by Casey Walker
In the ambient light of the coiled trees, her face was expectant, chin turned up, eyes squeezed open.
“Why did you come?” she asked.
“Actually, I’m a little lost about that myself.”
“You don’t know why you come to China?”
“Not strictly speaking, no.”
She watched a passing woman who looked to be shivering. She looked down to the woman’s high heels, and then below the heels to the uneven cobblestones.
“Are you from Shanghai?” I asked.
“I do not know anyone from Shanghai. Not one person.”
“So where then?”
“Henan Province,” she said. “You will not know it.”
“I’ve been to Kaifeng,” I said.
“It is all poor,” she shrugged. “You have to leave. Some time I would like to go to Paris. For now, Shanghai.”
“People say Shanghai is the Paris of the East,” I said.
“I don’t know why anyone says that. This is not Paris. How is it like Paris?”
“It’s not, really,” I said. “Not at all, actually.”
Nothing would slow my heartbeat, but Xintiandi clamored in a way that made our conversation feel very private. I heard a jazz band trying to render Miles Davis. If I sat at this table long enough, listening to chattering groups, I could probably learn six languages. The face of the police captain appeared in every third person who passed, and I shuddered each time, but the image always dissolved into the features of a different man.
“You want to hear a story?” I asked her.
“What is the story about?”
“That’s what I’ll tell you, but I’m asking first if you want to hear it.”
“I can listen,” she said.
She must know better than anyone the private side of public men, I thought. She might even have some counsel, or wisdom. I told her a story of improbable cities, exquisite dinners—corruption and disappearance.
“I want you to be honest,” I said when I was done. “What should the assistant do?”
She let me sit quietly.
“I don’t know,” she sighed.
“I thought you might have some ideas,” I said. I realized how stupid it was to pay this woman for her affections and then spend my time trying to discern the truth of her feelings.
“My idea is I don’t think you are this person you say you are,” she said.
“Why would you doubt that?”
“I talk to liars all day,” she said. “Are you married?”
“No,” I said.
“I don’t believe that, either,” she said.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. Let’s say I made it all up,” I said. “Why does the congressman disappear? What happens to the assistant?”
“I think the official is very corrupt,” she said. “His assistant is, too.”
“And so what happens to them?”
“They kill themselves from shame,” she said. “The official jumps from a building. The assistant drowns himself.”
“That’s the end?” I said.
“That’s the end.”
“That’s a sad fucking story,” I said.
“I have more thoughts.”
“Tell me.”
“You don’t like to hear the truth.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
She’d been right that I did like Xintiandi. The upmarket stores were still busy and blandly prosperous. It felt familiar—the wealthy familiarity of the cosmopolitan no-place—at a moment when any quantity of contentment seemed so out of reach that even the most bloodless form of consumer activity was desperately desirable. I left cash for our bill, and we walked down an empty lane where stone walls rose around us on each side.
Eventually, as though she’d been thinking everything over, she said: “In your story, the truth is nothing happens.”
“Nothing happens to who?” I said. Offering her my story had hurt more than it helped, made my confinement and poor choices feel more, not less, real.
“You see this in Shanghai,” she continued, “once in a long time some person goes to jail for their lies. But it is not so common. And nobody very important. Or look at the man in my home province stealing children from the Zhengzhou train station. He took them to work in his factory. He beat the children and did not pay any money. When he is caught, he says to consider his situation. Running a factory is hard work, he says. He explains he is not so bad, that he did not murder anyone. For me, I would like people to be more honorable. They were this way in the past. In the old China, people take responsibility.”
“And kill themselves?” I said.
“Sometimes,” she said.
She took my hand, and I aligned my steps with this girl in the pencil skirt, without even knowing her name. Rain and mist returned, and revolved, one coming after the other. She led me through neighboring alleys of some of the oldest remaining sections of the city, a few gray stone houses with faded red roofs and bent lanes where narrow corridors cut to the width of my shoulders. She always knew which way to turn, like following the lines on her own familiar palm. I was too tired to believe I could ward off any harm coming to me. My thoughts were those of an escaped convict: if what was before me was the prospect of capture and long suffering, then tonight I would abuse my last few steps of freedom.
WE RETURNED TO the Ritz Carlton. I wanted a room unknown to my hosts, or the police captain, and I paid the full rate out of my jacket stash of the mayor’s money. Upstairs, I paid her—she wouldn’t shut the door until I did. She asked what I wanted. I couldn’t tell her what I was thinking. She paced the room running her hands on the raised fleur-delis wallpaper. I smelled lavender. I told her I wanted to shower, and she said she would come with me. She took off her shoes. She smiled when she discovered the radiant heating in the marble floor.
“Lights on or off?” she said.
“Off,” I said.
Water from the rain-head shower instantly steamed the glass. As her body emerged out of the darkness around it, I felt her slight pearing, her nails bitten ragged, her cold hands. Everything was a surprise: Her shoulders were almost broad, like she was a swimmer, and her flat smile hid sharp teeth. Her wet skin was smooth as stream stones. Under the shower spray, in the dark, I thought she was right about everything she’d said—the assistant is guilty, too, and he drowns himself from shame.
III.
LATE THAT NIGHT, discomfited by Polk’s silence, I took my phone into the bathroom and called his house. A housekeeper told me he’d been taken to the hospital with breathing trouble. I phoned the hospital and pretended to be his brother. A nurse said he was on a respirator. I stumbled back to bed, and for the rest of the night, in scattered minutes of dozing next to the girl, I dreamed of the dead. They came like snow flurries, whipping in flakes and piling up around me. There was a cancer multiplying at the male root of the family line, from my father and his father. With the insomnia, it was my inheritance: all of us impotent before death.
The morning brought rain, and I braced myself against the sheets, trying to clear away my dreams. She was gone, though I didn’t remember her leaving. Between last night and this morning, I’d already lost some of the contours of her face, but when I closed my eyes I could still feel her motion, the impression of her hands on my breastbone, like she’d pressed them into wet concrete. She’d bitten me once on my chest, hard. I’d held her face and gently asked her to stop.
The flat sheet had bunched to the bottom of the mattress, and I climbed out of bed, stepping over pillows on the floor. The ballistics of their dispersion told the story of our night’s movements, but also suggested something more aggressive than the quiet reality of our brief coupling. She’d left behind a damp towel the room was too humid to let dry. I shouldn’t have done it, and I already missed her.
Out my hotel window the sun came up over half-formed Shanghai towers. Cranes stretched high above jackhammers, and great engines came alive to move the earth. A copy of the st
ate-run English paper thumped onto my doormat, and I paged through it to see if I’d find Leo’s picture, if there was talk of mayoral corruption, American interlopers, abuses of power. I wanted to know if a man had really died. And I wondered if a state paper would tell me any of it—if there was news, and if the censors would let it stay news. After some desperate flipping, I found a short article announcing the elevation of a new mayor in the city of Kaifeng. It was a buried little piece, likely boring to everyone but me. The man promised to make Kaifeng “a model for central China and a new global-class city.” No mention was made of his predecessor. Full of tight muscles and mysterious hurts, my heart raced too fast at images cast up behind my eyelids.
In ninety-six hours, I’d run through four pairs of black socks and three cities. The snowstorm of the dead, which fell all through my dreams last night, gave me very little confidence in this rising day. My best hope was that Leo was waiting for me at the airport and that no one else was.
AT PUDONG AIRPORT, a security officer wearing a blue button-up shirt and a red armband walked his circuit, and I froze on the opposite side of a “Departures” board. I ducked into the airport bookstore. Leo had two hours to arrive.
I hid in back among the books in English. The novels were limited to a single shelf, the beast fables of eighth grade: Watership Down, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Animal Farm. Animal Farm baffled me. The only part I could remember was the final scene: the pigs in the house getting drunk while the rest of the pitiable animals looked in through the windows. I bought a copy.
At a noodle counter, I held the book in front of my face and kept out of sight of the foot traffic in the terminal. I’d paid a messenger to bring my bags from the Hua-Ting hotel, and the more time that passed, the more I could begin to believe the Kaifeng police captain didn’t know the details of our departure, that if Leo arrived we could leave the country without further incident. The counter girl wore a hospital mask, and I ordered noodles with “nugget of fish.” I had to say it three times before I could make my voice loud enough for her to hear. When my food arrived, the noodles were dead and the fish boiled to golf balls.
At the other end of the counter, I saw a wan-skinned young man whose unshaven, squinting look was like staring at my own reflection. His head seemed inclined in my direction.
“Hua Ting Hotel,” he called out. “Last night.”
I flinched and put my feet on the floor, ready to leap up and run. He limped over and settled on a stool next to mine.
“The King of Mesh,” I said.
Relief was slow to hit my synapses.
“You look like shit,” I told him.
“You’re fucking telling me,” he said.
“You smell like soap and gin,” I said. “And the soap just barely.”
“I got Shanghaied last night,” he said. He paused for a laugh I didn’t give him. “But I’ve got twelve hours to Los Angeles and a handful of pills.”
“You’re flying commercial?”
“You have any idea what I’d have to do to get a private plane into China?”
“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”
“So get this, I had this driver last night,” he said. “He took us to this club—me and a couple buddies. You know what traffic is like. We’re just sitting there, and I’m getting pissed and it’s like, fucking do something, man, we’re going to be here all night.”
He paused.
“You waiting for someone?” he asked.
I’m waiting for everyone, I wanted to say. I’m in the waiting profession. I looked beyond his stubble to scan the faces in the terminal.
“So my driver, he cuts out of our lane and starts heading right into oncoming traffic. It was some real James Bond shit,” he said. He held out his hands with the palms together and then opened them like he was swimming a breaststroke. “We were going literally 150 miles an hour.”
“Literally,” I said.
“We were drinking this wolfberry alcohol,” he said. “Wolfberry. I always think they’re making this stuff up. They said it was good for stamina.”
“You running a marathon?”
“I was fucking a marathon,” he said.
“Jesus, you’re a scumbag,” I said. It didn’t make him angry. He leaned in close.
“I had these two girls, and we got this private room, sort of in this dome thing at the top of the club.” His voice crumbled with something that closely resembled emotion: “Whole thing was beautiful. No one gives a shit about anything here. I mean, these girls, up on the roof. I’ve got my dick. I’ve got all Shanghai. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Simple pleasures,” I said.
I wondered anymore if there was any difference between me and him—a couple young white guys in suits. His puffy face mirrored mine. You could read his bespoke tailoring, against my off-the-rack blend of inferior textiles, and figure out he was much richer. But you had to talk to him to hear how the things of most use to him—women and money—were useful only if everyone knew just how many, and how much, he had piled up. I needed to be different from him and needed it more after the smell of sweat and lavender this morning in my hotel linens; I had a bite mark from the girl last night, right above my heart. Some of the jagged circle her teeth had made was already bruised over. It hadn’t bled, but it felt like she bit down into muscle tissue, and now it hurt anytime my torso clenched. It hurt to have a fucking heartbeat.
“So you’re headed home?” he said.
“Actually, I just like the food out here.”
“Where’s your congressman?” He looked mean saying it, and happy to be.
“Busy.”
“I was hoping to meet the guy.”
I looked back into my book and thought of children’s stories where a little boy actually disappears into the pages.
“You want me to leave you alone?” he asked.
“It’s nothing personal.”
“You’re really deep in this shit, huh?” he said, as though the clouds finally parted in his understanding.
“What’s that?”
“You’re shaking worse than I am. And I’m still drunk on no sleep.”
My eyes began to water. I’d never had much respect for business sense—a nose for money, I thought, could help you smell a deal, but left the rest of your senses dead to the world. My instinct had put me off him, but what good are instincts if we don’t live in the same jungle that gave them to us?
“Should I call you a doctor?” he said. He reached out and felt the pulse in my neck, a gesture that made me realize I must look on the verge of fainting. “What kind of stuff are you into?”
I could see my reflection in the patent leather of his shoes, and that was about how I felt, like my face was wrapped around his foot. For the first time that morning, I remembered all the mayor’s cash was in Li-Li’s hands. I wondered what she would do with it—if it would be something good, if good was even possible, given its provenance. I tried to steady my voice, but I had nothing to say. The King of Mesh looked me up and down.
“Feels like I’m talking to a ghost,” he said.
The final call for his flight came over the PA. He came in close to me and put his hands on my shoulders.
“Look at me, friend,” he said. “You listening? I’ve been in sticky shit myself. Dead ends and no good options. You don’t want to be the guy. You know the guy?”
“What guy?” I said weakly.
“The one who’s left holding the bag,” he said.
I exhaled long, and my head tingled, and I couldn’t think. I was sure I could bang my fists on the floor and nobody would hear a sound. So maybe he was right that I was somehow disembodied.
WHEN THE KING of Mesh was gone, I held my hands up under my jacket sleeves and looked hopefully toward every middle-aged Western man with a Leo-like slouch. Travelers splayed across chairs, legs tucked over armrests, too tired to care about their public conduct. Nearby, two girls ran a Jack Daniels promotion, handing out pamphlets like advoc
ates of a religion: their communion vessels bottles of whiskey; their heaven a poster-board scene of a Las Vegas night.
There was no transport, I didn’t think, that could take me back to the first time I used my congressional ID to skip the tour group line and walk unescorted into the Capitol Building. I had lingered in the old Supreme Court chamber where Jefferson was sworn in. I’d strained my neck at a rotunda fresco, The Apotheosis of Washington, our first president on a seat in the clouds where Christ would ordinarily be. I’d stood at the center of the city, marked by a star, where all of DC’s avenues converged. I remember calling my father to tell him about it, and I remember that he was dead six weeks later.
An attendant announced our flight. The world was reduced to a hollow buzzing. Near my departure gate. I stood in the thick crowd, close enough to scan every face as people boarded. Still no Leo. It felt impossible to stay and impossible to go. I stalled until the last echoes of the boarding summons, until there were no more passengers left.
I woke to full alertness when two public security officers appeared. They spoke intently with two clerks, the nearsighted foursome now handling a sheaf of papers, now scanning one computer screen. The PA chimed, and “Luke Slade” was called in a dead tone. My name was repeated again, and my ears rang with admonitions. I felt suddenly broken by every ambition that had brought me to China, by every compromised instinct to run to pleasure and avoid pain, even where pain brought knowledge and pleasure pulled a hood over the eyes. I’d become one of those shrouded hermits at the bottom corner of an immense scroll painting, the figure you have to strain to pick out against the sheer volume of the mountain. If those hermits ever had any reaction to the hardships they were about to endure, they were too goddamn small for anyone to see it. The public security men stood still, as though waiting for me to throw myself at their patient feet.
ONE YEAR EARLIER
VENICE
AT THE DOCKS outside Marco Polo Airport, Alex and I were impatient and excitable, and it felt impossible to wait half an hour for the next groaning vaporetto, so we jumped instead into a handsome water taxi of polished, golden wood. We couldn’t help notice more gold in our ferryman’s hair. He powered through the shallow channel, quickly passing one of the lumbering water buses. Tucked into the back of our speeding craft, we watched our pilot standing up to the wind, the front end of our boat erect and out of the water. We were the fast and clever creatures who had won the waters from the monsters of the old lagoon.