by Casey Walker
“He is so modest,” the mayor said. “It is this man who has already built entire cities.”
“Have you?” I asked Shoes.
Shoes’s look was the plea you might give on behalf of your rambling grandfather. The mayor was undeterred.
“The new capital is his work. All from his head,” the mayor said.
“Beijing?” I asked.
“The mayor is flattering me,” Shoes said.
“What is Bund building in Beijing?” I asked.
“Not in Beijing,” Shoes said. “He’s referring to a project I consulted on. A very small matter and quite some time ago.”
“He built Naypyidaw,” the mayor said. “Much better than Yangon!”
“In Myanmar?” I said to Shoes.
“A limited partnership in which I am no longer involved,” Shoes said with some hesitation.
“A master project,” the mayor said in English. “They have a zoo. Penguins.”
Shoes set his jaw. “I have never heard of penguins.”
“One million people,” the Mayor said. “Very pleasing. Each ministry of the government with its own neighborhood. Each neighborhood with its special color. You know who a man works for by the color of his house!”
“Our involvement was very minimal,” Shoes said. “A little consulting on technical matters.”
“They didn’t consult you about the penguins?” I asked.
“It is not necessary to agree with every position of a partner just to do business,” Shoes said.
He turned to the mayor and fired several sharp rounds of Mandarin. My guess was Shoes was conveying that it wasn’t the best American public relations to advertise his involvement with the grandiose construction projects of a paranoid military junta. I fidgeted and played with the keys in my pocket. I carried them even though the locks they fit were an ocean away.
“The congressman has long desired to come to China to see the economic progress for himself,” I said. “But I’m sure he would be concerned that an American project proceed in the right way.”
Political fluff—like spun sugar. The mayor asked Shoes a question in Mandarin and received a long response.
“In China we know we are not modern,” the mayor said. “But every person will contribute to make a great nation. This is what will make China great, just as it is what has made America great.”
He’d stopped talking about Myanmar, to Shoes’s evident relief. We’d returned to platitudes. I talked this sort of empty politics all the time and found it easy to follow along. Bullshit has its function. I grew up in farm country, I sometimes told people, and you can’t knock manure if you want a harvest.
The mayor switched back to Mandarin.
“A thousand years ago, Kaifeng was one of the most important cities in the world,” Shoes said, translating. “Sophisticated. Educated. There were a million and a half people living in Kaifeng while in the West you were still in what you call, if I am not mistaken, ‘the Dark Ages.’” He paused while the mayor shouted at him. Then Shoes added, unhappily ventriloquizing: “The mayor believes Kaifeng can be great in such fashion again. He has been very forward-looking with private investments and wishes to grow Kaifeng’s economy with partnerships across the world.”
“The Dark Ages,” I repeated. Phrases like “forward-looking” and “private investment” made me wonder how much currency the mayor had plastered into the walls and which Swiss schools his children attended.
“Is ‘Dark Ages’ not a correct term?” Shoes said.
“There’s a little darkness in every age, don’t you think?” I said. I mumbled toward a line of ants on the arm of my chair. “Look at me: I’m twenty-four, and right now things look dark as hell.”
“I’m sorry?” Shoes said. “I don’t believe I understand.”
The mayor wasn’t listening to us: “To win-win situation,” he said in English. He toasted us all around.
All-day wear had made Shoes’s white shirt turn brown at the neck. His baggy, raccoonish eyes stood out even in low light. If he was supposed to show me Bund’s Kaifeng project from the most flattering angle possible, it seemed Shoes couldn’t even make himself believe this shaky, blood-vessel-burst mayor was a respectable steward of his responsibilities. He saw the mayor as I did—a man who spent more hours of his day drunk than sober, not a partner, but a liability. In better circumstances, both of us off the clock, Shoes might have simply taken me out late and asked me a thousand questions about what Americans thought of China, about Hollywood stars and pornography. Instead, he took another of his deep, nasal breaths and excused himself from the courtyard. It would be the last time I saw him that night.
The mayor gripped my right hand in both of his.
“It has been a pleasure to meet you, and I hope you take good tidings back to your boss, the Congressman Fillmore.”
The mayor released me and wagged his hands in that way of his—shaking his fingers like he was casting a spell. An attendant appeared, this time holding a brown leather briefcase with two clasps and a lock. My eyes swam to see it placed at my feet. The mayor twitched with a smile he was trying to conceal from his face, as though I was his only son about to receive his first car. When I didn’t grab the briefcase myself, the attendant lifted it onto the arm of the chair and unlocked it. He pulled back the velvet cover over the contents. On top was a manila envelope marked in Mandarin with an English translation that read: Documentation. Beneath the envelope lay stacks of American money, side by side, deep as the case, an emerald sea.
“Congressmen Fillmore should understand,” the mayor said, pulling his gravest face. “There is greatest potential for Kaifeng as a partner. Win-win situation.”
Somewhere far away, Leo attended to less incriminating matters of his own rest and comfort. I wondered if he knew—if this was expected. I wanted to turn this night over to see the stitching on the backside, the threads that composed it. I felt painfully what it said about me that I’d stood here, flattering this man all night while offering not a word of protest. I was a barbarian of a very special kind. Not the mere violent nomads of bad reputation who lingered outside the city walls. No, I was one of the barbarians inside, in some quiet council chamber, working up the official pocket-lining plans, running things luxuriously into the ground. I heard a voice calling to me, admonishing me from a great distance. It reached me, my conscience, as a quiet echo. It said just what the poet did: you must change your life.
I closed the briefcase and stood up and met the mayor’s eyes. And as to what happened next: Let me blame my drinking. Let me curse the jet lag and the late yawning night. Let me say that I didn’t want to cause offense to my host or that many other people would do the same. Let me point to my confusion and the inadequacy of Leo’s instructions as mitigating circumstances. Let me sliver the hard truth into something smaller. Let me say anything but what actually happened: I carried the money off.
AT THE VIP section of the hotel, the night clerk showed me to a room. Chairs covered in soiled plush and picture frames with chipped gold paint. The carpets were mismeasured and didn’t reach the walls. Mentally unkempt, too wild to sleep, I tried to draw a bath in the Jacuzzi tub. The hot water came out tepid, at a pace so slow that it would be cold completely by the time the tub filled. The in-bathroom sauna wasn’t even hooked into the cracked pipes jutting from the wall. The phone rang.
“Yes,” I said.
I heard Chinese I couldn’t understand and street noise in the background. I hung up, and the phone rang again. The voice was female, speaking heavily accented English.
“You lonely?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I come to your room?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “No, thank you.”
“Massage?” she said.
I hung up, and when the caller tried a third time, I let it ring and rattle the night table. When I was hired, the congressman had stressed that nothing was innocent or free—“Be suspicious of good treatment,” he’d said.
I’d tried to look askance at the men who came calling on our office, but Lightborn was the richest of these men, and Leo, as far as I could tell, didn’t evince any suspicions of him. Perhaps he believed he was above the petty suasions that would tempt his staff.
I opened the briefcase on the bed, and using a pillowcase as a glove, I dug out the stacks and saw they went all the way down to the stitching. I fumbled the packets around and saw only hundred-dollar bills—dead weight whose worth must reach into the hundreds of thousands. After a painful few minutes of sprawled, spinning nausea, I fell into nervous reflection. Insomnia was my worst friend, who came knocking at night to spew out every dark thing on his mind.
One day last April, Alex’s boss had come into the office seeing double and died of a massive seizure, right there on the taxpayers’ leather loveseat. We’d stayed at my apartment that night, the parlor floor of a HUD-subsidized town house, part of the government reconstruction of a once-boarded-up and burned-out area near the Capitol. She butchered open some wine and drank most of the bottle without my help, cork debris buoyant in a juice cup.
“He was so erratic,” she said. We sat cross-legged on my mattress. “So maybe that was a sign? Of whatever was happening in his brain?”
“Do those things have warnings?” I said. “It sounds, you know, more like a stray bullet.”
“He complained for months that he was exhausted. Was that a sign?”
“Stop saying ‘sign,’” I said. “You’re not a doctor.”
“One of us should have known,” she said. “He screamed at the whole staff. Flung anything he could get his hands on. He hadn’t done any real work in months.”
“Alex,” I put a hand on her thigh. “There are five hundred men in the building who fit that description.”
She stared at my blank walls, painted slate gray by the last tenant. It was like waking to a perpetually overcast day. I traveled so often with the congressman that I didn’t have much investment in my DC place except to be the simplest, barest thing—I called it minimal, but even I knew it was bereft of warmth. My mattress was on the floor, and my books were piled high without shelves. Alex said that I was trying to live like a poet without being a poet. I liked the books as furnishings: stacked in odd towers, they reminded me of sand castles. The few days a week I was in town, I usually slept at her place. I stole from her a sense of home.
“So is it bad that maybe I find this liberating?” Alex said. “The man’s dead. Just like that: dead.”
She seemed to catch herself here. “I’m sorry,” she said, touching my elbow. My father had only been dead eight months then.
“It’s not like you’re happy about it,” I said. It wasn’t clear anymore who was supposed to be consoling whom.
“Don’t say ‘happy,’” she said.
She looked at my open suitcase. It lived on my floor, halfway packed or unpacked.
“It’s just a junket,” I explained. “Apparently Lightborn’s got this place in Venice.”
“Venice?” she said. “Who can Leo even pretend to meet with in Venice?”
“I said I should skip it. I told him I should be around to help you get things sorted out.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“You want to know Leo’s answer?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do I?”
“He says you should just come.”
She cocked her head at me. “Go to Venice with you?” she said. “It’ll look like I’m dancing on a man’s grave.”
“It’s basically a long weekend.”
“And I pay for that how?” she said. “With severance?”
“Are you being funny?” I said. Maybe the wine had hit her too hard.
“It hasn’t been a funny day,” she said.
“It’s all Lightborn,” I said. “No one’s paying for anything.”
No moonlight and lanterns and teeming night now, just sun, and Kaifeng in empty morning daylight seemed at the furthest possible remove from any place I had known in my life. People screamed calisthenics outside, limbering their sleep-tightened muscles all in unison.
At seven, the hotel rang to say a driver was downstairs. He was a lean man, chewing a toothpick. On our way out of town, he helped me buy two cheap phones from a street-side electronics bazaar, negotiating the price down to a quarter of what was initially offered to my white smiling face. I saved one phone for Leo and used the other to leave a message at our office with my new number. My call to Leo’s room in Beijing went unanswered.
In the airport security line, sweat streaks ran from my armpits to my elbows. I received a skeptical once-over from a woman with the brisk movements of a drill-team dancer, and the briefcase cycled through the X-ray scanner and rolled to the end of the conveyer belt. The woman traced her hands over my bags and called over two dreary officials. I stared straight ahead. The recklessness staggered me—I was angry at myself for accepting the cash, but also at the mayor for lacking the sophistication to offer his gift in some subtler way. The officials looked at the briefcase, then at me, and made me follow them to a windowless room.
Minor officials the world over sat behind such desks: pedantic twosomes, heartbeats of the bureaucratic will. I sat stiffly and tried not to look like some itchy heroin runner. The older woman pawed my passport open to the travel visa, which featured an elaborate illustration of a red, bursting sunrise and the Great Wall loping over hillsides. I worried about my puffy, pale face. If it was a crime to board a plane with this much cash, I didn’t know it. If there was a penalty, I hoped the contents of the briefcase would suffice to pay. She unlocked it and scanned the envelope containing the mayor’s “documentation.” She showed the document to her partner, who leaned forward in his chair, scrutinizing the mayor’s letter. He looked on the verge of asking me some further question. Instead, he repackaged the envelope with care.
The woman pointed dismissively for me to collect my things, and I’d hardly stood before she was looking at me as though she’d never seen me before. I lifted the briefcase. Did I drop this in Leo’s room without a word? Did I try to explain? Would he be pleased or upset?
THE FIRST-CLASS BATHROOM housed a sick woman embarked on a long occupation, so I squeezed down to the two in the back. I was reluctant to leave the briefcase for even a moment. The load was heavy and sharp-cornered, and I knocked into a man’s knee hanging out into the aisle. In the tiny bathroom, I set the case between my feet, flattened my hair, rinsed my stale mouth, removed the mister from my cologne, and spilled it into my palms to mask the baijiu leaking from my skin.
Elbowed back halfway to my seat, I paused in turbulence. I saw a man who had been concealed by his newspaper on my walk down. The gaunt face, the blunt nose—mostly what I think I recognized was that incorrect ratio of neck size to suit size. This man with the tiny head—or, not tiny, but made to appear so by inartful tailoring. I turned from him as I passed. Back in first class, behind the rough curtain, I peeked through the slit. I was sure I had just seen the police captain from Kaifeng, escorting me with the mayor’s gift back to Beijing. Or, that’s the problem of it: it was a half glimpse and I became very afraid, which, when you put them together, feels very much like being sure.
DAY 3
BEIJING
DESCENT INTO BEIJING, through no-visibility smog, left me dizzy and distressed. Business class meant first off the plane, and I waited near the choke point of the boarding gate for a second look at the police captain. I wanted to run flush into him, to reintroduce myself. I wanted to mention all of last night’s associates by their proper titles—to say his name as to a fairy being, and thereby break the spell. The next flight’s passengers snaked and elbowed around the gate like they were witnesses to an accident. Something was happening with canceled flights or overbooked ones, or sandstorms were grounding planes, or the Beijing airport was an airlift and these the refugees. Or this was everyday life. I couldn’t tell. My arms were pinned to my sides by nearby bodies. People tried to pu
sh onto the gangway before the plane was empty. I never saw the Kaifeng captain disembark through the commotion—no man that was him for certain, nor whichever man I might have mistaken.
Outside, the bright mix of smog and sun—call it smogshine—made my eyes swell and itch. My taxi driver loitered in standstill traffic. Long ago, Beijing had been laid out on an orthogonal grid, a Ming-era design of concentric squares and ring roads that concealed the Forbidden City in the center. But the Ming pattern was now so swallowed by opportunistic sprawl, the pattern makers would have been lost instantly in the city they’d made.
“Last five years only,” the driver said, enunciating every syllable, pausing at the end of every word. He nodded happily to himself when he finished the sentence.
“What’s that?” I felt guilty asking him to clarify.
“Everything,” he said. He took both hands from the steering wheel and swept them across the length of the windshield, horizon to city horizon. Ordinarily this would have been a frightening maneuver to watch, but since we were basically parked, the car didn’t demand much of his attention.
“Next year people see,” he said. “Olympics.”
This last word was a hurdle for him, but he spoke proudly. I wanted to join him in his enthusiasm, but my thoughts were full to bursting.
We nudged like worms into Beijing’s dirt. Off the freeway, the city chaos felt like the objective form of my personal circumstances, entirely continuous with a glimpsed police captain on my plane and the gifted briefcase at my arm. A boy on the side of the road tried to fix the bent wheel frame of his bike, and his friend pumped air into the back tire, and above them, a team of workers adjusted the wirings of a leaning power post, while off in the farther distance a line of men as small as a row of pigeons stood at the roofline of an unfinished apartment tower. In all that flatness of Beijing before me, girls cut hair and blind men busked folk songs on erhus and attendants cleaned public restrooms. Life teemed out to the northern mountains, invisible today in the sandy wind. An old woman replaced yesterday’s paper with today’s at a display stand where people read as they waited for the bus. Beijing had the traffic of a city being evacuated. Cars and motorcycle rickshaws were piled into the road like all these buildings were in flames and every one of us fled a column of fire.