Читать книгу Last Days in Shanghai - Casey Walker - Страница 9

WE FLEW BUSINESS class for nearly a day on a packed and pork-smelling China Eastern Airlines jet, chasing back the sunset. Ambien and all the in-flight Harry Potter movies, my companions. When I fell asleep, I was pursued by wizards and schoolchildren with the powers of the devil. Strange how much of life you spend wishing it would only pass, faster, even faster.

Our driver from the Beijing airport wore white gloves and a bellhop’s cap. A drifting April haze gave the city a gray tint, with dark and shapeless buildings that blurred out on the horizon even as we approached them. My first city view was from our Buick, at a stoplight: fifteen construction cranes strapped to naked three-quarter buildings, many of which looked too tall already to support themselves. I followed one up as far as I could see until the smog and sunshine swallowed it.

“See it, Luke?” my boss said, pointing. “The national bird of China.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“The construction crane,” he said.

I’d heard him try this joke around the office in the days before we left. I’d heard all his bits. I made a laugh anyway. Congressman Leonard Fillmore—Republican, California, Fifty-First Congressional District—self-styled Asia hand, now embarked on his first visit to mainland China. He was a presidential hopeful with a familial claim to the office: Leo Fillmore was a distant relation of the thirteenth president of the United States, one of the least distinguished in our history. Nearing sixty, Leo looked to me much older, probably from carrying twice his body weight in grudge and grievance. To his friends he was sometimes known as “Leo the Lion.” But the nickname had spread far and wide among his enemies, too—you could hear it whispered up and down the Rayburn Building corridors: “Leo the Lyin’.”

“Who do we see at the whatever the fuck? Trade people, right?” the congressman said. “I’m fucking starving.”

I reached into my messenger bag for our schedule. The bag, the nicest thing I owned, was a beautiful dark leather piece of work my ex-girlfriend Alex had given me on my twenty-third birthday. I never gave her, in our whole relationship, anything half as thoughtful. Two weeks ago, I’d turned twenty-four, but we hadn’t spoken. I pulled out every piece of paper, sorting through shape-shifting documents, looking for a schedule I was certain I had. Apparently, no. The congressman turned, as much as he could in his seat belt, to give me a shriveling stare. I didn’t acknowledge it. I’d once been more afraid of Leo. I had once been more respectful. Now we just bickered, like he did with his wife—except that she still loved him, possibly.

“You’ve lost the schedule, Mr. Slade?”

He called me “Mr.” only when he was being condescending.

“Everything got scattered when I came through customs,” I said. I’d had to dig deep to find my passport, detained for additional questioning while Leo had already scampered to the bathroom.

“Unbelievable,” he said.

I pulled out my loaner phone and was alarmed to find it had no working signal. Our phones, like the trip, had been provided to us by a real estate firm called Bund International, a Chinese-American joint venture whose American face was a benefactor of Leo’s named Armand Lightborn. We had a five-day itinerary. The pace would be a horse race, and our ever-changing appointments were basically written in water. To be uncontactable was a piss-poor beginning. I shoved my phone and papers back into my bag and found a handwritten note on stationary someone had filched from the Savoy Hotel in London. When I recognized the scrawl, I felt it in my gums, like a dentist’s needle. It belonged to Leo’s wife.

Luke—

Make sure he takes his meds.

No booze.

No whores.

I’m serious.

xx,

Theresa

P.S. Daily updates.

MEN IN ORANGE vests—in groups of ten, and there were tens of these groups—were planting weeping willows and begonias by the road. The congressman watched from behind our tinted glass, and at the pivotal moment when workers balanced a hulking tree and began to tilt it into a pit big enough for its roots, I lost his attention. I was spared his annoyance.

“Hardworking,” the Congressman said. “It’s funny, I don’t see Communists. I don’t see people expecting the state will do everything for them. You have to give them credit.”

I waited to respond. It was a safe bet more was coming.

“Of course, it’s all for naught, isn’t it?” he said.

The “naught” hit my ear flatly—such a false note, as though to be deliberately antiquated was the lone prerequisite to seriousness.

“China could be a superpower, and who could compete?” he said. “But right now it’s all built on sand.”

He weighed his words for another second. He could sometimes be caught in the act of thinking, which is a rarer quality among the elected than one hopes. But it was the ruts and certainties where his thinking left him that disappointed me. Leo was a Republican cul-de-sac on which there stood three churches: anti-tax, business-anything, and Jesus Christ.

“It profits little, you know, to gain the world and lose the soul,” he said. He reached into a corner of his eye and flicked out an invisible crust.

“Christ,” he added. Whether he meant that as an endorsement of the Messiah or a curse, I couldn’t say. We spent so much time with each other that he sometimes talked to himself like he was alone. He’d get annoyed when I answered his rhetorical questions, but he’d snap at me, too, if I ignored some pearl of wisdom for which he awaited praise.

“You’re absolutely right,” I said.

Leo turned his back to me and hunched over, bulging his shoulder blades out into the space of the middle seat between us. I cracked his neck then started kneading my knuckles into his back.

I’d worked for him nearly two years. Leo gave me my first job out of college, my first paid work anywhere, if you didn’t count summers at my dad’s office reorganizing the law library. My second day in Congress, Leo took a call from a legislator who’d won a few presidential primaries, and for all I knew I was sitting at the center of the world. It stirred all my aspirational feelings. Still, I was under no illusions about my hiring. My father had arranged the interview, only weeks before he’d died.

My father and Leo had been five years apart in school, nodding acquaintances in a small town. The passing years, and their professional lives, had slowly entwined the two men, though my father’s political interests always remained strictly bounded. The national squabbles bored him, but he’d staked a tribal claim to our corner of California, the deep southeast where the state turned from coastal cities to lettuce and feedlots. The way our district was drawn, all our previous congressional representatives were from the suburbs of San Diego, so my father had seen Leo in a simple light: a local, and good for our desert town. Every year in the blistering heat of Fourth of July, my father’s law firm hosted a huge fundraiser for the congressman. He’d turned out to be right about the benefits. Our town rejoiced in the jobs when Leo steered us prisons and slaughterhouses. Even before I’d worked for our congressman, I’d spent more time around him than I had with some of my cousins and uncles, and I knew him at least as well as I had ever known my grandparents.

I don’t know what ends my father envisioned for my nascent political life—we were never able to discuss it—but I did know it was his name that gave me a start. Soon after, he’d been sapped by a cancer that was assumed to be slow and unthreatening but was not. Leo, to his credit, had helped me adjust to the long shadow of loss. To me, it wasn’t a question of my emerging from the shadow. What was perhaps possible was adaptation to a life with dampened colors, where every object felt cooler to the touch. More than once, in those first months, Leo had paid for a plane ticket, or arranged work for me in the district office, so I could be closer to home. I owed him that much.

But for a long time now, I’d been creeping toward pessimism about my work. Perhaps it was still just missing my father—a pessimism about the world at large. I’d told Leo it was time for me to move on. I did not tell him his office was a constant reminder of death. In response, Leo promised that if I would stay just one more year, he could find me a position with one of his foundation contacts, something gentle and gloriously funded. “Arts outreach. Or humanitarian shit. Twice the pay,” he’d said. “How happy would that make you?” I wasn’t sure that happiness was on the table, but I wasn’t opposed to the amelioration of suffering.

Among my current duties—unmentioned when I’d been hired—was to loosen up the pinched muscles near Leo’s spine and work out the painful bended kink in what the doctor called his “frozen shoulder.” When this first started, I’d emailed friends (other assistants, all of us) about this mission creep from legislative aide to part-time masseuse. They had no sympathy. They’d all done worse. One aide had written, uncredited, her boss’s entire book on leadership and the importance of integrity in public life. Another was required every morning to prick his boss’s finger and run the diabetes blood check, and when it was time for the shot of insulin to be administered, it was an assistant—it was one of us—with untrained hands planted on the furry lower back of the member of Congress. We retrieved enema kits and scheduled colonoscopies. We were next to our bosses when their doctors delivered the results of biopsies. We lied to their wives. We flattered their children. We made airport pickups at Dulles and brought along ice chests stocked with their favorite sodas and snacks. And we had, some of us, driven to Baltimore in Thanksgiving traffic to pick up a senator’s granddaughter from Johns Hopkins. We traded these stories, exacting what we could of revenge through exposure of our bosses’ privacies. This did not preserve any of our dignity.

I rubbed the knot out of Leo’s neck. It occurred to me to strangle him, for a passing second. I noticed the collar on his shirt was looser. He’d been losing weight on doctor’s orders.

“You heard the story about Kissinger?” he said.

“His consulting firm? Is Polk talking to them?”

“No, no,” Leo waved me off. “Early Kissinger. Kissinger and Nixon. China, in ’71.”

“’72, I think.”

“In ’71 they had Kissinger sneak in through Pakistan,” Leo said. “Before meeting Mao.”

He loved old stories of cloak and dagger, admired the exquisite details like an art historian talking about Vermeer.

“They can’t risk blowback in the States before any meeting even happens,” Leo said. “So they want Kissinger to get to China undercover. Set it all up with Zhou. You know Zhou?”

“Not personally, no.”

“Mao’s right hand. Whole burden on Kissinger is to read Zhou close, make sure Mao is really game.”

“I guess I hadn’t heard this,” I said. I was waiting for the part where Leo would claim he was the young pilot flying Kissinger’s plane, or the advisor whispering strategy in his ear.

“I love it,” Leo said. “They get Kissinger to Pakistan for all the usual bullshit. They’ve got press around, but they make it look pretty dull. Kissinger goes to a dinner one night, and the next morning his people start passing it around, ‘Oh, he’s got Delhi belly. He’ll have to spend a few days resting up.’ They send him to some villa up in the hills.”

“They got away with that?” I said.

“Probably harder then than it is now,” Leo said. “They didn’t have all this Internet shit, but in those days there was still a US foreign press. Anyway, they dress Kissinger up in a big old droopy hat and sunglasses and fly him out of Rawalpindi at three o’clock in the morning. They don’t tell the State Department—they don’t tell anyone. Kissinger twists the screws, and then, boom, all of a sudden Nixon’s going to China. They scare the piss out of the Soviets, push the Chinese on Vietnam. Two guys did it—two fucking guys.”

He wagged two fingers in my face.

“Look at me,” Leo said. “I’m getting wistful.” He laughed. I was happy he’d forgotten about our lost schedule. Only what Leo forgot could be forgiven.

Compared to Kissinger in China, Bund International’s plan for Leo, at least what there was of one, sounded prosaic. Boosterish commerce talks bound to be vague because Leo had no power to make them binding or specific; stultifying infrastructure surveys of the latest in agricultural projects or hi-tech districts. Leo would probably be photographed in a hard hat or a lab coat, looking like an asshole. We’d eat dinner with provincial officials inside some newly built business park in the gutted center of an ancient city. I braced for it: Leo sour and glowering, none of the meetings up to the level of his ambitions, and so heaping his frustrations on me, stone after stone. It was Wednesday. I’d suffer him without respite through Sunday. We’d fly home out of Shanghai, but even as I longed for that flight, I knew it wouldn’t mean reprieve—just more business-class hours of Leo elbowing me awake to share his ailments. I’d brought two suits in one small suitcase, but I was starting to think that packing light wasn’t smart when you were going to be eating all your meals with unfamiliar utensils. On the plane, I’d spilled sauce from gingered pork on the sleeve of one of my dress shirts. The hardened stain already looked permanent.

THE ASIA HOTEL on Workers’ Stadium Road had floors of what looked like—though, really, who could tell?—marble. It was polished slick until it was actually dangerous. The lobby wasn’t busy, and while Leo checked in I gave my suitcase a kick to see how far it would glide to the elevator. Most of the way, it turned out.

A young man intercepted us. He held a sign: Congressman Mr. Leonard Filmore.

“I am CCPIT driver,” he said. “For meeting?”

“There are two Ls in ‘Fillmore,’” Leo said.

The elevator pinged, and Leo stepped in. He stood with his legs apart in the middle of the tight space and punched at his phone like force would scare it into compliance. He let the doors close onto my shoulder. I pushed in next to Leo, and the driver held his sign out toward us. “Give us ten minutes,” I said, as the elevator closed in his face. Leo pounded the lit key for the top floor and groaned when we slowed to let me out five stories below him.

I turned every switch in my hotel room, but the lights never came on. I couldn’t get the automated curtains to open, so I changed clothes in the half dark. The room phone rang, and because I was sure it was Leo, and I knew he was angry, I made him wait ten rings.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’m calling to tell you that you’re a fucking liar,” Leo said.

“Does your room not have electricity, either?”

“I’m on a lobby phone,” Leo said. “You’re late.”

They told me at the front desk, once it was too late to matter, that I had to put my room key into a slot near the door to activate the power.

BEIJING TRAFFIC WAS abysmal, and it took nearly an hour to get to the meeting—a drive that would take fifteen minutes, the driver said, “in middle night.” Hundreds of bicycles passed our tinted windows. I took a few pictures through the glass, most of which came out showing Beijingers in mid-pedal with the ghostly reflection of my face superimposed on them. One of our constituents had called the office only last week to complain about an article she’d read alleging China was slaughtering stray dogs by the tens of thousands. I’d thanked her for her concern and promised to look into it. That wasn’t enough. She wanted the congressman to introduce an International Bill of Canine Rights. She had drafted one herself. She wouldn’t let me off the phone until I promised I would give it “serious time.” It arrived two days later, handwritten, on yellow legal paper—so clearly loved and so deeply felt that I had nothing but sadness for the woman’s effort. It stunk with amateurism, and no one would give it a moment’s thought.

Beijing was so dug up, I imagined rats in swarms. Two townhouses on my block in DC were under renovation—so minor, compared to this—and for weeks now I slept and woke to scratching mice. I’d decided to be ecumenical, thinking the mice had as much right to scramble and thrive as I did. But then I saw their shit in the pan I scrambled eggs in. After that, I set traps—broke their necks, one by one.

“You know what’s different about this skyline?” Leo said. “No churches. How long you think they’ll last without God?”

“Without our God?”

“Without Jesus.”

“I think they’ll last awhile,” I said.

He grabbed me by the back of the neck and shook me. I think it was meant to be playful.

“You’re lukewarm, Luke,” Leo said. “Spiritually, there isn’t a worse place to be.”

Like many latecomers to religion, the congressman had a past that didn’t square with this current revival of faith. He said he’d spent years looking for love in a drink—“My genetic affliction,” he called it. Sober Leo was supposed to be the new skyline of the man. But where others saw renovation, I saw scurrying rats. I didn’t think he’d read much of the Bible outside of some red-letter verses of Matthew, and I could more than match him just from remembered Sunday school. To me, his salvation by Christ sounded scripted. But then again, part of my job was writing his scripts. It was hard to discern where my failures ended and his began.

THE BUND INTERNATIONAL translator who met us at the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade was a young woman—around my age, I imagined—with impeccable, professional English, crisp as the pleat in her skirt. Her name was Li-Li. My first words to her were an apology.

She led us to a conference room set with lidded porcelain teacups. Framed letters of praise from leaders around the world hung six to a wall, including one from a nasty despot whose removal the congressman had very publicly supported. The letters reminded me of schoolchildren’s valentines: To Beijing, in eternal friendship.

The men we were supposed to meet, though I had lost the papers telling me exactly who they were, kept us waiting. The congressman reached obsessively into his pocket, not because his phone was ringing, but because it wasn’t, and it made him feel marooned. I stared at a winding scene of the Yellow River done in a sparkling mosaic on the facing wall. Finally, three men appeared. We stood, they bowed. They were solemn, early forties, ranged from slim to paunchy. Bureaucrats I imagined you could purchase by the pound in an office supply store. Li-Li sat at the distant head of the table, as though translation were a work of umpiring, and she wasn’t partial to either side.

My notes from that day reflect a circular conversation of platitudes and vague promises. China and the United States could work together “for mutual benefit”—a “win-win situation.” We prepared to sign some nonbinding documents of mutual praise. The pens they gave us were exquisite, worth far more than the pledges.

Leo, who never took a note himself, scribbled something on the back of a receipt. He had me announce that we were taking “a short recess,” our code for “emergency bathroom break.” I looked at Li-Li and waited for her to filter my English into Mandarin. Leo left the room, walking gingerly.

With Leo gone, the officials began to speak among themselves in staccato bursts, and I waited for them to acknowledge me. Li-Li clicked her fingernails against one another, and their polish shined in the light. I caught her eye and was about to say something to her when I saw her breathe in sharply and redden. Her eyes flicked toward the men, then back to me, and I wondered what kind of insult she’d understood that I hadn’t. I took Leo to be the target of the men’s mockery, if only because I was too insignificant to be worth denigrating.

When the congressman grumbled back into the room, the trade officials stood.

“This has been most productive,” one said, “and now we must adjourn for urgent matters.”

Whether this meeting would bring even a single shoelace out of their country and into ours was doubtful, even if we talked for three more hours, but Leo clearly felt that if they’d ended the meeting first, even if he was ready to leave, then he had lost their respect.

“We should have left half an hour ago,” he told the officials.

With every man in the room now annoyed or offended, we nevertheless posed for photographs. I took paired grip-and-grin shots and more inclusive group ones. The men who I suspected had just sat mocking the congressman clustered around him. The most important officials stood at the center, and a deteriorating line of nonentities were pushed out to the edges, a ghostly shoulder of the translator hovering barely into the frame. In the two shots where I wasn’t taking the pictures myself, Li-Li took them, and I came out half-faced.

AT THE MAIN entrance, a phalanx of suited men stood in a red-roped receiving line. Li-Li hurried us toward a side exit, but not before I saw the guest of honor. “El Presidente,” we called him, the latest fist-rattling Latin American head of state to become beatifically popular among the equatorial poor. He was built like a keg of beer, dressed in military epaulets and heavy black boots. Applause for El Presidente—thin-skinned petrotyrant, self-appointed heir to Simón Bolívar—turned to uproar. The congressman’s face soured in a way that made me smile. “That motherfucker,” Leo said.

Li-Li left us in a side parking lot where we waited for our Buick to come around. Still smog, no breeze. Disappearing at the edge of my sight line were two buildings under construction that looked to be falling into one another.

“I saw him in the bathroom,” the congressman said.

“El Presidente?”

“I’ve never seen a man who needs three bodyguards just to take a piss.”

“Just now?”

“I’m at the far pisser, but he pulls up to the middle one. Right fucking next to me,” Leo said. “I look over, and of course I know it’s him straight off, the fucking faker. Thinks he’s been to hell and back because he can put on a goddamn military Halloween costume.”

“Do you think he recognized you?” I asked. Leo hadn’t been in the military, either, though he had awkward lapses where he seemed to forget that.

“He thinks we were behind that horseshit excuse for a coup last summer,” Leo said.

“He thinks it was the CIA.”

“White men in suits,” my boss said. “We’re all alike to him.”

“You did sort of suggest you’d like him killed . . .”

“That was taken out of context,” he said.

“I’m not sure he reads the corrections in the Washington Post.”

Leo snorted. “I could feel him looking at me.”

“Did you say anything?” I asked.

“Longest piss of my life. He finished first and just stood there at the sink. I was racking my brain for something to say. Needle him, you know?”

“Was he really a general?”

“They don’t have an army, they have criminals with Kalashnikovs.”

“I didn’t know he even spoke English,” I said.

“Heavy accent.”

“He always uses that translator in interviews.”

“Translator. Right. It’s a good ploy,” Leo said. “What he said to me was, ‘You Yankees will never have me swinging by the neck.’”

“He meant us?”

“He didn’t mean the baseball team.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And he said, ‘Your government won’t hang me by the throat. That’s a promise.’ I told him not to go thinking his dick was so big, because if the United States wanted him by the balls, he’d squeal just like anyone else.”

“You said that?” I said. If some version of this story got out, I wouldn’t sleep for weeks from the volume of press phone calls. I’d go hoarse with adamant denials.

“Squirmy motherfucker. He smirks again. Says something in Spanish that I didn’t catch. Then he really starts letting it fly, about my mother and all the rest. Not that I understood all of it, but I’m not a fucking idiot. So then his guards hear the yelling and come busting in like I was going to cut him. They all line up and glare at me. I said to them, ‘The second we decide to, and this is a promise, we’ll have a big dick up your fucking ass.’ I gave him a good look at it. Then I zipped up and walked out.”

Our car slid up, and I opened the door for Leo. You hear about grown men, in government, behaving like children, but you’re never prepared for how much they have at their disposal that a playground kid could never dream of: swinging your dick around really can make embassies close and bombs fall, if you swing it right. I couldn’t always protect Leo from himself—my job was only to prevent, as much as I could, full public knowledge of the crooked timber he was made from. That meant I was the voice of the thinker after he spoke without thinking and the face of the family man when his family should have disowned him. I was hired as an adjunct to the congressman’s memory, but I found myself cast to play his conscience, too. I knew the next time I saw El Presidente railing from the floor of the United Nations I would think of the old raisiny dick of my American congressman, trying to shake menacingly at a Latin American head of state in a Chinese bathroom.

WE SPENT THE afternoon pawned off on a guide who called himself “Snow.” Snow was instructed to show us the entirety of official Beijing in about two hours, before our dinner with men from Bund International. In the Mao Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, a waxen copy of the chairman lay under glass, his actual body preserved somewhere in the bowels of the building. He’d been pumped so full of formaldehyde at death that he’d swelled to nearly twice his living size.

We entered the Forbidden City. Most of its buildings were under construction, part of the city’s facelift for the next year’s Olympics. I knew that by the time of the Opening Ceremonies, Leo hoped to be standing tall on his own world stage: at the Republican National Convention, as their next nominee for president. His would be a dark-horse bid—a pitch-fucking-black horse, honestly—but no one had asked my opinion. Leo’s intentions were publicly revealed only in the form of an “exploratory committee,” an event with press coverage limited to our town’s local newspaper.

The Forbidden City was a corpse of its former power, its anatomy forcibly preserved from ruin, like Mao’s. The open squares were hot and shadeless, white and blinding. The fresh-red buildings and yellow roof tiles looked brighter still against the background of gray sky. Squint your eyes, and it was all on fire—the tiny bands of blue around the entryway doors like the hottest part of the flame and the concrete walkways the color of ash. It was easy now to walk through the center of an empire, open to anyone, now that there was no longer an emperor. What was truly forbidden, the secrets of power these courtyards once held, was still forbidden of course—it had just been relocated to office buildings and conference rooms.

We crossed marble bridges and walked quickly through gardens built for the recitation of poetry, and Leo told me, as we hurried, that this morning’s meeting was just as he suspected: Beijing promised an erratic officialdom, tense and sensitive to slight. He read their wariness as a general trait of “the Chinese.” I was willing to trust the research I’d assembled and say that official Beijing’s suspicion of foreigners was not paranoid invention—two hundred years of British trading companies and gunboat diplomacy; of French concessions and Portuguese merchant cities; of Japanese adventuring and Western opium; of Chinese coastal cities built for the profit of financial capitals that were oceans away. And the internal distress: In just a hundred years, an empire had fallen, nationalist reign gave way to a Communist insurgency and a civil war; a victorious Mao proclaimed a republic from the back gate of the Forbidden City in which we stood. United States policy for most of Mao’s rule was that he didn’t exist, that the “real” China was the tiny island one hundred miles off the coast occupied by a defeated army turned political kleptocracy. A quarter century of Mao’s rule marked time by peasant starvation and burned temples, with anyone vaguely bookish or otherwise politically suspect sent to rural labor camps to be reeducated by the working peasantry. And Leo complained the officials seemed tense?

The congressman rushed through the Forbidden City as quickly as he had skimmed my briefing book. He showed no interest in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, massed above us on its terrace, with a double-hipped roof that looked like it floated on air. Leo claimed he knew plenty about China already, but I found he was often sloppy with that kind of knowledge, too prone to trust his dimly rendered general picture. He was pleased, though, to have diagnosed our frosty reception as part of some Chinese national personality disorder. He liked ice to crack. There’s no charm without resistance.

I lagged behind him. I peeked into closed-off sections of the complex. The side courts were in disrepair and the interior buildings almost entirely off-limits to my prying. Here is where the Empress Dowager Cixi made her extravagant demands. Here is where Puyi took the throne, lost it.

AT DINNER AT Beijing Da Dong Roast Duck restaurant, the congressman got drunk with businessmen from Bund International who slurped their noodles and instructed us to dip our Peking duck skin in the sugar bowl next to each place setting.

I reached out once to stay the hand of the waitress pouring Leo’s wine. It was fatal to my boss, what she kept dumping into his glass. The congressman struck my hand out of the way, hard enough that other guests heard the slap. He screwed his face up tight and hung a tough look on me. He was going to sit here with the other men and take his drink, and I had no right to stop him. Leo saw himself as a man of great soul beset, like all great men, by fierce demons—but his only proof of the great soul was the existence of the demons.

I watched him empty his wine. He dissolved into a clutter of symbols. He had an American flag pin he wore on his lapel the way someone superstitious might clutch an amulet. He had hardened hair, thin, combed sideways across his head and screaming insincerity. He was nothing like my own father, but he was a fatherly archetype—big-voiced, impatient, ever vigilant of his status in the room. Whenever he tried to expand his emotive range beyond gloating or annoyance, it was without exception uncomfortable.

Through dinner, the congressman did most of the talking. He was interrupted only when someone thought it necessary to announce the name of a particular delicacy being set before us or to relate a historical fact about our surroundings: “Here is the Cantonese chicken dish that Richard Nixon declared his favorite during the visit in 1972.” Something was said about Chairman Mao that I didn’t catch. And did we know the restaurant was once a granary for the Forbidden City?

Contrary to the custom of our hosts, who made these pleasantries and discussed nothing else specifically, the more Leo drank, the more eager he became to defend the intricacies of America’s global military positioning. He drank himself presidential, as though offering a realpolitik address behind closed doors to reluctant allies. The men from Bund International—with Li-Li along to translate—listened politely.

“Think of it as poker,” Leo said. “Saddam was representing aces.”

We sat at the table fifteen strong, as though in a well-catered committee meeting. I was served an architecturally plated dish of lotus root and crab. The low light was flattering, the windows at dusk even more inviting as decorative lanterns came lit in the street below. I focused just beyond Leo’s head, at the waiter boning out a duck, slivering the meat onto a serving dish.

“Fine, Saddam was bluffing. But it was still the right play, on the percentages,” Leo said. Our private dining room invited and prolonged his diatribe. “We made him show.”

The men nodded like veterans of Macau poker tables. The highest ranked among them, a vice president of some sort, eventually raised a question. He went by Charles, for our benefit.

“There is always a duty,” he said. “To know the tendencies of your opponent. To know how he bets.”

Charles was the only man who wore a tie I liked, checkered black and silver, sealed at the collar with an impeccable Windsor knot. He had matted cheeks, among many that glistened red around him, and two tiny eyes in his chinless, oval face.

“Let me tell you a story about our ‘opponent,’” Leo said. “Spring, 1990.” I stifled a groan. Leo continued: “We had this woman testify before Congress—a girl, really, not even eighteen. She worked in a Kuwaiti hospital. Saddam’s army bashed their way into the ward where she worked with newborns. The soldiers ripped three-pound babies out of their incubators, left them to die on the concrete floor of the hospital.”

“No one would dispute this is inexcusable . . .” Charles said.

Leo, at the time, had taken the nurse’s story personally. He pled for weeks after, to whoever would listen, begged we deploy our vast military for humanity’s sake. Pundits joked that the shortest distance between any two points was the straight line between Leo Fillmore and a television camera.

“It was truly awful,” Leo said. “And you know what else? None of it was true.”

Charles looked to me for clarification. I only scribbled in my small black notebook. On its title page I had written: The Congressman’s Memory. It started as a joke between Alex and me and afterward turned into a piece of our ritual banter. Once when I was running late in the morning, gathering my things, I asked her, “Have you seen The Congressman’s Memory?” and she’d said, “No, and I haven’t seen his conscience, either.”

“She was a setup,” Leo went on. “Her father was a Kuwaiti diplomat. They hired a goddamn advertising firm to coach her.”

“So what is the reason for this story?” Charles asked. He looked to Li-Li, perplexed, as though there must be context she was omitting.

“My point is this time it was pure calculation,” Leo said. “I don’t have anymore fucking illusions about saving the world.”

He took a pause here to survey his audience. The Gospel of Leo went something like this: “For God so loved the world he said, ‘Fuck it, you people aren’t worth saving.’”

“This sounds very much like two poor poker players,” said a man who hadn’t spoken all evening. He’d had the shortest introduction of all the executives and was seated farthest from Charles. His tie was thrown back over his shoulder. He was wildly drunk—a bottle of whiskey that had sprouted lips. He looked like he knew as soon as it was out of his mouth that he’d fucked himself.

“Well Saddam’s fucking dead,” Leo said. “How’s that for a hand?”

Charles directed curt words at the man who’d spoken out of turn. The man stood up, mostly under his own power, and there might have been fire ants crawling up his legs as he marked a curved path to the door. He turned, preparing for a final exchange, and was cut off by three men at once, who ushered him into the hallway. Li-Li translated none of this.

Charles stood for a toast to clear the air, but he looked like a man who knew his operation had just turned from rescue to salvage.

“We look forward to much future cooperation with Congressman Fillmore,” he said. Leo glared into his wine glass.

Charles continued: “And now I offer a toast to our mutual friend, Armand Lightborn, for bringing us together tonight.”

“To Armand,” Leo said, raising a glass to the absent presence. But I didn’t write Lightborn’s name in my book. I knew better.

MY BOSS FILLED my suit pockets with the business cards he’d collected, expecting me to alphabetize them later.

“They wish to say good night to you now,” Li-Li said, indicating the line of men clustered expectantly at the door.

The representatives of Bund International swayed like they were on the deck of a pitching ship. Charles listed right and gave my hand a firm shake, with a sweeping motion to lead me out of the room. He held the congressman back to offer further apologies. I stood in the corridor, and Li-Li was forced to take a few steps toward me as men gathered in tight around Leo. I remembered her red in the face at the morning’s meeting, embarrassed by how the men around her spoke, and so I took the risk of saying what came into my head. I had a desire to put a beam of daylight between my boss and me. I leaned to her ear: “You ever get the feeling these guys would rob their own mothers’ graves?”

Li-Li worked on what I’d said, visibly untangling it. Before she could respond, Charles pulled her away.

I hung back in the low, gold light at the top of the stairway, and I wanted to crawl into my shadow. It wasn’t that I thought I had risked much—it was that her reaction showed me an uncomfortable reflection. Perhaps to Li-Li I didn’t appear as different from these men as I wanted to be.

IN THE HOTEL lobby, I started for the elevator, but Leo didn’t follow. He collapsed into an armchair.

“Think I’ll go for a night swim,” he said.

“It’s too late. I don’t think they’ll let you in the pool.”

“The hell they won’t.”

“You don’t want to go upstairs?”

“I need some air,” he said. Air wasn’t going to do it—I don’t know what would have sobered him up besides maybe dialysis. The hotel staff, skating by on secret errands, made a good show of not staring at Leo sprawled in the chair.

“Phone,” he said, pulling his out.

“They don’t work,” I said.

He punched his. “Phone,” he yelled.

“We can get it fixed tomorrow.”

“These people are jerking us around,” he said. “Typical.”

“Bund International?” I said.

Leo fondled his phone like a baseball, looking for its seams.

“Or you mean Lightborn?” I said.

He made a sharp half rotation of his shoulder, and threw his phone at me, high and tight. I cut it off with my left palm, which spared my face. I had a good chance with my right hand at catching the phone’s low rebound, but I let it slip. My reflexes weren’t professional-grade to begin with, but a few drinks and my hands were steaks. The phone hit the maybe-marble floor. It wouldn’t rise again. A young man from the hotel fell to his knees picking up the pieces.

“You’re going to Kaifeng tomorrow,” Leo said. “They’ll pick you up in the morning.”

“To where?”

“I told them you’re my chief of staff,” he said. “The fuckers.”

Our actual chief of staff, John Polk, saw me as a nepotistic hire and barely tolerated me. Chemotherapy had left Polk’s head sheen as a missile, but he still kept two cell phones holstered on either side of his cock and would scream at me even from a hospital bed. Fallen sick, Polk wasn’t any wiser or more empathetic a person, but much more was forgiven of him. He’d never traveled with us, even before leukemia, because he said it was my job to wash the shit stains out of Leo’s underwear in places without reliable plumbing.

The hotel clerk tried to hand the phone fragments back to me, and I refused them.

“What’s in Kaifeng?” I asked Leo. He was beyond answering. He held both hands to his forehead like they were the brim of a hat.

“You speak English?” I asked the clerk. He nodded, not enthusiastically.

“If he wants to stay down here, then fine,” I said, pointing to Leo, who had slouched until his dress shirt was tight around his belly.

“But you don’t let him go anywhere,” I said. “And tell them.” I pointed to the attendant by the lobby entrance, and the girl behind the front desk. “He stays here.”

I fished out two notes with Mao’s face—two hundred yuan, what I understood was about twenty dollars. The clerk refused and chewed his lips. I pressed the money on him, and he followed me trying to give it back. I didn’t turn toward Leo again until I got to the elevator. The last thing I saw before the doors closed was Leo huddled over a lobby courtesy phone, like it was a toilet he was going to be sick into.

BACK IN MY room, the windows didn’t open. Gray night like gray day. I didn’t like the bed. I slept on and off—mostly off—in a chair until about five a.m., but then there was the hammering. At the foot of the hotel, a few courtyard houses were being demolished. They were single-story structures with shingled roofs, four buildings set in a square so that each house’s central garden was steeled against the wind, against the world—or had been, until now. Narrow alleys threaded between the falling gray walls. Workers pried off tiles, swung sledgehammers.

I thought to call Alex. It was early evening in New York City. My working day was often no more than a fourteen-hour break from my insomniac half dreams of ex-girlfriends, dead relatives, distant friends, and old tormentors. Alex knew something about China—the food anyway. She’d introduced me to hot pot restaurants and soup dumplings. There was a place in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge we both adored. The staff knew what we were there for and brought out crab and pork dumplings in bamboo steamers and we hardly had to ask.

The whole time we’d dated, whenever I’d told Alex she was pretty, she would always find something. She would say her nose was too sharp at its point or her earlobes too long. I told her no one had ever once looked at her earlobes and her nose was cute, like a little bird’s beak. “Words to avoid in reference to a girl’s appearance,” she had said. “Beak.” Plenty of people I worked with would say they didn’t take any bullshit, that they “call it like they see it,” and what they were really saying is it made them feel important to yell at waiters. Alex would never throw a tantrum and was so polite to people she could come off as stiff, but her resistance to bullshit was a layer hard inside, gem in a rock. It was the thing I missed most about her—that she wanted to set the world straight.

I felt Alex and I were still close. Well, close-distant, near-far—these were relative terms. We didn’t hate each other as people who had once had sex often did. Sometimes I imagined trying to explain that idea to a robot, or a child, about two people loving each other very much, or thinking they do, about the awkward grappling in the dark, and then, so much of the time, within a year, wishing that person were never born. You’d get asked why—why is it that way? How does close not stay close? I had nothing to add to the paucity of the world’s collected wisdom about love and its disappearance. I did know that despite the odds—which were all in favor of hatred or indifference—Alex and I were better off in our breakup’s aftermath than most. I rattled my fingernails on top of the hotel room phone.

We’d met while we were both working on the Hill, though Alex hadn’t ever liked DC. There wasn’t enough of a city in the shadow of those monuments, she thought, not enough free air: all of it was requisitioned by government business. When the Ohio congressman she’d worked for died in office—physically in office, below his wall of honorary degrees—she took a vague-sounding program coordinator job for a ludicrously named nonprofit in New York City. She had a lot of extra time for email, I noticed, working at Give the World A Hug. They had a tiny office carved between the load-bearing columns of a flat-topped financial district tower, the barest sliver of the Hudson River visible through the hallway window.

For a while after she moved, I spent a lot of hours on the Acela Express. I had the Friday-evening trains memorized and waited all week to be discharged into Penn Station, that horrid, wholly unredeemable hallway. Every week I marveled that I was in the busiest train station in the country, and not once had an architect ever considered how a human would get on or off a train. Invisible entrances, mousehole stairwells. I had, more than once, been walking out of the train station and had a bewildered tourist ask where Penn Station was. I liked to imagine what it might have been like if Alex could have met me in the old Penn Station, the Beaux Arts one built a hundred years ago, with Roman vaulted ceilings and pink-hued travertine marble. We would have had to meet in another time, years before we were ever born, before that old station was demolished. But it would have been a beautiful thing.

I would walk a cross-town block from Penn Station and take the Q train to her out in Brooklyn. I liked to ride over the river, take stock of lower Manhattan, make sure everything was still in its place. My weekend visits never stopped as much as work intervened, and they trickled. Finally, it seemed like we were being realists to cut the official strings. Amtrak talked of cracks in the disk brakes on their Acela trains, and I got stuck in Baltimore about every third trip. Broken-down Baltimore might have been the sourest note—the boarded-up sections of the city you could see from the tracks made visible all the consequences of neglect.

It hadn’t been too long since I had seen Alex, probably about four months. No, more—five. She’d switched apartments, taken on roommates, trying to save money. When I imagined men she was dating now, I thought of bankers having affairs. I pictured men of a different infrastructure: a pied-à-terre; the Metro-North; Greenwich, CT. Lonely weekends where Alex’s phone rang only when he was sneaking a call from a corner of his property. I was making all this up because it was the worst thing I could imagine for her. The worst proves irresistible at certain times of night, usually between two and four a.m. Now it was nearing six. I have been an insomniac since I don’t know when.

I wouldn’t sleep anymore, so I walked down to see if Leo had managed to drown himself in the indoor pool. I thought it was smart policy to get away from my room’s phone—the easier it is to get in touch with people, the easier it is to forget how often you shouldn’t. At the pool, they wouldn’t let me in: the young woman was very apologetic, but she pointed emphatically to a sign specifying the seven a.m. opening hour.

I searched, and Leo wasn’t sacked out in the lobby, which I took as a good sign. The attractive planters of decorative ferns were no worse for wear—vases of floating cherry blossoms were unspilled and unbroken, so perhaps Leo had just gone quietly to bed. I wished him luck sleeping off Bund’s hospitality. In the hotel business center, I found my work email inaccessible, for reasons no one could or would explain, but this felt less like something I needed to correct than like the momentary lifting of a burden. I went out into the Beijing morning, where old limber men stretched at their apartment windows and women unhooked the hanging laundry. It was six thirty, so with twelve hours’ time difference, Alex would be just leaving work, maybe as restless as I was.

I was obsessed for a time with how Alex kept my memory, what she told herself about how we’d ended. But now I tried not to think about it. You can’t control posterity. When Alex moved away, I felt that all that was left in DC that I cared about were myself and the Jefferson Memorial. But a little sadness at least made the city feel like a more complete place to me: to live there and miss her was evidence that life had transpired, that I was more than my job.

OUT OF THE breakfast-room speakers, woodwind instruments played an Orientalized rendition of a Simon and Garfunkel song. An erhu accompanied, doleful. I picked at the buffet, dragon fruit and rice congee, espresso and an omelet bar.

“Someone to see you in the lobby,” a hotel clerk said, touching my shoulder. I wasn’t yet feeling suitable for company.

Thursday morning in a business hotel. The lobby bustled with anxious men hoping to close deals before the weekend. A young woman wandered out from the other side of a pilaster.

“I work for Bund International. My name is Li-Li. You remember?” she said.

There was a mechanical kind of lag as she spoke, as though she pronounced everything to herself in Mandarin, translated it to English, and made sure it was clear before she ventured it out of her mouth.

“I hope your sleep was pleasant?” she said.

“Wonderful,” I said. “We are very pleased.”

There was nothing to add—and nothing was said—about my misjudgment last night in trying to pull her into my confidence at the roast duck restaurant. I hoped for my own sake that I’d mumbled and she hadn’t really heard me.

“And your boss?” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“The partners in Kaifeng will be very disappointed not to see him,” she said.

“This is what was arranged last night,” I said, perhaps too severely.

“Did I say something wrong?” Li-Li asked. She went red. “I apologize for my English. Did you receive my phone messages?”

“The phones are another problem,” I said. “All of these difficulties are entirely my fault.”

“This is not a problem,” Li-Li said hurriedly, though I knew she meant the opposite. “The car is waiting. You are ready?”

She certainly was, in defiance of the hour. Her hair swept tightly across the arch of her forehead, held back with pins, the rest short to her chin. She had faint sideburns bleached white and skin one shade toward olive. Nervous and sober, Li-Li wasn’t my copy, but she was my counterpart—a fraternal twin in this assistant’s life. She held herself together in a way I already envied. Her white blouse was without wrinkle or stain, her skirt and gray jacket right out of a dry-cleaning bag.

“I promise everything will be easier from here,” I said.

“I understand,” Li-Li said. And maybe she did, if she was as well-trained as I was at telling lies.