by Casey Walker
He took a pause here to survey his audience. The Gospel of Leo went something like this: “For God so loved the world he said, ‘Fuck it, you people aren’t worth saving.’”
“This sounds very much like two poor poker players,” said a man who hadn’t spoken all evening. He’d had the shortest introduction of all the executives and was seated farthest from Charles. His tie was thrown back over his shoulder. He was wildly drunk—a bottle of whiskey that had sprouted lips. He looked like he knew as soon as it was out of his mouth that he’d fucked himself.
“Well Saddam’s fucking dead,” Leo said. “How’s that for a hand?”
Charles directed curt words at the man who’d spoken out of turn. The man stood up, mostly under his own power, and there might have been fire ants crawling up his legs as he marked a curved path to the door. He turned, preparing for a final exchange, and was cut off by three men at once, who ushered him into the hallway. Li-Li translated none of this.
Charles stood for a toast to clear the air, but he looked like a man who knew his operation had just turned from rescue to salvage.
“We look forward to much future cooperation with Congressman Fillmore,” he said. Leo glared into his wine glass.
Charles continued: “And now I offer a toast to our mutual friend, Armand Lightborn, for bringing us together tonight.”
“To Armand,” Leo said, raising a glass to the absent presence. But I didn’t write Lightborn’s name in my book. I knew better.
MY BOSS FILLED my suit pockets with the business cards he’d collected, expecting me to alphabetize them later.
“They wish to say good night to you now,” Li-Li said, indicating the line of men clustered expectantly at the door.
The representatives of Bund International swayed like they were on the deck of a pitching ship. Charles listed right and gave my hand a firm shake, with a sweeping motion to lead me out of the room. He held the congressman back to offer further apologies. I stood in the corridor, and Li-Li was forced to take a few steps toward me as men gathered in tight around Leo. I remembered her red in the face at the morning’s meeting, embarrassed by how the men around her spoke, and so I took the risk of saying what came into my head. I had a desire to put a beam of daylight between my boss and me. I leaned to her ear: “You ever get the feeling these guys would rob their own mothers’ graves?”
Li-Li worked on what I’d said, visibly untangling it. Before she could respond, Charles pulled her away.
I hung back in the low, gold light at the top of the stairway, and I wanted to crawl into my shadow. It wasn’t that I thought I had risked much—it was that her reaction showed me an uncomfortable reflection. Perhaps to Li-Li I didn’t appear as different from these men as I wanted to be.
IN THE HOTEL lobby, I started for the elevator, but Leo didn’t follow. He collapsed into an armchair.
“Think I’ll go for a night swim,” he said.
“It’s too late. I don’t think they’ll let you in the pool.”
“The hell they won’t.”
“You don’t want to go upstairs?”
“I need some air,” he said. Air wasn’t going to do it—I don’t know what would have sobered him up besides maybe dialysis. The hotel staff, skating by on secret errands, made a good show of not staring at Leo sprawled in the chair.
“Phone,” he said, pulling his out.
“They don’t work,” I said.
He punched his. “Phone,” he yelled.
“We can get it fixed tomorrow.”
“These people are jerking us around,” he said. “Typical.”
“Bund International?” I said.
Leo fondled his phone like a baseball, looking for its seams.
“Or you mean Lightborn?” I said.
He made a sharp half rotation of his shoulder, and threw his phone at me, high and tight. I cut it off with my left palm, which spared my face. I had a good chance with my right hand at catching the phone’s low rebound, but I let it slip. My reflexes weren’t professional-grade to begin with, but a few drinks and my hands were steaks. The phone hit the maybe-marble floor. It wouldn’t rise again. A young man from the hotel fell to his knees picking up the pieces.
“You’re going to Kaifeng tomorrow,” Leo said. “They’ll pick you up in the morning.”
“To where?”
“I told them you’re my chief of staff,” he said. “The fuckers.”
Our actual chief of staff, John Polk, saw me as a nepotistic hire and barely tolerated me. Chemotherapy had left Polk’s head sheen as a missile, but he still kept two cell phones holstered on either side of his cock and would scream at me even from a hospital bed. Fallen sick, Polk wasn’t any wiser or more empathetic a person, but much more was forgiven of him. He’d never traveled with us, even before leukemia, because he said it was my job to wash the shit stains out of Leo’s underwear in places without reliable plumbing.
The hotel clerk tried to hand the phone fragments back to me, and I refused them.
“What’s in Kaifeng?” I asked Leo. He was beyond answering. He held both hands to his forehead like they were the brim of a hat.
“You speak English?” I asked the clerk. He nodded, not enthusiastically.
“If he wants to stay down here, then fine,” I said, pointing to Leo, who had slouched until his dress shirt was tight around his belly.
“But you don’t let him go anywhere,” I said. “And tell them.” I pointed to the attendant by the lobby entrance, and the girl behind the front desk. “He stays here.”
I fished out two notes with Mao’s face—two hundred yuan, what I understood was about twenty dollars. The clerk refused and chewed his lips. I pressed the money on him, and he followed me trying to give it back. I didn’t turn toward Leo again until I got to the elevator. The last thing I saw before the doors closed was Leo huddled over a lobby courtesy phone, like it was a toilet he was going to be sick into.
BACK IN MY room, the windows didn’t open. Gray night like gray day. I didn’t like the bed. I slept on and off—mostly off—in a chair until about five a.m., but then there was the hammering. At the foot of the hotel, a few courtyard houses were being demolished. They were single-story structures with shingled roofs, four buildings set in a square so that each house’s central garden was steeled against the wind, against the world—or had been, until now. Narrow alleys threaded between the falling gray walls. Workers pried off tiles, swung sledgehammers.
I thought to call Alex. It was early evening in New York City. My working day was often no more than a fourteen-hour break from my insomniac half dreams of ex-girlfriends, dead relatives, distant friends, and old tormentors. Alex knew something about China—the food anyway. She’d introduced me to hot pot restaurants and soup dumplings. There was a place in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge we both adored. The staff knew what we were there for and brought out crab and pork dumplings in bamboo steamers and we hardly had to ask.
The whole time we’d dated, whenever I’d told Alex she was pretty, she would always find something. She would say her nose was too sharp at its point or her earlobes too long. I told her no one had ever once looked at her earlobes and her nose was cute, like a little bird’s beak. “Words to avoid in reference to a girl’s appearance,” she had said. “Beak.” Plenty of people I worked with would say they didn’t take any bullshit, that they “call it like they see it,” and what they were really saying is it made them feel important to yell at waiters. Alex would never throw a tantrum and was so polite to people she could come off as stiff, but her resistance to bullshit was a layer hard inside, gem in a rock. It was the thing I missed most about her—that she wanted to set the world straight.
I felt Alex and I were still close. Well, close-distant, near-far—these were relative terms. We didn’t hate each other as people who had once had sex often did. Sometimes I imagined trying to explain that idea to a robot, or a child, about two people loving each other very much, or thinking they do, about the awkward grappling in the dark, and
then, so much of the time, within a year, wishing that person were never born. You’d get asked why—why is it that way? How does close not stay close? I had nothing to add to the paucity of the world’s collected wisdom about love and its disappearance. I did know that despite the odds—which were all in favor of hatred or indifference—Alex and I were better off in our breakup’s aftermath than most. I rattled my fingernails on top of the hotel room phone.
We’d met while we were both working on the Hill, though Alex hadn’t ever liked DC. There wasn’t enough of a city in the shadow of those monuments, she thought, not enough free air: all of it was requisitioned by government business. When the Ohio congressman she’d worked for died in office—physically in office, below his wall of honorary degrees—she took a vague-sounding program coordinator job for a ludicrously named nonprofit in New York City. She had a lot of extra time for email, I noticed, working at Give the World A Hug. They had a tiny office carved between the load-bearing columns of a flat-topped financial district tower, the barest sliver of the Hudson River visible through the hallway window.
For a while after she moved, I spent a lot of hours on the Acela Express. I had the Friday-evening trains memorized and waited all week to be discharged into Penn Station, that horrid, wholly unredeemable hallway. Every week I marveled that I was in the busiest train station in the country, and not once had an architect ever considered how a human would get on or off a train. Invisible entrances, mousehole stairwells. I had, more than once, been walking out of the train station and had a bewildered tourist ask where Penn Station was. I liked to imagine what it might have been like if Alex could have met me in the old Penn Station, the Beaux Arts one built a hundred years ago, with Roman vaulted ceilings and pink-hued travertine marble. We would have had to meet in another time, years before we were ever born, before that old station was demolished. But it would have been a beautiful thing.
I would walk a cross-town block from Penn Station and take the Q train to her out in Brooklyn. I liked to ride over the river, take stock of lower Manhattan, make sure everything was still in its place. My weekend visits never stopped as much as work intervened, and they trickled. Finally, it seemed like we were being realists to cut the official strings. Amtrak talked of cracks in the disk brakes on their Acela trains, and I got stuck in Baltimore about every third trip. Broken-down Baltimore might have been the sourest note—the boarded-up sections of the city you could see from the tracks made visible all the consequences of neglect.
It hadn’t been too long since I had seen Alex, probably about four months. No, more—five. She’d switched apartments, taken on roommates, trying to save money. When I imagined men she was dating now, I thought of bankers having affairs. I pictured men of a different infrastructure: a pied-à-terre; the Metro-North; Greenwich, CT. Lonely weekends where Alex’s phone rang only when he was sneaking a call from a corner of his property. I was making all this up because it was the worst thing I could imagine for her. The worst proves irresistible at certain times of night, usually between two and four a.m. Now it was nearing six. I have been an insomniac since I don’t know when.
I wouldn’t sleep anymore, so I walked down to see if Leo had managed to drown himself in the indoor pool. I thought it was smart policy to get away from my room’s phone—the easier it is to get in touch with people, the easier it is to forget how often you shouldn’t. At the pool, they wouldn’t let me in: the young woman was very apologetic, but she pointed emphatically to a sign specifying the seven a.m. opening hour.
I searched, and Leo wasn’t sacked out in the lobby, which I took as a good sign. The attractive planters of decorative ferns were no worse for wear—vases of floating cherry blossoms were unspilled and unbroken, so perhaps Leo had just gone quietly to bed. I wished him luck sleeping off Bund’s hospitality. In the hotel business center, I found my work email inaccessible, for reasons no one could or would explain, but this felt less like something I needed to correct than like the momentary lifting of a burden. I went out into the Beijing morning, where old limber men stretched at their apartment windows and women unhooked the hanging laundry. It was six thirty, so with twelve hours’ time difference, Alex would be just leaving work, maybe as restless as I was.
I was obsessed for a time with how Alex kept my memory, what she told herself about how we’d ended. But now I tried not to think about it. You can’t control posterity. When Alex moved away, I felt that all that was left in DC that I cared about were myself and the Jefferson Memorial. But a little sadness at least made the city feel like a more complete place to me: to live there and miss her was evidence that life had transpired, that I was more than my job.
OUT OF THE breakfast-room speakers, woodwind instruments played an Orientalized rendition of a Simon and Garfunkel song. An erhu accompanied, doleful. I picked at the buffet, dragon fruit and rice congee, espresso and an omelet bar.
“Someone to see you in the lobby,” a hotel clerk said, touching my shoulder. I wasn’t yet feeling suitable for company.
Thursday morning in a business hotel. The lobby bustled with anxious men hoping to close deals before the weekend. A young woman wandered out from the other side of a pilaster.
“I work for Bund International. My name is Li-Li. You remember?” she said.
There was a mechanical kind of lag as she spoke, as though she pronounced everything to herself in Mandarin, translated it to English, and made sure it was clear before she ventured it out of her mouth.
“I hope your sleep was pleasant?” she said.
“Wonderful,” I said. “We are very pleased.”
There was nothing to add—and nothing was said—about my misjudgment last night in trying to pull her into my confidence at the roast duck restaurant. I hoped for my own sake that I’d mumbled and she hadn’t really heard me.
“And your boss?” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The partners in Kaifeng will be very disappointed not to see him,” she said.
“This is what was arranged last night,” I said, perhaps too severely.
“Did I say something wrong?” Li-Li asked. She went red. “I apologize for my English. Did you receive my phone messages?”
“The phones are another problem,” I said. “All of these difficulties are entirely my fault.”
“This is not a problem,” Li-Li said hurriedly, though I knew she meant the opposite. “The car is waiting. You are ready?”
She certainly was, in defiance of the hour. Her hair swept tightly across the arch of her forehead, held back with pins, the rest short to her chin. She had faint sideburns bleached white and skin one shade toward olive. Nervous and sober, Li-Li wasn’t my copy, but she was my counterpart—a fraternal twin in this assistant’s life. She held herself together in a way I already envied. Her white blouse was without wrinkle or stain, her skirt and gray jacket right out of a dry-cleaning bag.
“I promise everything will be easier from here,” I said.
“I understand,” Li-Li said. And maybe she did, if she was as well-trained as I was at telling lies.
DAY 2
KAIFENG
IT WAS EARLY afternoon by the time I landed in Zhengzhou, a coal-fogged city whose glinting towers might have been built a week ago. Two men from Bund collected me from the cavernous airport the moment I disembarked. The teenager carried my suitcase and offered me bottled water. The other man cradled two cell phones in his large hands and reacted to everything quick as a trained falcon. One phone chimed during our introduction, and he answered it while handing me his card and shouting directions toward a driver reclining on a car. The driver became a dervish, rushing to shake my hand then spinning back to open the door. We piled in. More shouting, now directed at a sleepy middle-aged figure standing near a police car, though not dressed in uniform. He pulled an attentive face for the questions, but our car screamed away from him when the man with the falcon’s eyes had heard enough of an answer. I finally had a moment to look at the card: Executive Vice
President, Project Manager, Bund International. His name wasn’t translated from its Chinese characters, but he told me to call him “Shoes”—probably because it sounded close enough to his given name for my unrefined American mouth.
Our police escort sped us down avenues of red lights with no cars. We reached an empty toll road. Along the forlorn new highway was farmland—and, eventually, people. The farmers of Henan Province had the Yellow River to keep them in crops and disaster, not so different from the eastern part of California where my family still lived, where fortunes had been similarly lost and found in the cycles of a silty river prone to flood. Except these people had lost more, and lost longer. I saw none of the big-ag machines I knew from growing up rural. This toil was by hand and plow, in the shadow of bulbous-bottomed power plants fed by coal. I watched the smokestacks spout and imagined it was blue sky they were discharging into the already blackened air.
“Kaifeng,” Shoes said, “has a history of 2,700 years. It is a birthplace of Chinese civilization. We feel that among the projects of Bund International, the nearest example for Mr. Fillmore’s airport project is this Kaifeng achievement.”
I hadn’t heard of Kaifeng before last night—population, five million. I wasn’t sure I’d heard details of a Leo Fillmore “airport project,” either.
We neared the outskirts of the city, where deep concrete bathtubs portended future skyscrapers. Loaded cranes swung packets of steel beam thirty stories up in the air, metric tons of movement that looked offhand and casual. Shoes indicated this would be a hi-tech district for drugs and microprocessors, the best in the world. Other Chinese cities had boomed overnight—supplying the consuming earth with socks and cigarette lighters or buttons and toothpaste. But Shoes wanted me to know he was no dealer in cheap textiles and coat clasps. This complex was meant for higher-order exploration: circuits past the limits of human computation, next-generation pharmaceuticals designed to bring contentment and well-being.