born, for fantasy, not reality, and the reality of this fact had begun to pall, if not cripple.

For sixteen years, Marguerite had worked as the costume director for a major ballet company, the same ballet company with which she had danced for five years until the last in a series of ankle injuries made final punctuation of the fact that her dancing career was over.

After her ankle had healed for the last time, Marguerite left the ballet company to study historic costuming and fashion design. She then returned to the company as a costumier and not long after assumed the principal roles of director and chief designer.

Though never bitter over her failure to become a great dancer, Marguerite nonetheless always felt a melancholic wistfulness upon completion of one of the costumes for principal, especially one of the classic costumes: Giselle’s peasant dress with its laced bodice and tulle-frothed skirt; the patriotic pancake tutu for The Flame of Paris; Kitri’s tiered satin sunburst in Don Quixote . . . chiffon arm ruffles, lamp sleeves, laces, sequins, pearls, earthy dyes, ethereal pastels, and above all, wings, plenty of wings with which to soar artistically, spiritually, egoistically, though by the standards of physics, always artificially, a fact made known to every dancer through the solitary drama of pain.

Though Marguerite had claimed her father’s illness as reason for her resignation as costume director, in fact, for a long time, perhaps years, Marguerite had been thinking of resigning without exactly knowing why; hence, as so often happened, a subconscious desire produced its conscious means of fulfillment, which, for Marguerite, happened to be at once convenient and acceptable as an excuse.

Perhaps Marguerite had wanted to resign because ballet as an industry had changed from a materially funded artistic expression to an artistically funded commercial expression; perhaps la danse itself had changed from illustrating music and philosophy to exhibiting gymnastics; perhaps Marguerite had changed in that the filtered, fantasy world of classical ballets just did not fascinate her as much as it once had, especially as budgets grew tighter, along with muscles, while companies grew looser in repertoire and moral fiber.

To paraphrase General Douglas MacArthur, the classics never died, but the money for them was fading away.

Though George Balanchine had revolutionized the fashion of ballet by featuring practice clothes as performance clothes, the classics could never in a million years be stripped down and still make sense, let alone make money.

Personally, if not professionally, Marguerite had reached agreement with Balanchine’s remark When you get older, you eliminate things. You want to see things pure and clear. Marguerite had eliminated her job, her apartment, most of her belongings, and her city in order to return to the suburban town of her childhood, her childhood home, and to her parents who, in the last year and a half of their lives, had needed Marguerite much more than the classic characters in ballet ever had or ever would.

At 46, Marguerite, by now, would have been mandatorily retired anyway had she remained a dancer with the city’s ballet company. Now was time to move on. Marguerite’s mother had moved on three weeks ago, Marguerite’s father, a year ago, but Marguerite’s own path lacked such perfect determinacy. She wondered why death was such a common, great fear when it was so definitive, so final; rather, the multitudes of deaths within life were the most agonizing and inconvenient because the business of living continued regardless.

Returning her attention to the candlestick chart for the S&P 500 ETF Trust, Marguerite became aware of her face reflected in the black background of the computer screen. The stock market’s predominating phase was consolidation: it mirrored herself.

Marguerite had read all the dictionary and trade definitions for consolidation: 1) the combining of separate parts into a unified whole; 2) the discarding of unused or unwanted items from a collection for the purpose of organizing the collection; 3) solidification or strengthening of a whole; 4) rearrangement of military combat troops after an attack; 5) geological processes by which loose earth deposits transform into hard rock; 6) psychological processes that cause the memory of an event to endure, often for years, after the event; 7) the movement of an asset's price within a well-defined pattern or barrier of trading levels, regarded as a period of indecision, which can last for minutes, hours, days, or years, ending when the price of the asset breaks extensively beyond the restrictive barriers.

Marguerite was the consolidation of her parents whose deaths had been the consolidation of their lives, each and both. Marguerite’s memories of her parents continued consolidating as she continued consolidating her parents’ lives materially: their belongings, their assets, their respective birth and death certificates, one atop the other – did it matter which one? – with nothing in-between. In the process, Marguerite was consolidating her own life, past, present, future. Marguerite had indeed become very familiar, too familiar, with the meaning of consolidation. By now, she recognized consolidation as a true dynamic, not a false stasis. Consolidation was the movement of non-movement; it was existence – being – not living, not dying; it was the full heat of high summer, the empty cold of deep winter, the before and after of autumnal slow decay and fervent vernal vigor; it was the vital, but not vitalized or vitalizing, axis about which all wheels turned, whether forward or backward, particularly the wheels of time and fortune.

Intuitively, Marguerite understood the value of consolidation, personally, financially, and otherwise, but she was impatient for consolidation to end so that something else, something new could begin because so much already had ended to initiate consolidation.

To work again as a costume designer or director no longer interested Marguerite. She had thought of doing something else, something dramatically different, but the drama in dramatically different held little appeal.

Marguerite’s savings combined with money left to her by her parents would keep her financially secure for some time to come, and she had her parents’ house, the house of her childhood, to live in with no mortgages. But was there such a thing as financial security anymore? So far, the twenty-first century seemed destined to define itself as one long consolidation of uncertainty: no industrial revolutions were creating anything; no world wars were destroying anything; all that seemed to exist was badly subsidized uncertainty.

For Marguerite personally nothing seemed right, nothing seemed wrong; such was the nature of consolidation, which could function as both the eye of a storm and the storm itself, the worst kind of storm, the unseeming kind, or worse yet, no storm at all.

Perhaps the time was still too soon for Marguerite to decide anything, though how quickly too soon could become too late. Regardless, Marguerite had decided to commit to an earnest effort to learn to trade and invest in stocks before attempting to do anything else, and anyway, the stock market was not unfamiliar to Marguerite.

While growing up, an only child, Marguerite associated the stock market with fun time with her mother. Mary Veel would hold Marguerite on her lap, even after Marguerite grew too big to hold, and together they would page through The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Forbes, Fortune and other financial publications. Whenever Mary would read about a stock that caught her interest, she would ask Marguerite, What do you think? Would this bring a good return? Ignorantly and blissfully, Marguerite would nod her head yes or shake her head no, and Mary would act accordingly. Just as the Romany gypsies believed that any talisman fashioned for oneself by oneself held the most power, Mary Veel surely believed that she had created her own financial talisman in giving birth to Marguerite, her personal prophet for profit. In fact, more often than not, lucky they both were in predicting profit, but perhaps the times were lucky more than mother and daughter.

Marguerite’s workaholic father had taken no interest in the stock market whatsoever but had been equally lucky as a real estate developer in the city. Only now did Marguerite really see, in depth of hindsight more than breadth, that the half century between 1950 and 2000 had been a trajectory of luck for just about any human endeavor. Marguerite had been born – luckily? – near the half century’s midpoint, eight years before the century’s third quarter ended and its last quarter began. She had grown up in wealth of circumstance without even having been aware of it enough to take it for granted.

Now, not only were Marguerite’s parents dead, but so too were the parents of the American Dream: free enterprise and democracy. Because the American Dream had become the global dream, the world was now an orphan in a storm, which had slowly, surely been destructively gathering with exponential force. In effect was a new gold rush of inflated hyperbolic discount. Corporations, governments, and nations had divorced themselves from commitment to heritage and thereby vital analogy with the family fundamental of father, mother, child in multigenerational and universal expression. Revenues were no longer bread on the table to serve a country or a community or feed a company by feeding its family of workers; rather, revenues were meaningless, if existent. Solvency and liquidity had become mythical states of matter. Money was now inventible, printable on demand, and finance itself was virtual to the point of technological singularity. The fiat gold standard was substandard; wits rather than weight ruled the day.

The adage Not all the water of the seven seas can sink a ship unless it gets inside failed to anticipate that QE, which once referred to a luxury liner, now referred to quantitative easing: the water had gotten inside, and it was not acting as the universal solvent that it was purported to be.

When a ship was sinking, another adage came into play: Every man for himself. The world was now united and divided by self-interest, the only compound interest available. New democracy, the sham and shame of original democracy, was the equal struggle of all the world’s citizens to discover a financial alkahest that would not alter in principle or principal while dissolving economic morass from effect back to cause, household back to bank. Consequently, the world, as always, was alive with single-minded, double-handed human endeavor. The Internet particularly hosted a renaissance of industry, however virtual, variable, and vague, which offered something for everyone in search of supply and demand. Marguerite’s choice: the stock market, the most efficient choice for moneymaking in being the choice of plutocrats worldwide, for even the money that controlled the world needed to work to survive and prosper.

Slowly, surely, Marguerite was recognizing the arts of technical analysis and trading as the art of dance – one pair of shoes on its toes and to the point. This encouraged her to continue cross training her discipline from past to present, knowing that mastery was the same: the understanding of time’s changing meters evoking sudden or sustained movement phrases. Time and counter-time gave a body movement and shape with which to conquer space on a stage and gave a stock price paraphrasing with which to be interpreted visually on a chart so as to be conquered mathematically for profit. The fact that the science of mathematics, which formed the irrevocable, incontestable laws of nature, functioned also as the art of every art comforted Marguerite like custom pointe shoes: she knew that although rules were made to be broken, the laws of nature remained eternally unbreakable, and from that point she felt able to dance on . . .

Chapter 2

As late summer sunlight pierced the space between lace liners and drapes, a curious pattern, forklike, splayed across the bedroom wall every morning, reaching what appeared to be full expanse and intensity between 8:00 and 8:30. Marguerite never left the drapes closed long enough to discover what would become of the pattern beyond 8:30, but for the few minutes between the time she awakened and then opened the curtains to a day’s performance, she would lie in bed and observe the fork, contemplate it as a visual metaphor for the proverbial fork in the road. Even without metaphor Marguerite continually wondered which prong of the fork to choose without any clue as to what choices might be represented other than ones she had already made. Of course, once Marguerite opened the drapes, the metaphor and hence the wondering were gone, at least until the next morning; however, regardless of the time of day or night, Marguerite remained not just at the fork but as the fork.

Even after eight months Marguerite still felt strange awakening in the bedroom of her childhood, which had changed in décor but not in spirit. Long gone was the canopied bed with its dust ruffle like the romantic tutu of a sylphide; long gone also was the desk at which daydreams had competed with homework; most significantly and longest gone was the floral wall paper – stunted pink buds never to bloom. All that remained was all: a single, small picture in a wood frame, which hung on the wall opposite the bed. It was the only picture in the room, yet it was the room itself. Portrayed in chalk was Alexandra Balashova, the great Russian ballerina who had been the most influential dance teacher of Madame Grasse who had been the most influential dance teacher of Marguerite. The portrait had been a personal gift from Alexandra Balashova to Madame Grasse and from Madame Grasse to Marguerite.

According to gossip within the world of ballet, Madame Grasse, whose real name remained a mystery still, had left Paris in a narrow escape just before the outbreak of World War II. Apart from having been a prominent dancer, Madame Grasse had purportedly also been the lover of a prominent communist. In the interest of survival, Madame Grasse had emigrated multiple times but changed her name only once, the alias Grasse derived from the perfume capital in France. Besides having gifted Marguerite with pragmatic understanding of a mystique and elitism in dance known only to those of the imperial era in Russian ballet, Madame Grasse, inadvertently, had also gifted Marguerite with pragmatic understanding of the virtue of non-judgment.

Perhaps one of the few defenses for gossip was the opportunity for understanding empathetically the nature of what might or might not be true about someone, someplace, or something. For Marguerite, gossip about Madame Grasse had presented an opportunity to understand paranoia, which had hovered constantly around Madame Grasse like the base note of a heavy perfume, at once the inspiration and desperation of her alias. Marguerite had learned from gossip about Madame Grasse much more than just the gossip itself: she had learned that in meeting and knowing a person she was only meeting and knowing a time-framed portrait of now, more like a snapshot, behind which was a history, a time line of events and a whirlwind of experiences known only to the person in meaning even if recounted to others in fact. To judge any person based solely on the portrait of now was to commit an injustice against oneself as well as the person, yet what else was there ever but the face value of a consolidated now?

Madame Grasse had been the first and only dance teacher of significance to see potential in Marguerite, more than Marguerite had seen in herself. It was that potential, which now, despite being a long-ago dream, remained for Marguerite eternally vital and vibrant in the face of Balashova because reminder of potential in one area of life could be cross referenced for any area of life. Since her return home, Marguerite had been drawing daily from Balashova’s portrait as a wellspring of faith, hope, and courage. The portrait was proof that a religious icon, like beauty – as beauty – lay in the eyes of the beholder and outside of time and place.

Marguerite knew surprisingly very little about Alexandra Balashova, the woman, except that her home in France had become the studio of Isadora Duncan. Marguerite had never cared to know more. More than just a link to Madame Grasse, Balashova, for Marguerite, was a reminder that every link in the chain of human achievements was essentially the legacy of self-determination, the only real talent available to everyone, though not often recognized, much less appreciated or used to full potential.

Oddly, in all the years that Marguerite had awakened with first gaze upon Balashova’s portrait, she had never, until the past six months, noticed that the chalk drawing of Balashova’s head and shoulders bore remarkable resemblance to the various Madonnas of Leonardo da Vinci and other artists as well. Especially odd was that Marguerite had never noticed such resemblance during the very years when her convent education coincided with her ballet training. Perhaps Marguerite’s failure to notice objectively at the time or even later had been because she was living the essence of the resemblance subjectively and because she was too young, that generic excuse that accounted for so much deficiency or error, even long after one was no longer too young.

This morning, as Marguerite awoke to Balashova’s portrait, her first thought was that to unknowing eyes the portrait of a now relatively obscure, though once famous, Russian dancer would seem an odd means for a mother to preserve her only daughter’s room; only Marguerite knew the true meaning of the gesture.

The rain was fully, finally past. Marguerite knew so, not by forecast, but by feeling: her left ankle, sensitized by repeated dance injuries, invariably developed pains according to weather changes. So reactive to barometric fluctuations was her ankle that Marguerite could predict light showers, heavy thunderstorms, or winds just by her ankle’s shifting nuances of pain. Today the pain was gone, and the fork of sunlight on the wall was especially bright, clear, and well defined. Today was not a day for contemplation – euphemistic worry – or for sorting personal effects or for studying stocks. Today’s reward lay outdoors.

Marguerite bolted from bed, opened the drapes, then left her bedroom, the only renovated room in the house for the reason that Marguerite’s mother had experienced allergic reactions to paints, plasters, and other carpentry materials when renovation plans were put into action years ago; hence, the house’s one and only renovation had begun and ended with Marguerite’s bedroom.

Marguerite knew that both her parents had come to ill health, in part, through long-term exposure . . . to what? Everything, presumably: polluted air, treated waters, processed and genetically engineered foods, pesticides, herbicides, aerosols, synthetics, dyes, lies, heavy metal, including the music modernly ambient, and all the multilevel stress reactions of the human body in its rebellion against modern life. What a mess! And yet the sun still shined through it all, as much as possible, every day, especially this day.

Marguerite, in her pajamas, put on her tattered ballet slippers and went outside to the backyard patio. A beautiful September day, after Labor Day but before the autumnal equinox, greeted her. All of nature prophesied an Indian summer, but Marguerite’s inner nature felt only the stirrings of spring. The sensation was akin to the thrill that eddied in the solar plexus during a roller coaster’s downward rush, though Marguerite felt the sensation also in her heart as ascendancy, the roller coaster’s climb. She imagined the feeling to be that of a seed in germination, self-anticipating its first burst of a sprout leading to a root from which a stem would break through heavy soil to feel the first touch of sunlight, followed by leaves, branches, a trunk, buds, blooms, fruit . . . the sky being literally the limit. The day’s sunlight filled Marguerite’s whole being, and she thought of the fork on the wall, and suddenly, in her mind’s eye, the fork’s prongs began to narrow and merge, brightly, assuredly; then, just as suddenly, her vernal experience was gone, like a scent or a sound carried away by the same breeze that had brought it.

Marguerite went back inside the house to the kitchen and drank some water, bottled spring water to avoid her parents’ filtered water, which was beginning to smell sulfuric and boronic, no longer filtered. She went back outside to the old fig tree, which had never bore fruit but bore a low branch, peculiarly horizontal, which Marguerite had learned to use as a barre.

In over thirty years Marguerite could count on one hand the number of times she had missed morning barre, and she prided herself on knowing how to do a barre properly, in the classic style, without abbreviation. She had continued to take morning class with the ballet company even after becoming the company’s costume director. If Marguerite were traveling or for some other reason could not attend a formal class, then she attended her own class of two: herself and her shadow, which well substituted for a mirror while she substituted for mistress, carefully watching and correcting her movements by carefully watching her shadow. More than just a habit or a routine, class, for Marguerite, was an anchor in her life for the simple reason that she always felt better after a barre and for the complex reason that like Maud Muller she remained in touch with what might have been by remaining in touch with the barre, even when it was a tree limb.

Marguerite began humming the third movement of Brahms’ Symphony No.3 in F major, her favorite music for commencing her solo class. She had many pieces in her humming repertoire; she also had her parents’ dated, mediocre but functional sound system along with the classical library she had given to her parents, but Marguerite’s preference was to play her favorite music in her head and hum along – the acoustics were best and she could customize tempo.

After warm-up exercises and a thorough barre, Marguerite congratulated herself on being in good form, particularly after the many days of rain, which had not only pained her ankle but had forced her to take class using the kitchen counter as a barre, not good for leg extension.

As Marguerite dressed, she reminded herself, as she invariably did every time she dressed lately, that she was in serious need of some new clothes. Actually, as an adult, she had always seemed to be in need of new clothes. Though Marguerite had sewn and designed