Afterburn (6 page)

SOME BOYS POKED A STICK
into the body of the B-52 pilot and it exploded in gas and stink.

THERE WAS GREAT HURRY.
There was no hurry. Night and then day. He knew that.

THEY BROKE HIS ARMS
and he said yes, he flew a plane that dropped bombs.

THEY WERE KEEPING HIM ALIVE,
he did not know why. They made him eat. He remembered his children. A little girl and a little boy. He was glad they would never see him like this. They would grow up and never know their daddy, and if Ellie had any sense, she would marry again as soon as possible. She would know he wanted her to do that. Have more babies, sweetie, as soon as you can.

HE SAID MANY THINGS
about many things and they gave him water and tried to write it down and he kept saying everything and perhaps this made sense to them. One day the complete three-dimensional diagram of the F-4's electrical system came into his head and then it left and he knew he had forgotten it forever.

THEY TRIED TO WAKE HIM
so that he could feel what they were doing.

ONE MORNING
an American prop plane flew over, dropping loose bales of surrender leaflets. They pattered to the ground, several through the slats of his cage right in front of him. He'd seen translations of such leaflets. This one would have fit easily into his palm and showed a picture of a B-52, cargo doors open, a stream of bombs dropping from the plane's belly.

The village children gathered the pamphlets and burned them.

THEY MOVED HIM
to a hootch. They took off his old ropes, but he did not change his position. They tied his arms together and the new rope to a pole. Shit softly bubbled out of his ass, a great relief to him.

HE SPENT AN ENTIRE DAY
straightening his leg. When he finally looked at the leg, it was not straight, not even close.

ONE MORNING
they laid a board across his shins and put three rice sacks filled with stones on it. By the afternoon he had told them Ellie had signed a mortgage for forty-seven thousand dollars and that his life insurance was thirty-five thousand. They were interested in such large sums and wrote them down. You very rich man. What else you own? He saw no benefit in withholding now. They were killing him, he knew. What else you own? Shares of IBM, he whispered, eight hundred shares. What is IBM? International Business Machines, a company. What is shares? That's a piece, a small piece of the company. How many pieces in all of company? they asked. I don't know. They whipped his back with the flat inner tube of a bicycle tire. Maybe ten million, he cried. This number was far too high for them to believe, and so they whipped him again.

HE LOOKED AT HIS LEG
. He had no fat on his body anymore.

SHELLING ROCKED THE VILLAGE,
pounding the earth. It was night. Helicopters hovered in the distance, black gnats under the moon. At dawn a flight of F-105s zoomed at low altitude across the jungle, dragging a sonic boom behind them. Seconds after they passed, the sun boiled up from the earth. Skyraiders dropped in low. Antipersonnel bombs, clusters of smaller explosives. He had to be in Laos or South Vietnam. Soldiers ran back and forth in front of his hut. A woman hurried by with a small bloody bundle of arms and legs. He smiled. Commotion in the village. He heard chopper blades slapping the air, automatic-weapons fire. Between the slats of the hootch he could see soldiers running over the mud, some carrying rice bags. A jerky, spliced motion. He looked at his leather baseball glove, waiting to be picked. There was a little box on the left thumb with the words
Owns This Genuine Rawlings Glove
underneath. You were supposed to write your name in the box.

Now the Vietcong receded from the village into the jungle. He wriggled over the earth to the edge of the hootch, the rope pulling tight against his wrists behind him. Three Marines moved slowly from hootch to hootch. One would fire a few rounds into each, then go inside. Sometimes he came out clutching documents that he folded into a satchel. Most of the times he brought out a villager at gunpoint. After the men checked each hootch, one of the others burned it with a flamethrower, hosing fire from a shoulder cylinder through the air onto the thatched roof. The burning huts smudged the sky. The GIs found a teenage girl inside and pulled her out. She struggled.

"Baby-san suck-suck?" said one of the GIs.

"Me no give suck-suck." She spit in his face.

The soldier grabbed the girl's hair. "You fucking VC motherfucker baby-san, blow me!" She thrashed hatefully. He laughed and pushed her away.

After that, the soldiers stopped checking the hootches, just burned them quickly. He waited, wondering if the ball might get hit to him.
Grounder, watch it all the way into your glove, Charlie-boy
. They were not checking the hootches, and he was in one. The three men torched the hootch next to his. You have to want to be picked for the team. His arms were still roped to the pole. The soldiers' boots scuffed the earth outside. One of them machine-gunned the hootch.

Part of something that was part of his leg was blown off.

One of the GIs said, "You hear a noise?"

More shots. He curled into a ball. Something hot pierced his hand and passed between his legs. He screamed a hoarse whisper.

"It's a trap, man! Gas it."

His tongue lolled thickly in his mouth, his pants filling with blood. More gunfire cracked over him. Then silence. A shadow appeared at the opening to the hootch. A hand grabbed his dog tags. "Get the radio. We got a throttle-jock here. Fact, he just got shot." The hand slapped his cheek hard. A black face drew up to his, bloodshot eyes bright. "Boy, don't you fucking die on me now—someone else be doing the dying today."

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China Club, Hong Kong
September 7, 1999

HE WOULD SURVIVE.
Oh shit, yes, Charlie promised himself, he'd survive
this
, too—his ninth formal Chinese banquet in as many evenings, yet another bowl of shark-fin soup being passed to him by the endless waiters in red uniforms, who stood obsequiously against the silk wallpaper pretending not to hear the self-satisfied ravings of those they served. Except for his fellow
gweilo
s—British Petroleum's Asia man, a mischievous German from Lufthansa, and two young American executives from Kodak and Citigroup—the other dozen men at the huge circular mahogany table were all Chinese. Mostly in their fifties, the men represented the big corporate players—Bank of Asia, Hong Kong Telecom, Hang Seng Bank, China Motors—and each, Charlie noted, had arrived at the age of cleverness. Of course, at fifty-eight he himself was old enough that no one should be able to guess what he was thinking unless he wanted them to, even Ellie. In his call to her that morning—it being evening in New York City—he'd tried not to sound too worried about Julia. "It's all going to be
fine
, sweetie," he'd promised, gazing out at the choppy haze of Hong Kong's harbor, where the heavy traffic of tankers and freighters and barges pressed China's claim—everything from photocopiers to baseball caps flowing out into the world, everything from oil refineries to contact lenses flowing in. "She'll get pregnant, I'm sure," he'd told Ellie. But he wasn't sure. No, not at all. In fact, it looked as if it was going to be easier for him to build his electronics factory in Shanghai than for his daughter to hatch a baby.

"We gather in friendship," announced the Chinese host, Mr. Ming, the vice-chairman of the Bank of Asia. Having agreed to lend Charlie fifty-two million U.S. dollars to build his Shanghai factory, Mr. Ming in no way could be described as a friend; the relationship was one of overlord and indentured. But this was to be expected, and Charlie smiled along with the others as the banker stood and presented in high British English an analysis of southeastern China's economy that was so shallow, optimistic, and full of euphemism that no one, especially the central ministries in Beijing, might object. The Chinese executives nodded politely as Mr. Ming spoke, touching their napkins to their lips, smiling vaguely. Of course, they nursed secret worries—worries that corresponded to whether they were entrepreneurs (who had built shipping lines or real-estate empires or garment factories) or the managers of institutional power (who controlled billions of dollars not their own). Privately the entrepreneurs disdained the tedious, risk-adverse probity of the managers, who, in turn, stood burdened by the institutional reputations of the dead. True, the managers had not made something from nothing, but they had carried bucket upon bucket of obeisance to nurture a gigantus. As with the distinction between a sapling and an ancient tree, their spreading, limb-heavy corporations had known fierce political winds, diseases of managerial orthodoxy, the insect-hollowing of internal bureaucracy. And yet, Charlie decided, the men were finally more like one another than unlike; each long ago had learned to sell high (1997) and buy low (1998), and had passed the threshold of unspendable wealth, such riches conforming them in their behaviors; each owned more houses or paintings or Rolls-Royces than could be admired or used at once. Each played golf or tennis passably well; each had purchased a Canadian or British passport; each possessed a forty-million-dollar yacht, or a forty-million-dollar home atop Victoria's Peak, or a forty-million-dollar wife. Like the wealthy businessmen on New York's East Side, the Chinese executives hired more or less the same doctors and antique dealers and feng shui mystics to advise them. Each had a slender young Filipino or Russian or Czech mistress tucked away in one of Hong Kong's luxury apartment buildings—licking her lips if requested—or had a secure phone line to one of the ministry buildings in Beijing, or was betting against the Hong Kong dollar while insisting on its firmness—any of the costly mischief in which rich men indulge.

The men at the table, in fact, as much as any men, sat as money incarnate, particularly the American dollar, the euro, and the Japanese yen—all simultaneously, and all hedged against fluctuations of the others. But although the men were money, money was not them; money assumed any shape or color or politics, it could be fire or stone or dream, it could summon armies or bind atoms, and, indifferent to the sufferings of the mortal soul, it could leave or arrive at any time. And on this exact night, Charlie thought, setting his ivory chopsticks neatly upon the lacquered plate while nodding to the uniformed boy to take it away—on this very night he could see that although money had assumed the shapes of the men in the room (including him, of course—his shoes, his dental work, his very shit), it existed in differing densities and volumes and brightnesses. Whereas Charlie was a man of perhaps thirty or thirty-three million dollars of wealth, that sum amounted to shoe-shine change in the present company. No sir, money, in
that
room, in
that
moment, was understood as inconsequential in sums less than one hundred million dollars, and of political importance only when five times more. Money, in fact, found its greatest compression and gravity in the form of the tiny man sitting silently across from Charlie—Sir Henry Lai, the Oxford-educated Chinese gambling mogul, owner of a fleet of jet-foil ferries, a dozen hotels, and most of the casinos of Macao and Vietnam. Worth billions—and billions more.

But, Charlie wondered, perhaps he was wrong. He could think of one shape that money had not
yet
assumed, although quite a bit of it had been spent, perhaps a hundred thousand dollars in all. Money animated the dapper Chinese businessman across from him, but could it arrive in the world as Charlie's own grandchild? This was the question he feared most, this was the question that had eaten at him and at Ellie for years now, and which would soon be answered: In a few hours, Julia would tell them once and forever if she was capable of having a baby.

She had suffered through cycle upon cycle of disappointment—hundreds of shots of fertility drugs followed by the needle-recovery of the eggs, the inspection of the eggs, the selection of the eggs, the insemination of the eggs (recorded on videotape—another needle squirting into a dish), the implantation of the eggs (also recorded on tape with an ultrasound screen), the anticipation of the eggs.
My eggs, my eggs
—Julia's sad mantra. She'd been trying for seven years. The blockage of her fallopian tubes might be due, she'd said, to her use of an IUD years prior. Abortion, Charlie knew, could also cause the problem, but he'd never asked and his daughter had never told. Now Julia, a woman of only thirty-five, a little gray already salting her hair, was due to get the final word. At 11:00 a.m. Manhattan time, she'd sit in her law office and be told the results of this, the last in vitro attempt. Her
ninth
. Three more than the doctor preferred to do. Seven more than the insurance company would pay for. Almost as if she was trying for all of them, after what had happened to Ben, trying to bring new life to the family. Good news would be that one of the reinserted fertilized eggs had decided to cling to the wall of Julia's uterus. Bad news: There was no chance of conception; egg donorship or adoption must now be considered. And if
that
was the news, well then, that was really goddamn something. It would mean not just that his only daughter was heartbroken, but that, genetically speaking, he, Charlie Ravich, was finished, that his own fishy little spermatozoa—one of which, wiggling into Ellie's egg a generation prior, had become his daughter—had run aground, that he'd come to the end of the line; that, in a sense, he was already dead.

And now, as if mocking his very thoughts, came the fish, twenty pounds of it, head still on, its eyes cooked out and replaced with flowered radishes, its mouth agape in macabre broiled amusement. The chief waiter displayed the fish to the table, then whisked it away to a sideboard, where another waiter brandished gleaming instruments of dissection. Charlie looked at his plate. He always lost weight in China, undone by the soy and oils and crusted skin of birds, the rich liverish stink of turtle meat. All that duck tongue and pig ear and fish lip. Expensive as hell, every meal. And carrying with it the odor of doom.