Afterburn (15 page)

The car phone rang—it was Karen.

"You got the sales report?" she asked.

"Yes. What else?"

"Your daughter will meet you at the restaurant for a late lunch, and Martha Wainwright will be here at five."

He glanced at a taxi speeding past. The driver was reading a newspaper. "Any update on the factory?"

"No."

"It's late."

He knew the on-site generator had arrived, but there seemed to be a question about the scaffolding contractor. "Call Conroy, tell him I'm pissed off."

Then he dialed Ellie. "This is your first husband reporting."

"I'm leaving the retirement village brochure on the dining-room table," she said, as if continuing a conversation they'd been having.

"Terrific. What could be better?"

"I'm just
asking
you to look at it, Charlie."

"I'll do it to get on your good side." He paused. "If you know what I mean."

"Which side
is
my good side, exactly?" Ellie asked.

"Both are very nice."

"Flattery will only get you so far."

"Far enough, I think."

"You're horrible," Ellie said, but he could hear she was pleased. "Oh, and, Charlie, how was the sales report?"

"Manila Telecom is killing us."

"Kill them back."

THE DRIVER
nosed them toward Manhattan, past outdoor billboard advertising already changed in the week Charlie had been away. New movies and TV shows and car models. The speed of everything! The quad-port transformer Ming was so curious about had been a faulty prototype three months ago, a plan six months ago, an idea a year ago, and an impossibility a year before that—merely theoretical, assuming advances in signal compression and polymer chemistry. And if they could get the Q4 into production in six months, it would be obsolete two years out. Terrifying, Charlie thought, if you think about it, which I do, which is why I shouldn't.

They popped out of the tunnel and into the dense bake of the city proper. Inside his moving air-conditioned cave, he could see down the blurred avenue, women pinching their blouses, the shimmering heaviness of the buildings, taxis piled against red lights like overheated beasts. Carbon monoxide layered beneath the oxygen, in and out, exhaust and exhalation. He thought of Ellie in this heat, five or ten years hence. Another reason she wanted to leave.

INSIDE THE RESTAURANT,
waiting for Julia, he watched the businessmen and -women finishing their lunches. Soldiers of twenty-first-century capitalism. The shoes, the neckties, the smiles. So prosperous and young they looked! How fast they talked! I'm a dinosaur to them, thought Charlie. Gray hair and a nice suit. He remembered underestimating some of the old pilots in Thailand, guys who'd seen action in Korea, even one who'd flown at the end of World War II. All dead now. Dead as Sir Henry, the news of whom appeared in that morning's
Wall Street Journal
and
Financial Times
, but already seemed ancient. News cycles and jet lag. Phone calls and sleeping pills. Was he having trouble keeping up? Yes. No, not really. His dream would come back to him. He so rarely remembered them these days. That happened as you got older; your dreams dribbled away like the piss dribbled out of him now—no strong hosing, just a weak and intermittent stream.

Julia shouldered past the waiters—business hair, business walk—a woman, as always, in a hurry but never late. Except for motherhood. She'd waited too long, and now the frantic catch-up hadn't worked. She was tall like he was and always a little thin, he felt, thinner than she needed to be. Why the anxiety? She'd found a partner and made partner; she was set. Maybe if she weighed ten pounds more, he thought, she could get pregnant.

"Good trip?" She bent close for a kiss.

"Too much Chinese food," he said.

"But it's
good
Chinese food."

"Sure, best in the world. But you eat too much, you start dreaming Chinese dreams."

She smiled fiercely at a waiter to bring menus. "I'm sorry I got so upset on the phone. I'd just gotten the news."

"How is Brian with all this?"

She sighed. "He's coming around. We could have a surrogate pregnancy; that's the next thing."

"They fertilize another woman with his semen?" asked Charlie.

"Yep. Very lovely idea, I think not." Julia dropped her napkin into her lap. "Brian isn't crazy about it, either. It raises so many questions for the kid. I mean, you have to explain that the biological mom is not your actual mom, and then they're starting to say that these donor-egg kids have this weird
rejection
feeling, like why did my mom give her egg away, or
sell
her egg?" Julia smoothed the table with her hands, one of Ellie's mannerisms. It suggested that people were reasonable, problems had answers. It calmed. He felt sure Julia did the same at polished conference tables around the city to great effect. She'd soared through law school, married a real egomaniac bastard, divorced him, run wild for a year or two, met Brian, soared through her law firm. A quick study, dependable, good judgment, great energy. But no baby. "Now they're doing these tests," she continued, "where they put the DNA from one woman's egg into the shell of another's. Then fertilize it. The woman would have her
own
kid, using the egg of
another
woman. It'll be too late for me, though. But this is just going to keep going. Theoretically, you could have a grandmother give birth to her granddaughter's child—to her own great-grandchild. You could also have the
opposite
. You could have the granddaughter give birth to her grandmother's fertilized egg, in which case the granddaughter would be giving birth to her own great-uncle or -aunt. It's getting
crazy
. Then there's the multiple fertilized eggs that a couple will have genetically tested."

"I don't get it."

"Let's say Brian and I had six healthy embryos. Soon there will be tests to select the one with the best math skills, fastest runner, best resistance to skin cancer, whatever. Stuff like that."

"They can't really have that technology yet," Charlie said.

"No, but it's coming."

"And you're sure you don't want to try one more time?"

"One
more
time?"

He shrugged.

"For me?" Julia asked. "Or for you?"

"For you, sweetie, of course."

Julia drank her water. "I've accepted this, Dad."

After they ordered he asked, by way of retreat, "So, what about plain old adoption?"

"Maybe, I don't know. We're pretty worn out. Also I've got to get all these drugs out of my system. At least Brian doesn't have to give me any more shots in the butt." She smiled gamely, knowing there was humor in anything, if only you were willing to see it. "I kept telling him that as long as he's got the needle in there he can withdraw some
fat
."

"Sweetie, come on, you're a beautiful girl."

"I'm feeling old. I'm bossing people around now, you know?"

"Think how I feel."

She waved her bread at him. "Oh, Daddy, you just keep going. You're indestructible. It's Mom I worry about."

This surprised him. "Why?"

"She's anxious about everything."

"She wants to move out to a retirement village."

But Julia saw through this, as always. "She wants it for
you
. She wants to take walks in the woods together. I think it's a nice—"

"You've seen it?" he interrupted.

"We went last week," she admitted, watching his reaction. "Drove down there in about ninety minutes. It's
very
well done. They kept a lot of the old trees."

"Mom liked it?" he asked.

Julia frowned at his ignorance. "
Loved
it. She took all the papers with her."

"The papers?"

"The purchase agreements, that kind of stuff."

But hadn't told him.

"I miss Ben," Julia suddenly said. "This baby thing wouldn't have been so bad if I could have talked to him."

He had no answer to that, no answer at all.

Julia touched his hand. "I'm sorry, Daddy, I shouldn't have brought it up."

"Yeah," he said vaguely. "It's okay."

"I'm going to go pee and check my voice mail." She pulled a phone from her bag. "Simultaneously."

He watched his daughter walk through the restaurant, a woman, a wife, maybe a mother someday, but no longer a sister. He loved her painfully all the more for knowing what he had lost. His son, his Ben, his boy, his beautiful Ben-boy, blowing a bubble of spit as he slept in his baby carriage, sucking greedily on Ellie's milk-lumpy breasts at night, standing like a loyal sentinel in his crib as his diaper filled with shit, fifty-nine pounds of enthusiasm at age six, cut over the eye by a swing when he was seven, sitting in the tub and pulling on his penis like a man trying to start a lawn mower, lighting a cigarette off the kitchen stove when he was ten, helping Charlie paint the bathroom when he was twelve, playing the trumpet badly for years, showing Charlie that he could do seven one-handed push-ups, running the mile in four minutes and twenty-eight seconds as a lanky sixteen-year-old, working as a logger in Montana the next summer, just nicking his shin with a chain saw, arrested for fighting in a bar out there—wrote them a beautiful letter explaining the circumstances of the arrest, an argument over Ronald Reagan's politics—then enrolled at Brown, later admitting to Charlie that he'd spent most of the first semester having sex with the beguiling daughter of a Mexican diplomat and reading translations of Mayan poetry. And then his Ben, his only boy, his flesh, his dream, woke up one day with dark bruises all over his legs, his skin almost splitting from the swelling, purple arcs beneath his eyes, panting weakly, and it was a blood problem, said the first doctor; it was leukemia, said the second doctor; there's nothing we can do at this point, said the last doctor, and indeed there was not. Strong as he was, Ben did not linger; he was ejected out of the world and carried to the other place, wherever it was, and that was fifteen years ago, barely a minute, and none of them, Ellie, Julia, or Charlie, had ever been the same.

ON HIS WAY INTO THE OFFICE,
he nodded at the security guard and continued toward the elevators. Teknetrix spread across three floors on Park Avenue, each leased for four more years at three hundred thousand dollars a year—two hundred sales and accounting and technical support people overseeing another eleven thousand globally, almost all of them fifty-dollar-a-week factory workers in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Taiwan. The executive offices sat tucked away on the company's top floor, just eight men and their assistants, a small kingdom of technocrats that Charlie ran like a flight squadron. They didn't need more people than that. Charlie was very hands-on yet gave his vice-presidents broad responsibility, keeping them too busy to fight one another. Teknetrix was small as companies go, too new to feel secure, too lean to replace the carpeting in the back hallways.

Karen looked up when he entered. "Bill McGellen called."

Charlie glanced at his watch. "The market just closed."

"Yes."

"How bad can it be if the market is closed?"

"He can tell you, I guess."

"Okay. Did a package arrive from China?"

"Not yet."

"A big bowl for my wife."

Karen smiled politely, but her eyes said, Call McGellen. Which he would. But first he dialed the toll-free number of Marvin Noff, one of the investment newsletter advisors who had made Teknetrix a strong buy several months before, partly on the announcement of the construction of the factory in Shanghai. Charlie listened to the automated chatter, then punched in his company's stock exchange symbols. "Tek-net-rix," the computer voice responded. "For our—technology growth—model, we have—downgraded—Tek-net-rix—to a—hold—position. This rating was adopted—" that same date, three minutes after the market close. Noff's followers, thousands and thousands of them, the lemmings who made up the market, religiously checked his hotline and Web site each day, and now a significant portion of them would be selling Charlie's company tomorrow. McGellen, the New York Stock Exchange specialist who handled Teknetrix, razoring a slight profit on every order, was not one to panic. Usually he had enough buy orders to accommodate a wave of sell orders. But not now.

"Mr. Ravich, afternoon, sir," said McGellen. "I've got about four hundred sell orders waiting for the market to open tomorrow."

"What's the size?"

"Some small, just a few large. But they add up to much more than I'm holding."

"Give me your numbers."

"I've got new sell orders on three hundred thousand shares at prices from this afternoon's close of thirty-four all the way down to twenty-seven. As for very large buy orders, I have an old one for nine thousand shares at twenty-six."

Charlie sighed. The company was often criticized for not having enough shares on the market, only sixteen million, making it thinly traded and subject to unnatural volatility. "What's your gut?" he asked.

"Once some of these bad boys get involved, we're looking at a big blow-off tomorrow, maybe even twenty percent. There's a lot of fear in the market. The stock is going to get spanked."

"What do you think you'll open at?"

"Hard to say. It could be four points down."

He looked out the window, saw a piece of paper rise past, carried on an updraft. His stock was going the opposite direction. Teknetrix was going to have to defend its price—an ugly business—by buying back stock on the open market. So long as a company had a board-approved buy-back plan and this fact was public information, the action was legal. He called the company's broker and told him to defend the price at twenty-nine dollars a share.

"Noff fucking with you guys?"

"Yeah," said Charlie. "You want to call your portfolio boys upstairs and let them know our stock is cheap tomorrow, I won't mind."

He was spending a few million to avoid losing forty or fifty million in market value. In another season he would've let the price ride down, but he didn't want Mr. Ming to see a sudden drop in Teknetrix's value and start wondering about the fifty-two-million-dollar loan. Nervous guys, Chinese bankers, chewed too much ginseng root. A lower stock price made a hostile takeover easier, too. For all he knew, Manila Telecom was quietly accumulating Teknetrix shares. All this because of Noff, some asshole newsletter guru, some hype-hopper who didn't have suppliers and factories all over the Third World but instead just flooded select ZIP codes with direct-mail campaigns, sucking in new suckers.