by Mohsin Hamid
The following night the pretty girl arrives home late, dressed as though she has attended a party, in a highnecked, sleeveless top baring arms supple and veiny and strong. But the night after that the pretty girl is again alone, consuming a solitary meal with wine while watching a film, and on this third night she receives a phone call. The caller is a woman, easily identified as the pretty girl’s assistant, for the mobile she uses is linked to an e-mail account with messages chronicling her activities for the pretty girl’s boutique.
A recording of their conversation reveals a tone of warmth, these two clearly being not just colleagues but friends. They discuss a purchasing trip to a tropical country famed for its lush forests, its numerous islands, and its volcanic mountains, as well as, presumably, its furniture. From her laptop’s camera the pretty girl appears animated, excited, these trips abroad seeming to be something she looks forward to. Her assistant informs her that their visas have arrived, their flights and hotels are booked, and their local contacts are notified and ready. The names of restaurants are mentioned, and of a type of music they intend to see performed. Departure is only a week away.
The pretty girl smiles after their chat. Her laptop is angled away from her bedroom, so this evening her pre-sleep rituals cannot be seen. What can be seen are the steel bars on her windows, heavy in gauge and narrowly spaced, and a square motion sensor mounted high on her wall. Beneath it, near her front door, is a keypad belonging to her home alarm system. A light on the control panel goes from green to red, signaling that it is now armed. Perhaps this happens automatically, at a preprogrammed time. Or perhaps the pretty girl has activated it from a sister unit kept close at hand.
On the streets outside, a phone call reporting gunfire is being made to a police station. No one is immediately dispatched to investigate. Elsewhere a headless body missing the fingers of both hands will be recovered from a beach. Crime statistics will confirm that a significant number of prosperous residents are presently in the process of being burgled or robbed. Contact between extremes of wealth and poverty fuels such incidents, of course. But the organized underworld’s battles for turf overshadow any individual attempts at the armed redistribution of jewelry or mobile phones, and so even in this most unequal city, the vast majority of tonight’s violence will be inflicted upon neighborhoods whose residents are reliably poor.
Paramilitary forces are deployed to prevent such battles from spilling over too easily into areas deemed vital to national security, the port, for example, or upscale housing enclaves, or those premier commercial avenues from which rise headquarters of major corporations and banks. Indeed a paramilitary checkpoint is, at this moment, in operation a stone’s throw from the towering headquarters of the bank that holds the accounts of the pretty girl, her boutique, and her assistant.
An examination of its records reveals that the pretty girl, while not swimming in cash, has a decent buffer set aside for a rainy day, and that the revenues of her boutique fluctuate but manage on average to stay ahead of expenses. Her assistant has a capped signing authority on the boutique’s account, indicative of a rare level of trust, and a respectable salary that has been raised steadily over the course of the decade and a half she has been in the pretty girl’s employ. Her assistant’s monthly payments of home utilities, and of rent, coupled with a complete absence of expenditure on children’s schooling, suggests she too may live alone, or perhaps with elderly parents, for her credit card also shows frequent medical costs, charges from a variety of doctors and diagnostic centers and hospitals, charges at times exceeding her wages, yet on a regular basis paid off in full by the pretty girl, with a direct transfer of the required amount from her personal account to that of her assistant.
Atop the bank’s skyscraping offices are blinking lights meant to ward off passing aircraft, lights that glow serenely, high above the city. Below, as seen through helipad security cameras, parts of the metropolis are in darkness, electricity shortages meaning that the illumination of entire areas is turned off on a rotating basis, usually but not always on the hour, and in these inky patches, at this late time, little can be seen, just the odd building with its own generator, the bright headlamplit artery of a main road, or, on a winding side-street, so faint as possibly to be imagined, the red-tracer swerve of a lone motorcycle seeking to avoid some danger unknown.
A week later the city is a sun-drenched maze of beiges and dirty creams receding beneath a jetliner on which the pretty girl and her assistant are registered passengers as it climbs into the sky and heads out to sea. It is picked up by the radar of a warship in international waters, identified as a commercial flight posing no immediate threat, and then for the most part ignored, the naval vessel using its antennae to continue to sniff the pheromone-like emissions of electrons wafting from coastal military installations instead.
The jetliner rises through a bank of scattered clouds. At roughly the same altitude, albeit far inland, an experimental unmanned aerial vehicle cruises in the opposite direction. It is small and limited in range. Its chief advantages are its low cost, allowing it to be procured in large numbers, and its comparative quietness, permitting it to function unobtrusively. There are high hopes for its success in the export market, in particular among police forces and cash-strapped armies engaged in urban operations.
On the outskirts of the city over which this drone is today validating its performance parameters, a crowd is gathering at a graveyard. Two vehicles stand out among those parked nearby. One is a van, emblazoned with the name and phone number of a commercial spray painter, possibly even belonging to the deceased, for it is being used as a hearse to transport his white-shrouded body. The other is a luxury automobile from which emerges a pair of male figures in suits, a man in his sixties and a slender, teenage boy, perhaps his grandson. These two are conspicuously well dressed, contrasting with most of the other mourners, yet they must be closely related to the fellow who has died, since they lend their shoulders to the task of bearing his corpse to the fresh-dug pit. The elder of them now commences to sob, his torso flexing spasmodically, as though wracked by a series of coughs. He looks up to the heavens.
The drone circles a few times, its high-powered eye unblinking, and flies observantly on.
TEN
DANCE WITH DEBT
We must hurry. We are nearing our end, you and I, and this self-help book too, well, the self in it anyway, and likewise the help it offers, though its bookness, being bookness, may by definition yet persevere.
As my writer’s fingers key and your reader’s eyes flick, you stand at the cusp of the eighth decade of your life, substantially bald, mostly thin, resolutely erect. Your parents have died, your surviving sister and brother survive no longer, your wife has left you and married a man closer to herself in outlook and in age, and your son has chosen not to return after studying in North America, which, despite Asia’s rise, retains some attraction for a young conceptual artist with craggy hip bones and lips like buttered honey.
Through the window of your office you see your city mutating around you, its zoning and planning restrictions slipping away, deep foundation pits and skeletal building sites occupying land that only a few years ago aerial photography would have shown puffed over with opulent, pastry-esque villas. The sun is low and fat in your line of sight. A voice can be heard. It emanates from your former brother-in-law, still your deputy, sitting behind you and once again entreating you to take on more debt.
In this he is surely right. With borrowed funds, a business can invest, gain leverage, and leverage is a pair of wings. Leverage is flight. Leverage is a way for small to be big and big to be huge, a glorious abstraction, the promise of tomorrow today, yes, a liberation from time, the resounding triumph of human will over dreary, chronology-shackled physical reality. To leverage is to be immortal.
Or if not, your deputy asserts, at least the converse is true.
“If we don’t borrow,” he says, “we’ll die.”
You turn from the window and r
eseat yourself opposite him. “You’re getting carried away.”
“We don’t have scale. The sector’s consolidating. In two years, there won’t be a dozen water firms operating in this city. There’ll be three. At most four. And we won’t be one of them.”
“We’ll compete on quality.”
“It’s fucking water. We just provide to spec.”
Increasingly, your deputy has begun speaking to you in tones that veer almost to the aggressive. Whether this is because he blames you for the collapse of your marriage to his sister, or because he, a younger man, fears you less and less as age exacts its toll on your body, or because he is at last confident of his own indispensability to the smooth running of your operation, you do not know.
“That’s not true,” you say.
“It’s true enough. Either we buy a competitor or we sell. Or we’ll rot away.”
“We’re not putting ourselves up for sale.”
“That’s what you always say. So let’s buy.”
“We’ve never taken on that much debt.”
“It’s risky. A gamble. But one we’ll have a good chance of winning.”
You catch at that moment a reflection of your ex-wife in the form of your deputy, glimpsing, as you do periodically, a telltale flourish of the genetic hand that drew both their lines, beautiful in her case, rather comedic in his. You trust him. Not entirely, but enough. And more than that, you sense he may have a better understanding of the future course of your business than you do. But most of all, you no longer care so passionately about the outcome. Of late, you have had the impression of merely going through the motions of your life, of rising, shaving, bathing, dressing, coming in to work, attending meetings, taking phone calls, returning home, eating, shitting, lying in bed, all out of habit, for no real purpose, like the functioning of some legacy water meter, cut off from the billing system, whose measurements swirl by unrecorded.
And so you say, “All right. Let’s do it.”
Your deputy is pleased. For his part, he regards himself as a mostly loyal member of your team. Mostly loyal because he has secretly skimmed only enough funds from your firm over the past two decades to cause no real harm, money he has squirreled abroad, far out of sight, as a measure of insurance should his employment come suddenly to an end. But testing times lie ahead, the viability of your enterprise is itself at stake, and despite being well paid, your deputy has saved too little, living the lifestyle of an owner rather than a manager, and now may be his last chance to capture a more meaningful slice of the pie. Buying another company offers him the prospect of pocketing a sizable kickback, an unofficial golden parachute he considers very much his due.
That evening you ride home alone, in the rear of your limousine, behind your uniformed chauffeur and a guard who clutches an assault rifle upright against his torso. At each traffic light people attach themselves to your window in supplication, beggars, one armless, one toothless, one a hermaphrodite with white-powdered face and down-slanting smile. You see a man on a motorcycle bearing also his wife and children turn off his engine as he waits for the signal to change. Through fourteen speakers and four subwoofers your radio purrs a report of a series of bomb blasts in a crowded market on the coast. You curse resignedly. If riots flare in protest, a consignment of yours could be stuck in port.
Over the coming months your business is quantified, digitized, and jacked into a global network of finance, your activities subsumed with barely a ripple in a collective mathematical pool of ever-changing current and future cash flows. A syndicate of banks is rallied, covenants sworn to, offices and trucks and equipment and even your personal residence pledged as collateral, an acquisition war chest electronically credited with booty, a target hailed, and the basic terms of its capitulation negotiated. The proposed deal is high priced but not exorbitant, with a plausible opportunity for success.
Thus the matter might have rested had fate, or narrative trajectory, in the form of coronary artery disease, not taken a hand. You are attempting to sleep when the pain begins, mild, a numbness proceeding down one arm. You turn on a lamp and sit up. It is then that an invisible girder slams into your chest, surely flattening it, forcing you to shut your eyes. You cannot breathe. The pressure is unbearable. But it recedes, and you are left weak and vaguely nauseated, your scrawny limbs sweating inside your thin cotton pajamas despite the chill. You open your eyes. Your thorax is intact. You unfasten a button and run your fingers along your ribs, your nails too long and slightly dirty, your hair there white and coiled. No wound can be seen, but the man you touch feels brittle. In the morning, still awake, you go to see your doctor.
The hospital is large and crowded, charitable donations, including from you, ensuring many of the patients it admits are desperately poor. A village woman on the verge of death lies on a bench, her look of bafflement reminding you of your mother. You are unable to walk unaided and so you lean on your chauffeur. You stumble, and embarrassingly he lifts you off the ground, easily, as he might a child or a youthful bride. You order him to put you in a wheelchair. Your voice is hoarse, and you have to repeat yourself. A man dabs with a filthy mop at what appears to be a trail of urine, telling people mostly ineffectually not to step in it.
Your doctor has come out of his examination room to greet you, an unprecedented honor. He smiles in his usual manner, but forgoes his customary wagging of the finger as though you have been naughty, and instead says in a cheerful tone, “We’ll be going straight to the intensive-care unit.” He wheels you inside himself, telling your chauffeur he is not permitted to follow but should certainly remain in the hall, as he may be needed. You are fortunate that your second heart attack takes place in the ICU. When you regain consciousness, you have become a kind of cyborg, part man, part machine. Electrodes connect your chest to a beeping computer terminal mounted on a rack, and a pair of transparent tubes channel oxygen from a nearby metal tank to your nostrils and fluids from a plastic pouch into your bloodstream through a needle taped at your wrist. You panic and start to flail, but your limbs barely move and you are gently restrained. A nurse speaks. You have difficulty following her words. You understand, though, that for the moment this apparatus and you are inseparable.
To be a man whose life requires being plugged into machines, multiple machines, in your case interfaces electrical, gaseous, and liquid, is to experience the shock of an unseen network suddenly made physical, as a fly experiences a cobweb. The inanimate strands that cling to your precariously still-animate form themselves connect to other strands, to the hospital’s power system, its backup generator, its information technology infrastructure, the unit that produces oxygen, the people who refill and circulate the tanks, the department that replenishes medications, the trucks that deliver them, the factories at which they are manufactured, the mines where requisite raw materials emerge, and on and on, from your body, into your room, across the building, and out the doors to the world beyond, mirroring in stark exterior reality preexisting and mercifully unconsidered systems within, the veins and nerves and sinews and lymph nodes without which there is no you. It is good you sleep.
When you next wake, your nephews are here, your brother’s sons, and also, surprisingly, your ex-wife, along with her new husband, a bearded man with a fatherly demeanor that disorients you because he is practically a generation your junior. The illumination of your room is odd, futuristic, the artifact of either some advanced bulb technology or your addled mental state. Your doctor pats your hand and summarizes for you, in everyone’s presence, your overall position and course of treatment. Your prognosis is less than peachy. The muscles of your heart have been damaged and the fraction of blood it is pumping per beat is dangerously low. Such a condition need not be immediately fatal, your doctor has himself had a patient who improved and lived on for years after a similar level of impairment. But you also have extensive blockages of the coronary arteries and so you face the imminent likelihood of a further heart attack, which would almost certainly be terminal.
Yet in your situation a bypass or angioplasty is out of the question, and leaving the hospital, in your doctor’s judgment, would also be unwise. It would be best to wait and see.
You understand this advice as a coded instruction to prepare to die, a thought reinforced by the wet film you observe dancing in the eyes of your ex-wife. She returns to the hospital each day, usually minus her husband. She is formal with you but also efficient, as though playing the role of a dedicated administrator in a movie. Under her supervision, second and third opinions are sought, a new cardiologist identified, and you moved to a different institution. A renowned world expert has agreed to see you in a few weeks, when he is next in your city, and it is on him that your ex-wife appears to pin her hopes.
This world expert is like a man from another planet, with an orange glow to his skin, unnaturally white teeth, and hair so thick he could safely ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Upon examining you and considering your file, he says there is no reason that a few stents in your arteries should not do the trick. There is, of course, a modest chance of dying on the operating table, but since there is a very good chance of dying soon off of it, the risk seems outweighed by the potential reward.