How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (12 page)

At times the pretty girl feels shocked looking at you, the shock of being mortal, of seeing you as a cane-propped mirror, of your frail and gaunt form's inescapable contemporaneity to her own. These impressions tend to occur in the first moments of your encounters, when an absence of a few days has run itself like a soft cloth over her short-term visual memory. But quickly other data begin to accrue, likely starting with your eyes and your mouth, her image of you resolving itself into something different, something timeless, or if not entirely timeless, still beautiful, handsome to behold. She sees in the cock of your head your awareness of the world around you, in your hands your armored gentleness, in your chin your temper. She sees you as a boy and as a man. She sees how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.

One night, after a movie in a theater that astonishes you with the size of its screen and the quality of its sound and the costliness of its popcorn, and also with the suddenness of the fight that breaks out among teenagers outside, in which you are knocked to the ground by mistake as a member of the crowd backs up, and you receive a bad bruise on your thigh, but nothing is broken, thank goodness, the pretty girl invites you over to her place. Her tenants grin as you enter, clearly delighted to see that their landlady has a gentleman caller, and with knowing glances make themselves scarce.

“Would you like a drink?” the pretty girl asks.

“I'm not supposed to,” you say.

“A half glass of wine?”

You nod.

She retrieves an opened bottle from the refrigerator. “Sit, sit,” she says, and pours for you both.

The two of you sip at your glasses. A silence descends.

“Should we just go to my room?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She leads you by the hand and shuts the door behind you. She does not turn on the light.

“One second,” she says, heading to her bathroom.

You worry about your balance in the darkness.

“Where's the bed?”

“Oh, sorry.” She directs you with a palm at your waist. “Here.”

You sit down. The mattress is firm. You grope with your hand and, finding a wall, carefully lean your cane against it. A faint light emerges from beneath the door of the bathroom, and sounds emanate from within, scraping, running water, the flush of a commode. You need to use a toilet yourself, but you suppress the impulse. The pretty girl is gone for a while.

When she returns she sits beside you. You kiss. She tastes of mouthwash. She has changed into a nightie and through its fabric your hand can feel her ribs, her belly, the unbelievable softness of her breast like a second set of skin. She helps you undress. She tugs at you rhythmically, and fortunately you become hard, perhaps benefitting from the pressure of your full bladder on your prostate. She applies between her legs an ointment from a jar on her bedside table, and lies on her side with her back to your chest. You fumble a bit but are able to enter her. You move. She touches herself. You hug her with one arm.

Neither of you reaches your finish. You begin to deflate before that moment comes. But, I should add, you do reach pleasure, and a measure of comfort, and lying there afterwards, temporarily thwarted and a little embarrassed, you unexpectedly start to chuckle, and she joins you, and it is the best and warmest laugh either of you has had in some time.

TWELVE

HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY

THIS BOOK, I MUST NOW CONCEDE, MAY NOT HAVE
been the very best of guides to getting filthy rich in rising Asia. An apology is no doubt due. But at this late juncture, apologies alone can achieve little. Far more useful, I propose, to address ourselves to our inevitable exit strategies, yours and mine, preparation, in this lifelong case, being most of the battle.

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

As you create this story and I create this story, I would like to ask you how things were. I would like to ask you about the person who held your hand when dust entered your eye or ran with you from the rain. I would like to tarry here awhile with you, or if tarrying is impossible, to transcend my here, with your permission, in your creation, so tantalizing to me, and so unknown. That I can't do this doesn't stop me from imagining it. And how strange that when I imagine, I feel. The capacity for empathy is a funny thing.

As an illustration, let us consider a fish unable to burp. We can see it now, suspended in its glass bowl, floating weightlessly in a cloud-puffed sky. Its water is so transparent as to be invisible, and were it not for its bowl, it would look as if it were flying in the air, perhaps propelled about by the fluttering of its little fins. It has escaped from the seas, from the lakes, from the ponds, and it dangles now, free, bathed in sunlight and in warmth. And yet it is deeply troubled. It has a pang, a bubble trapped in its fish esophagus. Though heavenly, angelic, still it suffers. It strains. And do our hearts go out to it? Yes, they do. Burp, dear friend. Why do you not burp?

Meanwhile, directly below this aerial ichthyological drama, a mountain's height lower to be more precise, and therefore back on earth, an old man lives in a small townhouse with an old woman. You and the pretty girl have moved in together. She has lost a tenant, and your mind has begun slightly to drift, not always, but on occasion you are unsure where you are, and for this reason residing in a hotel has become problematic. You do not share a bedroom, the pretty girl never having done so before and being of the view that it is a bit late to start, but you do share much of your days, by turns cheerfully, grumpily, quietly, or comfortingly, and when the mood strikes you both, your nights, and you pool your dwindling savings, which are fast being eroded by inflation.

The two of you venture out less often, and the only other people you see with regularity are the pretty girl's one remaining tenant, the actress, and the pretty girl's factotum, who assists you when you are disoriented, and who reminds you of your father, even though physically they are dissimilar. Maybe this is because he is an obedient man, and a house servant, and close to the age at which your father died.

Sitting on a reupholstered chair, a newspaper in your lap and loud music in your ear, to which the pretty girl nods her head as she smokes, and enjoying a temperate autumn afternoon, you are surprised to hear the bell ring and find yourself in the presence of your son. You had forgotten he was coming. You stand to greet him and are swept up in a ferocious yet protective hug. He kisses the pretty girl's cheek, and she too perceives time ripple as she sees a reflection of your younger self, albeit a better-dressed version with a mincing walk quite unlike your own. She offers him a cigarette, and to her satisfaction he accepts. You can sense she is taking a liking to the boy, which makes you happy. He has grown, though that must be unusual for a man of thirty, and even seated he towers above you.

It is the first visit in many years for your son, finally a citizen of his new country and free to travel, and you try to suppress your undercurrent of resentment at his decision to absent himself from your presence in so devastatingly severe a manner. You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one. He tells you he has just been to meet your ex-wife. She is well, he says, and their reunion was tearful and affectionate, and he agreed not to speak of certain things and she for her part did not ask.

For a month you and the pretty girl are caught up in a whirlwind of engagements, mostly at home, your son cooking for you or bringing over a film, but twice outside also, at restaurants of his choosing, swanky places with newfangled decor, where he pays with his credit card. Then he is gone and your world shrinks to the townhouse once again. He has left you some cash, which is fortunate. A blast at a nearby bungalow, purportedly utilized to hold and interrogate suspects by an intelligence service in the past, shatters your windows, and you use the money to have them replaced.

The city beyond is an increasingly mythological space. It intrudes in the form of power and gas outages, traffic noises, and airborne particulates that cause you to wake wheezing in your bed. It can be glimpsed around curtains and through iron grilles. Television and radio also bring in some news of it, usually frightening, but then that has always been the case.

Frequently you have the impression of gazing with the pretty girl, as if from the lip of a cliff, off into a valley where night is falling, a stark and dry and contaminated valley, where perhaps all sorts of bony, mutating creatures abide, many of them carnivorous, and having had your share of carnivorous tendencies yourself, you know that carnivores feed especially on the old and the sick and the frail, terms that have come to cling ever more tightly to you, eroding what once was your supple skin.

But in other moments, meeting with a keen young repairman arrived to fix your telephone connection, or speaking with a knowledgeable young woman behind the counter of a pharmacy, you are pricked by a lingering optimism, and you marvel at the resilience and potential of those around you, particularly of the youth in this city, in this, the era of cities, bound by its airport and fiber-optic cables to every great metropolis, collectively forming, even if tenuously, a change-scented urban archipelago spanning not just rising Asia but the entire planet.

Mostly, however, you do not think of the city, and focus instead on events transpiring nearby, in your living room and kitchen, or on reality-warping phantasms and reveries, transported by your brain as powerfully as by any manufactured technology, though with far less design, or on the pretty girl, with whom you settle for hours, alternating observation with argument or laughter. Together you and she have discovered a passion for cards.

You sit at this instant, side to side, the person's width of sofa between you your playing table. The hands you have been dealt are held close, averted. A wrinkled finger of ash hangs from her cigarette. You lift the ashtray so she can flick it, peering carefully to see if she twists and drops her wrist. No such luck, this time.

“Cheat,” she says.

“A compliment, coming from you.”

Her own eyes take in your posture, the inflection with which you lower the ashtray to the sofa. You are a gifted bluffer, inscrutable, as steady with a bad hand as with a bountiful one. It is your strength. Hers is her unpredictability, her instinct to win big or lose big, to eschew the odds. It is also her weakness. And while both of you suffer from mediocre memory, what you lack in recall you jointly make up for with slow, smoldering intensity.

“I'll raise you, little boy,” she says.

“Well, well. That tells me all I need to know.”

“I'm sure.” She arches a slender brow.

“Wait and see, pretty girl.”

You call. The hand is yours. Chance, really.

You scoop the pile of what were originally backgammon chips, smooth and cool to the touch, mostly whites but a pair of blacks too, sliding them your way. She rises to fetch herself a glass of lemonade.

“It must hurt,” you say.

Inwardly she seethes. But outwardly she grins. “It's not over yet.”

Returned to the sofa, her drink on her armrest, she examines you as you shuffle. Your gaze is focused, like a mechanic disassembling an engine, with none of that cloudiness that can descend upon you so suddenly. She leans forward and waits. You notice. You kiss.

When the pretty girl's death comes it is mercifully swift, at diagnosis her cancer having spread from her pancreas throughout her body. Her doctor is surprised that she is in so good a superficial state. He gives her three months, but she lasts only half that, refusing to relinquish smoking until the very end, when breathing itself becomes difficult. There is no point admitting her to a hospital, and so she spends her final weeks at home, cared for by a nurse, her factotum, and of course you, who tries to hunt down her favorite movies for her to watch an ultimate time. Never fond of prolonged cuddling, she leans against you now, and allows you to stroke her sparse white hair, though whether she does this to comfort you or to be comforted, you are not entirely sure.

“I don't want you to be alone,” she tells you one afternoon, as you sip your tea.

“I won't be,” you say. You attempt to add that her factotum is here, and her tenant, and on the telephone your son. But you are unable to form the words.

Medications do not relieve her pain, but they make it less central, and in her center builds instead a desire to detach. It costs her to be touched, as she approaches her finish, companionship softly irritating her, like the remaining strand of flesh binding a loose milk tooth to its jaw. An almost biological urge to depart is upon her, a birthing urge, and at the end it is only with great consideration for what has been, with love, in other words, that she manages to look up from her labors to give you a smile or squeeze your hand.

She dies on a windy morning with her eyes open. You arrange to bury her at a graveyard belonging to her community. She might not have had much to do with them, but it is unclear to you where else she ought to be buried. Besides a preacher, a pair of grave diggers, and a prospecting band of professional mourners, who tear up and moan with robust commitment, there are just three of you in attendance.

The actress who was the pretty girl's tenant sticks around for a while, because the pretty girl has asked her to, but uncomfortable in a house otherwise occupied only by men, and despite the low rent, eventually she departs. The factotum stays, in part out of loyalty to the pretty girl and in part because it is easy to skim money from you. You do not begrudge him this. You would do the same. You have done the same. It is a poor person's right. Instead you are grateful for his help, for his refusal to sever you from your few remaining possessions by violence. The townhouse's water pressure has dipped so low that filling your tub takes an eternity, and therefore you must be sponged, sitting naked on a plastic stool in your bathroom and unleashing the occasional prodigious fart, and this the factotum does for you twice a week, without complaint.

Until one day you wake up in a hospital bed, attached to interfaces electrical, gaseous, and liquid. Your ex-wife and son are there, and they look a little too young, and you have a moment of panic, as though you have never left the hospital, as though the last half decade of your life were merely a fantasy, but then the pretty girl enters. She too is a little too young, and maybe she has just heard of your heart attack and rushed here from her home in the city by the sea. But it does not matter now. She is here. And she comes to you, and she does not speak, and the others do not notice her, and she takes your hand, and you ready yourself to die, eyes open, aware this is all an illusion, a last aroma cast up by the chemical stew that is your brain, which will soon cease to function, and there will be nothing, and you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved, you have loved your father and your mother and your brother and your sister and your son and, yes, your ex-wife, and you have loved the pretty girl, you have been beyond yourself, and so you have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.