Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (21 page)

A broad man in a tidy blue suit escorted him to the private elevator. He swiped a key card and the doors swished open pleasantly. They stepped inside. He swiped the card again, entered a few digits, a string of ten, and the doors shushed closed and they began to rise. The walls were made of glass. After two floors they were looking out into the night. The street looked like a battleground after a marauding army had passed through. Bodies everywhere. People passing and lying and sitting and the revolving blue and red lights of the police. The elevator rose with a barely audible hum. The sensation of motion was slight, a scant pressing of the feet to the floor as the elevator raced skyward.

Four floors down was the street. Charles recognized it as Sixth Avenue. The site of his confrontation with the protesters. How long ago that now seemed. Another life. Another man.

The elevator rose above the smoke like a plane finally clearing the clouds. Moving swiftly and surely. Up. Up. Up. The lights of the downtown area fell away. The windows of office buildings were lit and became clear. And then they too blurred in perspective as the elevator rose and the vista opened beneath them. The lights of the city, the famous lights of the city burning beneath them, white and yellow and red, but mostly orange like scattered embers of a city laid to waste.

The elevator rose and rose. Rose above the buildings and then some more. The hotel itself seemed to be shrinking to a point. The elevator's trajectory bending backward and up, a curving of the metallic spine headed toward the top. The elevator man or security man or whoever he was drummed his fingers against the back wall. He offered Charles a stick of gum, which he refused. Why did he feel as if he were a prisoner at execution, riding to the gallows?

The elevator slowed and stopped. The pressure in his belly eased. The security elevator man put the gum in his pocket and gave him a little friendly nudge with his elbow. “Go ahead, sir. They're waiting for you.”

Then he was in the clatter of the dining room, soft music overhead, dim lighting, the cool recycled air of the air conditioner, delegates of various nations huddled in groups of two or three, animated economic discussion, the light tinkling of ice in glass as they complained and argued in loud voices. Evidently they hadn't appreciated being trapped inside their hotel all day. Across from Charles sat two of his oldest friends, Sir Edward Bancroft, Teddy to those that knew him, one half of the pair that made his only friends during those lonely years at Cambridge. Sir Teddy, in his tan suit and blue tie, in a wheelchair to which he'd been confined as long as Charles had known him. Sir Teddy. The Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

The other friend was Martin Oswego. Martin was from the Ivory Coast, the West African nation, and he, like Charles, had been a scholarship boy from a former colony.

Look at them now, financial ministers at the highest levels of power, drinking double martinis in a fancy American hotel.

Five minutes. In five minutes he had gone around the world. From victory to ignoble despair. And now skyrocketing back from despair to happiness, realizing all in an instant who had called for him, whose power had pulled him from that bus, given him a fresh change of clothes, a new suit which was a perfect fit, whose power and influence had snuck him through the employee entrance to the Sheraton in the loading dock, and sent him all the way up here to this hall in the sky.

“I was arrested, Teddy. They put me in jail.”

And here came Sir Teddy's booming laugh.

“I know, Charley. You certainly did make a fucking mess of things.”

And here at the heart of everything, in the holy sanctuary of the Sheraton dining room—delegates only please—was the Director-General of the WTO laughing and saying fuck like he was a cowboy in a saloon, and not a single person surprised by the man's manners.

“They canceled the meetings, Teddy. Those children. They canceled our meetings.”

 “The meetings aren't canceled,” Teddy said. “They were just delayed, that's all. We'll have our meetings tomorrow. Or the next day. Or next month. Fucking kids.”

“But Teddy, how can they be delayed? I had a meeting with—”

Sir Teddy cut him off with a chuckle deep in his chest. He patted the padded arm of his chair.

“I know who you had a meeting with, Charley. Sneaky bastard, good for you. But Charley, you didn't miss your meeting. Clinton isn't coming.”

A crushing wave of nausea passed over him.

“Clinton's not coming?”

“No, Charley. Secret Service said it wouldn't be safe.”

“But Teddy—”

Teddy wasn't listening.

“Did you hear Fidel sent a delegation?” Laughing, shaking his head good-naturedly. “Can you bloody imagine? The Cubans? Here? What, trading cigars and rum?” He laughed. A great basso rumbling boom-boom-boom.

“You have to give it to the old man,” Teddy said. “He's got a pair on him, eh? Jesus, god, the Cubans. Can you imagine it? You know, though,” he said, leaning in close, “I would have loved to talk with him. Fidel! What a leader!”

Charles drained the rest of his drink and raised his hand for another. His steak sat forlornly cooling on his plate, hardly touched. He had taken one bite—the blood rushing into his mouth—and nearly retched. In his increasingly inebriated state he tasted in its marbled veins of fat only his own frustrated hopes, his singed and bloody ambition.

Sir Teddy made a joke and Charles forced himself to laugh. Watching the casual manners of his friend, the friendliness riding softly above the authority, Charles had instantly realized his own position all these years, all those meetings with all those presidents and prime ministers. He was a small fish. A big joke. The banana-and-elephant man. What the fuck did Tony Blair care about him?

He gagged down this newly discovered knowledge with a gulp of gin and vermouth. The olive loosed from its pick, bounced its way down his throat. Coughing, coughing, coughing. Choking on his helplessness. Martin leaned over and whacked him on the back and before Charles could switch to something safer, another martini—a double—arrived in his hand as if by incantation or curse.

Something niggling at the edges of his brain, something that had more to it than his rising drunkenness, and his inability, his goddamn timidity in the face of Sir Teddy. Sitting right here and Charles had not the courage to ask him for the favor he needed. Charles found himself drifting. He found himself remembering, he could not say why, Tennyson. His dog. That stray scraggly mutt from his days at Cambridge, the scrawny mutt he had found on the street and fed and brought back to his bedsit, the dog easing his loneliness, his foreignness. He named him Tennyson, and Tennyson trusted him. Lived with him for weeks, loved to run along the river in the Backs, barking at the punting fools rowing between the locks. But what had happened to Tennyson? Charles thought of the day it was discovered he was keeping Tennyson in his room, and told in no uncertain terms that he must get rid of the dog if he was to remain in Cambridge lodgings. Well, he had nowhere else to live—impossible—and didn't know anybody in the whole of England who might possibly take in the stray dog he so foolishly loved. He now remembered, for the first time in many years, possibly for the first time since the day itself, taking Tennyson to the shelter where a white-coated technician had rubbed Tennyson's head and then stuck a needle in his leg and Charles holding his dog in his arms and telling him it would be all right, old Tennyson, shaggy-haired Tennyson, the light draining from his eyes, the sweet dog from the street whose head sagged in Charles's arms while Charles stood there and told him it would be all right.

Charles pushed away his drink. He lifted his fork and picked at three asparagus spears, limp beneath a murky hollandaise. Oh, he was a coward and a fool. Even Tennyson must have known that.

“Teddy,” he said, interrupting whatever the fuck the man had been talking about, “I was supposed to meet with President Clinton.”

“Yes, I know, Charles. And as I said, he will arrive later tonight or not at all.”

“I have to have this, Teddy.”

Teddy eyeing Charles, and sipping his drink. He smiled again though his manner had utterly changed. Gone was the casual authority of a man entertaining his friends with stories of their ill-spent youth. Here sat the Director-General, the real Sir Edward Bancroft, clothed in the folded robes of his true self, all those centuries of power and wealth. Martin sat meekly beside him, quiet, it seemed, now that there seemed to be an argument brewing.

“Listen, Charles,” Teddy said, “I am not unaware of Asian history. African history. The history of colonialism throughout the world. But that's
old stuff.
The millennium is upon us. You and I, we're the positive people. The people who believe in change, in progress, in moving forward. Getting past fucking
history
.”

Charles clutching his steak knife beside the plate.

“We are here,” Teddy said, “to negotiate the terms of world trade. One hundred and thirty-five nations to discuss, in clear and open meetings, the rules by how we will all play the game.”

His voice took on an edge, a note of exhaustion. “Those children, out there”—he flung his arm expansively toward the room, a gesture which seemed to include in its sweep the street, the city, possibly the entire globe.

“Those
children
may believe different. That we are trading away democracy, the environment, labor laws. That we are starting a new American empire. For whom? Global corporations?”

He looked down at his hands, then met Charles's eyes directly. “Can I be honest with you, Charley?”

“Please stop calling me Charley.”

That small smile appeared and disappeared.

“Dr. Wickramsinghe, I don't mean to insult, but what do we have in Sri Lanka? We have a small island nation the size of what, Belgium, that has been at war with itself since 1983. A sixteen-year civil war which shows no sign of abating. A tiny poor nation. What do you possibly have to offer anyone besides warmed-over wage slaves and more of the same?”

“Textile factories—”

“Producing what? Undershirts and shawls? Blouses and briefs? Even if you did have a meeting today, why would it be with President Clinton? It wouldn't be with Clinton.”

He stopped and smiled. Rolled gently back from the table in his chair. Charles realized with a shock he did not appear to be drunk in the least.

“It was never going to be with Clinton. Jesus. It would be with some mid-level bureaucrat who, despite his fifty other meetings with B-list countries today, would pretend to be interested in Sri Lanka's tea and rubber trade. Your textiles!”

“Teddy, don't go.”

“Our man from the Treasury, who may once have had high dreams of his own about changing the world, would probably talk about the importance of privatizing the telecom business, privatizing the water and electricity, grumble about distortions to the market, the inefficiencies of state bureaucracies.”

Charles was silent. He was afraid to even move lest Teddy leave him entirely behind. How many meetings had he had that were, in fact,
exactly
like this? Teddy had just described his last five years of meetings.

“And you know what, Charley? You might sign some small agreement. Big to you, of course. Giving away all your state enterprises. Selling off your water and electricity and communications. And do you know what that would be?”

Charles couldn't possibly begin to answer. He looked at Teddy no longer eating, his chair angled toward Charles. Martin, too, no longer eating, watching the two of them in shock and disappointment.

“That, Dr. Wickramsinghe, is how you play the fucking game.”

Teddy raised his hand and motioned to a staffer who had been sitting, waiting, at another table. The young woman politely made her way to their table and bent to Sir Teddy and Teddy spoke into her ear and she nodded, looked at Charles, and then walked from the restaurant.

Teddy cleared his throat. “Listen, we support development. But there are some serious problems with the Sri Lankan way of life. I can assure you there will be no entry into the WTO for Sri Lanka, nor any free trade agreements with the U.S., unless you enact some serious reforms. Tighten your fucking belt. I believe we have made it very clear that your grossly overfunded health and education will have to go.”

Charles straightened. “The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka,” he said, “has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. We pride ourselves on our education.”

“That is commendable.”

“We could not cut our education programs.”

“You would have to.”

“The people would not accept it.”

“Dr. Wickramsinghe,” Teddy said. He was calm and mocking and amused, his voice doing a fair imitation of Charles's own baritone intonation. “Is the
Democratic
Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka
a country where the economic decisions that affect the nation's future are made by the
people?
”

The young staffer returned and offered Teddy a sheaf of folders, which he took and tossed on the table.

“But we are willing to work with you if you are willing to work with us. Here are the terms of the agreement, which include, as I've said, the proposed budget cuts. Sign and you begin Sri Lanka's entry to the WTO. It's as easy as that, my friend.” He smiled, open and full now. “Of course, as the lead negotiator on this deal, there would be a significant bonus for you personally.”

Charles looked at Teddy carefully, at the band of fat beneath his chin, at his wheelchair, at his rueful grin, and Charles thought of the house he would buy in the hills of southern England, the small touches his granddaughter would add, flowers on the windowsill, embroidered curtains. He thought of the walks he would take alone in his retirement, down the chalk cliffs to the shore, the sound of the crashing waves and the cold gritty sand between his toes, gulls wheeling and crying above in an English sky of English clouds, the perfect peace he had long dreamed of.