Last Days in Shanghai

by Casey Walker

  I wanted to run cold water into the sink, dump a bucket of ice into it, hold my face under until my corneas froze. When I tried the bathroom door, it was locked—slammed shut in the commotion. I jiggled a credit card in the door latch, futilely, before calling the front desk. I hoped they would send a different worker than the trembling one who’d just sprinted out the door.

  I was relieved when an employee I’d never seen before appeared with a master key. He sprang the lock and what we found inside, to my surprise and his, was another cowering girl—this one woeful and tearful, with a growing red knot on her forehead. She was dressed in the hotel’s black uniform, which had a much bulkier, institutional fit than what the girl under the bed had worn. A stack of fresh towels on the bathroom vanity made me understand I’d made a grave mistake.

  “There was a girl hiding in my room,” I said to the boy with the key. “Tell her there was someone else here.”

  I left him ministering in a serious whisper to the crying maid. I grabbed the briefcase and went chasing after some other girl who I was positive was already far gone.

  “SHE WAS ABOUT this tall,” I said, hovering my hand at my breastbone, talking to one of the bellboys. “Black skirt. Young.”

  The bellboy tried to help, but I could tell I only worried him. With the help of his shift partner, whose English was slightly more advanced, they conveyed to me that I’d circled the hotel for a girl who’d left behind no impression.

  I stalked away from the hotel into a night that blew a cool diesel breeze. Not knowing Beijing, every direction was as good as any other. I felt the impossibility of my situation. Corruption filled my sight without shape or contour—a gray wall. I held tight to the hopeless compromise of the briefcase and could make no sufficient account of Leo’s invisibility. I wanted time to parse the piling confusions of search and surveillance, but Beijing seemed to possess no quiet or private space. The city’s explicit inhospitality to the uninitiated was as choking as its smog. I was twenty-four years old and felt every short day of it.

  Beijing’s daylight was like sunlight through smudged glass, and the night, with artificial lights by the millions, a perpetual dusk. I walked with the briefcase until I arrived at a park. I wound my way inside, around tiled pavilions, faint and gray, under a canopy of green leaves that grew purple as I strayed from the streetlights. I came to a vast lake. My skin perked, and I shivered like I was some hairless little house dog.

  I sat on a bench and nestled the case between my feet where the nubs of my ankles held either side. I stared across the dark water. I’d been with Leo in places where we were as sure that we couldn’t drink the tap water as we were that our hotel rooms were bugged. Only I’d never been in those places alone. I hoped I was right that Leo had simply gone to Shanghai ahead of me, to enjoy the kind of stunning entertainments Armand Lightborn could provide, but my speculation also felt like it wasn’t worth much—if it was a currency, you’d need a wheelbarrow full of it just to buy a bowl of noodles.

  Finding movement best for my nervous thoughts, I left the park and wandered. I walked through a hutong alley of the sort I’d seen near my hotel, with an air of having stood for centuries, even as I knew they took only a morning to demolish. In stray conversations, the Bund men made it sound like the residents uprooted by this spectacular development, the people in these courtyard houses, were the very people moving into the apartment towers replacing their homes. I had a hard time believing that could be true. The location was too central, too valuable—if it wasn’t, the old houses would still be standing, and the people in them would have been left alone. I paused at one crooked lane to see two ceremonial lions perched on either side of an arch that framed an empty space beyond. I felt strange—maybe burdened is the better word—to be in possession of one of the last pair of eyes to see houses that had been built long before the Constitution of the government I worked for had been signed. Above the dust of falling walls was a picture of what would replace them: towers not more than a few years old, already scuffed and worn. It seemed almost deliberate, a ruin aesthetic—the new Beijing so poorly built that it counterfeited the age of the hutongs being destroyed.

  I took a pedestrian walkway under a major road whose name I would never know. In the underpass, people camped next to bursting canvas bags. Men who looked just-arrived from the provinces were dressed in long sleeves and long pants in this windless walkway on a windy night, looked nervous and beaten. A boy stood guard over a rusted bike as though this crowd was nothing more than a parade of jealous eyes. He seemed unable to imagine that what he so prized wasn’t something everyone else coveted, too. I pressed through until I got back above ground, in front of a train station that looked like one of the old Paris gares. I walked aimlessly for a very long time. Finally I met peddlers selling ten-pack postcards of Tiananmen Square. I turned to find the square behind me, the empty concrete center of the city. It was haunting, so barren. I set down the briefcase to rest my arm.

  As exhausted as I was, weighted with concern and a growing paranoia, I continued to imagine I could lift the mystery of surveillance and rob it of its power by confronting the spectral Kaifeng captain to say, “You are following me and having me followed. You sent a girl to search my room.” And I thought that if I could only say this, and make him agree, then his agreement would turn him to dust or smoke. I was positive I could explain that I wanted, just as much as the captain and the mayor did, to deliver this money to my boss without further delay—that my lips were sewn shut and my real longing was only to get home.

  I flagged a taxi and mimed “drink” to the driver, like I was throwing one back. He puzzled at my charades, then hit the steering wheel with a satisfied smack. He kept telling me where he was taking me, and I never understood. At a stoplight, he pointed: “Sanlitun Lu,” he said with a sweeping wave of his arm up and down the street, like it was impossible it would not contain everything I could ask for.

  I found no bars I liked—all crowded and clubby—until I turned off the main street. I climbed narrow stairs, and it seemed like a dream to walk through an entryway of hanging beads and be the only person in the place, where the beer was Carlsberg and no European dance track roared from the jukebox. The bartender, who also seemed to be named Li-Li, spoke almost no English, and her Mandarin was in a dialect that I couldn’t even identify, let alone understand. She ran the least popular dive in Beijing. It was the sort of hideaway I thought would compel the morning to come without further incident. I put the briefcase between the stool and the bar, and Li-Li seemed to be asking me about it, and I was glad that I could act like I didn’t understand her.

  After I’d had a few drinks, she tried to teach me a game. We each shook clusters of dice under our cups and then peeked. She flashed numbers on her fingers. And then I wasn’t sure what. She got fed up and finally just looked at my dice each time and pronounced a winner. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. I took my camera out and showed her my pictures of Beijing and Kaifeng. I skipped quickly over the official ones, like I wasn’t here for anything in particular, was just some lonesome traveler. I kept touching her arm, she kept bringing me Carlsberg. I took her hand and brought her to the karaoke machine with me. We chose together. I wanted Johnny Cash, and she wanted Michael Jackson, so we played them both. She handed me the microphone, and after mumbling my way through “A Boy Named Sue,” which I don’t think she’d ever heard, the Michael Jackson came on. We belted out “P.Y.T.” together—I knocked over one of her barstools and pulled her close to the microphone. Her sweat was acidic and sour. She sang loudly through crooked teeth. Her voice broke, and mine was too deep, but both of us tore our hearts out running up to the chorus: I want to love you—PYT!—pretty young thing.

  The song ended, and my ears rang in the silence. We went back to the bar, and I lifted the briefcase onto a stool, and she pretended she was going to open it, and I pretended I was going to stop her because it held a bomb. She thought that was funny. We wrestled over it until I held her close.
My burdens were in no way lessened, but they seemed to be. She had a bony body, with some surprising paunch in her belly. The course of my life’s errands did not become any clearer. Leo’s whereabouts were not revealed, and the Kaifeng police officer had disappeared from my sight, but not from the world, and the girl I’d caught in my room still pattered her secret little steps over some part of Beijing unknown to me. But my thoughts contracted to the bartender’s cotton shirt in my hands, and we kissed for a long time. I got the sense we were equally puzzled, having no language to speak to the person in our arms. She gave me her home number and a cell number and an email address, and I made her an awful lot of promises I meant sincerely, as I said them, but would not keep.

  FROM FOUR TO eight a.m., I slept curled on my side on a massage table in the Asia Hotel’s gym, hugging the briefcase to my chest. I got probably fifteen minutes of hard sleep, ended when two vigorous Swedes came in to use the treadmills and shook me so hard they must have feared I was dead. I apologized to them and stumbled to the shower in the pool house. When I finally had the courage to peek into my room, two maids were stripping the sheets. I collected my bags and discovered, upon checkout, that there was no bill to pay.

  I called Polk on his home phone.

  “I should be happy to hear from you,” he said. He ran out of breath. He wheezed hard. “And yet I’m not. So explain this to me. Because you’re fucking impossible to find.”

  “Who?” I said. “Me?”

  “Why don’t you answer your fucking phone?”

  “Leo broke my phone,” I said. “Inside fastball. I gave Glenn this number.”

  “Glenn never gave me shit,” Polk said. “He said you were evasive.”

  “Glenn’s going to have a long and successful career,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would have been roughly as difficult to reach in the last forty-eight hours as was Leo.

  “Put Leo on,” Polk said. “Your voice is like listening to someone shit.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. Leo’s disappearance was a flat horizon, a blue fading beyond reach. But I wanted to stack it on Polk’s shiny head, because it should have been his unwinding as much as mine. I told him, to the best of my knowledge, it seemed Leo had gone to Shanghai without me. Polk went hoarse with frustrated screams, phlegm in his throat. I heard his nurse’s voice, a Jamaican accent trying to calm him.

  “So what do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “What do you do? Is anything you’re saying serious? Do you have a goddamn time machine? Get one of those. Set it for last Tuesday before you fucked everything up.”

  I told him I’d be reunited with Leo by this evening, an assertion that landed somewhere between a hope and a lie. I said I’d call again. I thought from the silence the line had gone dead until faintly I heard Polk’s wheezing.

  I DRAGGED MYSELF up the jetway and boarded to flight-attendant scowls just before they barred the door. As we ascended, I watched Beijing recede. Leaving the city offered me one small relief: the image of the police captain grew minute to me, like the shrinking towers.

  I had never thought much, or long, about what might come after this life, but that morning I was so out of sorts, so dubious about whether I would find Leo in Shanghai, and what state he would be in if I did, that I had the strangest vision. I suddenly felt in sympathetic contact with a world of bygone things, a world of ghosts. With the lone exception of the Forbidden City, what I saw in Beijing below was the manic destruction of every brick of the architectural past. It was like getting rid of the past tense of a language. The present tense was supermalls with eight lucky floors and big-box convention centers and starry hotels for people like me. Residents evicted in favor of those just passing through. It made me think that if the spirit world was anything like our own, their desires must tend toward what they lack. They would spend all their time thinking of the beloved objects they could never touch again. So how the ghosts must wail as we bulldozed ourselves a present—tore their walls out of joint and pulled down their pai-lous and leveled the gardens where they had once found peace.

  DAY 4

  SHANGHAI

  I.

  I RECOGNIZED A WOMAN standing at the end of a tired receiving line of taxi drivers and errand boys just outside baggage claim. She smoothed her skirt with her hands, and in the process wrinkled it, so that she had to set to work again, smoothing. She lifted her head to scan the terminal and found me standing in front of her. She was startled but smiled in a bolder, toothier way than she seemed capable.

  “Mr. Slade. I am Li-Li,” she said, offering me her business card with both hands. “From Bund International. You remember?”

  Each time we met, she was convinced I would have forgotten her. I felt in a hurry but looked her card over politely. These formal graces needed renewal each day.

  I explained that my boss’s arrival in Shanghai had preceded me.

  “Very good,” she said. “This is no problem.”

  “Maybe not for you,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?” She concentrated on my face.

  “I don’t mean to rush you,” I said. “But I feel like a donkey lugging these bags.”

  Li-Li panicked and reached out to take the mayor’s briefcase off my hands. I yanked it back in a reflex.

  “I don’t want to burden you,” I said. I hoisted the case and grimaced like a weightlifter. She turned her face a quarter ways, angling me from the corner of her eye. I thought all the while about an accidental conjunction—how, long ago, Leo and my father were born under the same desert sky, and how that first coincidence had now, through a thousand permutations and bad decisions, brought his son groping into Shanghai with a suitcase and a messenger bag and probably half a million dollars embezzled from the taxes of Chinese peasants.

  WE TOOK THE Maglev train out of Pudong Airport—bullet speed through gray flatlands, the train barely swaying despite the ground it covered. Li-Li’s presence didn’t dull my apprehensions about Leo’s drinking, or ease my worry that I might have trouble corralling him, but it did comfort me, at least, to have arrived in the city from which our flight home would depart tomorrow. Wherever he was, he didn’t want to stay in China forever.

  Shanghai was dripping, gloomy. Skyscrapers pushed into view, a cloud city rising to life out of some old illustration of the future. From the Maglev stop at Luoyang Road, Li-Li found a taxi, and we crossed the Huangpu River in halting traffic, under global financial towers that crept up and groped the sky. Nothing in my imagination of the world’s possibilities—the hands that built it, the lives it contained—could help me account for Shanghai’s over-awing presence, its high-rises multiplying from the soil into a miasma of soot and acidic rain.

  We sputtered through a commercial district of wide boulevards emptying onto eight-story shopping malls. Li-Li’s version of the congressman’s appointments listed only what pertained to her direct boss, whom she called Mr. Hu. In some paper universe, Mr. Hu awaited the pleasure of Mr. Lightborn’s and Mr. Fillmore’s company at dinner this evening. This confirmed what Glenn had told me, but I was desperate to see how ragged a state Leo was in, to gauge if I could speak to him about the Kaifeng money and the girl I’d found searching my room. I felt like I’d been sewn into my clothes.

  Li-Li followed me into the Hua Ting Hotel. I checked in and asked the young desk clerk if Leo Fillmore had arrived, but the girl would neither confirm nor deny. Li-Li waited while I dropped my bags in my suite. The briefcase I kept with me.

  “It’s chaos, I know,” I said, by way of apology. “Our trips usually run more smoothly.”

  Li-Li considered this, then looked back to her phone, which scrolled blue light along her face. She said she’d called to reconfirm dinner, but Armand Lightborn’s layers of assistantry told her Lightborn was shuttling between meetings and couldn’t be reached. If the point of secretarial work was to insulate Lightborn from people like us, his staff performed their work superlatively.

  “Don’t let me keep you,” I t
old her.

  “My work is to see that you and the congressman are arrived to dinner,” Li-Li said. One knee was buckled, and her other leg shook. I didn’t like the concern that darkened her face with my every sentence, like she was solving algebra problems without scratch paper. We were both of us like this, I suppose: squirrelly assistants with endless worries.

  I found two chairs that sat in a facing pair, far from the bellhops and check-in counter. I hoped to settle myself before the dinner. The waitress came by shortly and she didn’t understand “Negroni,” so I took a beer instead.

  “So where are you from, Li-Li?” I asked. I liked her for sitting with me. It soothed my nerves to keep up appearances, and talking with her gave me something else to occupy my head.

  “Where are you from?” she said.

  “You go first,” I said.

  “Anhui Province,” she said. She would have been happy to leave it at that.

  “And what’s there?” I pressed.

  “One of the most beautiful mountains in China,” she said. She flushed at the word “beautiful.” “It looks like a painting.”

  When the waitress came back with my drink, Li-Li changed her mind and ordered a glass of white wine.

  “And you grew up there?” I said. “On the mountain?”

  “No,” she said. “Two hours away. Where did you grow up?” She looked relieved whenever she lobbed back a question.

  I told her where I was from, and to my surprise, she was familiar with my corner of the Fifty-First Congressional District of California—its skin-peeling sunlight and cattle feedlots, our ranch-style, white stucco houses roofed in Spanish red tile. She said that she’d visited our district with her boss to survey a potential airport site in the desert north of town.