Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  He nibbled a cracker. “I heard you, Ellie. My hearing is still pretty good for a guy about to be buried alive.”

  “You think the Chinese know something we don’t?”

  “Yes.”

  She returned, carrying his drink. “What?”

  “They know what time it is.”

  “Sweetie”—she looked at him beseechingly—“that may be true, but it has nothing to do with where we live the next ten years.”

  Of course. He took her hand, raised it to his lips. “Don’t bother about me,” he said. “I’m just—I saw a man die in Hong Kong. Heart attack. I tried to help him, but he was gone. I haven’t seen someone die for a long time …” Except in his dreams, which occasionally came back to him, the villagers and water buffalo and smoking pieces of trucks flung fifty feet into the air—but that was an old story, a story everyone had forgotten.

  “Maybe we should talk about this after dinner.”

  He tasted the drink. Not quite right. “What will we say?” he badgered her. “That I agree? That I see it your way?”

  “That would be expecting the impossible.”

  She wasn’t going to back down, he saw. He put out his hand. “Come here.”

  She smiled warily. “Oh no.”

  “Come on. I’m your old pal, remember?”

  “I know what you’re doing.” But she came over to his chair.

  He pulled her closer. “You should have married someone nice.”

  She shook her head in disgust. “I don’t want someone nice. Never did.”

  He pulled her tight against him, laid his hand on the back of her dress. Her rear was loose and fat, yet he loved it anyway. “But nice lasts a long time. You think you don’t really want a man who is nice, and then thirty years with a bad man go by and you realize that nice would have been, yes, rather nice after all. All the other things wear out”—he rubbed her ass vigorously, watching her smile—“but nice? Well, nice keeps on going.”

  “Oh, please.” But she was letting him kiss her.

  “The mistake you made,” he whispered in her small pink ear, “was that you married someone who was rotten. A mistake women often make, even the smart ones. They like the rotten guys.”

  “You were never rotten.” Her face was happy, her eyes were closed.

  He moved his hand between her legs. “Am I in the game here?”

  She opened her eyes. “You want to be?”

  “I always want to be in the game.”

  She contemplated him. “All right.”

  “Now?”

  “After dinner.”

  TWO HOURS LATER, Ellie lay under the covers, her flesh a sentimental landscape.

  “Downtown or uptown?” he asked.

  “Stay up here.” She pulled his arms.

  Despite the estrogen pills, she still had lubrication problems, and so dipped her hands into a small jar of petroleum jelly she kept in their bedside table, and worked herself and him.

  “My hands are cold,” she said.

  “It’s all right.” He hadn’t ejaculated in two weeks.

  “Come on now,” she said.

  He pressed into her and she began to finger herself gently, lips pursed, eyelids fluttering. He counted strokes. Usually about forty-five strokes and Ellie would come, then again after another fifteen or twenty, and again after another ten. Very dependable, his wife, at least in this respect. At stroke twenty-three he paused. Twenty-three? What was the meaning of twenty-three? Manila Telecom’s percentage market share? Something like that. Maybe MT’s management had been talking to Marvin Noff, bad-mouthing Teknetrix, maybe trying to—

  “Don’t stop,” Ellie breathed, “not now.”

  He resumed, the blood pounding in his ears. At forty-four, Ellie lifted her chin and cried out, banging her palm on his chest.

  “Keep going,” he whispered. “The woods are burning.”

  Ellie took a breath, spit on her fingers, then went at it again. She cried out sweetly and then pulled on him. “Now,” she commanded.

  But as he pressed, he felt himself soften. He shifted his position, but it didn’t work.

  “Want me to lift my legs?” Ellie asked in the dark.

  “Sure.”

  She raised her knees up, slipping one hand behind each to hold them, something she had started to do in her forties, and he pressed again, but it was no good.

  She felt the change. “You want me to help?”

  He exhaled. It didn’t seem worth the trouble. “I’m a dead dog,” he said, rolling off.

  She rubbed his back. “Jet-lagged is what I think.”

  “Maybe.” He wondered how soon he’d see the responses to his advertisement.

  “You thinking about Manila Telecom?”

  “We have to get that plant going.”

  “You will.”

  “We’ve got some leeway built into the schedule but not that much.”

  She held his penis, rubbing it with her thumb the same way the money changers in Shanghai fondled fat wads of dollar bills. Eight million, he thought, but no hard-on.

  “Sweetie?”

  Her dutifulness depressed him, and he brought her hand to his chest.

  They lay there in the darkness until he heard Ellie’s breathing flatten out. He was running on China time, not sleepy, not even close, and after a few minutes, he got up and wandered into the office off the bedroom and stood at the window watching the taxis pulse through Central Park. He would have Jane transfer all of the GT proceeds to his private account at Citibank. There was no need to mix the sum with his other investments, and he could ask Ted Fullman, his private banker, to segregate half the money for capital-gains taxes. Don’t let me touch it, Ted. There was plenty of money, piles of it. After he died, Ellie could live to one hundred and forty if she liked, and there’d be millions left over, thanks to the Teknetrix stock, which had first been offered at a laughable two and a half dollars a share, and now, sixteen years later, had reached one hundred and fifty-four dollars, not correcting for splits. And Julia was well provided for, Martha Wainwright having drafted all the documents that would paper over his grave. No, the Sir Henry money was genuinely superfluous; he could turn it into cash and hand it out in the Port Authority bus station if he so desired and his life would be unchanged; the sum would merely have moved through him in its endless transubstantiation, the regular heartbeat of a Hong Kong billionaire becoming dirty bills fluttering through Manhattan, a fortune atomized, only to reappear somewhere else in the future.

  How strange to be so rich, so comfortable. He had never expected it. On the wall, next to the old photos of Charlie standing stiffly, painfully, with the Secretary of Defense, with Nixon himself, next to the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Purple Heart, hung the framed Air Force T-shirt he’d been wearing when he was rescued—torn, rotted, stained with blood. The colonel at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where Charlie had been flown within ten hours of being found, had ordered the shirt retrieved from the base hospital and had it mounted and framed with a small brass plaque that noted the dates of Charlie’s capture and release. While almost everything in his life had continued to change—Ellie, Ben, Teknetrix, China, how men and women made babies—the shirt, a gray rag blotted with rust-colored stains, just hung there in its frame, a battle flag long unused.

  After his rescue, he’d been in and out of hospitals for ten months. Because he was a former prisoner of war, there was a place for him in the Air Force as long as he wished. They made him a lieutenant colonel, in fact. They took care of you, they took care of their own. But implicit in the promise was the recognition that you might need such a promise. You might be broken. You might not be valuable anymore. And, truth to tell, he was broken. Wasn’t worth shit. Couldn’t walk right, couldn’t sit right, couldn’t lift up the kids and play with them, couldn’t watch television without getting headaches. Pain in his neck, shoulders, back, arms, left hand where the bullet went through and hit him in the testicle, left le
g, both knees, both ankles. He’d picked up all kinds of bugs while in captivity and been lucky he hadn’t died from those alone—worms in his intestines, fungus in his anus, infection in his ears. Shrunken cartilage, bone loss, nerve damage. Vertigo, palsy, numbness. Limited extension of the left hamstring muscles, rotator cuff damage, permanent vulnerability in ankle pronation. Compression of the frontal eminence of the parietal bone, complete atrophy of the torn capsular ligaments of the right shoulder, degradation of the internal condyle of the left humerus.

  After his first surgeries, they took him up in an A-10, a green buffalo of a plane, just to get him back in the air, but his spine couldn’t take the G’s anymore. Like grinding broken beer bottles together. He felt uncertain and weak, he felt fraudulent—for the first time in his life. Get me out of here, I’m going to crash this thing. They tried going up three times, once with painkillers, which was against regs. Didn’t work. His back was stiff, he had trouble even climbing into the seat. He couldn’t shoot a basketball, much less fly a fighter jet. Once they knew that about you, you were no longer operational. You couldn’t be forward-based, you couldn’t train other pilots. The instructors were all the best pilots who had survived their own expertise. And anyway, new planes were coming through the procurement pipeline, F-14s, F-16s, F-18s. All advanced fly-by-wire avionics. Heads-up instrument displays. More complicated tactical weaponry, the advanced versions of which had later been used to smoke up Saddam’s pathetic army in Kuwait and then a couple of hundred Serbian tanks. By 1976, it had been clear that Charlie was washed up.

  They had been living in Virginia then, where he’d had a desk job at SAC in Langley. Ben and Julia almost teenagers. His salary twenty-one thousand a year. He was driving an old Buick, which he’d bought because it was soft on his back. A bad year all around. That was the year he did not fuck, not once. The nerve damage and the scar tissue adhesions had his back in a vise. No hip motion, no flex to the upper back. His legs were still weak. Ellie had tried sitting on him, but she didn’t really like it. She performed the other possibilities, but it was a duty, not a pleasure.

  Yet there were many others like him, men whom the Air Force no longer needed, capable and hardworking and intelligent, and he found two of them, Merle Sokolov and Harold Cole, both Vietnam washouts like Charlie. They talked, they dreamed, they drank a lot of cheap beer and figured out that they trusted their fates with one another. Each man had children and an anxious wife, each man needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat. They fixed upon three essential pieces of information: One, computers and telecom switching equipment were soon to benefit from the massive R&D of the war effort and the space program; two, the demographics of the American population foretold a huge market of prime-age consumers; and three, most residential growth would continue to occur not in cities but in new suburban and rural developments, which meant investment in new telecom equipment. The key was to put yourself in front of the wave, let it wash over you, carry you forward.

  The three men, as it turned out, had separate skills. Sokolov was a natural salesman, a fellow of neckties and haircuts and cuff links, and they relied on him to raise venture capital. Harold, the gloomy genius, understood transistors and switches and was schooling himself in microchip technology, and that, he announced, was all that he could do for them, which was more than enough. Charlie’s natural ability was organization and leadership. He set up the first corporate structure, made the first hirings. Negotiated the first office lease, the first supplier agreement, did all the traveling to the Far East to look for subcontractors.

  Each man tended to hire younger versions of himself. Harold chose young, socially uncomfortable tech-workers who responded to his disinterest in their gracelessness. Sokolov picked one slick salesman after another, burning them out, letting them spend too much on their clients’ food and entertainment. And Charlie? Charlie hired work-horses. Their only great argument was where to locate the company. Charlie wanted to stay in Virginia, where costs were lower, but Sokolov prevailed upon them to move to New York and rent cheap office space. It made them appear serious, made them look like players. This was not necessarily true, but it was true that Sokolov had a new girlfriend in New York and they needed him more than he needed them. He could move to New York and sell anything—cars, advertising, apartments, Ellie told Charlie they should move, and that had been the decisive factor. They’d established themselves in crappy offices on lower Fifth Avenue and made no money for five years. The company’s backers, four semiretired heart surgeons, had wanted to pull out. Instead Sokolov and Charlie talked them into putting in more money, which effectively diluted the trio’s ownership to less than ten percent. Among the doctors’ conditions for further investment was that Charlie commit to a five-year contract. The company wasn’t going anywhere without that kind of elbow grease. As for Sokolov and Harold, the doctors made no requirement; they were forcibly elevating Charlie; either he ran the show or it closed. Sokolov and Harold understood, but he felt he had betrayed them. The shift in the power among the three men was made easier by the fact that they had started to make some money, and then, a year or two later, quite a lot of it. Yet Harold committed suicide for reasons Charlie still did not understand, and Sokolov said he wanted Charlie to buy him out so that he could get into the real-estate business, which he was sure was going to boom. So Charlie bought him out, increasing his stake in the company to almost seven percent. The surgeons, each anticipating the age of reckoning, wanted the company to go public so that they could cash out their gain. Charlie had no idea how to do an IPO, but the old men hired a cocky punk from Goldman Sachs who inspected the numbers in Charlie’s office.

  “You’re sure these are right?” he’d asked Charlie.

  “Yes.”

  The kid shrugged, not impressed. “The company’s worth eighty million dollars.”

  In celebration of his impending fortune, Charlie had put his father up in the Pierre Hotel and taken him to dinner to explain the momentousness of what was happening. He could now send Julia to a good law school, he could buy Ellie a decent apartment, he could join a golf club. But the old man couldn’t listen, for the age of reckoning was upon him, too, and he could barely hold his soup spoon without spilling it. His ears were hairy, the red rims of his lower eyelids hung forward, his coat was too big; he was tired; he missed Charlie’s mother, dead ten years; he was old, worn out by work, scared of New York, confused by the opulence of the Pierre. “Charlie … I don’t follow …” The rest of the time he listened to his father talk about his stomach, the nuances of its digestion, the schedule of its torments, what it preferred and what it disliked, and, as things turned out, Charlie thought now, his father had been right to be so worried, because two months later the whole bag of guts more or less disintegrated. One could not live without a functioning stomach, and Charlie’s father did not.

  Death, always tracking you. Took his mother and father, took his son, took all of Julia’s embryos. Took Larry, his backseater. And Harold Cole, too. Perhaps no grandchildren was his punishment for all the killing he’d done. How many? Don’t ask, don’t tell. He knew the number. Added it up once, only once. They told you not to do it, but he’d looked back at all his post-flight reports and made a guess. A terrible thing to do—he was condemned to know the number forever. You could put that big number on the left and the number one on the right. One. One child. One more child. One more child, God. Forgive me. Ellie’s right, I’m going to be old soon. Give me one more child. Correct the flow of time, God. Let me roll the dice again.

  He drifted disconsolately through the dark apartment and glanced at the irregular mosaic of lighted windows in the other apartment buildings, rows of yellow rectangles, people inside them—sort of like airplanes at night, he thought—and, there, as he stood in the dark, that thought was what brought the lost dream rushing back to him, except that it had not been a dream, it had actually happened the previous night on the flight from Hong Kong. He had put his inflatable pillow around his neck when th
e cabin lights dimmed, slipped on his sleeping mask, kicked off his shoes, taken his little blue capsule, pushed the seat back, and fallen into a deep sleep. But then, a few hours later, he had woken suddenly, his pillow hot against his neck like a giant finger curling around it menacingly, the sleep mask a veil pressing against his open eyes. He had leaned forward in his seat, coldly aware, frightened even. Around him the other passengers slept. He stood, not quite knowing why, and in his socks walked slowly back along the plane, a wide-body 767, his back aching a bit, his hands skimming each seat rest, passing row upon row of sleeping passengers. Businessmen, teenagers, young wives and husbands, babies, retired couples, slouched and fallen and slumped against one another with unknowing intimacy, heavy, unmoving, as if—dead, they all looked dead, he’d thought, gliding silently along the aisle, the soft, open-mouth faces illuminated by the emergency exit signs. He slipped toward the galley at the back of the plane, expecting to see the stewardesses talking or doing their chores, or perhaps a few passengers waiting to use the bathrooms, but no one was there. The stewardesses had fallen asleep in their seats, heads tilted backward, faces still bright with makeup like mannequins, cheeks pink, lips red, hair pinned neatly back, but eyes closed and the cheeriness of them gone. He glanced up at the computer graphic on all the screens that cycled through indications of the plane’s global position, the tailwind, the ground speed—609 mph, he remembered—and the estimated time of arrival. They would all get to New York the next day, having all been dead together if only a moment, which, of course, was a reversal of the true nature of things—that they were alive together only a moment, all time prior never possessed and all time following forever lost. Six hundred and nine mph, tailwind 58 mph, didn’t seem that fast to Charlie, not fast at all, really, and not because he had flown more than twice as fast on many occasions. No, such a speed was nothing when you saw how fast time itself was flashing forward—mockingly, tauntingly, a piece of trick-mirror light jumping discontinuously in front of him, uncatchable. Six hundred miles an hour, by contrast, was nothing, a pitiful speed, standstill, virtually flowing backward; it could get you from Hong Kong to New York City in seventeen hours, but nowhere beyond that.