The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  “Jesus, Pop, are you crying?” Could be out of pride for what I sold, or maybe he was hurt that I tried to knock him down. Either way, I felt a prickle of shame and couldn’t bear to look at him.

  “No,” Dad said, seizing up. “You nuts? Eh, maybe a little. I only saw Papa cry once. Well, twice. A little when I graduated high school, but then for sure when I got the house in Swampscott with a swimming pool. He wouldn’t budge from it. Covered his face with his hands. Can’t forget it. He said, ‘I never thought a son of mine would have something like this.’”

  * * *

  Back at the hotel, I rode the elevator up to the forty-ninth floor. In my room, I was met by a spiteful cloud of cinnamon freshener. Everything was back to its starting point: my toiletries hidden away, my books back in my suitcase, everything, even the brochures fanned evenly on the desk, the room immaculately clean, any hint that someone lived here scoured away. It was always my first night.

  There was a silver tray on my desk with a bottle of wine, a long-stem rose in a champagne flute, a box of Godiva chocolates. Even the gifts were a kind of mockery: here, enjoy a long sensual evening by yourself. These came courtesy of the hotel, once a week, for Ambassador-level guests. You reached Ambassador when you’d spent a good three-quarters of your life on the road sleeping in their hotels. It got passed down too, an inheritance you didn’t earn. Death by luxury.

  I slowly undressed and got into the shower. Growing up we had an endless stockpile of these mini-soaps and mini-shampoos that Dad had plundered from hotels around the world. Do Not Disturb signs, too, hung from the knob of every door in our house. Busy come back later. Can’t you read the sign?

  There were mirrors on all sides of the bathroom. No one needed to look at themselves this much. I tried to let my thoughts go, but for some reason I thought of the time I worked a summer as a chicken-gutter for Boston Rotisserie wearing a hairnet—even this was in line with my fate. Written across my forehead like the Hebrew word for truth that brought the golem to life. I was born into this, right? Cows, chickens. Why did we kill so much? My family. Were we butchers? We must have been. We were.

  I let the water beat down on my shoulders, let the water fill up my mouth—don’t swallow!—and let it dribble out. I thought about taking a shower as a kid with my mother right outside the bathroom door, braced for a sudden, calamitous thud. And for a perverse moment I wished to hear her voice, something calming in her craziness. “I don’t want a slip and spill, Alex! They’re not just brains, Alex. Private school brains! I’m protecting my investment.”

  Elsa and Fedor. Mom and Dad. Everything missed with them.

  When did Mom finally snap? Maybe it was when she took us to the Chagall exhibit at the Boston MFA. I was young. A kid. It was the happiest I’d ever seen her. Her knees buckled in front of I and the Village. This was a painting my mother spoke about in hushed tones reserved for UFO sightings. “This is the pomegranate, soft like mortal men, and this is the ram’s horn Elijah blows to raise the dead”—and suddenly Dad interrupted to say: “What’s with the stupid goat?” My mother let out a groan she’d been saving forever and stormed off. That one goat cost me years of therapy where a very nice lady told me, in brief, Forgive, but it was too late to supplant the original Sunday school message: never forget. The therapists and the rabbis had their signals crossed. But my mother. Jesus. She didn’t talk for the rest of the day.

  It wasn’t long after that she joined the ladies auxiliary club at the synagogue and they were restoring this gorgeous mural they’d discovered. The mural was almost a hundred years old, and no one knew it was hiding back there until the cruddy paint started peeling off the wall.

  Then she got in deep. Orthodox deep. But my mother had also taught me how to say fuck off in Russian. How to pinch an orange from the fruit carts on Boylston Street beside the T station when the vendor wasn’t looking. I mean she was fun too. If you got a putty knife and scraped off the topcoat, there was something hiding behind all that.

  I got out and dried off. I was standing naked now at the window looking out over Qiangling Lake and I could see the dark silhouette of the dragon boats moving like silk over the water, their oars stroking in unison, and the sound of the coxswain keeping time with a leather drum, a deep bass pounding in my ears. Could they see me, stark naked and afraid, hanging here by the window on the forty-ninth floor? I wanted to call Ivy on her cell phone and ask the name of the tree blossoming white under the lantern by the lake. How would I know anything if I couldn’t name that tree? What was a dragon boat anyway? In Mandarin, Cantonese, English, Pinyin, who cares, tell me all the names because all that I don’t know makes my head dizzy, makes me deeply afraid. Did we really hold workers hostage? Was Ruxi not free to go? I could see in the window the lake but also my own naked body, a hairy chest, flabby midsection, flat feet—she probably wanted a man like Trotsky, lean, sinewy, great arches, someone slick enough to scale a Palace wall. Not a pudgy Jew. The dragon boat rowed toward me now, spearing my chest, moving through me, superimposed on the window, and it sifted through me like a ghost ship or I through it. What was I so afraid of? That I’d always need someone to translate the world for me.

  4

  IN THE FACTORY’S freight elevator there were two signs written in English:

  Do Not Carry Explosives.

  Trapped? Stay Calm and Wait for Help.

  Below them, carved with an edging knife, were the initials of two lovers. I’d come in the morning to the third floor to find Shen, the production manager, to ask about Ruxi. If I went straight to Yong it would only get back to Dad, and he could get pissed enough to fire Ivy.

  The elevator opened onto a room the size of an airplane hangar, and the dank warm air from the heat setter boxes slipped over my face like a pillow. A boy with a Mohawk scowled at me: a stump for a right arm, severed at the elbow by the steel embossing plate on the leather grain press. A girl, eyes jaundiced, punch-drunk, the first flush of benzene poisoning from cement glue vapors, scratched at her arm. Everywhere, people and machines. The sandpaper wheel kicked up dust, and these yellow orbs floated past the sallow face of a girl shouldering a steel leather horse down the line. Iron shavings glittered on the floor. The constant tinny plink of hammers, each little tack driving deeper in my skull, the whirring of the roughing belt, the sweet, sickly smell of cement glue curled my toes. Signs around the factory: Don’t Spit—50¥ Fine. The crouching, slavering, overheated machines, and the utter sincerity of levers, wheels, sprockets, buttons.

  This was why I tried to avoid coming to the line. Shocking more people didn’t faint in here. Dad had already come up with his own excuses for avoiding the floor, allergies, bad for his lungs, too loud, and maybe that was as honest as he could get.

  A red paper Fu bat hung from the wall above Shen’s desk at the head of the first line, but he wasn’t there. I turned to walk to the other end of the plant when a line manager, showing off for me, slapped his hand down hard on the table between two stitchers giggling, and so I didn’t consciously notice Dad walking toward me until he handed me a spec form for a riding boot. I looked down at the paper and saw the words Lt Peanut on top.

  “Who’s Lieutenant Peanut?” I asked.

  “It’s a color, moron. Light peanut. Where’s your head?”

  I didn’t know. He walked back to his office. It was hard to concentrate in here. Everyone on their way to becoming something else. Everyone telling themselves this was their last day. It was the only way into tomorrow. You didn’t care what they took out of your check. What we took. It was we, not they. If nothing else, I had to get my pronouns right. This was why I hated walking the line, because everything I knew loosened, broke off and got hauled away like granite rocks. Outside it was spring, but really it was always the dead of July, your clothes hard and rough, stiff from sweat, a constant awareness of them pressing you, like a second skin.

  Shen was on the fifth production l
ine standing beside Xiafei, the head of Industrial Engineering. Xiafei, a frail young man with khaki pants hiked up to his belly button, held a clipboard in one hand and a stopwatch connected to a lanyard around his neck. Both men hovered behind a young woman’s shoulder as she operated the cutting machine. She was probably in her early twenties, a low bridge to her nose, a touch of auburn in her hair, wearing a loose yellow tunic and jean shorts. They were timing how fast she could cut patterns out of a hide of leather. Every time she pressed the triggers, the hydraulics hissed and the giant steel plate lowered over the die, a deep satisfying thunk as it bit into the leather.

  After a curt hello, they continued scrutinizing the girl’s movements. “Faster,” Shen shouted at her. Her hands trembled. Cutting the upper for this boot, said Xiafei, who saw the world in milliseconds, should take 13.57 seconds, but she was at 14.16 without changing the die. The girl reached across her body for the next quarter hide of finished leather, the muscles bubbling in her shoulders.

  “Wasted movement!” Shen yelled. He deplored waste with every fiber of his being. “Why doesn’t she reach with her left hand? She wasted 1.16 seconds.”

  “So lazy,” Xiafei said.

  “She needs to maximize her productivity,” Shen said. “Xiafei!” he shouted to the man standing right beside him. “How much is this costing us?”

  Xiafei touched the tip of his tongue with the pencil eraser and announced in a flinty voice that she wasted seventy yuan over the course of the day. Shen rubbed both hands over his face very fast like he was just waking up, and, leaning toward me, asked, “Is it true in your country you can hit a person smaller than yourself? Is this law?”

  “You can’t hit anyone in either of our countries,” I said.

  The girl knew something was terribly wrong. Her eyes jittered back and forth. She worked faster. A drop of sweat clung to an incisor of peach fuzz on the side of her face. By Xiafei’s calculations, she wasted eight and a half minutes a week, putting her in the bottom 10 percent of workers.

  “Remember to breathe,” Xiafei said, consoling Shen.

  “Breathing is for monks,” Shen said, turning purple. He stamped his foot. “Counter-efficiency is the one thing I cannot tolerate. Eight and a half minutes! One could make a child with his wife in that time. Xiafei! Is it true?”

  “I have never timed that,” Xiafei said, blushing, and lowering his stopwatch.

  “Shen,” I said, interrupting them. “I need to speak to a worker.”

  “Of course, Alex. But please let me first finish. Then we talk all you want.” He turned to Xiafei. “I am afraid there is only one thing to do with this worker.”

  “You cannot fire her,” I told him. “You don’t have permission.”

  “Fire? No, I was going to kill her.”

  Xiafei said, “Why don’t we put her in dog cage?”

  “There’s a dog cage?” I asked, my voice thin. I grabbed the edge of the table so I wouldn’t fall over.

  Shen laughed. “No, of course not. Xiafei exaggerates everything.”

  But Xiafei’s face betrayed him, and I was starting to realize there were two factories: the one I thought I saw, and the one that existed once I turned my back.

  “This woman is capable,” I said. “Look at how nervous you make her. No one can work under these conditions. Train her so her numbers improve. Now please, apologize on my behalf to her.”

  She blushed deeply when they apologized to her and bowed.

  “Shen,” I said, “I need to speak to a worker named Ruxi. In private.”

  “Ruxi?” Shen said, and stared up at the metal trusses on the ceiling. “We have a few Ruxi.”

  Xiafei said, “He must mean to see worker 329017.”

  “Oh, 329017! Of course,” Shen said, scowling. “She is a tapeworm in my belly. Finally she reached your attention. It is time we fire her. This is a good day. She is not a diligent and keen one. Xiafei! Her numbers.”

  “Bottom 5 percent. Insole press. Line three.”

  “Take me to her,” I said.

  As we walked over to line three, Shen almost jogged ahead of me, saying he needed someone from the top to smash her. “I told her you would come for her. She is Nakhi tribe from the north, this is why she is so lazy. My recommendation is we stop hiring this minority. Also they eat their children. This is fact.”

  He was giving me a headache. “Let me handle it,” I said. Now was not the time to set him straight about the reason for the meeting. I needed to get her alone. I needed her to trust me. Shen stopped in front of a girl whose hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

  “This is the deplorable worker,” he said.

  At the sound of Shen’s voice, the girl snapped out of whatever deep trance she was in and spun around to face us, head lowered.

  In my awful Mandarin I asked her name. She recited in a soft voice her ID number, and I felt a surge of heat along my neck.

  “No, your real name.”

  “Ruxi,” she said.

  I held out my hand. She wiped the sweat off her face with her protective forearm sleeve hand sewn from cotton scraps, and reached out her hand, but stopped herself short, holding up her palms to show me they were filthy, stained in grease and oil from the machine, black along her skinny fingers.

  “It’s okay,” I said, wagging my hand, and hesitantly she reached out. Her palms were heavily callused. She barely gripped my hand.

  For some reason I thought she’d be much older, but she was quite young with long lashes that stood apart and high cheekbones. She wore a T-shirt that said Baby Love, jeans that ended at her calves and scrungy, once-white Keds.

  “I fine her on repeat,” Shen said. “I try every means of torture, but nothing communicates to her. Look at her pile compared to better girls.”

  There were four insole press machines in a row, the metal jaws molding the thin fiberboard to the last. The girls stacked them in plastic bins. At a glance, Ruxi had maybe a third of what the other girls produced.

  “I need to speak with both of you in private,” I said to Shen. “In my office.”

  They said this to her and her eyes widened. Right as she picked up her ID card off the table and clipped it to her belt, the first rumble of thunder shook the building. The late-morning thunderstorm was starting early. The three of us walked across the floor and up the green stairs to the administrative offices, but in the hallway I was cut off by Dad, flustered, bug-eyed, holding two huge shopping bags. He needed me to go down to the tannery in Tai-San and give these gifts to Peng, the village chief.

  “That’s not my job,” I said. He was crazy if he thought I was running deliveries. And I tried to go around him but he cut me off.

  “It is your job.”

  Out of respect, Shen and Ruxi turned at the same time and pretended to take great interest in the antique wood rickshaw in the corner with a bleached cow’s skull on the bench seat, half its jawbone missing, wide-eyed, watching us in hatred.

  I saw Dad wasn’t going anywhere, so I told Shen and Ruxi that we’d have to meet that evening. Then I pulled Dad into my office. He set the heavy bags down on the table.

  “I’m a partner now,” I said. “Not an errand boy.”

  “Hey, I did it coming up. Now it’s your turn. The driver’s waiting downstairs.” He crossed his arms.

  I peeked inside the bags. Cartons of cigarettes, bottles of expensive baijiu and a tin box that looked like it held Christmas cookies. I opened it and inside there were stacks of hundred dollar bills fixed with rubber bands.

  “Fuck,” I said, “how much is in here?”

  “Enough.”

  “I’m not carrying this. What if I get spot-checked by the police?”

  “There’s plenty in there.”

  Now it came back to me all the times Don Bauer went down to the tannery carrying these bags, which, like a moron, I’d
always thought were full of leather swatches. Dad had gone down there too.

  “Have Don do it,” I said. “I’m not moving it.”

  “He’s up north looking at a new supplier.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “Just deliver the fucking bags to Peng, will you? I’m not asking you to sleep with the guy. Peng speaks English, so you’ll be fine, but I don’t go anywhere without a translator. Take Taishu from the outsole plant if you want. I’m sure he could use the air.”

  The minute he mentioned a translator I saw my chance. “Okay, I’ll do it this once.”

  “That’s more like it. Good boy. Car’s waiting. I’ll see you tonight for dinner,” he said and left the office.

  Ignoring Dad’s request to take Taishu, I sent a text to Ivy and waited about ten minutes for the reply, then I lifted the bags off the table and carried them down the stairs to the street.

  Ivy was standing inside the security guard’s boot, holding her palm out in the rain falling in long gray sheets, already filling the irrigation ditches and bubbling up out of the sewer holes and then, without warning, the rain stopped. She stepped toward me, and I noticed she was wearing different-colored sandals: one black, the other dark green.

  She looked very beautiful, and I wanted to tell her this but I was sure she knew, I was sure she’d been told that many times and was tired of hearing it, and maybe it was a terrible thing to be that beautiful. So instead, I said, “Sorry for stabbing you yesterday.”

  She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “I am sorry too.”

  The heat returned. Mist steamed off the asphalt and the fishtail palms shimmered in the sunlight, and the breeze carried the sweet fragrance of frangipani blossoms in the direction of the river.

  “So,” she said, looking at the bags in my hands with a knowing smile, “we go down to Tai-San to cultivate friendship?”

  “Yes, unfortunately. It’s my first time running this errand.” I explained to her that we were in a joint venture with this local official down there named Peng, who was the majority owner and set all the prices. I was also going to text Shen to make sure he knew that I needed her as a translator.