Afterburn (47 page)

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 something 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.

And what about his own goddamned little project? He gave the driver the address, and a minute or two later they entered Pudong's manufacturing zone, passing huge buildings marked Kodak, Ericsson, Motorola, Seimens. Here it was, a walled site with a sign announcing in already-faded paint the factory's completion one month hence, a goal now impossible. Lucky to make it in the next three. But don't tell that to Marvin Noff or Mr. Ming.

He asked the driver to wait while he got out. His back! He staggered out of the car in his wrinkled suit and hobbled toward the fenced construction driveway.

"I help you," said the driver, running up to him.

He leaned on the man's arm until they reached the fence. "Thank you," Charlie said. "I appreciate that."

"Very bad back, I think so much," said the driver, pointing.

"Yes," he breathed between spasms. "Will you take me to the friendship store?" Charlie remembered that the department store for foreigners usually had Western over-the-counter remedies for sale. "We can go there and then to the hotel."

"Friendship store closed now," said the driver. "I take you better."

"I'll go to the hotel's doctor."

The driver laughed.

"What's funny?"

"Hotel doctor, many people die."

"I don't believe it."

"Hotel doctor good, traditional Chinese medicine very, very good. Number one."

"You sure?"

"Very, very good, I promise. Medicine very good."

"Okay." He clutched the fence in misery. "I'll try anything."

The driver pulled out his phone and began to chatter in Chinese. Charlie turned to look at his factory, his dream. The building—five windowless stories, thirty thousand square feet on each floor—had progressed minimally since he'd seen it last. Stacks of copper piping and pallets of bricks stood in the same places they had before. No scaffolding. He could see a load of steel, edges starting to rust. Loose trash blew across the site, catching on the locked gate. He gripped its bars, imprisoned from without. But he could see enough to know the trouble he was in; the subcontractors were gone—no electricians, no climate-control people, no plumbers. He'd have to lie to Mr. Ming, fudging the factory's progress reports in order to get the next installment of financing released. Such a fraudulent statement was grounds for termination of the loan. The thing was sinking him. Every day the plant was late getting on-line was a day less of revenue in the second quarter of the next year—a disastrous deficit, what with revenue streams from other products tapering down as they became obsolete or as Manila Telecom stole market share, chewing his feet off. If Marvin Noff knew how behind they were, he'd stick a knife in Teknetrix's stock—urgent sell. I'm getting killed here, Charlie thought, killed big.

"I take you very good medicine," the driver said.

Maybe it's worth it, Charlie thought. I have to be in good form the next few days. A bad back is going to shut me down. He waved his hand. "Let's go."

TEN MINUTES LATER
they had entered old Shanghai proper, the driver threading the crowded streets, coming so close to the passing waves of bicyclists that Charlie could have reached out a hand and rung the bell on their handlebars with no difficulty. The riders wore bright Western clothes, but some of the older men pedaled by in vintage Mao jackets, as if unconvinced that the political and economic liberalizations of the last decade were permanent. The driver pulled up before a Chinese pharmacy with a male acupuncture mannequin in the window, tiny Chinese characters scattered across it asymmetrically, not a few of them clustered meaningfully around the mannequin's discreetly molded organ of reproduction. Charlie didn't feel hopeful. A few Chinese on the street noted his arrival with interest. The driver helped him inside, past rows of manufactured Chinese medicines, to a counter where an old woman stood mashing something with a mortar and pestle.

The driver addressed her, and she looked at Charlie and asked some questions. The driver turned to Charlie.

"She say how long your back hurt?"

He sighed in discouragement. "A long time."

The driver repeated this to the woman. They spoke. The driver nodded. "How long in days and weeks?"

The woman watched him expectantly, perhaps never having treated a white man before.

"Twenty-seven years," said Charlie. He glanced around the shop. A few Chinese were staring, then they smiled. They came closer.

"Years? You write number."

This he did and the slip of paper ended up in the old woman's gnarled hands. She checked again with the driver.

He nodded as they spoke. "She say do you pass waste easily?"

"Yes."

They spoke. "Do you have pain in heart?"

"No."

The woman nodded. "Do you have clean lungs?"

"Yes."

"Do you have bad dreams?"

"Yes."

"Do you have pain in legs?"

"Yes. But because they were hurt."

"Do you eat fungus?"

"No." I'll ask the hotel for a doctor, he thought. Now four or five Chinese people stood watching, commenting among themselves.

"Do you take any Chinese medicine?"

"No."

"Do you have strong manhood?"

Charlie grimaced. "You mean—do I—"