Last Days in Shanghai

by Casey Walker

  Now that he’d turned pitchman, Shoes sounded dutiful, and beneath that, even melancholy. I looked out the window at the workers’ housing, cramped outbuildings sitting on the perimeter of the construction site. His abrupt silence, as we passed those trailers, left the impression that Shoes saw things far beyond what he was willing to describe to me. I felt he was gazing at the coruscating machinery, the denuded landscape, the laborers’ small temporary homes, and feeling at least passingly sorry for his role in it.

  “You ask Mr. Lightborn,” Shoes said. His voice was quiet, his eyes unfocused. “We don’t build this all for clean teeth.”

  The first time I saw Armand Lightborn was from the back, about eighteen months ago. I never got within twenty feet of him. We were at a private party at a restaurant with a boardwalk on the Potomac River and a view of the Kennedy Center. The weather was unseasonably cold; I distinctly remember stepping out when I’d had too many and counting on the air to shock a little speech back into me. I went back inside when I felt sober enough to stand again, or at least was frozen so solid that my legs wouldn’t buckle.

  The cover band had taken their first break when Lightborn appeared. It was Alex who pointed him out. We were wallflowered in a corner with our drinks, trying to suck them down before the end of the open bar. Lightborn graced our floor only long enough to find the stairs to the mezzanine. We groundlings affected not to watch our betters upstairs, and our bosses affected not to notice they hovered physically above us. We suspected they had the boutique vodka and we had the Popov, but as long as drinks were free, I didn’t complain.

  Alex spotted Lightborn when he bobbed up again near the rafters. She held two drinks in her hands, both for her, and I had two in mine, and I remember exactly what she said, pointing a full gin and tonic imprecisely in Lightborn’s direction: “Check out this motherfucker.”

  We watched Lightborn talking to Leo’s wife, Theresa—I had no idea where my boss was. The opinion around the staff was that you might survive Leo not liking you, but if his flinty wife ever turned on you, it’d be best to start filing unemployment paperwork. Out at the party, an actually smiling Theresa was all pearls and pearly whites. Lightborn was cozy and in close.

  “Jesus,” Alex said. “I thought it was just congressmen that Lightborn was looking to fuck.”

  I’m sure I laughed. I bent my head back, looked up at him as closely as I could. The hitched way he held his left shoulder, imperfectly repaired in several surgeries, suggested the pitcher he’d been in college. He was clean-shaven and had a windblown coloring in his face, like he’d spent too much of his youth in the sun, or had just arrived from a ski slope. He apparently possessed clear eyesight—no glasses, no blinking at uncomfortable contacts. There was otherwise not much remarkable about Lightborn’s physicality, except that he stood like he was very rich, with firm, never-anxious planted legs and his chest barreled outward. He was top-percentile handsome in DC because he was moneyed, over six-feet, and the correct weight for his frame, and very few men had all three. The hair that Theresa playfully straightened on Lightborn’s head was dark and blacker for the products that kept it in place.

  We stared at them and at each other, eyes wide, until the sleepy band started up some slow, coercive number. Alex killed one drink, roused by the strains of “My Funny Valentine,” and put her free hand around my wrist and tugged. She didn’t like that I didn’t hold her right, or close enough, or make intimate eyes at her while surrounded by all these people.

  “You dance like I’m your little sister,” she said.

  “I only had a brother,” I said. “We didn’t slow dance much.”

  “The slow ones are easy,” Alex said.

  “We can dance all you want in the dark,” I told her.

  She laughed, but I’d meant it seriously. I probably looked offended.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re perfect.”

  That was a nice moment—as nice as the comical stumble to the taxi must have been, a blacked-out ride that we conjectured only on evidence of a receipt we found the next morning alongside her bra with a broken strap. Lightborn was gone before the song ended, or, at least, I never saw him again that night—and no Theresa, either.

  All day, the Bund men and their associates rocketed me from cloistered office to conference room, showing me everything except what I might want to see, the city outside, its brisk market streets. When we finally ventured to their construction site, I poked around for a few curious minutes before they scooped me back into the car. Perhaps I had come too close to the perimeter fence between the work site and the workers’ housing. I did the quick math—the number of workers a project this size would require, and the rough number of living quarters on site—and figured they must have ten men to a trailer. What did the workers do there, I asked, with the last of their energy in the evenings? I got a gruff answer about wasting paychecks on games of dice and cards. If you paid them too much money, they all became alcoholics, Shoes said. This was the last word before we left for a welcome dinner with the mayor of Kaifeng.

  “This restaurant has a thousand years of history,” the mayor of Kaifeng said when we arrived on the fifth floor of the building housing our banquet room. I wondered how that could be true, considering I’d just stepped off the elevator. No answers were forthcoming.

  Whenever I returned from one of these trips abroad, other assistants always asked what the place was like, what I thought of where I’d been. I usually said a few obvious things about the quality of the food, or related some allegedly telling cultural attitude regarding punctuality or table etiquette. But the truth is I almost never met people who weren’t working for a government, or a Western-directed business, people among the small minority of a country’s English speakers—and these made poor, or at least abnormal, examples. So whatever I ended up “thinking” about the country was only some combination of what the host government was hoping I would, divided by whatever skepticism I retained, and helped along minimally by a very few unscripted interactions with people who, by the very fact that they could even converse with me, demonstrated our similarity rather than our difference.

  The mayor led me to a private dining room, and twenty men stood to greet me. He presided robustly over the receiving line, and I gave each man one of Leo’s business cards. I shook hands with a firm jerk, the way I saw the mayor do it. I watched every face, and none reacted to my English.

  After introductions, the staff directed us to our place settings, and the mayor began to address the gathered room in Mandarin. His translator stood mutely alongside, and I understood only “Congressman Fillmore” and the word for “thank you.” It was obvious Leo had been expected as the guest of honor.

  The mayor turned to me with a gesture of lifted hands. It was my turn to speak. I rose slowly, and my hands tremored until a private joke occurred to me. I huffed a few times and slouched my shoulders, in imitation of Leo’s posture, and bowed deeply like an idiot who’d mistaken China for Japan.

  “We may not always agree on matters of state,” I said, not in my own voice, but in that loud, ponderous one I knew just as well. “But rest assured, honorable men, that America’s best interests are also your best interests. We’re strategic poker players, not weepy sentimentalists. And together we can all prosper.” If I was smirking, and I might have been, I trusted the translator would render the words sincerely.

  “To the good people of Henan Province!” I said.

  The Henan officials applauded. The premier cru Bordeaux, poured by our waitresses until it nearly topped the glasses, was raised high, and I was implored to chug it to the sediment.

  I took my seat, and the man to my left tried to speak to me in English. It was something about how, given my youth, I must be full of talents. As he flailed, Shoes, at my right, offered no help. He dragged his chopsticks like a pen across his empty plate where they left behind no pattern. He closed his eyes tight and held them that way, and when he opened them he did not turn to my neighbor,
who was still trying to get his attention. That guest gave up speaking to me and addressed something to the full table that made everyone laugh. I tried to play along and gave them Leo’s laugh, from the base of my diaphragm.

  The mayor watched me intently. Through his translator, he asked me a question much less pointed than his stare.

  “Your ancestry?” he said.

  “I’m just your regular American mutt,” I said. “Scotch-Irish by way of Texas on my father’s side. Southern European on my mother’s, which is why you’re looking at these thick eyebrows.”

  “Kaifeng has a history of Jewish traders,” the Mayor said. “And it is well known that the Chinese empire under the Khans once stretched all the way to Babylon.”

  In the time this took to translate, I realized that I’d missed an opportunity to please him. I should have traced my family back to the Arabian Peninsula and the brotherhood of the Khans. Whenever the mayor wasn’t looking, Shoes would set his flitting bird’s eyes on the man and hold them there.

  The waitresses began to serve: duck liver in jelly, shark-fin soup in a hollowed-out orange. Many fingers of the twenty at the table turned the glass lazy Susan. I looked to Shoes for how to avoid faux pas, but he didn’t move. His neighbor served dishes onto his plate while Shoes stared mildly at his hands in his lap. The man next to me piled food up for me, too. I didn’t see anything I wanted until a chicken dish spun near that looked familiar as Chinese takeout. I was clumsy with chopsticks but reached for a thick piece I could handle. When my catch landed on my plate, I saw I had grabbed the head. Beak and skull—leathern flesh cooked to the color of a mummy’s skin. I pushed it to the plate’s edge and tried to ignore it. Was it stranger to see the head of the animal I was eating, or stranger not to? I knocked one of my chopsticks to the floor.

  The mayor saw it happen and rose to shout at me.

  “Chinese custom says that the person who drops a chopstick is the one to pay for dinner,” the translator explained. It may have been a joke, but if so the mayor didn’t laugh. The waitress brought me a fork.

  The croaking translator ferried along the mayor’s address to the table about the “modernization” of Henan Province, but several minutes of closing disquisition was rendered in a single English sentence: “Henan Province has the happiest labor force in East Asia,” the mayor said.

  The waitresses poured baijiu. A glass of it sat in front of me, clear and smelling of kerosene.

  “Gan bei!” the mayor screamed.

  “It means ‘dry the glass,’” Shoes whispered.

  I took the baijiu down. They compared baijiu to vodka, but vodka’s virtue is neutrality. Henan baijiu was a militant grain.

  “It’s good you don’t flinch,” the mayor said to me. “You see? He drinks without flinching!”

  With this endorsement, five enthusiastic officials of Kaifeng’s government raised their glasses to me from several seats away. They expected me to stand, toast, and light a wildfire down my throat. I did, and they did, and we were all good friends.

  The teenaged waitresses watched us like judges. Finally there was a lag between talk and toasts where people began to eat. The chicken head remained, its eyes on me like it might address me with recriminations. I wanted to mush it up into a ball and toss it under the table, but my napkin was cloth, and its top corner was tucked under my plate. Dumplings arrived in wooden steamers, and I speared two with my fork and built a small fortress around the head. The chicken eyes still poked above the dumpling wall. I looked so long into them—their hundred-yard stare—that I imagined a banquet of animals, with my own head spinning on the table’s center.

  The mayor stood—arm extended, palm facedown, fingers wagging. He pivoted toward me and toasted to the congressman. I stood, shakily, as Leo’s earthly representative. A waitress in a qipao dress crawled out of the wallpaper to pour me one step closer to death. I was goaded to speak again, so I repeated something I’d heard Shoes say earlier that day.

  “The sky is high,” I said. “And the emperor is far away!”

  The mayor grinned. His associates raised glasses. When I thought no one was looking, I spit my baijiu into my water. It was the only trick I could think of to avoid heaving later in the bathroom.

  “Thank you for that, Mr. Congressman!” my neighbor exclaimed in English. I turned to see myself beheld in glassy eyes. Only then did the depth of their misapprehension become clear. A shiver ran through me that I was afraid must be visible. Shoes might have been meditating, mouth and eyes closed, inhaling deeply through his nose. I looked into my lap, trying unsuccessfully to focus my eyes.

  Before I could think of how I might begin correcting these men, the mayor made two fists with his hands and started swiveling his arms in a machine gun motion, with a stuttering ch-ch-ch-pop noise. You didn’t have to know a single Mandarin tone to understand the shouts of “Rambo, Rambo!” that intercut the mayor mimicking heavy gunfire.

  “The mayor now describes a very famous battle,” the translator said. “The Chinese fighters were outnumbered by the Japanese. But all of the Chinese fought like Rambos. The Japanese were cowards.”

  At “cowards”—he apparently knew the English word—the mayor stood up on his chair. His porcelain eyes tried to lock onto his nearby deputies. They stared into their hands as their boss, arms exultant, searched the room for any object as vital as his beating heart. For the first time all night, the room was silent enough to hear footsteps in the outside hallway. I excused myself from the table. Twenty men could testify that an American congressman had born witness to it all.

  SHOES FOUND ME steadying my elbows on the restroom sink top.

  “The drinking is custom,” he said. “You are a good guest to accept it. I know it does not always make for nice memories. Or nice mornings.”

  He took my arm to stop my swaying.

  “I have a feeling they are very impressed by you,” he said softly.

  “You told them I was a congressman?” I said.

  The tile floor echoed our voices.

  “Do you feel unwell?” Shoes asked. He took a bottle of water from a row near the sink and tried to hand it to me.

  “They think I’m Leo?” I said, holding my stomach in.

  “The mayor has been very honored to have this meeting with Congressman Fillmore,” he said. “I can only say that certain of my superiors see the mayor as a useful ally. My duty is to facilitate the wishes of my superiors and assist an introduction. I have done no more than this.”

  “So who told everyone I was Leo?” I said. I’d delivered a mocking speech, tossed off a few toasts for private amusement in a distant place, but I couldn’t accept that as sufficient reason for such a vast mischaracterization of who I was.

  “You gave to everyone the business card of your boss,” Shoes said.

  “Not because I was claiming to be him,” I said.

  “Consider it from the other perspective,” Shoes said. He tapped two fingers on his open palm, and it made me think of an old telegraph machine. “The mayor expects a powerful guest. He invites his associates to a banquet. But the powerful guest does not arrive.”

  The baijiu climbed back up my throat, and I closed my eyes and imagined a cork in my esophagus.

  Shoes continued: “If the mayor wishes not to lose face, and if he sees you rise and speak as an authority, he would quite reasonably believe that you understand the necessity of what he has done.” He sighed like he was talking to a recalcitrant employee. “He might believe that you agree it is more beneficial.”

  “Beneficial to whom?” I said.

  “It has seemed you were a willing participant,” Shoes said.

  “That’s a misunderstanding,” I said.

  He took my arm, and I jerked it out of his hand.

  “It is not so consequential,” Shoes said. “The dinner is finished.”

  “What happens when his guests find out I’m not really a congressman?” I said.

  Shoes shifted his weight and looked past
me to the dragon-embossed doors of the toilet stalls. “The mayor did not have to tell any of these men anything they were not already prepared to believe. Nor did you appear to decline assistance.”

  “Fucking hell,” I said.

  “Please,” Shoes said. “If we do not return to say good night to everyone, they will believe you have been made sick.”

  Faintly through the bathroom doors, I heard the liquored camaraderie in the banquet room. Shoes was considerably taller than me, and his movements became a mirror of mine—fallen shoulders, shimmering eyes. He anticipated my next objection.

  “Who knows Mr. Fillmore’s beliefs and habits better than you?” he said, crossing his hands and leaning forward, speaking close to my ear. “And please consider: how would any of these men benefit by exposing as false what their benefactor has suggested to them is true?”

  WE DROVE, AFTER dinner—a night tour for my benefit. The Yellow River had long ago claimed what was left of the city of the Northern Song, the last dynasty to have made Kaifeng its capital. Somewhere, under the silt, were its palaces. Now the city was the rising steam of pork buns, the smoke of open-air fires, the whine and whistle of pasted-together motorcycles. Mao had Beijing’s walls torn down—veneration of old things was an impediment to revolutionary progress—but here the city walls remained, saved by Kaifeng’s irrelevance. The sky was high, the emperor far away.

  The mayor sat in the front passenger seat of our Buick, and I sat in back next to Shoes, who seemed lost in the caves of his own consciousness. On the other side of Shoes was a thin man in a bulky-fitting suit that made his head look small. I recognized him as our police escort from the airport this morning. Shoes introduced him as a captain, and the man, unsmiling, showed me an identification card. I gave it a glance and handed it back, but then he shoved it at me. He seemed to think I didn’t believe his rank or title, but it’s not like the quality of his ID helped: an American teenager couldn’t buy beer with that kind of flimsy laminate. The captain looked to be wearing the same suit in the picture as he was in the car.