“Are you fucking kidding me? You’re hung up about college?!” Alyssa stopped typing and turned her head towards him as he said this. Ryan just started at Alyssa open-mouthed. It wasn’t about college? Then what had that look she had given him been for?
“Ryan - what you earn in a year is … well, I don’t even earn anything and look at me: I have a magna cum laude, so much help that was. I still gotta ask Daddy for money every month! Why the hell would you go run yourself into debt by going back to school? Nah, do what you love anyway, that’s the only thing that counts. Of course you shouldn’t quit your job, baby! No way. That was the last thing I was thinking … trust me!” Again Alyssa ’s face began to scrunch up into that cute little ball all over again.
Ryan propped himself up on his left elbow. His head was spinning like a fucking ring around Saturn, and it wasn’t the drugs. A surge of relieved bemusement overcame him and he began to feel horny from being reassured about who he was all over again. And although his cock ached from having cum so hard inside her tight, gushing wetness, he began to feel it firm up again into a hard rod as the sheets slipped slightly over her breasts and brushed under her nipples. A long silence passed between them.
“Well? You want to tell me what is about then? Baby I saw the look you gave me …” he asked her. His pulse raced. Please don’t be some terrible news that fucks the whole night up now … after all this …
“It’s just … you must have some access to some pretty cool news stories. You got to hear about something I could use, sometimes … look, I know it’s not right, so forget it,” said Alyssa quickly. Was she jerking him off with a hand full of baby lotion and a whole box of kinky lesbian pornos here … or what? It was his turn to laugh now. So this was about journalism then?
“Don’t laugh,” said Alyssa protectively, and she mock punched his bulging bicep. “’Cause I know that we – you and me I mean – with you working’ on the Street and me being at Streeter and whatever, that we should remain professional and stuff. Especially if we get serious, which I feel it’s like we are. But … if there’s something that I could write about one day – like something that would get me a breaking story – that would be … very cool.” Ryan didn’t say anything. What could he say? He was more flattered and pumped and overjoyed by what he had heard than anything anyone had ever said to him could make him feel. So he was some kind of hotshot market source with which this super-smart, sexy chick was getting serious, now?
What a turnaround from a few hours ago, when he was coming in off the sidewalk soaked to the bone with a cheeseburger to bribe someone who was about to dump him for one last birthday sympathy fuck! His heart sank a little though when he considered the plausibility of him being able to meaningfully help his new hot almost-girlfriend.
For the truth was, there wasn’t that much he knew about in the markets that he knew about before Alyssa was likely to hear it. He was a stockbroker – a glamorized salesman, for all intents and purposes. He told guys to grab their balls and roll the dice on shit. Sometimes it worked out, more often it didn’t. Still, he wasn’t about to tell her this; not now at least, given that she evidently thought he wasn’t all that bad.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked –”
“No, no. Let me think about it. Leave it with me baby. C’mon let’s have some more coke.”
Ryan sniffed a three-inch line that was stacked up in the middle of the mirror beside the bed, and felt the amphetamines running through his blood and powering up his mind as it began to race. There was something he could share with Alyssa – but it was a long shot. Still, it may work. He’d discussed an idea before with Terry and Brad many times before after work at PJ Clark’s. Had the conversation not always been accompanied by the typical mad melee of cocaine and vodka-champagne and OxyContin and whatever else, he might have thought of it sooner. “Yeah. There may be something you can write about, come to think of it,” he said absently. ‘Uh huh …”
“Seriously? That would be so cool!” Alyssa jumped up on the bed. ’Cause you know, the ones of us who get original stories now, we actually get hired there – like full time.” Alyssa kissed him, her tongue pirouetting inside his mouth tasting the cum of her own pussy herself.
“Mm mm, I love girl cum, don’t you? ‘Especially when I’m high, you know. We have to do it with a girl sometime, now that I’m gonna be your girlfriend and everything.” She drew away and looked him in the eyes. Tears of happiness began to form at the edges of them, he was so happy. And a lesy girl too …
Ryan could barely contain his self-satisfaction right now, which would explain the crying.
“Well, I guess it’s now official anyway, whatever happens from here on. So … Happy Birthday … dumbass!” Alyssa wrapped her slender alabaster legs around him and pushed her clit towards his mouth. Her pussy felt so wet against the tip of tongue and his fingers slipped straight into the back of her deep, throbbing moistness as he made her cum for a fourth time that night.
All the while he couldn’t stop thinking about this thing he’d been discussing before with the boys. They could make some real money, he thought – like, fuck you money!
Ω
Maybe it was fate. Call it karma even, but Ryan never pulled the trigger, for the moment that his finger pressed down on the .35mm’s trigger, that was when hope struck. For months after he had started the scheme – which was only shortly after Alyssa and he became serious with one another – Ryan had held out a little hope that far off in China of all places, one of those crazy schemes he’d been plugging money into over the years would yield. Just as Ryan was about to blow his brains out, the phone rang. His hand shook like a leaf as he put the phone to his ear. “We’ve got it,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
Ω
“You need to get that girl you’re going with –” the voice had said. “What’s her name? She’s special … Not like us somehow.”
“Yeah,” sighed the Dreyfuss twin. “I know.”
“You’ve seen something already?” asked the voice on the other end of the line.
“Not exactly – b-b-but … like I said, there’s two of her. That means there’s one your side, too.”
“At least we didn’t go down in the crash – I was worried about it all coming apart for a second there.” The voice was dead, empty, serious. Undramatic.
Ryan lay his head over his bicep and balanced the phone on the top of his free ear. “Yeah, me too, for a second.” He stared down at the barrel of the pistol.
And then, out of the blue, without warning, and without being triggered by his finger, as if triggered by its own sense of purpose, the gun went off.
And the face of Alyssa with her hands clasped over her mouth muffling a silent scream, standing at the doorway in her high heels, her stockings riding up her legs in patterns and spirals of different pastel colors, the fabric mesh dyed over her pale skin and youthful splendor, hugging the body that up until that moment had been all his forevermore, and her designer handbag that fell like a stone in what appeared to him like slow motion now to the floor and dropped with a soft th-th-thu-uddd! at her feet, and then (in what was a partial glimpse only) the fragments of his body lurching over her in their various pieces, in what may have been some sort of vision of things to come; these were the last things that Ryan saw before the lights went out that night on his life.
Ω
PART 2: Face
CHAPTER IV
Sex, Lies & MP4s
Ω
June, 2008
SOFIA SHIVERED in several hard long convulsions as she huddled up into her own body under the covers of her sheets. Somewhere outside the perimeter of her consciousness, the high-pitch horn of an alarm clock peppered the silence of her bedroom. She didn’t need it, but it sounded out anyway until her fumbling right hand found her iPhone on top of her bedside table and her thumb slipped across the bottom of the screen in a short, defiant dash.
She was getting sick. Maybe it was all the drugs,
which had kept her up for the last four days straight. Maybe it was that right now she needed her parents more than anything in the world, when they were far away in Malibu at some movie star’s birthday party sipping old-fashioned Martinis on the beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean while it was three in the morning in her luxury apartment on the banks of the dirty River Bund in Shanghai, where she was all alone. These things didn’t help. They definitely didn’t help at all. But it was more than that. It was because she knew that out there, there was a video of her. It had her naked body on it. It had her whole shivering little girl demeanor on it. It had her face on it. And it was all in the hands of a bunch of people determined to use it against her.
She had often whined to the envious crowd of friends and family that doted on her that she was fast becoming the most photographed girl in the whole of Shanghai. Now there would be an entire thirty-minute video of her ensconced in a sadomasochistic orgy for a billion plus people to get off to instead. Never mind that she had screamed out for them to stop once it had got going. She had obliged them in the first place. Face, or mianzi as the Chinese called it, was a stubborn sticker, and once it was torn off the blank canvas that was your reputation, the marks it left on the surface still stuck to your fingers with the remnants of its gluey backside.
The thoughts made her retch. This wasn’t a pleasant wretch, however. It wasn’t like when she wanted to wretch just after she had a line of coke. It wasn’t going to bring on that warm calm, followed by that razor-sharp, skyscraper-high mental agility.
Cocaine was like a love affair: there was no alternative emotion that went with it other than an all-consuming obsession. On the surface it felt great, like the most exhilarating rush of pleasure and passion combined into a single moment in time. But underneath the high lurked a more demonic reality held together by a thread of lies and poor decisions made in a state of exaggerated confidence. You always imagined that you could handle it all, until the day that you couldn’t.
Sofia turned over in her bed. Somewhere, in the ten minutes she had managed to slide into a sort of semi-unconsciousness, she had peed herself in her bed. That was the other thing about coke: it was a dirty intoxicant, forcing you into involuntary actions against your free will. And then, one day, it burnt through the wall of your subconscious, so that the hell-fire that was the same secret magic that had once made you feel victorious now ensconced you in a wall of flames, surrounded by only the most vulgar of the sins that you had committed.
She rubbed her eyes; the soft secretions of water from her tear-ducts stung from all the drugs. But she wasn’t crying; she’d done plenty of that already. Her Louis Vuitton suitcases were stacked upright on the other side of the room. They had all been neatly packed for her, all three of them, by her servants earlier in the afternoon when she had been over at Jasmine’s house getting high for a final time before her solo send-off. On top of one of the suitcases her personal maid, Ma Ai, had set out her checkered maroon-and-baby-blue Prada Gruvee handbag with charcoal-grey straps and zipper. Nice choice, she thought to herself absent-mindedly.
Sofia was a straight-A student, the best of the best. She was Dame of the Shanghai Sorority, and on her way to becoming an A-list celebrity in China. She spoke English, Mandarin, Cantonese, French and German, all fluently. Bright, alert, together, on top of the world: this was what she was. She had everything that every Shanghainese girl dreamed of: she had it all.
And there was a video of her out there somewhere, forcing her to give it all up.
Ω
Unlike on her matinee sojourns to work at Theo Farrell, the world’s most exclusive advertising agency, which she made in the luxury of her chauffeur-driven car, it was humid and sweaty in the back of the cab she was riding to the airport in. Under his breath, she could hear the cab driver mouthing a string of vulgarities in Cantonese. He probably assumed she couldn’t understand them.
Rich mongrel white-devil trash, pig-fucking wench – look at her monkey-brained hairstyle …
It was classic working-class Chinese racism, directed at her equally divided Chinese and American biology. At least he didn’t recognize who she was, that was the main thing.
To have taken her limousine would have alerted the media when all she wanted was to get out of here quietly, without Shanghai’s poor excuse for celebrity reporters following her with their trillions of inane questions about why she was absconding at the height of her fame.
Outside, there were no people walking around right now either at this hour, except for the few wandering peasants on the hunt for leftover food and illegal work, hurriedly dashing in and out of the scaffolding of tomorrow’s gleaming skyscrapers that were under construction like wild creatures navigating a concrete jungle, trying to avoid the plainclothes government spies that would sweep them away quicker than they had made passage into it.
Once she had remarked to her cousin Chanel that she felt an affinity with them, scrambling into the back seat of her limousine behind its blacked-out windows just to avoid the nocturnal predation of the new class of Chinese tabloid journalists that hunted her from exiting expensive nightclubs. But spying them like this, a pang of unfamiliar guilt surged up inside her.
It was a horrible, truly delusional analogy, for their realities were as far from one another as was the sun from Pluto, the vast chasms between their existences separated by the casino-effect wrought upon the country in the past two decades of capitalist cronyism.
As it whirled passed, this city, which it had always seemed a stretch too far of her imagination to call her home now seemed to her like one of the many half-flaming cocktails served late into the night in the numerous bars spilling out into the square of the open air nightlife district in Xin Tian Di.
Enormous flashing red-and-white triangles and long, dimly-lit opal-tinted rectangles, and flat, partially-lit blocks of various geometrically-flattened cube-like configurations cast against a uniform layer of deep-space-blues dominated the core spectrum of her optic senses.
Somewhere in between these broader shapes were a whole circus-parade of the circles and dashes and lines of pinyin characters, flashing out unchanging weather forecasts for the week ahead and the censure-heavy good news of the country’s rising dominance over the rest of the world, intercepted by commercials for Chinese-built automobile loans and one-child family life insurance packages that whirled endlessly on-and-off the gigantic electronic billboards, multi-billion dollar annual revenue pit-stops for Asia’s array of golden-oldie brands gone boldly contemporary in the blink-blink-blink of the dragon’s eye.
Until recently, she had been the face of many of those brands herself. But not any more.
All that was all going to be ancient history now. Sofia Jiang YuZheng Lincoln was once the face of Shanghai high-society. It was the name that everybody wanted to be associated with.
Now it would be the name of just another half-Chinese expatriate living unbeknownst to her new friends in a kind of exile in Dubai, where she would take up her new role at Theo Farrell as the ad agency’s Director of Europe, Middle East and Africa operations without a fuss, and where she would try and make a sort of peace with herself by putting her head down and getting on with building a new life for herself without causing a stir.
There were a few who might recognize her, but only in the way that expatriates all vaguely recollect each others’ names from their myriad cornucopia of past experiences spent wandering their working lives across the globe in the nomadic search for new friends and newer opportunities.
It was the exact same way people back in the States recalled the names of the various domestic rural skiing and seaside resorts where they had once holidayed long ago as kids, a momentary recognition flashing across their eyes followed by a badly-disguised instantaneous searching of their heads for the finer details that never came.
CHAPTER V
The Shanghai Sorority
Ω
June, 2008
“THAT WAS Mama,” said Chanel, replacing her
rose colored Virtue embossed in a petal composed of twenty half-carat diamonds on the oversized crystal coffee table. She said Mama the Chinese way, with her a’s sounding as if she were about to say apple.
“Sofia’s plane left last night. Her parents still don’t know a thing – Mama’s just telling her what she’s telling everyone else: that she got a job offer she couldn’t refuse in Dubai.”
Her friend Jasmine knew that Dame Ming-hua, China’s richest woman and the first woman to be pegged as the communist party candidate for the PRC’s Premiership one day, was telling her daughter more than this, but she said nothing.
“Which is a little strange, but it’s not so far fetched, I suppose – I mean, Co-Director of Theo Farrell at twenty-two years old; that’s got to have taken a lot of huilu somewhere along the line. It can’t all have been Sofia’s doing, certainly. My dear Mommy, she’s so much stronger than I am or ever will be.”
“Rubbish,” said Jasmine sweetly, sucking-up to the heir-apparent of the Shanghai Sorority, but agreeing silently that yes, the creation of a brand new management position for such an inexperienced hire inside one of the world’s largest American multinational advertising empires must have required a hell of a lot of huilu – bribes, as they were known in Mandarin.
The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel Page 6