The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  Miguel was regarding me quizzically.

  “I have to ask you,” I said. “Does AG have anything to do with a company called Auxiliant?”

  He looked shocked. “No! Thank God. And I hope they never do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Auxiliant is a completely separate company. How did you know about it, Beth?”

  “I don’t really. I just heard something about it and I’m trying to find out more.”

  He glanced around. Despite the fact that we were sealed inside the car, he lowered his voice. “It consists of me and a small team that works with me. And a few investors. Most of the investors were recruited at that event in Germany. We’re buying back the rights to the Beacon marque from AG. We can’t announce it for a few months, until the lawyers are finished. The production of Beacons—in a different sense—is going to be reinstated in England on the site of my grandfather’s factory. Also in China and one or two other countries.”

  “I was told Auxiliant did research.”

  “We do. We organize and fund research, through much bigger partnerships. The idea is to develop clean technologies, and some parts of them will be branded under the Beacon name. It’s nothing like AG’s business model. For the past few years, it’s been a kind of skunkworks within AG, with the management’s knowledge, but no meaningful funding.”

  I had to tread delicately. I needed to know if my understanding of Emerson’s true will was correct. “So the investors you mentioned, they’ve been backing you?”

  “No, their participation is quite recent. It’s taken nearly two years to put together the buyback offer. That night at the zeppelin event I thought it was hopeless. But not long afterward, when I turned thirty-five, I started receiving money from a trust, blindly.”

  “Blindly?”

  “My grandfather,” he said with a sudden smile. “It had to be. Except I don’t know how he managed to hide even fifty pence from my parents. He was . . .”

  He bowed his head. When he spoke again, he was more composed.

  “We have the ability to make something new. Not just new: better. People not caring—that’s what’s frustrating.”

  “You’re brave to try,” I said, recalling Hélène’s words.

  “But it’s expensive to be brave. And I’m poor. It’s only the proceeds of that trust that have been keeping me on life support.”

  My heart seemed to be beating in my throat. I knew now what Webster had been alluding to when he said I had business with Miguel. But it was more than the funding I controlled.

  All around us, the faces staring into the car seemed to be waiting for me to speak. I fought to keep the identity of his benefactor from rising off my tongue. I understood that Miguel had been grieving when I met him in the zeppelin, grieving not the loss of his grandfather and his parents, but Emerson. Miguel had been the one to find the engine for him. For that, and for so many other reasons, he deserved to know the truth.

  “Your grandfather,” I said, “he’s—”

  The interior of the car seemed to shrink around us. What had Webster said when I’d asked him if he’d told Miguel he had a son? It wasn’t necessary.

  For all his losses, Miguel had managed to gain some forward motion. He had opened himself up to intimacy and, left with nothing, rehabilitated far more than his family’s name. He was proud of having done it on his own. If I resurrected Emerson’s ghost, wouldn’t it only drag him back into those woods of grief he’d been finding his way out of? I’d watched it happen to Hélène.

  I glanced nervously behind us, expecting to see that dark place looming in the rear window. But it was clear.

  “Your grandfather—”

  “What about him?” Miguel asked, watching me with anxious eyes.

  I realized I was shaking. “He must have loved you very much.”

  Was there any air in the car?

  “How do I get out of here?” I asked, groping for a door handle. I looked around—there was nothing.

  Miguel threw his arm across my seat as my mother used to do when she hit the brakes, as if she could stop me from marrying the windshield. He touched a button to retract the roof, and the rubber-scented air of the convention center washed over us.

  The man with the headset was waiting for Miguel on the passenger side. I climbed out and crossed to where they stood. “It was so much quieter inside the car,” I said, accepting a goodbye kiss from Miguel on each cheek.

  “Yes,” he said. “But is that a plus?”

  A woman with heavily bronzed skin pushed past me to get a closer look at the Beacon. She commandeered Miguel for a tour of the vehicle as another man, sweating heavily under the lights, took the microphone and introduced himself as the company’s technical director. “Men and machines cannot coexist without some cost to the natural world,” he told the passing crowd. “The question is not ‘What kind of car do you want to drive?’ It’s ‘How do you want to live?’”

  I crossed the stage, searching for a cell-phone signal. When I got through to Bruce Kingston’s office, I made an appointment for the following week, to talk about managing the trust in order to give the beneficiaries the maximum amount to work with. As Miguel said, who knew what was possible? I didn’t need to start a new archive for Hélène just now. The living were the archives of the dead, I decided, though I hadn’t counted myself among them until I came into Emerson’s employ.

  I’d said goodbye to the old Beacon two years before, and as I left the stage I ran my hand over the new one, wondering how many others had done the same when they were building it, shaping a new idea of the future.

  “Excuse me, miss? Please don’t touch the car.”

  It was the man with the headset. Trying to be polite.

  I withdrew my hand. “Look—no fingerprints.”

  He stepped closer to examine the paint. “What’s that right here?”

  I could see why he would have thought so.

  Some round spaces. Blanks, really. A filmy impression of palm sweat and grease—a souvenir composed of skin cells. If nothing else, it indicated where someone had been.

  Acknowledgments

  Some exceptional people underpinned the early development of this book. I remain especially grateful to Carolyn Eastberg, Anthony Champa, Geoffrey Precourt, Susan Smith Ellis, Robert B. Smith, Sarah Barth, Courtney Barth, M. C. Boyes, John Lineweaver, Maggi Tinsley, Carlo Armani-Tinsley, Andrew D. Miller, Jennifer Weissman, Bern Caughey, Mark Cunningham, Todd Knopke, Josh Poteat, and Michael Mrak. I am deeply grateful to four collaborators whose support and talents were vital to the book’s realization: Andrew D. Miller, Euan Sey, George Hodgman, and literary agent William Clark. My gratitude to Marcel Cornis-Pope, Christopher Wilson, Marita Golden, Tom De Haven, Alan Filreis, and the late Maureen Duggan-Santos and Nora Magid, for their advocacy and intellectual generosity. Thanks to all those who provided support or technical input, particularly Jonathan Welsh, Frank Markus, Jim McCraw, Todd Lassa, Dorothée Walliser, Cara Forgione, Jennifer Champa Bybee, Robin Kimzey, Richard Backer, Robyn Dutra, Inge Hoyer, Jonathon Keats, Joe Richardson, Kari Nattrass, Julie Claire, Tom Bouman, Amy Goldwasser, Susan Armstrong, Melissa Dallal, Natalie and Larry Welch, Jean Tierney, Cathryn Drake, Faith Wascovich, Fred Kanter, the Unboundary autocross team, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, especially Jenna Johnson, Johnathan Wilber, and Larry Cooper. I am grateful to the European Translation Center and the House of Literature in Paros, Greece, for providing a residency during the revision of the manuscript, and to the Virginia Commission for the Arts for an earlier writing grant. Special thanks to Dan Ross, Yorgo and crew, and to the designers and many professionals who shared concepts, roads and route maps—for your MOBILITÉ, AMOUR ET CURIOSITÉ.

  Sources and References

  The second Rilke poem referenced by Mr. Webster is “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” originally published in New Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1907, 1908; an English translation can be found in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translat
ed from the German by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International, 1989.

  The poem “Unrequited Love,” named in Emerson’s notebook, can be found in June 30th, June 30th by Richard Brautigan, Dell Publishing (a division of Random House, Inc.), 1977, 1978.

  The quotation by Mike Nichols in the second epigraph appeared in an article by Joan Juliet Buck in Vanity Fair, June 1994.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made of the following works, which provided helpful historical context and are recommended for further reading: Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter, Walker & Co., 2010, and Italian Sports Cars by Winston Goodfellow, MBI Publishing, 2000.

  Thanks to Mike Robinson at Bertone for his observation, “It’s expensive to be courageous,” paraphrased in the novel; to Michael Borum at CocteauTwins.com for his kind assistance; and to Frank Rinderknecht and Rinspeed, whose “UC?” concept car of 2010 served as a functional reference for the second (1999) Beacon prototype.

  About the Author

  PAULA CHAMPA writes for magazines on design and culture. For the past decade, she has focused on automotive design, reporting for publications including Intersection, CarDesignNews.com, and Surface. She is a native of Rhode Island.