Shining City

by Seth Greenland

  Jan had no idea why Plum would want a child. She was not maternal. She didn’t particularly like other people’s children. Since her divorce she had dated a series of men, none of whom were prospective fathers in anything but the strictest biological sense. The most recent one was a cosmetic dentist who had offered her free porcelain veneers if she agreed to participate in a threesome. His work was high quality, so Plum nearly went along with it, but she knew the relationship wasn’t going anywhere and didn’t want to think of Dr. Pradip Singh, D.D.S., every time she caught herself smiling. A child did not seem to be a logical fit in her current life.

  “Who would be the father?”

  “Why does there have to be a father?”

  “Okay, technically you don’t need a guy in the room, but, still. You want to have a baby for a piece of video art?”

  “Wouldn’t it be an amazing subject? I could shoot every moment of the experience and make something incredible.”

  “Plum, I think that’s called ‘home movies.’”

  “Context is everything,” Plum said as she typed sperm donor into a search engine and clicked. When Jan returned her attention to the window display, she wondered at the way Plum’s mind worked. There was an ongoing creative impulse that Jan admired. No matter how much rejection Plum received from the art world, her desire to make art, however misguided, was undiminished. Jan no longer felt the same way. She had been impelled toward design when she graduated from school, but that feeling had waned with her twenties. Ripcord, with its constant mercantile demands, was not providing the creative outlet she craved. Jan recognized that she was more practical than Plum. Finding a means by which she could fly her freak flag was now less important to her than helping her family pay the bills. Jan had recently purchased a minivan. A new, more practical career would be a logical step. She glanced at Plum, who steamed like a dumpling as she worked her way through lists of prospective fathers for her imaginary child. Traffic floated by on Van Nuys Boulevard. Dust motes swam in the wan morning light. No one came into the store.

  Roon had been delayed at the board meeting of a textile company he had recently acquired in Mexico, and his Gulfstream jet had landed only forty-five minutes earlier. He and Marcus were in a small office Roon kept at the factory for his brief droit du seigneur visits. Although it was his first real business office, the bareness of its walls and the functional simplicity of its furniture attested to the utterly utilitarian lens through which the increasingly peripatetic magnate regarded the seed of his empire. As they made small talk, Marcus reflected on how their relationship had evolved.

  The two men had become friends while playing high school basketball in San Pedro, a South Bay town whose curving, primal coastline formed the western border of the asphalt-paved, smoke-spewing Port of Los Angeles. Roon’s father, a liquor distributor who never touched his product, sent his son to a Junior Achievement convention where the speakers, avatars of the new economy, pronounced business an exalted calling. Roon heard the good news. Marcus would listen to his friend’s ramblings on weekend nights—if they had nothing else going on, they’d get a six-pack and head for the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. One evening Roon cracked open a beer and informed Marcus that a speaker at the Junior Achievement convention had given the following piece of advice: If you find yourself in Hell, you have to keep walking. Roon said that was going to be his motto. Marcus was impressed that his friend was the kind of guy who could commit to a motto. He didn’t think it was something he’d ever have, since he lacked that kind of certainty. Even in the beery haze, Marcus knew Roon was going to make something large happen, and he imagined a future where the two of them would be in business, thriving and prospering together. That Roon could now play the panjandrum to Marcus’s supplicant struck him as a perverse twist.

  “That was some event on Saturday,” Marcus said, referring to the Caligulan bar mitzvah. He hated to be so overtly ingratiating. Roon nodded, waiting for him to continue. The man’s actual presence had drained some of the self-assurance Marcus had been feeling five minutes earlier. “I’ve got a bit of a situation with Jan’s mother, who’s living with us now.” Here, Roon chuckled sympathetically but otherwise remained silent. His subtly patronizing look said it all: you poor schmuck. “Anyway she’s got this physical condition something with her eyes so I’m wondering if I can put her on my health insurance.” Marcus said this in a rush of words, the speed of his tongue reflecting his desire to get the task over with. Roon smiled and nodded, his manner having shifted from patronization to amused forbearance. Marcus’s heart leaped. Perhaps he would get lucky.

  “Can she speak Mandarin?”

  “Mandarin?” This was certainly incongruous. Was Roon playing with him? “Why do you ask?”

  “Because we’re closing down the factory here in North Hollywood and moving to China.” Roon said these words with the rue he believed his suddenly poleaxed old friend deserved to hear. Marcus reacted to the news with an audible intake of breath, as if Roon had whacked his sternum with a bag of office supplies. Wazoo Toys moving to China? How could this be? For nearly fifteen years Marcus had driven through the gates, parked in his spot, and marched up to his modest office. He had naïvely assumed this would continue as long as it was convenient for him. Now he fought the urge to put his head in his hands and immediately thought of his father, the unlucky Joe Ripps.

  Roon continued talking, but Marcus had stopped listening. Unlike the senior Primus, who had so adeptly steered his son, luck had not smiled on Marcus’s progenitor. Despite staff cuts, frequent sales, and a name change from Joe’s Shoes to the trendier Sole Man, his Seal Beach store slowly bled to death, a victim of the rising bargain leviathans. Joe never saw it coming, clinging to the belief that people cared about tradition. When the store finally went belly-up, the Ripps family had to sell their modest house and move into a rental. Marcus’s mother, a high school English teacher, resented her husband for allowing this calamity to occur, and this led to constant low-level friction in their marriage. Now Marcus lamented that he was going to become a victim of the exact same industrial myopia that had turned his father into roadkill on New Economy Highway.

  Emerging from this brief fugue, he registered what Roon was wearing. A crew-necked sweater that looked to be made of expensive wool hugged his barrel chest. Trousers, creased and cuffed, were woven from an equally rich material. Then there were the shoes: loafers of an oxblood hue, their tassels dangling gaily. And his socks probably cost fifty dollars.

  As Roon’s image came back into focus, Marcus began to once more discern words. “… a reason the American manufacturing base is disappearing. You have to look at it like the Amazon rain forest or the polar ice caps. Things change. What do you do when there’s no more ozone layer? You adapt. Wear sunscreen!”

  “This is a little different,” Marcus said, feebly.

  “No, it’s not! China’s the future, Marcus. You have any idea what’s going on in that place? They got entire towns over there— entire towns!—devoted to sneakers! They got towns devoted to pants! Golf shirts! Underwear! A whole city in China is dedicated to making underwear with a single-minded purpose, and you know what that purpose is? World domination! Guess what, pal? These people are gonna be our masters and they won’t need tanks and guns. All they’ll need are tube socks. Billions and billions of tube socks.” Roon was inexorable, like the weather, and Marcus couldn’t do anything about it. He looked out the window toward the parking lot, the chain-link fence, the uncertain sky, an unhealthy gray on this momentous day. “What do you think? You wanna move there? You could enroll in a Berlitz course, get a head start.”

  Marcus was thinking of Sun Tzu’s enduring observation: If you sit on a hill above the river long enough, eventually you will see the body of your enemy float by. Right now he was picturing Roon’s bloated carcass drifting lazily along, fish nibbling at the decomposing flesh. Marcus then imagined himself telling Jan they’d be moving six thousand miles away to a country where none o
f them spoke the language so he could keep his job, a job that had not led to happiness or fulfillment, and which he no longer particularly liked. With Nathan’s bar mitzvah coming up. And Lenore’s medical condition, a situation that would only decline. That was how those things usually went, wasn’t it? They got worse. How were people with glaucoma treated in China, anyway? They probably shot them and then harvested their organs. He knew things had eased up economically over there, but China was still world-class when it came to repressing their population. He had read about Tiananmen Square. The Chinese Army had not been shy about ventilating their comrades with volleys of hot lead produced by their increasingly aggressive mining industry. Admittedly, that was near the end of the previous century, but it nonetheless was not the manifestation of a nurturing culture. And he’d heard from friends who traveled there that the food was inedible, not at all like the Chinese food they ate at Tung Sing Hunan on Ventura Boulevard. Marcus had particularly enjoyed the spring rolls and the Meu Gai crab, never thinking he would have to consider whether he wanted to switch to an all-Chinese diet.

  The enchiladas he had eaten at lunch had started to misbehave. He swallowed a belch and had to cover his mouth as the sickly sweet taste of the cheap meat burst forth from his intestine. He felt as if he might throw up, but he didn’t want to allow Roon to think this news was having a negative effect on him. He swallowed and took a deep breath.

  “Are you going to learn Chinese?”

  “I won’t need to, I’ll hire interpreters. But you … if you’re gonna be my guy in Guodong …”

  “What’s Guodong?”

  “It’s where the factory’s gonna be. You’re gonna need to speak the lingo. Do you want to take some time and think about it?” When Roon saw that Marcus was still ruminating on the question, he began to describe his efforts to salve the blow to the workers. “I had T-shirts made and I’m giving ’em to everyone on the line along with two months’ pay.” Here he reached into a bag at his feet, and suddenly Marcus noticed a piece of cloth flying his way. Reflexively catching it, he held it up and saw it was a T-shirt with large black letters embossed on a white background.

  WAZOO THANKS YOU.

  Marcus knew this jaunty gesture would not mollify workers who were about to lose their livelihoods, but didn’t want to get into a discussion about Roon’s pathetic attempt at employee relations. What he said was: “When are you closing the operation down?”

  “Today.”

  “Today?” Marcus’s distress was conspicious.

  “I know this is kind of a shock, so take a couple of days and let me know. ’Cause if you’re not gonna do it, I need to find someone who will. I need an American running the show. Tell me you’ll think about it.”

  Marcus felt himself seeping into the floor, beneath the concrete and into the hard earth where he envisioned himself comfortably dematerializing, ceasing to exist in his present form as a man with troubles he believed he would not be able to solve. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “It’ll be an adventure! I walked into a bar over there in some town I can’t even pronounce and I ordered a Diet Coke, and you know what? They had it! I’m telling you, China rocks. In the meantime, you should clean out your desk. I sold the factory, and an equipment broker is coming to liquidate the place on Wednesday.” By naming the actual day the factory would cease to exist, Roon had placed an exclamation point at the end of this chapter of Marcus’s life. It thudded on the page, the vibrations of its landing resonating through his being which was beginning to seem increasingly insubstantial to him.

  When Marcus managed to speak, all that came out was “Wednesday?”

  “Day after tomorrow,” Roon pointed out helpfully.

  “Don’t I at least get a gold watch?” It was a joke, exemplary under the circumstances.

  “A gold watch? I’m giving you a new life.”

  “In China.”

  “The town already has an American school your boy could go to. Marcus, we’re the last American factory that’s not there. I’m trying to run a business.”

  “It’s all vanishing, isn’t it?” Marcus regretted saying something so trite, but at the moment he couldn’t do any better.

  “And the bank that’s holding your mortgage won’t be sentimental when you start missing payments. Don’t be afraid to take risks. Your brother Julian … you remember that time he gave us a ride to the Dodger game, going like a hundred and twenty miles an hour on the 405?” Marcus nodded. It was not a memory he wanted to relive. “He cut off that guy in the Corvette, the guy followed us to the exit and we thought we were gonna get killed?” Roon smiled now, cherishing the memory, his misspent youth. “Then your brother gets out of the car waving the toy gun. I thought the guy in the Corvette was going to piss his pants! Julian was a risk-taker. How’s he doing, anyway?”

  “We’re not really in touch.” Marcus didn’t want to talk about his brother.

  “That’s too bad. Great guy.” Roon got up from his chair, indicating the meeting was over. “I want you to understand something, Marcus. The world is made up of masters and slaves. I’m not saying it’s bad to be a slave, hell, most people are slaves. I’m not saying it can’t be comforting to have someone towering over you with a whip telling you what the hell to do. But it’s your choice today. You can be a master or you can be a bootlicker.”

  Although Marcus had been blindsided by Roon and was feeling slightly disoriented, he had enough mental wherewithal to know that he wanted to retain his options. “What about the health insurance?”

  “If you go to China, I’ll put your mother-in-law on the policy.”

  Chapter 4

  Marcus withdrew, his mind reeling. A toxic blend of rage and bafflement mixed with a sense of betrayal that he already knew was unjustified. Because where was it written that the status quo must be maintained? To everything, there is a season: A time to expand, a time to downsize, a time to move the entire operation to the Far East. Wrestling to get his emotions under a semblance of control, Marcus opened his desk and, hitting DefCon 4, reached for the Nietzsche volume. It was nearly twenty years old, and he had underlined so many passages that it was hard to find ones he was looking for. After a few minutes of anxious reading, he came upon the following:

  A living thing desires above all to vent its strength—life as such is will to power.

  In those increasingly rare moments of reflection when he considered what he’d done with his life, Marcus knew that all he had vented was a will to mediocrity. Yes, he’d supported his family. Yes, he’d paid his taxes. And he was buried in the middle class with no hope of upward movement. Philosophy for Marcus had always been academic, to be read, debated, and contemplated, not actually lived. If asked to characterize his own belief, he would have said he had become an accidental Stoic, a purveyor of the Gospel of Endurance, one who was glad to simply get by. This was fine in theory, when he was receiving a paycheck every two weeks and living in the terra cognito of Van Nuys. But he had an unnerving feeling the Letters of Seneca (or any other canonical Stoic text) would be cold comfort were he to find himself trying to function on the other side of the world in Chinese.

  At the end of the workday, he appeared on the factory floor and broke the news to the stunned workforce. He informed them they were eligible for unemployment benefits and suggested they apply immediately. Then he thanked them for their years of service to the company and wished them good luck. There was a great deal of consternation among the workers, and Marcus answered a lot of questions after the meeting. He understood the pain they felt and the uncertain future they faced. He was greatly sympathetic. And entirely impotent.

  Marcus drove home through the early-spring twilight and tried not to panic. In an attempt to put the situation into perspective, to concretize it and give it actual heft, he stopped at Tung Sing and purchased Chinese takeout for dinner. Now Jan, Nathan, Lenore, and Marcus were sitting in the kitchen eating egg rolls, pork lo mein, orange chicken, and moo goo gai pan. As Marcus
maneuvered his chopsticks to pick up a piece of orange chicken, he turned to his son. “What’s your favorite kind of food?”

  Nathan, chewing a mouthful of lo mein, paused for a moment and said “Focaccia,” indicating he hadn’t entirely understood the question.

  “Focaccia? Really?” Marcus asked, nonplussed. He hadn’t heard the word focaccia before he was thirty, and here it was dancing off his son’s tongue as easily as lollipop. “I thought you liked Chinese,” he said, holding out hope Nathan’s lifelong proclivity for egg rolls would give him an entrée to the subject of moving to their ostensible place of origin.

  “I like Chinese,” Lenore chirped. Marcus sensed that she thought he needed to be bailed out of something.

  “It’s actually kind of fatty,” Jan said. “I was surprised when you called and told me you were going to pick up Chinese.”

  “Something happened at work and I got a craving.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Lenore said, squinting at Marcus and nodding. He appreciated that she was always trying to make him feel good, to assuage the guilt she experienced for availing herself of his hospitality. Marcus hoped Jan would ask what had happened, but she chose not to and a silence of several seconds ensued.

  “Can I be excused?” Nathan asked. “I need to practice the clarinet.”

  Nathan was duly released, and, after deflecting Lenore’s offer to help, Marcus and Jan set about cleaning up. When Lenore had gone to her room, Jan said, “The glaucoma’s worse. The doctor’s thinking she might need surgery.”

  Wiping food remnants off a plate and into the garbage, Marcus did not want to talk about Lenore’s condition right now. “How do you think the store is doing?”

  “Great.”

  He sensed that she didn’t even think for a second before answering him. Her response was entirely reflexive. “Great?” His voice rose slightly with the strain of not saying what he really wanted to say, which was: When can we stop pretending that that money pit is going to succeed?