It was only when I saw the encounter for what it was – an original sin, my own sin, a self-created sin that involved no other sexual partner but that of my own creation, that had no alternate spiritual compass available to it but that which belonged to my own spiritual core – only then, did the wheel of fortune, as I call it, begin to roll like the giant roulette wheels of the games in Macau.
And roll they did; they rolled and rolled, the wooden ball bouncing from pocket to pocket high into the air, keeping the crowd in suspense, between gasps, not ever given the relief of feeling some kind of euphoria or despair, but always at the point of waiting. I guess by the time I reached rehab I had grown tired of waiting, and so I became a local celebrity of sorts. It was around that period when none other than the most talked-about girl of the rehab - a former patient, no less - stopped by to pay me a visit one afternoon.
“Why? What’s it about?” I asked her.
“We can talk once we reach my house. It’s private.”
“Who are you?” I asked again, my heart skipping a tiny beat this time. The girl fiddled with the lining of her skirt, before placing her hands back down inside her lap neatly.
“You can call me Number One Sister,” she said. “But my name’s really Milana. Nice to meet you!” With that, we sped away and never looked back.
CHAPTER VIII
Citizen Mao
Ω
September, 2009
“I DON’T just sleep with … anyone for any-thing, you know!” she said, and the black eyes that drown her pupils in an infinite camouflage is somewhat dazzling offset as it is against her alabaster skin and wild little-girl auburn-black hair so trendy among north Chinese these days, I know deep in my heart that this sentence is to mean that in fact this girl really believes she is the Virgin Mary reincarnate.
But truly, we both know the reality, that human beings are inherently sensual and sexual and cannot resist touch, not at any cost, and I therefore pursue her with the same zealousness that a regular at the whorehouse might pursue his more frequent companion despite her being with a customer tonight.
But just as I was gearing up to snatch her from the greedy clasp of whatever factory-owner-cum- market maven was rubbing his hands up and down her slender thighs, a bright blink averted my attention from this high-priced piece of human art; now instead my gaze was drawn towards the irresistible display in front of me.
The lights from the convoy of supercars flashed straight through the club in an official capacity, announcing the arrival that the city’s society guests had been waiting for all night. Outside under the palms three slick 8-series BMWs rolled up beside the curb flashing their headlights in an epileptic strobe, but it was the discreet navy blue Bentley behind them that everyone had set their eyes on. Behind the tinted glass of the vintage vehicle was the vague shadow of the man to whom most of them owed their extravagant Martini-fuelled lifestyles in the pollution – and I hoped soon, the continuance of my own as well.
But not everyone welcomed the entrepreneur with such relish. At the moment the Bentley’s lights went dead, a short, stocky figure moved in a split-second motion through the crowd and into the entourage. This intruder began to let rip a stream of bullets from a hidden sub-machine gun. The ploy was failing: instead of hitting the desired target inside the vehicle, the bullets instead ricocheted off the car’s back window in an almost perfect arc.
As if part of an elaborately overacted hoax, a cavalry of bodyguards, all heavy-set ex-British army-turned-neo-Communist private security officials emerged from the three BMWs and charged at the assailant, tackling him to the ground. The short man with the machine gun fell instantly on his own weapon, which was still firing a few of the golden bullets. His body audibly cracked and visibly splintered under the weight of the troops and his own bullets ripped a neat scarlet-maroon slice through the right side of the cummerbund of his tuxedo. The way he was bleeding, it looked as if the entire night’s excesses of his liver were giving out.
Inside the club, a high-pitched gasp pierced the late 90’s club music that the DJs in this quasi-independent province of Asia favored. During the summer months Shanghai was a place that witnessed some violence, but it was never aimed at any of the city’s commercial patriarchs.
“That’s not what I’d call your regular mob hit,” I said, trying not to get wrapped-up in the building hysteria.
Jimmy Wen, a Cantonese residential property developer who grew up in Barcelona and Hong Kong, and who I had first met upon his immigration to Shanghai two years back, considered my comment amid the pushing-and-shoving of the party-goers around us eager to catch a glimpse of the action outside the club’s window. Shoulder-to-shoulder, the two of us made for an unwelcome obfuscation of the drama.
“All the same, it’s an ominous sign,” he said, raising his voice over the music and the ascending voices. “It doesn’t look like you’re getting your 15 minutes’ face-time tonight, and many of the guests will start talking. If only because they didn’t get their 15 minutes either.”
As if on cue, the four cars restarted their engines and began to move gradually out of the club’s cornice and my heart missed a punch. I had been jostling – albeit hesitantly – to see the billionaire for some months now.
But then an unexpected thing happened. As the cars picked up speed and circled the roundabout which joined the two-way system of the interchange in front of the nightclub district, the convoy swung back suddenly into a three-sixty-degree formation and re-entered the cornice, pulling up again outside the club.
“No: It’s just a decoy, to fend off further triads from trying the same thing,” I said.
The lights on the 8-Series’ were more aggressive this time, more strobe-like, and the unanimous blaring of their high-pitched horns sounded like something of a deliberate extra synthetic layer to the heavy Taiwanese house ballad that was now thumping throughout the club.
“Typical,” said Wen. “The old reclusive billionaire can’t resist showing off his sixteen-year-old Swedish bride-to-be to Shanghai’s rich and famous – even if it means possible death.”
“It’s not so much that as it is he doesn’t want to disappoint, I think,” I said. “And she’s seventeen, by the way.”
Wen raised his thin dark-brown eyebrows playfully, his brown eyes lighting up like dirty cat’s eyes in the laser-blue lighting of the club.
“You’re more Chinese than I am these days,” said Wen, without laughing. “You want what’s for you, irrespective of the cost of another’s life. Or maybe that’s just because you’re a journalist – I can’t tell.”
Since arriving in Shanghai a decade ago, luck had undeservedly favored me. Starting with a real estate magazine for expatriates – from those on multimillion dollar multi-national corporate packages down to the truly unemployed who were here just to chance their luck in the madhouse that was this neon-shackled city in the constant fog – I had built a mini-empire of English- and Chinese-language magazines and five television channels all covering the country’s rise to financial prominence. With fame, the western expatriates like myself here often liked to reflect, had come Middle-Earth’s dominance over an increasingly disunited states of America as the neo-communists shrewdly swallowed up trillions of dollars of T-Bills to keep their ever-more-sophisticated but no less original consumer goods competitive on the global import-export market.
As such, I was more involved with the stainless-steel purpose and logic of the world’s price-to-earnings ratios and various nation's’ gross domestic products than the more physical reality of the homeless or the victims of rape and child-abuse with whom general news journalists must spend their hours ingratiating themselves. But it is also true that as a journalist (if in name only these days), it is impossible to witness anything out-of-the-ordinary and not to think about the fabric of lead paragraphs and nut-grafs and context graphs with which the scene will be relayed to the rest of the world. And herein was Wen’s point.
Still, what a scene it was becom
ing. Five military police SUVs and an ambulance had pulled up against the billionaire’s stationary convoy from which no one other than the bodyguards had yet to emerge, while a man no one had ever seen or heard of before lay bleeding out like a beach mansion’s sprinkler system onto the sidewalk. Meanwhile three of the club’s domestic staff – all African illegals imported for precisely the purpose of conducting such tasks as would certainly ill-befit any of the recent neo-generation Chinese mainlanders – were doing their best to mop up the blood and encourage it down into one of the road’s nearby drains. As a couple of doctors laid the man out on a stretcher and rushed him into the ambulance, a gathering of uniformed and heavily-badged senior police officials stood casually in the midst of the fracas, chatting and joking with what must have been the billionaire’s bodyguard-in-chief.
The now dead assailant was stood upright and given a hard-shove into the back of the ambulance. The ambulance pulled away from the club, a dead man walking into the Shanghai night. And back went the club’s patrons went back into hypnotic anticipation of the emergence of the billionaire and his teenage blonde. Outside, one of the police chiefs let out a slightly louder laugh at something the bodyguard-in-chief had said, and lit another cigarette.
There was tragedy and unfairness written all over this affair.
Ω
It took me many years to accept that speak to the girls again would be forever impossible in this city, in this country … in this world.
They now belonged to another cosmos, I realized bitterly; the one I was once arrogant enough to imagine that I could describe with near-perfect characterization, the one from which I made my living. I might have been found innocent of manslaughter, but the truth is that I killed both my daughter and her best friend; two innocent, brilliant, beautiful – the very best, in fact – extensions of this bastardized human race. I condemned them to the world of the imagination, and bad imagination at that. I sent the best characters of all to the back of the slush-pile: for in a snap miscalculation of speed and distance over time, I damned the girls to nothing more spectacular than a string of memories.
Amazingly, the media reaction to the tragedy was sanguine and even sympathetic and certainly never accusing. Society – especially New York society – went real easy on me, as in the tried-and-tested American way I was and remain legally innocent. But this, I could not help but feel, was only by chance; which after all, was logically of the same source as the misfortune that took my daughter away from me.
The reality is that there was simply no science to prove me guilty. In everything I saw or did or tried to understand, every moment of every day my actions only served to remind me of the unspoken truth that I was as guilty of killing these two girls as I was for bringing best-selling characters into this world.
I was their creator and guardian, and they died on my watch, and for that I am as guilty as is the first man to walk this earth of original sin.
Like a spell Alyssa stayed with, three years on, clear and vivid and perfect, that last memory, the one before the terror struck her eyes dead; the way I caught her smiling deviously at the perfect little firm-chested Asian body of her closest friend to her right.
There were other, more metaphysical casualties as well. As I later discovered is the case in most family-child tragedies of this sort, the death of my daughter quickly wrecked havoc upon my once-joyful marriage. That’s not entirely fair: in some ways I had stopped loving Marianna long before Alyssa died. But still, I know that Alyssa was as much Marianna’s child as mine own – if not more, given their oft-whispered asides as Daddy rushed off to another interview or book seminar or cocktail party for rich writers and trendy hedge fund managers. I should have stood by her and supported her.
Yet after Alyssa’s death, it was almost as if I began to seek out failure in Marianna for every quality and nuance that her daughter failed to replicate in her. Shortly after I recovered from my own physical injuries, I began to find without reason or want my daughter in every female form I encountered … except in her own birth mother. In Marianna I found only emptiness.
For a long while before I fell asleep Alyssa’s voice became almost pitch-perfect, lulling me back into a familiar reverie into which I passed out seconds before she died in the charring fire of the crash, and it felt there like a brief relief of dream-time before the city stunned me hours later with its marred determination to push ahead no matter what the cost.
When Marianna spoke I would desperately search in my head for any hint of the lullaby of Alyssa’s voice; I heard them in various guises at all other times in the peripheries of my subconscious. But listening to Marianna, I heard only noise. I saw only the self-pity of an ageing female skeleton crying out constantly for the pathetic sympathy of the friends I had always hated anyway. But that was, admittedly, just defeatism – for the truth was that she bore something much greater than what I was able to summon up inside of me; Marianna’s was a spirit that willed itself to do better than find the wreck that I had become.
And so, like the cocaine-addled Atlantic City casino manager, I ended up offering Marianna the best that my money could buy and little else.
Pain isn’t even the word maybe, what I suffered from thereafter was more terminal than that, more accosting, and could appear randomly and madly at any moment, and kept me up late into the night chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking hard liquor or maybe just rich Cuban caffeine if I got sick of all the booze; it kept me long past closing-time at some tourist-trap midtown jazz club I had no desire to be inside, surrounded by professional alcoholics and soiled concubines I had no inclination to talk to – the madness permeated my total reality – the madness of loss, the schizophrenia of broken communication, never to be resealed.
I never said goodbye, and time’s past, I should be over it, I should be fine and sober and proper even, I continued to tell myself … but I had become the vice of misery, breaking glasses and driving drunk (even today when I’m sober I drive recklessly, carelessly, hoping to die or jar this despair that consumed me then like a slow, gut-wrenching cancer) and getting smashed and getting laid – over the internet, in the beds of prostitutes, bit-part foreign student whores who don’t protest at the endless tirades of midnight narcoleptic ramblings as long as you keep their wallets oiled and their wrists and fingers well-jeweled, screaming down walls as I lose my virginity to heartbreak.
Like the blind, I learned to feel color without ever actually seeing any evidence of its existence; the waitress with the longing text from her newly-wed and the matching blue bra and panties underneath her plaid black skirt to go; the seventeen-year old boy with the smeared white cum-stain in his checkered orange and grey boxers; the pink nipples of the California tanned thirty-something brunette masquerading a pricey piss-blonde hairdo – like a biological gamma-ray my mind reads the field in front of it vividly despite any classical biological optical restrictions of the retinae.
I begun to hear thoughts, too, in a way; the waiting sales guy with a deal to push to my right, the three-year-old kid on the floor preparing to scream for ice-cream he knows he doesn’t deserve or want for no other purpose than just to win his first primordial war. I was, if not a multimillionaire back then, by every account a successful writer, and yet I now realize never in creating any of that success was I acutely conscious of other people.
People, language and concepts were always part of the same, practical package to me, courtesans of scripture, tools to the divine. I wished it were that easy now. As if it were some sort of sick joke, my only obvious scars were across the palms of my hands, where the glass from the windscreen had torn deep into the skin. It was as if the accident was forever reminding me of my inability to write any more.
My acute sense of the human condition impeded constantly upon my ability to create, to just go ahead and make something up. I had suffered an internal 9/11, something went in the wrong way and never came out, leaving me with the unexploded chaos that happens seconds before the destruction, but never
actually at the definitive point of the destroyed.
Those that have fallen to their near-deaths say that the worst moment in falling is the brief point at which you realize you are falling but have no ability to reverse the process – that sudden, impending rush of hyper-anxiety, that all-consuming pounding of fear in your heart, deep through your cosmos – and this is the moment I was perennially confined to.
I was in a state of slipping, without ever actually falling, and this heightened my nervous system daily, propelled by all the caffeine and Xanax and booze that I ingested to temporarily sedate the paranoia. I knew these were short term tricks, but my life was short-term; I had no strength for long-term anymore; for long-term is for the far-sighted; I could not even retrace my steps beyond the day I killed my greatest ever creation of all, which like a tormented demon, I destroyed in a flash of burning metal because I was too busy saving myself from the wreckage. The specialists assigned to me tell me this is human instinct, that nothing can prevent self-preservation.
But that, my instincts told me, was just the bullshit of textbooks.
I knew more or less instantly after the crash that I was finished writing books – at least ones that required any sort of imaginative input function; for I had become the literary equivalent of an amnesiac. Memories are second-rate thoughts, and yet memories are all I have to cling onto, to look forward to and back on. If I wrote again it would be an impossible effort, for the sum of its existence would be to face the karmic creator in the waters he divined; their very syllables and rhymes would mime the poetry of the cool, vacuous abyss he never quite fell through.
The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel Page 19