Last Days in Shanghai

by Casey Walker

  I leaned back against the wall and felt the engines vibrating. I’d done so little I could defend. At least I felt in the right for finally being an enemy to him.

  “Don’t think cutting you loose gives me any joy. I’ve thought of you almost as a son,” Leo said. “You know the first thing Theresa asked once she found out I was okay?”

  I stood stupefied.

  “You,” Leo said. “She asked about you.”

  “Nice of her to be concerned.” The words came out painfully. I was reaching out for a thread of self-possession, but I’d begun to lose hope of grasping it. “So what’d you tell her?”

  “I told her the truth,” he said. “The whole truth.”

  “You think she’s telling you the whole truth?” I said. It was a pathetic way to try to hurt him. He brushed this off, too.

  “You have to live with your own conscience, Luke,” Leo said. “I live with mine. That’s all there is to say.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “And fuck her.”

  Leo finished his stinking cup.

  “It’s true,” he said. “She’ll fuck anyone.”

  He chose his bottle and went back to his cabin, and I heard the door latch. We never spoke again that night—or any other night, either. My letter of resignation would arrive by certified mail. I’m certain it was Glenn who wrote it. The stated reason was “moral turpitude.” Leo included return postage and a space for my signature: I put my name to it, every word.

  DAY 7

  NEW YORK CITY

  ICAN STILL SEE Alex standing on the Manhattan Bridge the night I returned from China. It felt right, hung out over the East River, no land beneath us, suspended between two boroughs. The winds were fierce and she, always sensitive, was wrapped in a fitted trench coat. Trains screeched beside us on the rails, conductors at the helm finishing a day of running back and forth between Astoria and Bay Ridge, Coney Island and Yankee Stadium. Boat lights leaked over the East River. A salty wind kicked up, and with one gust I felt like I was right back in Shanghai, my arm bent up behind me while I stared at the Huangpu River.

  The view from the bridge was spoiled some by a chain-link fence, high and curved inward, spot-welded onto the original waist-high railing. More fencing stood between the walkway and the subway tracks. The observation bays looking over the East River, like stations for patron saints in a church, had all been padlocked. Apparently, from the point of view of the municipal government, anyone who might pause, to look south to the Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth Building, or north to the white and blue lights of the Empire State Building—anyone who desired to take stock of the city, or of himself—would invariably come to a single and overwhelming conclusion: jump! What else could it mean that the earlier century had built these bays as spaces for contemplation, and we had added padlocks and “No Trespassing” signs?

  We shared the bridge with a policeman on bike patrol and a Chinese woman carrying leeks and bok choy that poked out of an orange plastic bag. Two battered old drunks passed a can of Steel Reserve back and forth, leaning against the fence. The officer dismounted to move them along. Trains roared by, and we saw a hundred multiethnic mirrors of our own solemn faces looking out of the B and Q trains at nothing in particular.

  Alex kept glancing at the broken capillaries on my face. She listened to my story—money, China, police—with her face turned toward the southern tip of the city. Her reaction struck me as deliberately stifled, perhaps from shock or confusion. But I’m sure I confirmed for her that if she ever had doubts about what she’d left behind in DC, she shouldn’t. We mounted the middle hump of the bridge in silence. The full skyline grew downward out of the dark—the building tops visible first and then their foundations stretching out to touch the ground.

  “You know, I got an invite from my old boss to some fundraiser thing tonight at the Waldorf,” she said finally. “I wondered if you and Leo would be there.”

  “Your old boss is dead,” I said.

  “I meant the chief of staff.”

  “The one who had a thing for you?”

  “He didn’t have a thing for me.”

  “He must have invited every staffer to Antibes,” I said.

  I’d never been able to connect the hazy first time I came to meet Alex in New York with any other visit. There was a subway we took over a bridge without a name across a river I thought was the Hudson and later learned was not. We’d walked to a mysterious bar on some shrieking avenue in Brooklyn, where I sat with her trying to piece together what was going to become of us. I remembered the church across the street and its huge marquee: Jesucristo Es El Señor. Though I knew now that the train was the Q, the bridge the Manhattan, the river the East beneath us, which is really an estuary, and the street distant Fourth Avenue, I had still never been able to assimilate any of that later knowledge into my first picture of New York City, when it was so new and unknown to me. Now she lived with two other girls on the garden level of a poorly maintained townhouse just off the Brooklyn side of this bridge, in a makeshift bedroom where a folding screen was her only privacy. They were all giving up whatever they had to live here, no one sure yet who would bear it out and prosper and who would be just more fuel, burned up to realize other people’s dreams.

  “Can you take tomorrow off?” I asked. I had so much more to say.

  “Can you?”

  “I don’t have a job,” I said.

  “So you’re stuck in Baltimore,” she offered. It was one of our old jokes—anything interminable, inconvenient, hopeless. An Amtrak train, stuck in Baltimore.

  “I thought we’d go do something,” I said.

  “Don’t expect me to absolve you of anything,” Alex said. “It’s not my place, and I don’t want to.”

  Her disappointment was in the white of her eye, in her refusal to look at me. But I would rather see myself with her eyes than with my own compromised ones.

  “I can be better,” I said. “Does that count for something?”

  “In horseshoes and hand grenades,” she said.

  “Come have a drink with me.”

  “Luke,” she said. “I shouldn’t.”

  I liked thinking Alex was still free, that she existed at the loose ends of the possible. I wasn’t interested in hearing her contradict it.

  “Is that where you work?” I asked, stabbing my finger out toward a hollow to the right of the Woolworth Building.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t see it from here.”

  She started to give me a roundabout letdown.

  “I don’t need to hear about it, Alex,” I said. “If you can’t get a drink, then you can’t.”

  “If it helps, I’m about to break it off,” she said.

  “How’s he going to take it?”

  “I’ve been avoiding it a month.”

  “So let’s walk,” I said. “We can sort each other out.”

  “I’m so tired,” she said.

  “I’m half dead.”

  “I’m not skipping every bar in the city until you find the one empty one you like,” Alex said.

  “The first place you like, that’s where we’ll go,” I said. “Wasn’t there a bar near that dumpling place?”

  “I haven’t been there forever,” she said.

  “I miss it,” I said.

  I hoped at least I could make her understand where I’d arrived, after China—what I intended.

  “I’m starting over,” I said.

  She took this in silence. The downward slope of the bridge into Manhattan was dead of pedestrians, alive only with late construction spotlights. The black car-service Lincolns tapped their horns at every slowdown, and that night I remember thinking of them as the underworld ferrymen of the East River. We passed an apartment covered in graffiti, right above East Broadway, immigrant tenements jammed with delivery boys and dishwashers. Alex’s phone rang, lost deep in her purse, and she had to stop and crouch down and use both hands to search it out of the bag’s maw.

  A skinny Chinese man
inside a dimly lit apartment, ten floors up, eye level with me, clicked on a single-burner stove. Over the flame sat a huge black wok. He glared straight ahead from his open window, entirely still. He might have seen me return his stare. It was a strange night, lived in innocence of knowledge I would soon acquire. Because even by morning I knew about Mr. Hu. That much turned up when I went looking for news of our last days in Shanghai—news of Leo, or news of myself. Instead, I found this “disgraced project manager,” as various reports put it, from “an international firm.” Tabloid reporting: The man had bound his hands with red rope, filled his clothing with stones. A container ship called in the sighting. The police fished his waterlogged body from the Huangpu River. A note in poorly wrought calligraphy was pinned inside Mr. Hu’s jacket, lines from a lament of Qu Yuan—My heart was caught in a mesh that I could not disentangle; my thoughts were lost in a maze there was no way out of.

  Later, I would linger on the impression he left of a man at the end of his tether. I could hear all his cadences as those of someone who believes everything is finished for him, and not just finished, but squandered. And I came to believe it was true that Mr. Hu had killed his rival—only I didn’t think he’d done it ambitiously, with hopes of prevailing, because Mr. Hu had already been discarded. Nor was it mere revenge, because so much of his rage seemed directed inward. He would have poisoned the mayor, I believed, simply for being the one who, in defeating him, had also shown him the emptiness of his own strivings. It was some part despair, some part nihilism. I imagined that after I’d left Mr. Hu at that riverfront restaurant in Shanghai, he’d ordered himself an extravagant meal—he’d already thrown the die and was only waiting for the croupier to read the numbers and collect his losses. We are shackled to dead men, all of us.

  But that night with Alex, no word had yet reached me of his reported suicide—that night I had no reaction for Mr. Hu at all. I only watched a woman appear in the kitchen of a tenement apartment and yell at the man standing over his wok—her mouth wide open, arms flailing. He responded by pointing. Soon the woman came over to the window and followed his raised finger, which indicated either me, or something beyond me. I lifted my hand to wave at them both. They pulled the blind—as I would have done, had it not been me raising my hand to wave; as I would have done, had it been me in a city so far from home.

  I turned back to Alex.

  “This is a fresh start,” I called to her. She returned the phone to her bag and began to hurry toward me. She had consternation in her face, about what, I didn’t know—me, or the other man.

  “A clean slate,” I said.

  I faced her and waited.

  “There’s no such thing,” she said, and she made up the steps between us.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to my agent, Henry Dunow, for his editorial acumen and steady bedside manner, and to Rolph Blythe, Nicole Antonio, Megan Fishmann, Kelly Winton and the whole Counterpoint team.

  My own trips to China, and continued correspondence with people I met there, form the backbone of this book, but I owe a massive debt to the expert work of other writers. Particularly important to my understanding of contemporary China were Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler, Out of Mao’s Shadow, by Philip Pan, Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China’s Peasants by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, and The Corpse Walker, by Liao Yiwu. I have at certain points taken small liberties with a city geography or with the timing of certain news events.

  The support of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Sam, Connie, Deb, Jan: thank you!) and of Jeff and Vicki Edwards helped me bring this novel to a close. Thank you to my teachers there: Kate Christensen, Ethan Canin, Charles D’Ambrosio, Andrew Sean Greer, Marilynne Robinson. For a week each spring, Antonio and Carla Sersale open their exquisite Positano hotel to the Sirenland Writer’s Conference, and I owe thanks to their hospitality and the community it fosters. Thank you to dear friends Dani Shapiro, Michael Maren, and Hannah Tinti for keeping that community alive.

  To my indispensable mentors—the devious, blistering intelligence of Jim Shepard; the wisdom of Charles Baxter; the magic of Aimee Bender. Karen Russell—mind twin, insomniac—thank you for refusing sleep and for text messages a mile long.

  Iowa friends who talked late into the night—Brian Booker, Jake Hooker, Sara Martin, Dina Nayeri, Jen Percy, Devika Rege, Jamie Watkins. And Jamie again, for a late, great read. Jake Hooker—who spent more than a decade in China, and received a Pulitzer Prize he never talks about for his journalistic efforts there—patiently read two drafts and answered my rudimentary questions over chicken tenders at the Bluebird Diner. Thank you for that time, Jake.

  To Mom and Dad, Kiel and Liz, Mike Beard, Jim and Martha Thompson and, finally and gloriously, to Hazel June: I live on your love and support. The El Centro crew, the Frequency, the Shadows: Essential inspiration and more essential distraction.

  This book would not exist—not in its present form and not in any form—without Nathan Ihara and Karen Thompson Walker. At my most stubborn low points it was your readings, your friendship, your insistence, your brilliance that made me keep working. Thank you for everything, Karen: Your wisdom, love, care, and our little girl.