Last Days in Shanghai

by Casey Walker

  “My grandfather was a police officer,” I said to him in English.

  I could have tried Mandarin, I suppose. I hadn’t told Leo this, because he would have overestimated my grasp and sent me on hopeless errands, but I took a year of Mandarin my first year of college to fulfill a language requirement. It had proven no help in China, but it’s true I might have attempted a little basic politeness. The police captain looked to Shoes, and I heard Shoes say the Mandarin word for grandfather, one of the few I still recognized. The captain was unimpressed. He went on clearing his throat and spitting out the window.

  My dinner drinks bit deeper, and I tried to grab and hold a last connection to my sentient self. Lights hung across the water of a small lake, and I concentrated on a few men fishing, even at this hour of the night. “Peasants” was the first word that came to mind, doing work that could have been performed the same way a hundred years ago—old men with wooden fishing poles, young boys delivering watermelons by handcart, women up in the middle of the night making five-spice bread under lean-tos of tarpaper and scrap wood. A man balanced his bicycle with a load of twined cardboard, easily six feet high, and I watched the herky-jerky way he pedaled, always a second from toppling.

  We arrived at a square at the end of Imperial Street, where stores rebuilt in the style of the vanished dynasty were decorated in strings of white lights. The square ended at a lagoon, where a bright causeway led through the haze. The mayor, with choppy movements and half bows, wanted me to follow him into the street. He had me pose with him for a picture in front of the Dragon Pavilion—a magisterial structure on the far side of the lagoon brightly illuminated in green and yellow.

  A small crowd of shrunken saleswomen watched, selling Buddhist prayer beads and collecting stray bottles. Standing side by side with him, the mayor was my height, and I saw black circles flecking his white teeth. His smile looked like a row of dominos.

  “We are not just business,” he said in English. “We are friends.”

  It struck me as a question, so I answered it as one. “Yes,” I said. “Friends.”

  None of the mayor’s associates remained for us to lie to, and I thought it was time to say good night.

  The mayor spoke to Shoes, who then said to me: “He wishes you good health, rejuvenation. He says he has a remedy for your weariness.”

  I’m not sure how I looked when this was said to me, but I must have appeared concerned, because the mayor, who had been stiff and formal, gave me an awkward back slap that turned into a half hug. He might have thought this was American custom. I tried to say I preferred to go back to my hotel, but our conversation felt like an endlessly recessed set of mirrors, multiplying under the burdens of translations and mistranslations. The mayor smiled his black-and-white teeth, and Shoes looked at the ground, and I became preoccupied with another problem: when two people are talking through a third, then whom do you make eye contact with?

  WE WOUND THROUGH common streets of little distinction—committee-planned buildings thrown up as quickly as possible, each like the last, spanning a long block. Then the next street would be salvage-heap structures and houses with odd additions, each one unique to its family’s limitations. We stopped in front of a glass-fronted three-story building with a sign that read Foot Health Massage.

  “You have?” the mayor asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You have had massage?” the mayor said. “A specialty of this region. Better than Swedish. You know Swedish? Great experience!” His English was better, I thought, than he had been letting on.

  Once upstairs, I started to feel sick—baijiu sick, discomfort sick. The building was a converted hotel. Girls carried buckets of steaming water down the long corridors. Uniformly young, these girls, in uniform, too, white blouses and black pants. But how young, exactly? I worried for them—burdensome young girls from the country, fast-used-up pack animals. Like there might be a glue factory ahead for them, or maybe this was already the glue factory. The mayor took his suit jacket off and yelled in angry bursts at small girls who were so obedient to the yelling they never looked him in the face.

  I relaxed slightly when they led me down the hall and I saw three beds to a room. Shoes vanished around a corner. The mayor waved me in, flicking his hands and curling his lips. He entered the room directly behind mine.

  The light overhead was harsh and clinical, and I sat down on the middle bed. An attendant brought green tea in a paper cup, and a plate of sliced watermelon. But only one cup, and only one plate. A scurrying tuft of black hair, with no eyes that I could see, came in and closed the door behind her. She took my shoes and socks off, fingered the blisters, and shoved my feet into saltwater so hot I almost screamed. My feet stippled white around the toes. I put myself through mental paces. In my stomach I could feel the one inadvisable bite I’d taken of a lobster that tasted like it had been on land as long as your average cow. I envied the real Congressman Fillmore. He was no doubt comfortable in Beijing, stripping to his underwear and counting out pills that would ease him through the night.

  I already knew I wouldn’t share details of this massage parlor visit with Leo. By his lights, it was fine to let Armand Lightborn pay for our trip—the House Travel Disclosure, if we ever bothered to file it, would be a fiction by exclusion—but Leo would still think it suspect for me to be behind closed doors with the local women. Your average voter’s eyes might glaze over at ethical lapses of the fiscal sort—in fact, these were basically expected—but a tabloid would see no difference between a Kaifeng foot massage and a Bangkok brothel.

  The girl dried my feet and tapped my foot with a pair of nail clippers. I looked down at my scraggly, tormented toenails. She wanted to cut them. It was a strange sensation. No one had cut my toenails for me since my mother, when I was too little to do it myself. The girl worked skillfully, and it felt very kind. She had a flat face, wider than you would expect for her thin body. She was tall, relatively, and not, I thought, pretty.

  Soon she was using her weight to push her palms to either side of my heart. I didn’t want to draw the comparison, but there was Alex anyway. I felt her body conjured from the masseuse’s hands. For a moment, succumbing to myopia, I imagined Alex had been the last girl I’d slept with. I would have liked to claim I had been faithful to her memory, so I could feel sorry for myself. But it wasn’t true. There was one woman—one night—after Alex. It still haunted me, what I had wanted, and the reasons I had wanted it. I asked an older woman in pearls to fix me one more Negroni and allowed her to hand me the drink as though I didn’t know exactly what I was doing or why I had come so far, and so late, to see her. She was my boss’s wife.

  I tried to brush all these thoughts away—Alex, and Leo’s disapproval, and Theresa in pearls—and to think of this masseuse like a dentist or an internist: dispassionate, palliative people for whom a human body was just a work site. No more sexual charge than a mason feels for bricks. My muscles were plastic and dead in her hands. According to the wall chart, there were color-coded energies in the body, and she was busy realigning the coursing of my spirit through my flesh. I tried to ignore my rising desire.

  Above us, a television played some kind of Chinese opera, where a plaintive emperor with a Genghis Khan haircut wailed over the loss of a beloved concubine. Or perhaps he’d lost his entire empire. The music became very beautiful to me, as though I could understand it, some contact from a world where our deepest feelings of loss were transformed into consolations. But the feeling couldn’t survive the desperation of the place.

  At a lull, I heard a man’s voice through the wall behind me. I recognized the distinct rhythm and high volume. It was the mayor. When he stopped speaking, I heard a muffled series of groans, an unmistakable animal satisfaction. Three sharp grunts, before the last and loudest one. I tried to believe I was mishearing. It was terrible to me, the thought of him, more baijiu than blood, with his domino teeth, making whatever use he wanted of one of these whipped little girls. More terrible, in f
act, to find my position was just the same.

  The girl tugged at my belt. She made a motion for me to undo it, and I hesitated. I looked down at her through the bottom of my eyelids.

  “Why?” I asked. It was the first thing I’d said to her in Mandarin.

  “Ni hui hanyu ma?” she said.

  “Bu hui,” I said. “I don’t speak it well.”

  We felt our way around in our own instant creole, putting the screws to both languages. Her minimal English, my tiny Mandarin. She repeated a phrase several times that I only heard as “lost babies.”

  “Las Vegas?” I said.

  She smiled, clapped her hands. “I want to go,” she said.

  “What do you know about Las Vegas?”

  “From a movie.”

  “Don’t believe the movies,” I said.

  “You know it’s in . . .” I stuttered. I didn’t know how to say “desert.” “You know it’s very far away.”

  She waved her arms in a semicircle, like drawing a rainbow.

  “Big lights,” she said.

  “Somewhere else,” I said, “might be better.”

  “A friend of mine goes to New York,” she said. “So beautiful, I hear. Not like Chinese cities. So clean. So much trees and fresh air! The TV from America,” she said. “Friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Friends is New York?”

  I didn’t know what to tell her.

  “You look like the one called Ross,” she said.

  “You think so?” I said. She appeared to have forgotten about my belt.

  “He is not handsome,” she said.

  I lay back on my pillow.

  “But he is very educated,” she said.

  I didn’t actually remember Ross’s job on the show—to the extent anyone in a sitcom could be said to have a job.

  “New York might be okay for you,” I said. “I don’t think you should move to Las Vegas.”

  She looked hurt.

  “There’s a huge Chinatown in New York City,” I said.

  “I do not want to go to America to see Chinese people,” she said.

  She started to undo the belt again.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She jerked her hands back and held them defensively at her chest.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Yes?” she said, reaching back to my pants.

  “Is this what happens?” I asked.

  Her face curdled to a scowl that she took pains to hide. She didn’t speak anymore, and she yanked my belt loose and I let her. She opened my pants and took me in her hand and stared off deep into the wall like she could see through it. I was afraid that my body wouldn’t respond, as though somehow that would be worse. But it did. Whatever was going on in my head was unimportant. And it was fast, which was a relief. The least embarrassing thing was for it to be wordless and over. She cleaned me up with a warm cloth. I had a vision of her cold round mirror of a face looking out from the Las Vegas Strip with the lights in her eyes.

  “Do you really think you’ll go to America?” I asked. She didn’t respond. She unfolded a fresh towel, wrapped it around her hand, and used it to pick up the soiled one crumpled at my side. She left holding the entire bundle at arm’s length, her face turned away from both me and the mess I’d made. I scratched at the drying white stain on my zipper flap and hoped it could be mistaken for toothpaste.

  I WAITED ON the lobby couch of the Foot Health Center for the mayor and Shoes. I never saw the girl again.

  “Yes?” the mayor said in English. “Good?”

  “Yes,” I said. The spirit of my body had fled, but the machinery still ran. We helped each other into the car, arms over one another’s buckling shoulders.

  Bright white lanterns lit a wide street with poplars planted in the median.

  “Your hotel,” Shoes said, pointing out a set of buildings I could faintly see through a gateway in a high stucco wall. A vast red banner hung across the arch, with white lettering in two languages, welcoming the congressman to Kaifeng.

  “The most grand hotel in our city,” the mayor added. “The former President Jiang Zemin has stayed.”

  “It looks perfect,” I said. I heard the relief in my voice, which otherwise sounded like I’d been gripped by flu.

  We passed the hotel, and the car never slowed from its clip. I looked to Shoes for an explanation. I could find no trace of the quick, efficient man I’d met at the airport only this morning. He’d been replaced by a weeping willow, drooping over its reflection. Up front, the mayor looked pallid and slumping, his suit askew, the once-careful part of his hair now limp and stringy. I thought he wouldn’t get much further in Communist Party politics without a more presidential coif.

  Soon, we were at the mayor’s house. In fact, we were inside his house. It wasn’t clear to me how it happened. This absent whir of the body when the mind isn’t in residence: I was a heart-lung machine.

  The mayor’s residence was decorated in the exact palatial style I thought of as Saddam-chic—glinting chandeliers, baroque flourishes in the hand-carved moldings, gold or faux-gold fixtures, right down to the doorknobs. Our present placement, in central China rather than a Baathist palace, was suggested by silk wall hangings with flying phoenixes and embroidered rugs with tongue-wagging dragons. I became absorbed in a ten-foot-long scroll painting I was told depicted the city of Kaifeng a thousand years ago. It was filled with people in spring, and the spring of their lives—dozing in sedan chairs, wandering in straw hats. Scholars talked under trees, women ate noodles. I could say I was drunk, but something in the old city scene haunted me, something beyond the easy sadness of its being past. When I looked up, all I could think was that I was far from home, that I didn’t understand this country, but that I knew these men absolutely, to their guts, and I didn’t want to.

  The centerpiece of the mayor’s residence was an interior courtyard open to the sky. Beneath a stand of trees were two overstuffed chairs flanked by three couches. My companions sat, while I excused myself to a nearby bathroom. Under a gilt-plated mirror, I wretched up my dinner and the baijiu sitting on top of it. It didn’t make me feel any better. I rinsed my mouth in a sink with a gold drain stop.

  When I returned to the courtyard, the mayor and Shoes were arguing. They were standing partly obstructed by a latticework screen, beyond which I could see their cutouts in motion—flailing arms, pointing fingers. I moved closer to them, but when they became aware of me, they fell silent. The mayor offered me the chair next to his. Shoes took the couch to our right.

  “He says you are a literate man,” Shoes said to me. Small mounds of gray skin swelled up under his eyes. It was beyond me why the mayor would find me impressive, so I understood it as flattery.

  “The mayor is the real scholar,” I said. “He had us all in rapt attention at dinner.”

  “Rapt?” Shoes asked.

  “I just mean we were listening to him very closely,” I said.

  The mayor spoke to Shoes.

  “The mayor is curious about your position on the people,” Shoes said.

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “People of China,” the mayor said in serviceable English.

  “It was the first thing Congressman Fillmore noticed when we arrived,” I said. I watched the way the mayor might react to a direct mention of my boss, but his face reflected only blank inebriation. I continued, “Mr. Fillmore says the people of China seem to be very hard workers.”

  I didn’t have the clearest mind, at the moment, for policy. But I realized it wasn’t difficult to repeat the congressman’s platitudes—like riding a bike, which I could also do drunk.

  “‘Serve the people,’” I added. “Isn’t that the saying?”

  The mayor laughed.

  “You have read Chairman Mao,” he said.

  I hadn’t, but I liked that he thought so.

  “Chairman Mao was a most gifted leader,” the m
ayor continued. “Still, even the Great Helmsman is only 70 percent correct in what he did for China. This gives to everyone humility.”

  I was unsure what precisely he was trying convey to me with this Mao talk, until I realized the mayor believed this 70-30 split indicated fair-mindedness. Forget Mao, I thought: I worked in the US Congress. There was no way the ratio of truth to fuck-up in human affairs was anything but the reverse.

  An attendant brought a new bottle of baijiu. “The mayor would like to know what you think of the Kaifeng New Zone,” Shoes said.

  “You mean Bund’s project?” I said.

  “Bund and partners,” Shoes said.

  “Well I’m certainly impressed with the scale,” I said.

  The mayor smiled: “We expect no more than eighteen months this will take.”

  “Even more remarkable,” I said.

  “Is this possible in the United States?” the mayor said. His English was getting unaccountably better as the night wore on.

  “Not that quickly,” I said. “You could never get everyone to agree.”

  “But in China we all agree!” the mayor said. I let it go. It wasn’t a fight to have deep in the night and half in the bag. The mayor drank like a dead poet. Except after eighteen whiskeys, even Dylan Thomas left the White Horse Tavern to go ungently into that good night.

  “The mayor hopes that showcasing Kaifeng’s development will demonstrate that he could be an effective partner with the airport project in your district,” Shoes said carefully. He watched my face.

  I bluffed—the first firm mention I’d heard of an airport project was this morning.

  “An airport would be a huge undertaking,” I said. “Though I imagine if anybody could manage those complications, it would be Mr. Lightborn.”

  I felt servile and on display.

  “I do not wish to leave you a false impression,” Shoes said in fast, low English. “This discussion between Bund and the mayor about investment and construction abroad is only in the very early stages. ‘Feasibility’? Is that your word? My personal interest is still to discover if your airport project could even be done.”