He still remembered it quite clearly.

He still remembered it quite clearly. The word, suicide, was not a word easy to deal with. The implications of its meaning turned its only presence unwanted. That was his view on the word and the concept back in his childhood. That was why, as a child, he felt uneasy when he learned in the classroom about the many suicides that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929 in the US. He pictured brokers jumping off windows in desperation, he thought about the level of misery those men had reached to defeat fear and take that final step, it troubled him a good deal the large figures of brokers falling from skyscrapers his teacher's discourse revealed as the lecture unfolded. He resolved to try hard to avoid a future of financial shortage in his life as it might well imply he should get atop the largest building in his provincial hometown and jump to nothingness from its roof. Those thoughts, he was certain about it, struck his infant mind when he was a child.

That child was now long gone and the adult he had become was doing his best to stay afloat amidst the foam and eddies of the persistent wake left behind by the waves of the current economic crisis. The word was still there, concealed and menacing, and surprisingly rejected by everyone. That blunt refusal was at odds with his conception of how cause and effect worked in the world of stock dealers. His mind learned the hard way it needed an upgrade to make room for the new paradigm. The suicidal brokers of the past left no legacy to their 21st century successors. These must have figured that jumping off windows was for assholes. Nobody did, jumped that is. As ducks in a pond they only bobbed down a bit with the first waves, loads of fresh cash in their wallets out of all the damage done.