How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (11 page)

In the months that follow, you receive anonymous death threats and meet with politicians you thought were allies but prove barely able to conceal their gloating. You are caught up in one of the cynical accountability campaigns periodically launched by your city's establishment, tossed to the wolf pack of public opinion, unsubstantiated rumors of your shady dealings receiving scandalized attention in newspapers. You have always been an outsider, and finally you have been wounded. It is only natural that you be sacrificed so that the rest of the herd may prance on.

Once this outcome is clear, you accept your fate without too much resistance, struggling, to the extent you do, largely out of habit and a sense of responsibility for your ex-employees. It almost seems that a part of you perversely welcomes being humbled in this way, that you suffer from some mad impulse to slough off your wealth, like an animal molting in the autumn. Perhaps this contributes to the frenzy with which you are attacked. When it is over, your financial bones retain only tiny slivers of their former meat, but you have not been picked entirely clean. You are not destitute. You remain unincarcerated. You are an old man in a hotel room, taking your medication, looking out the dirty window at the street below, traveling by taxi when you must.

In person you sometimes appear timid, hesitant, though whether this change is due to your economic misfortune or the decline in your health, it is impossible to say. You have encountered the reality that with age things are snatched from a man, often suddenly and without warning. You do not rent a home for yourself or buy a secondhand car. Instead you remain in your hotel, with few possessions, no more than might fit in a single piece of luggage. This suits you. Having less means having less to anesthetize you to your life.

Near the hotel is an internet cafe. You walk there now, slowly. Because you are easily winded and must pause to rest, you carry the ultra-light shaft of plastic and metal your doctor refers to, perhaps nostalgically, as a cane. You have spent more time on this earth than have all three of the young technicians who work in the cafe combined. Their T-shirts and tattoos and stylized whiskers are symbols of a clan with which you are unfamiliar. They are not pleased to see you. But their leader, a youth with a notch razored into his brow, at least rises with a semblance of respect.

“If you wouldn't mind helping me again,” you say.

He nods. “Number five.”

His manner is brusque, but he is thorough as he ensures you are set up and ready to proceed. You are seated in a cubicle, on a chair of firm yet comfortable mesh. In front of you is a flat monitor with a readout of time utilized and money owed. Invisible below the surface of your desk, but touchable with your feet, is a shin-tall computer from which you carefully pivot away lest you do some harm. Though small, these cubicles have partitions higher than those in your late firm's offices, designed to afford users a maximum of privacy. The cafe is dark, with no active source of illumination other than its screens, and smells vaguely of women's hair spray, sweat, and semen.

Your son materializes before you at an angle suggesting you are looking down at him from above. You sit straighter, unconsciously trying to raise your head to a height from which this perspective would be normal, but it has no effect on your sense of slight disorientation. You do not know what to do with your hands, so you grip the armrests of your chair. Your son freezes, pixelates, and then, flowing again, speaks.

“Dad.”

“My boy.”

He is in his apartment, a warehouse of a room sparsely furnished with reappropriated building materials, his dining table two stacks of cinder blocks supporting a horizontal door with hinges intact. Outside his windows it is night. He inquires concernedly after your health, you reassure him that all is well, and you chat about politics, the economy, his cousins. He has been unable to visit you because his visa status is linked to a long-standing asylum petition. A trip home would undermine his claim that he is in danger.

“Have you spoken to your mother?” you ask.

“No. Not in a while.”

“You should. She misses you.”

“I'm sure she does, in her way.”

Your son's friend passes behind him, shirtless, unshaven, sleepy. The friend is brushing his teeth, preparing for bed. He waves to you and you lift a palm in reply. Your son smiles, half turns to his friend, voices something inaudible, and redirects himself to the camera of his computer.

“It's getting late,” he says apologetically.

“Yes, don't let me keep you.”

“When's your next doctor's visit?”

“Today.”

“Promise to text me how it goes.”

You say you will. The sticky headphones on your ears emit an aquatic plop and your son's image disappears as though it has been sucked down a hole the size of a single pixel in the center of your screen. Where before there were brightness and movement there is now only stillness, save for the time and money counters ticking along in a corner. You settle your bill and pass on.

At this moment the pretty girl is also scrutinizing a computer, reviewing with her assistant the month's sales figures, which make for somber reading. Tonight she too will journey to a hospital, though of course presently she does not know it.

“It's shaping into quite a drop,” she says. She smiles tightly. “I hope you're ready for the bounce.”

“More than ready,” her assistant says.

She considers. “Doesn't look like we have a choice.”

“No.”

“Fine. Cancel the spring procurement trip.”

The two of them are silent.

“There's always the fall,” her assistant says.

The pretty girl nods. “Yes. There's always that.”

She leaves her furniture boutique at her customary hour, five o'clock, her driver making haste to beat the traffic, though his efforts must contest with dug-up roads. The pretty girl peers out her window at recurring series of slender pits. Cabling is going in, seemingly everywhere, mysterious cabling, black- or gray- or orange-clad, snaking endlessly off spools into the warm, sandy soil. She wonders what on earth it binds together.

It is her assistant's job to close the boutique, later that evening, and her assistant has done so, and is supervising the manager's counting of the day's take, in preparation for placing it overnight in the safe, when a brick is thrown beneath half-lowered steel shutters to smash the glass shop door. The pretty girl's assistant hears this in a small office out back and sees, in crisp monochrome, on a CCTV display, three armed men enter, their faces partially concealed. Instinctively, she activates a silent alarm, locks the money away, and spins the combination wheel, all to the horror of the manager, who now fears getting out of this situation alive.

The armed men appear to know an alarm has been triggered, and perhaps as a result their leader makes as if to shoot the manager through the forehead without a word. But he thinks better of it and tells the pretty girl's assistant to open the safe. When, out of confusion rather than bravery, she hesitates, he hits her on the temple with the butt of his rifle, not too forcefully, given her age and gender, but firmly enough to knock her to the floor. She rises and complies. The armed men pocket the money. In total, the robbery lasts no longer than five minutes. Private guards arrive in nine, the pretty girl in twenty-two, and the police in thirty-eight.

As a precaution, due to the blow her assistant has received, the pretty girl brings her to an emergency room. She puts her hand on her assistant's in the car, holds her fingers gently, the less elderly woman stunned and staring straight ahead, mostly unspeaking. A harried nurse glances at the pretty girl's assistant, says it is a bruise, nothing more, suggests an ice pack and some analgesics, and sends them on their way. During the drive home, her assistant complains of dizziness and nausea. The pretty girl takes her back to the hospital, her assistant convulses and loses consciousness in transit, and when a doctor pries open her eyelids and shines a torch at her pupils she is already past revival and soon dead.

It is on this evening that the pretty girl's forty-year affair with her adopted metropolis comes to an end, though she does not leave right away. Time passes as her decision gathers within her. She must also sell her shop and conclude certain practical matters. But something has changed, and her direction is not in doubt. She will sit alone in her living room, gazing out through bars at the night, at the lights of aircraft ascending in the sky, and feel a tug, of what she cannot say, no, not exactly, only that it pulls her with soft finality, and that it emanates from the city of her birth.

ELEVEN

FOCUS ON THE FUNDAMENTALS

I SUPPOSE I SHOULD CONSIDER AT THIS STAGE CONFESSING
to certain false pretenses, to certain subterfuges that may have been perpetrated here, certain of-hands that may have been, um, sleighted. But I won't. Not just yet. Though filthy richness is admittedly gone from your grasp, this book is going to maintain a little longer its innocence, or at least the non-justiciability of its guilt, and continue offering, through economic advice, help to two selves, one of them yours, the other mine.

As luck would have it, this advice is unaffected by the loss of your wealth, since it applies to those of modest means too. And the advice is this. Focus on the fundamentals. Blow through the fluff, see the forest for the trees, prioritize what's core to your operation. Right now, in your case, that means cutting costs to the bone.

You have done so admirably well. At the two-star hotel that is your residence, you have negotiated a long-term, month-by-month room rental for less than half the standard rate, taking full advantage of both your willingness to pay cash and the fact that you once gave a job to the hotel manager's late father, who described you with undying, referring of course to the sentiment, not the man, veneration. You also eat sparingly, your metabolism having slowed enough for you to make do with a single meal a day, you scrimp on transportation by using taxis instead of bearing the expense of owning and operating a car, and you avoid being saddled with hefty phone bills by conducting your weekly conversations with your son from an internet cafe. Thus the majority of your limited savings remains untouched, available for doctor's visits, tests, and medications, and it seems not improbable that in the race between death and destitution, you can look forward to the former emerging victorious.

Your one indulgence is the serving of tea and biscuits you provide to your supplicants, without fail, in the cramped lobby of your hotel. The building itself is perhaps ten years in age, though it could equally easily be thirty, pressed between two other structures of similarly four-storied height, malnourished width, and indeterminate date of construction, on what was formerly an access road to a quiet market but now lies within the ever-expanding boundaries of a bustling and amorphously amoeba-shaped zone of commerce. Nearby, animals are slaughtered, pastries baked, high-fidelity speaker crossovers tweaked, fake imported cigarettes distributed, and blast-resistant window film retailed, the last with promises of free installation, a not insignificant plus, given that precise and labor-intensive squeegeeing is needed to expel unsightly air bubbles.

The clansmen who come to you are often, but not always, recently arrived from their villages, unskilled or semi-skilled hands in search of jobs in construction or transport or domestic service, and so they look around at the worn common areas of your hotel with awe, taking the mechanical door and steel buttons of its non-functional elevator and the daintiness of its teacups and saucers as confirmation that you are, as they have been told, an important man, an impression further reinforced by the fine tailoring of your clothes and the distinguished bearing that you, despite your age and setbacks, have mostly managed to retain. You help them as best you can, making calls, putting in a good word, and answering in painstaking detail their many questions.

But not all of your supplicants are rural youngsters. Some are city boys, first generation, as you once were, or second, with jaunty haircuts and savvy, quick-moving faces. Others are older, professionals, managers even, on occasion dressed in suit and tie. For these more urbane callers your abode is something of a disappointment, but their misgivings usually abate in conversation, when it becomes clear you are a man who speaks knowledgeably, and a generous listener too, albeit one slightly hard of hearing. They are eager to mine your network of business and government contacts, a diminishing vein you are nonetheless content to prospect on their behalf, and it is not altogether infrequent that you turn up a nugget of assistance.

You accept no financial reward for your contributions, no placement fees or referral tokens, nor do you hunger after the expressions of gratitude bestowed upon you. Your motivations stem from different sources, from lingering desires to connect and to be of use, from the need to fill a few of the long hours of the week, and from curiosity about the world beyond, about the comings and goings and toings and froings of that great city outside your hotel, in which you have passed almost the entirety of your life, and of which you once knew so much.

You hear reports that the water table continues to drop, the thirst of many millions driving bore after steel bore deeper and deeper into the aquifer, to fill countless leaky pipes and seepy, unlined channels, phenomena with which you are intimately familiar and from which you have profited, but which are now contributing in places to a noticeable desiccation of the soil, to a transformation of moist, fertile, hybrid mud into cracked, parched, pure land. Meanwhile similar attempts, both official and non, seem to be under way to try to desiccate society itself, through among other things creeping restrictions on festivals and the public pursuit of fun, with a similar result, cracks, those widening fissures evident between young people, who appear to you divided as never before, split into myriad, incomprehensible tribes, signaling their affiliations with an automobile sticker, a bare shoulder, or some arcane permutation in the possibilities for facial hair.

You often do not know, when you venture forth into the streets on your errands, who among them stands for what. Nor is it at all clear to you that they themselves, beneath the poses they strike, really know what they stand for either, any more than you did at their age. But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms. At times, watching the stares that follow a luxury SUV as it muscles its way down a narrow road, you are nearly relieved to have been already separated from your fortune.

If, while I write, I can't be certain that you have had no inkling of your proximity to the pretty girl, still it stands to reason that this should be true. She resides about thirty minutes from your hotel as the crow flies, but since the urban crow tends to fly circuitously, and with many pauses, she may not be that far, or she may be much farther. She owns a small townhouse, of which she is landlady, renting her two spare rooms at below-market rates to a pair of women, one a singer, the other an actress, early in their careers and neither quite yet a success. Between her savings and this rental income, the pretty girl gets by.

Perhaps because of a persistent twinge in her hip, she ventures out less than she formerly did. She leaves most household chores to her factotum, a diminutive, middle-aged man who cooks, drives, shops, and occupies a servant quarter next to her kitchen. She does however make a daily round of her favorite park, walking slowly but erectly, in the evenings during summer and fall, and in the mornings during winter and spring, when she particularly enjoys observing the youthful lovers who gather there for hurried, furtive liaisons before they report to class or to work.

At home she watches movies and, especially, listens to the radio, often turning the volume high enough that it amuses her tenants, who might take a break from their busy lives to chat with her for a few moments as she nods her head to the beat and puffs along on her cigarette. Sometimes one of them will share with her their latest work, a video clip or demo of a song, but this is rare. She is never invited to a set or a studio. Her townhouse is at the end of a cul-de-sac, and from her upstairs lounge she can see all the way down her street, past a stretch of shops and restaurants, to a telecommunications center from which red and white masts soar mightily, towering above satellite dishes, like electromagnetic spars built to navigate the clouds. She bought her place for its view.

Hers is not by nature a temperament sympathetic to nostalgia, in fact the opposite. She refuses to visit the seaside metropolis where she spent so many productive years. Nor does she seek to scrape together the funds to retain, on a temporary basis, a new assistant who could translate and facilitate for her, making possible a final coda to her much-loved trips abroad. In her mind, her return to the region of her birth marked a decisive break from days gone recently by.

And yet, whether because of her advancing age or the strange echoes this city sustains through its associations with her childhood, she finds herself pulled into frequent and unexpected turns of thought, dampness on a fingertip used to wipe dew off a glass of water reminding her of a gentle and now-dead photographer, say, or a sudden breeze felt on her balcony conjuring up a beach party long ago. Present and alert in this moment, she, unaccustomedly, might well be lost to reverie in the next.

You reencounter each other at a pharmacy, a crowded micro-warehouse stacked with pallets not much bigger than matchboxes, mostly white, bearing text too minute to be legible, even while squinting, and, on occasion, iridescent seals of hologrammed authenticity that shimmer like fish in the light. You are progressing incrementally to the counter, buffeted by those who push forward out of line, reliant on strangers who acknowledge you and are good enough to wait. Ahead you see a figure turn after paying for her purchase, a figure you think you recognize, and you are seized by a powerful emotion. This emotion is akin to panic, and indeed you consider shoving your prescription back into your pocket and making for the exit.

But you stand your ground. As the figure approaches, she frowns.

“Is that you?” she asks, not for the first time in her life.

You lean on your cane and scrutinize the wizened woman before you.

“Yes,” you say.

Neither of you speaks. Slowly, she shakes her head. She rests her hand on yours, her skin smooth and cool against your knuckles.

“Do I look as old as you do?” she asks.

“No,” you say.

“I thought you were an honest boy.”

You smile. “Not always.”

“Let's find a place to sit down.”

Near the pharmacy is a coffee shop, evidently part of a chain, and possessed of a franchise's artificial quirkiness, its seemingly mismatched sofas and chairs and tables corresponding to a precise and determined scheme set forth in the experience section of a corporate brand guidelines binder. Its furniture and fittings evoke decades gone by. Its music, its menu, and, saliently, its prices are utterly contemporary. For affluent younger customers, the effect might be pleasant, transporting them from this street in this neighborhood to a virtual realm inhabited by people very much like themselves across rising Asia, or even across the planet. But for you, who remembers that a fruit seller occupied this particular property until a few months ago, the faux wornness of this establishment would be disorienting. Normally. Today you do not notice.

Over tea you and the pretty girl discuss what ex-lovers meeting again after half a lifetime usually discuss, namely your health, the arcs of your careers, shared memories, yes, this often while laughing, as well as your present whereabouts, and, in passing, so tangentially as merely to be grazed, whether you are currently single. Your waiter is courteous, seeing a pair of elderly people leaning forward, engrossed in conversation, which is, of course, what you see also, except that it is not all you see, for you see too, overlaid on the pretty girl's diminished form, or perhaps rather flickering inside it, a taller, stronger, more zestful entity, happy in this moment, and able yet to dance in the moistness of an eye.

“How strange to be using the word retired,” the pretty girl says as she finishes her tea.

“We're unemployed,” you correct her. “Sounds more alive than retired.”

“Are you looking for work?”

“No.”

“Retired, then.”

You pour two glasses of water.

“You should interview me,” you say, passing her hers. “And I'll interview you. Then we'll be unemployed.”

She takes a sip. “Only if neither of us gets hired.”

You call her the next day, and in the weeks that follow you spend time together, going to a restaurant for dinner one evening, on another converging in a park for a slow-moving stroll. You explore the city's main colonial-era museum and its pungently aromatic zoo, attractions you last visited when your son was a schoolboy. At the zoo you are surprised by how inexpensive tickets are, and further by the size of the facility, which seems bigger than you recall, though you had expected the opposite to be the case. The pretty girl marvels at the aviary, you at hippopotamuses slipping daintily into a mud pool from the grassy banks of their enclosure. She draws to your attention the large number of young men who are here, their accents and dialects often hailing from remote districts. They call to the animals in amusement and wonder, or sit in clusters on plentiful benches, taking advantage of the shade. The zoo has signs listing the daily dietary intake of its most prominent residents, and occasionally a literate visitor is to be heard reading to his fellows the prodigious quantities of food required to maintain such and such beast.

In the pretty girl's company, you give up a small degree of the physical isolation you had imposed upon yourself, venturing out into the city a little more, having, through the presence of a friend, greater reason to do so than you did before, and also, when part of a group of two people, being less afraid than when alone. Yes, the city remains intermittently perilous, in, for example, the slashing thrusts of its vehicles, the ferocious extremes of its temperatures, and the antibiotic resistance of its microorganisms, not to mention the forcefulness of its human predators, and particularly at your age you must stay on your guard. But you savor your tentative, shared reentry, and think that the city may not be quite so fearsome, that indeed, when gazed upon with the good humor that can come from companionship, significant swaths of it appear mostly navigable, at least for the present, while a measure of bodily vitality endures.