Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  “You all right, Rick?”

  “He’s in shock,” Morris said, checking his mirror. “His pupils are big. He went from lying down to a sitting position. His heart is working a little harder, and probably there was too much sugar in that candy bar. His kidneys are dry, but he’ll be okay. Five minutes he’ll be better.”

  “But you remember about the truck, right, Rick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not going to forget that.”

  He shook his head, which made his face hurt. “No.”

  A few minutes later they were close to Bellevue and pulled over at the light.

  “Rick, the hospital is up the block.” Morris watched in the rearview mirror. “You go just up the block and there it is.”

  “Get me out first.”

  “First talk about the money.”

  “Outside. Get me out.”

  They opened a door. Gentlemen. Of course, they could shove him back into the car if they wanted. He dragged himself over the seat and put his feet on the pavement. He could barely move, his ankle and foot and arm hurt so much.

  “We’ve been very cool here, Rick. Now you come through.”

  “Yellow truck. My truck.” Something was wrong. His ears pounded.

  “He looks weak to me.”

  “Where is the truck?”

  “Ask the Russian guy.”

  Tommy slapped him. “What?”

  “Garage, across from the gym. Lafayette. Grand Street. Second floor. Ask the Russian guy.”

  “The money’s in the truck?”

  He nodded exhaustedly. “Radiator. Pull the wire.”

  “What’s at the end of the wire?” came the voice in his ear.

  “Plastic bag. Filled with hundreds.” Also the traveler’s checks that Paul had given him.

  The men looked at one another. “Let’s go.”

  They opened the car trunk and dropped the big sealed ice chest on the pavement. “See, Rick, we’re very cool here,” said Morris. “You’re one block from the hospital. The cooler is here, your arm inside. Everything is cool. Now you can stand up and get out.”

  He rose uneasily in his long coat, his foot hurting like broken fish bones, leaking blood, and staggered over to the cooler and sat on it. They yanked the car door shut and pulled into the traffic. Then up the avenue, then a turn at the light, then gone. He picked weakly at the duct tape around the cooler. Stand, he told himself. He couldn’t stand. He stood anyway. Get someone to help. Who would help? Not many people out this late. He knelt and grabbed the ice chest by the handle and lifted one end. It was shockingly heavy. How could that be? Somebody had made a mistake. Too much ice. No way he could actually carry it. But he could drag it, he knew that, and he waited for the light. Don’t think, don’t worry, he told himself, just drag this box across First Avenue. Make your legs do the work. Worry about the police later, you want your arm back on. That’s the thing. The pain chewed at his left side. Guys in wars do this shit, Rick thought, so can I. The light changed to green and he pulled. The fucker was heavy; it must have weighed three hundred pounds, all that ice in there. It was too big, that was the problem, they didn’t need a chest that big. He bumped the thing off the curb and began to drag, knees bent, back bent against the weight, his left arm, the stump, doing nothing, just jerking around strangely, hurting like hell, and he pulled the thing across the first lane of traffic, scraping the shit out of the bottom of the chest, but who cared. The taxi drivers watched him; in the darkness nobody noticed he was missing his arm because of the long coat or saw his bloody foot, nobody understood, and that was fine because he was going to make it, he was going to do all good things … Halfway across he saw a van turning onto First, going too fast, and he was unsure whether to run or stay, and instead he pulled harder to make sure the ice chest was out of the path of the van, but the effort did not produce commensurate progress and the van honked in irritation, not slowing exactly but cutting its wheels sharply, not to avoid Rick but rather an old man ten steps behind him on First Avenue—the van had a choice of hitting the old man or Rick’s ice chest, and so it hit the chest, the corner of the bumper catching the back of the box and spinning it out of Rick’s hands. He jumped back, foot on fire with pain.

  The van stopped. “Yo,” said the driver, jumping out, a man in his twenties, head a bullet. “What the fuck you doing, you goddamn—” He saw the blood on Rick’s T-shirt, stopped, and jumped back into the van.

  Rick reached the cooler, which was dented but undamaged, and dragged it over to the curb. He noticed the cooler’s drainage plug and pulled it. Water gushed out. Was there a bit of color in the water? He could do it, he was almost there.

  HE DRAGGED THE TRUNK through the emergency ward’s electronic doors, right past the guard up to the nurses’ desk.

  “I got my arm cut off,” he croaked.

  “What?” asked the nurse.

  He shrugged his big coat to the floor. His shirt was a bloody mess.

  “Lie down!” she commanded. “Clyde, I have a priority! Call Dr. Kulik.” She turned back to Rick. “Sir, lie down! You need—”

  “It’s in here,” he said, pounding the cooler. “Get someone down here who can put it back on!”

  “What? The arm?”

  “Yes,” he said, suddenly dizzy.

  She picked up a phone. “I need a gurney and saline and a quick blood match.”

  “The cooler …” Rick muttered.

  “Clyde,” ordered the nurse, “cut open that cooler. But don’t touch anything. Sir, lie down! We’re getting a gurney in here, sir.”

  The guard stepped over to the cooler and produced a pen knife. He slit the tape with four hard strokes and lifted the top. Then he looked back at Rick.

  “Get it out!” Rick called.

  The guard took his flashlight and stirred around the ice. He struck something and bent closer.

  “Don’t contaminate any body parts,” called the nurse.

  “You can contaminate my body parts,” muttered the guard, digging in the ice. “This is fucked up.”

  An orderly pushed in the gurney. “Sir?”

  “What—wait,” pleaded Rick. “I have to see my arm.”

  The guard reached in, spilling ice. “I got it, I got it.”

  “Let me see!”

  The guard shook his head in disgust. “This ain’t no arm.”

  “What?” cried Rick. “Look!”

  “No, you look, my man.” The guard tugged upward, using his weight, this time spilling most of the ice, and pulled out the frozen head and neck of a huge turkey, its pale plucked body following, maybe thirty pounds in all, something asymmetrical about it, frozen black feet sticking out awkwardly. The guard examined the turkey, then pointed. “They took off one wing, right here.” He dropped the carcass back into the cooler, looked at Rick. “That’s it, my man.”

  He pushed away the gurney and sank down on one knee, then two, thinking he might vomit, but he did not, although a sickening shiver went through him, a cold shot of pain and grief that ended in stillness. The dog, eating. He put his remaining hand against the tile floor, supporting himself, then fell forward as they gathered around. His head rested against the floor. That was it. You can’t give frozen turkey to a dog.

  Sir, they said, we’re going to start an IV. He was somebody else now, forever. He collapsed onto his right side, lifting his legs to his chest like a child curling beneath a blanket. Yes, now he was released. He’d waited years and years and finally it had happened. He had received his punishment.

  PEACE HOTEL, SHANGHAI, CHINA

  SEPTEMBER 24, 1999

  HIS TAXI RACED recklessly from the airport over an elevated highway that snaked past hundreds of enormous construction sites extending every direction into the haze. This Shanghai, new yet already retrofuturistic, forced itself brutally upward through the accumulated crust, erasing the narrow lanes of crumbling brick and pagoda roofs, penetrating the massive and ill-kept English mansions—surviving relics of Europe’s s
hort-lived triumphalism—and toppling, perhaps especially, the dreary ten-story apartment blocks erected by Mao’s bureaucrats. Knocked down, bulldozed aside, trucked away. All gone—forever or soon. Finished, the fifty-story projects stood like rigid mechanical fingers, exoskeletally articulated with glass and stainless steel, aloof in their inhuman size, while the unfinished structures—great concrete bones veiled with bamboo scaffolding—entombed the foul air of the very sky itself, their shadowy honeycombed interiors flickering and flaring with welding torches as cranes lifted tilting loads, or caged construction elevators plummeted along zippered seams, while gray antmen in yellow hard hats moved along the huge edges of man-made stone with dull vigor.

  But the sight of the city did not relieve him of his misery; the sleepless flight to Hong Kong had rewired his back for constant pain, down low where all the surgery had been, and the bad air already made his chest ache. His suit lay wrinkled and damp from the heat, his mouth tasted sour, his eyes burned. The knockout pills hadn’t worked—he’d been too upset about Marvin Noff’s prediction of Teknetrix’s demise. And he was worried about Melissa Williams, that Ellie would find out, worried by what the evening with Melissa meant, how he should think about it. Flopping around on a hotel bed with some overly attentive woman half his age was not in the plan. Not if he knew himself. But he’d given in to her so easily. Why? Was it just that he was lonely? He liked her, dammit. Was this so bad? She’d made him feel younger, if only for ten minutes. Not just younger, but alive, able to create and destroy. Maybe it was the sex that had hurt his back so much. Probably. Definitely. But it had been worth it. He wondered if she’d enjoyed it. Emotionally, he would guess. Maybe she’d had an orgasm at the end, he couldn’t tell. He was no match for a man twenty or thirty years younger. But that was understood; no one needed to dwell on that. She’d said not to worry about the birth control—probably on the Pill like most of them. He doubted very much she might have AIDS. All the demographics were wrong. College-educated white woman. And he wasn’t going to worry about the little sexual diseases, not at his age, not with all the big possibilities already waiting. What did she want with him? Did she want to be a mother? Breasts and nipples and hips and a soft belly, all waiting. Could he ask her the next time he saw her? No, not yet. You don’t just spring that on a woman. But he would see her again, he knew that. Yes, Charlie, you bad boy. Maybe at the Pierre again, maybe somewhere else. He liked her appearance and intelligence. When did you start thinking more about the past than the future? He could live with Ellie another thousand years and she’d never float that question. Because the future scared her. He’d ask Towers, the bow-tied investigator, to find out more about Melissa. No harm in that, just get some basic information.

  He slipped his hand around to his back and watched the buildings go by. Something had seized up along the base of his spine, where they’d fused two vertebrae, making him feel the old seams of scar tissue. Something tight or out of alignment, sandpapering the nerves. The doctors had fixed the two worst vertebrae but left a couple of others alone to grind around and disintegrate by themselves. He’d need some kind of medicine, just to walk without looking like he was a hundred years old. Back pain was tricky, part emotional even when the physical malady was obvious. Maybe the tension had contributed—the company, the baby-making business, which now he was convinced he’d been going about in the wrong way. Putting an advertisement in the paper and hiring people to help him—he was staffing an expansion, he was proceeding corporately, for God’s sake. Better maybe to find someone he liked, someone young and smart and compatible, and then privately raise the question of a baby. Maybe Melissa Williams might want to have a baby. It wasn’t an impossible idea. Why not? You could have an understanding. Everything written down and signed, but based on respect.

  Yet life doesn’t work that way, he told himself. Life is fuck-ups and plane crashes and your wife acting strange. Having sex with some hot little chick in a room at the Pierre Hotel was not the way to go about making a child. Pleasurable, yes, but not part of an intelligent plan. The wise action at this point would be to forget how much he had enjoyed himself, how sweet and smart she was, and bring whatever further conversation ensued to a graceful close. Maybe one or two more meetings, just so that the ending was not too abrupt. Make sure she did not feel angry or furious. Angry women had a way of being very costly. Better to keep things at arm’s length, to continue his plan with Martha and the women who’d written him letters. If she gave him trouble, he would—he didn’t know. Pay her to leave him alone, or have a lawyer send a—

  Was he as horrible and paranoid as that? Couldn’t he have more faith? He had no reason to think she was not just a nice girl who found a bit of comfort being with an older man. A lot of women were like this—they felt safer, better understood, fathered. He had long suspected that Julia had slept with a couple of her professors in college and did not regret it. How wrong was it? Certainly he was never going to leave Ellie. He wondered how she would take it if she knew. Not well.

  He shifted miserably in his seat. He’d made matters worse by skipping the night in Hong Kong, deciding instead to bounce north to Shanghai on Tiger Air with no layover. Getting too old for this kind of travel. Dinner that night with Tom Anderson. I’ll give him holy hell, Charlie thought. He hoped to stay only three or four days, depending on how severe the problems were. The construction schedule had been fine just three weeks prior. He assumed that someone working for Mr. Ming out of their Shanghai office had already checked on the status of the construction. How much did Ming know? Did he read Marvin Noff’s pronouncements?

  Bad mood, bad air. The car hummed along toward the Bund, the string of massive European buildings fronting the Huangpu River, where beneath encrustations of neon and television antennas he glimpsed the profile of the great nineteenth-century trading city—the orifice that China had presented so self-exploitatively to the West. Full of Englishmen in bowler hats going about in rickshaws. Opium dens. Chinese girls with cigarette holders and the latest haircuts from Paris. All obliterated by World War II and then the 1949 revolution, after which Shanghai, symbol of Western corruption, was starved by the central government, allowed to rot and rust.

  Now all was being rebuilt, to twenty-first-century specifications. Using the same damn bamboo scaffolding techniques that they had practiced for more than a thousand years, erecting splendors long before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. The wood was extraordinarily strong and light. The Vietnamese had also used it, on bridges, walls, anything. He remembered seeing bamboo scaffolding in reconnaissance photos. Trouble then, trouble now! Here was Teknetrix with a market capitalization of $500 million, embarked on a $52 million construction project that was threatened—imperiled—by the inability to get a few dozen illiterate peasants to string up a pile of long sticks. Insanity! And it wasn’t as if the place suffered a shortage of labor, either. Sixty million people lived within a one-hundred-mile radius of Shanghai. Beneath the elevated highway swarmed cabs, bicycles, bicycle rickshaws, motorcycle rickshaws, and trucks piled high with tubing and cement block or bricks. He wished Ellie could see it. She never traveled to China with him anymore. Too dirty and full of disease. She preferred sitting in Italian cathedrals, reading about who painted what mural. Fine, then. Go live in Vista del Muerte.

  His unfinished plant lay on the other side of the Huangpu, in the Pudong section, itself a most audacious undertaking, considering that two decades prior nothing had been there. Historically an alluvial flood plain and then a place of fishing shacks and low brick factories, Pudong was now the site of a new financial district, the glass-and-steel fingers there achieving a staggering density meant to rival that of New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, or London. The West was full of doubters about such development in China, that it would ever be done, or done well, or done without great economic dislocation. As if the histories of the United States or Britain or Germany had not been wrenching and destructive. But the only way you made something new was by destroying somethin
g old. On the other side of the river, the cab passed the Mori Building, China’s third tallest, a massive pagoda-roofed rocketship, terrifying in its scale.

  “Stop,” insisted Charlie. “See big building.”

  The cabbie proudly flashed his teeth. “Yes, very good. Number one.”

  Charlie unrolled his window and peered upward; the top of the building was lost in the haze. America doesn’t know, he thought bitterly, doesn’t want to know. We’re too young, too ignorant of history. China’s ascendancy was not merely a business cycle or a set of policy changes; no, it was a civilization stirring—again, as China had always stirred again. The recent problems in Asia would be gone within a year or two. Next to the Mori Building rose the World Financial Center, destined to be the tallest building in the world. He remembered two years earlier, when the construction site was merely a muddy field with giant pile drivers hammering steel footings into the mudflats. Now the building was roofed, walled, windowed, and wired, and included a hotel so high up that guests could look out their windows at clear skies, then take the elevator down to the street and walk outside into rain.