He took a big red plane and a little blue pill, and woke up on the other side of the world, alert as coffee and hanging eight thousand feet above Manhattan's stony skyline, which, after the glass rocketry of Hong Kong and Shanghai, appeared worn and obsolete. As he bounced through customs and immigration and into the black company car waiting for him, he forgot the dream he'd had on the plane but remembered the eight million after-tax dollars vomited from Sir Henry Lai's mouth. A very pleasing sum of money, enough to procure an East Hampton mansion, a minor Picasso, or-better than these and not nearly as expensive-a secret child. A boy, a girl, who cared? Assuming that Martha Wainwright had followed his wishes, his advertisement would appear in the personals sections of the next issues of The Village Voice and New York magazine. Read each week by thousands of young, fertile, intelligent, and caring women who could recognize a good deal when they saw one. Who would be intrigued by an ad placed by a "mature executive" willing to support mother and child for twenty-one years. Medical expenses paid. Education expenses paid. They'll write me, Charlie thought, how could they not? And while that might be good, here was something bad, handed to him by the driver in a sealed folder prepared by Karen: the weekly sales tracking report! Did he dare peek? The summary showed raw numbers only, but he knew what to look for, and what he saw was Manila Telecom coming after him in every market with every product, jinking around, stunting and harassing him, stealing his salespeople away, cutting prices to the bone, copying Teknetrix's products, even bribing clients' purchasing personnel. MT had two major factories in Indonesia. Give me a little labor riot there, Charlie thought, give me a currency fluctuation, something to slow MT down. He had to get the factory in Shanghai up and operational or MT was going to keep gnawing away at Teknetrix's market share, and with it, Charlie's breakfast. No, worse than that. After MT ate his breakfast, it would chew through his tongue and esophagus and right on down to his shoes. That was the telecom-component manufacturing business. Supply or die.
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.
Martha Wainwright — gray, dependable, sixty pounds past a size eight, and maybe a lesbian, for all he knew-arrived in his office smoking a cigarette, and when he looked up from his papers, he could see the anger in her face, her mouth tight, her eyes accusatory. He closed the door. "Let me just get to my chair, Martha, then you can start-"
"I see no reason for this, Charlie."
"That doesn't surprise me. Did the advertisement go in?"
"Yes, it went in," she answered, eyes glaring. "Charlie, there are so many homeless children, so many neglected kids. Why not choose one of them?"
He breathed out. "That's a reasonable question."
Karen came in with an ashtray, then hurried away when she saw Martha's face. "Is it only vanity, Charlie?" she asked, taking the ashtray. "That's what this strikes me as, vanity. Male vanity, I might add."
She meant well, of course; she wanted to present him with every argument in order that he know his own mind. "Hey, my daughter is infertile."
She shook her head in irritation, blowing smoke at him. "Your daughter could adopt."
"I know."
"That's not good enough?" Martha protested. "You won't feel warmly toward that child?"
"Of course I will feel warmly toward that child. I'll do everything I can to make that child's life the best possible."
"And that's not good enough?"
"No. It doesn't comfort me."
"You're doing this for your own comfort?"
"In a sense, yes."
"You want something of yourself to go on."
" Yes, Martha."
She stood in irritation. He could hear her wheeze softly. "This is about vanity and fear and weakness. This is not about love. A woman would never have this attitude."
"Are you sure?"
She glowered. "Yes."
"I think a woman would never have this attitude because a woman, Martha, could not be in this situation. Fifty-eight-year-old women still, for the most part, cannot have children. I can procreate, Martha, you cannot."
"It's a mistake, an immoral mistake."
"Why? You're saying that it's immoral to bring a child into the world and give his mother the resources to raise that child properly?"
"Yes, when the resources could go to children who are already born."
"You're an estate lawyer, Martha. This is what you do. You help people to pass their wealth on to whomever they choose. You're telling me I can't do that?"
"No, I'm saying as your counselor that I find this idea to be foolhardy."
"On what basis?"
"Emotionally." She stamped out her cigarette.
"For whom?"
"Everyone, Charlie. Dammit! The mother, the child. Maybe Ellie and your daughter if they ever find out."
"The mother can pick a good husband. The child will-"
"That child will miss you all of his life!" Martha interrupted, her face reddening. "The child will want to know you! By the time he is four, he will want-"
"And if the woman marries successfully? What then? She'll be able to marry the fellow she loves, if I'm paying all her expenses."
Martha shook her head. "The child will always want to know."
Calm her down, Charlie thought. Pretend that you almost agree with her. He gave a couple of heavy nods, as if weighing all of her considerations. "If I decide to do this," he asked softly, "will you handle it for me? I mean draw up the arrangements, supervise the interviewing of the women?"
She paced to his desk, poked at his papers. "Yes, Charlie. Yes, goddammit, I will do it for you."
"Good."
She looked at him, mouth set. "On one condition."
"What?"
"You tell Ellie."
The one thing he absolutely didn't want to do. "Oh," he said. "Sure."
At seven, he eased out of his cab, looking at the sky for information-an old pilot's habit-but the only thing floating above him was the lunatic grin of Kelly the doorman, standing ready to torture Charlie with service. Every day Kelly smiled as if he had woken up wishing to smile just once at something worth smiling at-at Charlie Ravich, his great friend, not the man who gave him three hundred bucks cash each Christmas, as was the custom of the building, which you never disregarded, upon threat of an immediate drop-off in service and a vague disregard from all the staff people. But Charlie paid, always, in a crisp blue Teknetrix envelope, and so here was Kelly smiling like a man charming the devil himself, pulling open the brass door to the apartment house. Charlie nodded gruffly, hobbled into the air-conditioned comfort of the lobby, and then was conveyed upward by Lionel, the seventyish night elevator man, who wasted no energy on salutation or manners, instead concentrating his exhausted animus in the precise thrusting and braking of the elevator's brass lift handle. The thing resembled the throttle on the old T-37 trainer Charlie had first flown in 1962. Always Lionel pressed it forward to maximum upward speed just long enough to hit a momentum that, upon his pulling the handle back early enough, allowed the elevator to coast to a position exactly flush with the requested floor-so dead even you could lay a carpenter's level over the crack. This Lionel accomplished without change in expression or apparent contemplation, without, it seemed, even breath itself. Then he would pull the cage back himself and after being thanked by Charlie show no reaction. At most he scratched the skin flaking from his forehead. You could drop diamonds on the floor, a young woman could pull up her dress, you could cleaver off your nose and shake the bloody lump in Lionel's face. Nothing. He'd been made dead by service, and paradoxically, his deadness passed into Charlie. Every time Lionel opened that cage, Charlie felt just a little less of something. He himself would love to throttle up the elevator, fondle the mechanical tremor of it, even get the braking wrong a bit and have to feather the elevator up and down to hit the mark perfectly, but he'd never had the chance and never would.
The apartment was dark. No Ellie. Odd that she was still out. Where could she be at this hour? Funny old chick, his wife. Julia was right. Anxious these days, more anxious than in the past. Didn't really know her anymore. Sex okay, not like it used to be. Familiar as an old shoe. A brief nudge of genitals. Habit and half-forgotten remembrance. Sometimes his dick worked well, sometimes not. He was tired, or his back hurt too much. Hadn't kept up with the physical therapy, and after sitting in chairs all day, the thing just seized up on him. Plus, no Viagra because of the blood-pressure pills. Rotten all around. Ellie stayed patient. Loved her but didn't know her. Not so bad, that, because she didn't really know him. Didn't know about the eight million! Eight million dollars was a big secret-bigger than a mistress, but smaller than disease. He needed a secret, everyone did.
He drifted through the apartment, not bothering to turn on the lights, letting the glow of the city fill the rooms. Look at this, said Ellie's note on the dining-room table. The New Jersey retirement community brochure. It had the glossy lushness of pornography, happy senior couples standing proudly in front of their "custom mansions," expensively tacky matching boxes of vinyl siding and overlarge windows. Lounging around the Olympic-sized swimming pool. Tearing ass in a golf cart across the glistening sixteenth green. we will pamper you. we will care for you. come home to vista del mar. The place pampered you, all right, straight into your grave: "We look forward to providing you with every amenity, from maintenance-free condo living to the four-star Vista del Mar dining facility to the immaculate greens on our championship golf course to a staff of committed elder-care health professionals on call twenty-four hours a day." Guys keeling over every week, no doubt, flopping spasmodically around in their golf togs. He'd seen one heart attack recently enough, thank you. Cancer, too, trolling the quiet streets, stopping expectantly in front of each house like the Good Humor truck. He paged back and forth, intrigued. You had to spend real money to get in-a quarter million for the membership fee, plus annual clubhouse fees, pool fees, common charges. A big project, house prices well over a million dollars. They'd thought of everything. Tour-group packages to Moscow, tennis lessons, dog-runs, on-call electrician, plumber, gardening and lawn maintenance, computer classes, glass-blowing, ballroom dancing. Had they hidden a small morgue on the premises? A whole page was given over to "security features"-the winking promise that cars full of young, joy-riding blacks from Newark or Jersey City would never, ever be seen there. And if they were? Not quite shot on sight, but the protectors of Vista del Mar, claimed the text, were "experienced enforcement professionals"-code for retired cops who were pals with the local police force and thus could beat the hell out of any intruder with impunity. A safe place. So safe you could go there to die.
He heard Ellie's key in the lock, the sound of packages landing on the kitchen counter. He looked back at the brochure. Something was not right. The women seemed too fit in their one-piece bathing suits; he saw no spiderwebs of varicose veins, no grape bunches of cellulite hanging from their thighs or underarms; and the men themselves were remarkably jaunty, trim around the middle, with suspiciously full heads of gray hair-impossible, Turkishly thick hair-with no skin sagging around their knees, none of the ravages, the proofs of time! No shrunken jawbones, no droopy earlobes, no bandy-legged, shrinking-spine postures, no low testicles flopping sadly inside a pant leg-nothing! These were models, men and women in their smug forties, dolled up in geezery cardigans and knee-length shorts, their hair sprayed gray. Well, screw them. No, screw me, Charlie corrected himself, for not realizing it from the first.
"I hate this, Ellie," he called. "I hate everything about it." He picked up the retirement brochure and walked into the dining room.
Ellie carried in a silver tray of cheese and crackers. "I know you don't like it, but I'm trying to get us thinking."
Here was his wife, an attractive woman of fifty-seven, still with nice hips on her, still with lovely breasts, her eyes clear and ankles slim, and she was bunkering in for doom. "I don't want to think," he finally said. "Not about that."
She put the tray down, careful not to bang it. "We need to plan."
"What do we need to plan for?"
She smoothed her blue sweater with her hands. "The time when we move out of the city." She disappeared back into the kitchen and returned with a glass of milk and his pills-the blood pressure, the cholesterol, the fall allergies, the replacement testosterone, the vitamins.
He swallowed the pills dutifully, then waved the brochure. "Did you notice they have a morgue on the premises?"
"I didn't see that."
"Right there. They embalm the body and stick it in a lawn chair overlooking the golf course."
"Don't be ridiculous."
He sat down. "There's also a wishing well full of dentures and hearing aids."
"Now you're being mean." She went into the kitchen.
"Why don't we just move to Hong Kong instead? I'll watch the ships all day. Eat my pills with chopsticks."
Ellie came back carrying silverware. "You'd rather move to Hong Kong?"
"Better there than Vista del Muerte."
"Vista del Mar." She laid his knife and fork on the table, the fork upside down.
"It's nowhere near the ocean!" cried Charlie.
"They just took an old truck farm-"
"I know what they did." Charlie fixed his fork. "They chop up some great old place and put an idiotic name on it, like Vista del Muerte."
"That's not right," Ellie said.
"What do you mean?"
"It would be 'Vista de la Muerte,'" she explained. "You're confusing the masculine and the feminine."
"Isn't that the trend?" Charlie asked. "Doesn't that make me a cool guy?"
Ellie ignored this. "It's got everything we're ever going to need," she said.
"For God's sake, Ellie, you've got all you need here. A doorman, a gynecologist, a dry cleaner's, and a lot of weepy friends with fascinating tragedies you can talk about."
Ellie rubbed her finger on the dining-room table. "Oh, Charlie, the city isn't the same," she said softly. "Everything is falling apart."
"The city's been falling apart for the last two hundred years."
She looked at him. "I know, but I was never almost old here. We're almost old, Charlie."
"Who's almost old?"
"Nobody, Charlie," she snapped. " Nobody is getting old. Barbara Holmes says her husband just leapt into multiple sclerosis last month. Woke up with it! And Sally Auchincloss upstairs is in a wheelchair-she's just so heroic about it-and I just heard that Bill's prostate cancer is all through him."
"Yeah," Charlie breathed. "Good old Bill shoots a needle in his dick to get an erection. That is heroism, if you ask me."
"Please!" she cried. "Can't we discuss this pleasantly?"
"No."
She looked at the dining-room table, remembered something, and went back to the kitchen. He flipped through the mail. "The Chinese work until they drop in their tracks, you know that?"
"I honestly don't understand you," she called.
"Yes, you do. We just disagree."
"What do the Chinese have to do with it?" she asked with true irritation. "You're obsessed with the Chinese."
And why not? The Chinese were reverse-engineering America's F-18 fighter jet, illegally buying old versions and spare parts in an effort to figure out how to manufacture the plane. They had stolen U.S. nuclear missile technology so that they could blow up Taiwan after they bought it. They were building the world's tallest building. They understood capitalism better than Americans, because they had seen it arrive, loved it as a new toy.
"I said you're obsessed with the Chinese."
He nibbled a cracker. "I heard you, Ellie. My hearing is still pretty good for a guy about to be buried alive."
"You think the Chinese know something we don't?"
"Yes."
She returned, carrying his drink. "What?"
"They know what time it is."
"Sweetie"-she looked at him beseechingly-"that may be true, but it has nothing to do with where we live the next ten years."
Of course. He took her hand, raised it to his lips. "Don't bother about me," he said. "I'm just-I saw a man die in Hong Kong. Heart attack. I tried to help him, but he was gone. I haven't seen someone die for a long time…" Except in his dreams, which occasionally came back to him, the villagers and water buffalo and smoking pieces of trucks flung fifty feet into the air-but that was an old story, a story everyone had forgotten.
"Maybe we should talk about this after dinner."
He tasted the drink. Not quite right. "What will we say?" he badgered her. "That I agree? That I see it your way?"
"That would be expecting the impossible."
She wasn't going to back down, he saw. He put out his hand. "Come here."
She smiled warily. "Oh no."
"Come on. I'm your old pal, remember?"
"I know what you're doing." But she came over to his chair.
He pulled her closer. "You should have married someone nice."
She shook her head in disgust. "I don't want someone nice. Never did."
He pulled her tight against him, laid his hand on the back of her dress. Her rear was loose and fat, yet he loved it anyway. "But nice lasts a long time. You think you don't really want a man who is nice, and then thirty years with a bad man go by and you realize that nice would have been, yes, rather nice after all. All the other things wear out "-he rubbed her ass vigorously, watching her smile-"but nice? Well, nice keeps on going."
"Oh, please." But she was letting him kiss her.
"The mistake you made," he whispered in her small pink ear, "was that you married someone who was rotten. A mistake women often make, even the smart ones. They like the rotten guys."
"You were never rotten." Her face was happy, her eyes were closed.
He moved his hand between her legs. "Am I in the game here?"
She opened her eyes. "You want to be?"
"I always want to be in the game."
She contemplated him. "All right."
"Now?"
"After dinner."
Two hours later, Ellie lay under the covers, her flesh a sentimental landscape.
"Downtown or uptown?" he asked.
"Stay up here." She pulled his arms.
Despite the estrogen pills, she still had lubrication problems, and so dipped her hands into a small jar of petroleum jelly she kept in their bedside table, and worked herself and him.
"My hands are cold," she said.
"It's all right." He hadn't ejaculated in two weeks.
"Come on now," she said.
He pressed into her and she began to finger herself gently, lips pursed, eyelids fluttering. He counted strokes. Usually about forty-five strokes and Ellie would come, then again after another fifteen or twenty, and again after another ten. Very dependable, his wife, at least in this respect. At stroke twenty-three he paused. Twenty-three? What was the meaning of twenty-three? Manila Telecom's percentage market share? Something like that. Maybe MT's management had been talking to Marvin Noff, bad-mouthing Teknetrix, maybe trying to-
"Don't stop," Ellie breathed, "not now."
He resumed, the blood pounding in his ears. At forty-four, Ellie lifted her chin and cried out, banging her palm on his chest.
"Keep going," he whispered. "The woods are burning."
Ellie took a breath, spit on her fingers, then went at it again. She cried out sweetly and then pulled on him. "Now," she commanded.
But as he pressed, he felt himself soften. He shifted his position, but it didn't work.
"Want me to lift my legs?" Ellie asked in the dark.
"Sure."
She raised her knees up, slipping one hand behind each to hold them, something she had started to do in her forties, and he pressed again, but it was no good.
She felt the change. "You want me to help?"
He exhaled. It didn't seem worth the trouble. "I'm a dead dog," he said, rolling off.
She rubbed his back. "Jet-lagged is what I think."
"Maybe." He wondered how soon he'd see the responses to his advertisement.
"You thinking about Manila Telecom?"
"We have to get that plant going."
"You will."
"We've got some leeway built into the schedule but not that much."
She held his penis, rubbing it with her thumb the same way the money changers in Shanghai fondled fat wads of dollar bills. Eight million, he thought, but no hard-on.
"Sweetie?"
Her dutifulness depressed him, and he brought her hand to his chest.
They lay there in the darkness until he heard Ellie's breathing flatten out. He was running on China time, not sleepy, not even close, and after a few minutes, he got up and wandered into the office off the bedroom and stood at the window watching the taxis pulse through Central Park. He would have Jane transfer all of the GT proceeds to his private account at Citibank. There was no need to mix the sum with his other investments, and he could ask Ted Fullman, his private banker, to segregate half the money for capital-gains taxes. Don't let me touch it, Ted. There was plenty of money, piles of it. After he died, Ellie could live to one hundred and forty if she liked, and there'd be millions left over, thanks to the Teknetrix stock, which had first been offered at a laughable two and a half dollars a share, and now, sixteen years later, had reached one hundred and fifty-four dollars, not correcting for splits. And Julia was well provided for, Martha Wainwright having drafted all the documents that would paper over his grave. No, the Sir Henry money was genuinely superfluous; he could turn it into cash and hand it out in the Port Authority bus station if he so desired and his life would be unchanged; the sum would merely have moved through him in its endless transubstantiation, the regular heartbeat of a Hong Kong billionaire becoming dirty bills fluttering through Manhattan, a fortune atomized, only to reappear somewhere else in the future.
How strange to be so rich, so comfortable. He had never expected it. On the wall, next to the old photos of Charlie standing stiffly, painfully, with the Secretary of Defense, with Nixon himself, next to the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Purple Heart, hung the framed Air Force T-shirt he'd been wearing when he was rescued-torn, rotted, stained with blood. The colonel at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where Charlie had been flown within ten hours of being found, had ordered the shirt retrieved from the base hospital and had it mounted and framed with a small brass plaque that noted the dates of Charlie's capture and release. While almost everything in his life had continued to change-Ellie, Ben, Teknetrix, China, how men and women made babies-the shirt, a gray rag blotted with rust-colored stains, just hung there in its frame, a battle flag long unused.
After his rescue, he'd been in and out of hospitals for ten months. Because he was a former prisoner of war, there was a place for him in the Air Force as long as he wished. They made him a lieutenant colonel, in fact. They took care of you, they took care of their own. But implicit in the promise was the recognition that you might need such a promise. You might be broken. You might not be valuable anymore. And, truth to tell, he was broken. Wasn't worth shit. Couldn't walk right, couldn't sit right, couldn't lift up the kids and play with them, couldn't watch television without getting headaches. Pain in his neck, shoulders, back, arms, left hand where the bullet went through and hit him in the testicle, left leg, both knees, both ankles. He'd picked up all kinds of bugs while in captivity and been lucky he hadn't died from those alone-worms in his intestines, fungus in his anus, infection in his ears. Shrunken cartilage, bone loss, nerve damage. Vertigo, palsy, numbness. Limited extension of the left hamstring muscles, rotator cuff damage, permanent vulnerability in ankle pronation. Compression of the frontal eminence of the parietal bone, complete atrophy of the torn capsular ligaments of the right shoulder, degradation of the internal condyle of the left humerus.
After his first surgeries, they took him up in an A-10, a green buffalo of a plane, just to get him back in the air, but his spine couldn't take the G's anymore. Like grinding broken beer bottles together. He felt uncertain and weak, he felt fraudulent-for the first time in his life. Get me out of here, I'm going to crash this thing. They tried going up three times, once with painkillers, which was against regs. Didn't work. His back was stiff, he had trouble even climbing into the seat. He couldn't shoot a basketball, much less fly a fighter jet. Once they knew that about you, you were no longer operational. You couldn't be forward-based, you couldn't train other pilots. The instructors were all the best pilots who had survived their own expertise. And anyway, new planes were coming through the procurement pipeline, F-14s, F-16s, F-18s. All advanced fly-by-wire avionics. Heads-up instrument displays. More complicated tactical weaponry, the advanced versions of which had later been used to smoke up Saddam's pathetic army in Kuwait and then a couple of hundred Serbian tanks. By 1976, it had been clear that Charlie was washed up.
They had been living in Virginia then, where he'd had a desk job at SAC in Langley. Ben and Julia almost teenagers. His salary twenty-one thousand a year. He was driving an old Buick, which he'd bought because it was soft on his back. A bad year all around. That was the year he did not fuck, not once. The nerve damage and the scar tissue adhesions had his back in a vise. No hip motion, no flex to the upper back. His legs were still weak. Ellie had tried sitting on him, but she didn't really like it. She performed the other possibilities, but it was a duty, not a pleasure.
Yet there were many others like him, men whom the Air Force no longer needed, capable and hardworking and intelligent, and he found two of them, Merle Sokolov and Harold Cole, both Vietnam washouts like Charlie. They talked, they dreamed, they drank a lot of cheap beer and figured out that they trusted their fates with one another. Each man had children and an anxious wife, each man needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat. They fixed upon three essential pieces of information: One, computers and telecom switching equipment were soon to benefit from the massive R amp;D of the war effort and the space program; two, the demographics of the American population foretold a huge market of prime-age consumers; and three, most residential growth would continue to occur not in cities but in new suburban and rural developments, which meant investment in new telecom equipment. The key was to put yourself in front of the wave, let it wash over you, carry you forward.
The three men, as it turned out, had separate skills. Sokolov was a natural salesman, a fellow of neckties and haircuts and cuff links, and they relied on him to raise venture capital. Harold, the gloomy genius, understood transistors and switches and was schooling himself in microchip technology, and that, he announced, was all that he could do for them, which was more than enough. Charlie's natural ability was organization and leadership. He set up the first corporate structure, made the first hirings. Negotiated the first office lease, the first supplier agreement, did all the traveling to the Far East to look for subcontractors.
Each man tended to hire younger versions of himself. Harold chose young, socially uncomfortable tech-workers who responded to his disinterest in their gracelessness. Sokolov picked one slick salesman after another, burning them out, letting them spend too much on their clients' food and entertainment. And Charlie? Charlie hired workhorses. Their only great argument was where to locate the company. Charlie wanted to stay in Virginia, where costs were lower, but Sokolov prevailed upon them to move to New York and rent cheap office space. It made them appear serious, made them look like players. This was not necessarily true, but it was true that Sokolov had a new girlfriend in New York and they needed him more than he needed them. He could move to New York and sell anything-cars, advertising, apartments. Ellie told Charlie they should move, and that had been the decisive factor. They'd established themselves in crappy offices on lower Fifth Avenue and made no money for five years. The company's backers, four semiretired heart surgeons, had wanted to pull out. Instead Sokolov and Charlie talked them into putting in more money, which effectively diluted the trio's ownership to less than ten percent. Among the doctors' conditions for further investment was that Charlie commit to a five-year contract. The company wasn't going anywhere without that kind of elbow grease. As for Sokolov and Harold, the doctors made no requirement; they were forcibly elevating Charlie; either he ran the show or it closed. Sokolov and Harold understood, but he felt he had betrayed them. The shift in the power among the three men was made easier by the fact that they had started to make some money, and then, a year or two later, quite a lot of it. Yet Harold committed suicide for reasons Charlie still did not understand, and Sokolov said he wanted Charlie to buy him out so that he could get into the real-estate business, which he was sure was going to boom. So Charlie bought him out, increasing his stake in the company to almost seven percent. The surgeons, each anticipating the age of reckoning, wanted the company to go public so that they could cash out their gain. Charlie had no idea how to do an IPO, but the old men hired a cocky punk from Goldman Sachs who inspected the numbers in Charlie's office.
"You're sure these are right?" he'd asked Charlie.
"Yes."
The kid shrugged, not impressed. "The company's worth eighty million dollars."
In celebration of his impending fortune, Charlie had put his father up in the Pierre Hotel and taken him to dinner to explain the momentousness of what was happening. He could now send Julia to a good law school, he could buy Ellie a decent apartment, he could join a golf club. But the old man couldn't listen, for the age of reckoning was upon him, too, and he could barely hold his soup spoon without spilling it. His ears were hairy, the red rims of his lower eyelids hung forward, his coat was too big; he was tired; he missed Charlie's mother, dead ten years; he was old, worn out by work, scared of New York, confused by the opulence of the Pierre. "Charlie… I don't follow…" The rest of the time he listened to his father talk about his stomach, the nuances of its digestion, the schedule of its torments, what it preferred and what it disliked, and, as things turned out, Charlie thought now, his father had been right to be so worried, because two months later the whole bag of guts more or less disintegrated. One could not live without a functioning stomach, and Charlie's father did not.
Death, always tracking you. Took his mother and father, took his son, took all of Julia's embryos. Took Larry, his backseater. And Harold Cole, too. Perhaps no grandchildren was his punishment for all the killing he'd done. How many? Don't ask, don't tell. He knew the number. Added it up once, only once. They told you not to do it, but he'd looked back at all his post-flight reports and made a guess. A terrible thing to do-he was condemned to know the number forever. You could put that big number on the left and the number one on the right. One. One child. One more child. One more child, God. Forgive me. Ellie's right, I'm going to be old soon. Give me one more child. Correct the flow of time, God. Let me roll the dice again.
He drifted disconsolately through the dark apartment and glanced at the irregular mosaic of lighted windows in the other apartment buildings, rows of yellow rectangles, people inside them-sort of like airplanes at night, he thought-and, there, as he stood in the dark, that thought was what brought the lost dream rushing back to him, except that it had not been a dream, it had actually happened the previous night on the flight from Hong Kong. He had put his inflatable pillow around his neck when the cabin lights dimmed, slipped on his sleeping mask, kicked off his shoes, taken his little blue capsule, pushed the seat back, and fallen into a deep sleep. But then, a few hours later, he had woken suddenly, his pillow hot against his neck like a giant finger curling around it menacingly, the sleep mask a veil pressing against his open eyes. He had leaned forward in his seat, coldly aware, frightened even. Around him the other passengers slept. He stood, not quite knowing why, and in his socks walked slowly back along the plane, a wide-body 767, his back aching a bit, his hands skimming each seat rest, passing row upon row of sleeping passengers. Businessmen, teenagers, young wives and husbands, babies, retired couples, slouched and fallen and slumped against one another with unknowing intimacy, heavy, unmoving, as if- dead, they all looked dead, he'd thought, gliding silently along the aisle, the soft, open-mouth faces illuminated by the emergency exit signs. He slipped toward the galley at the back of the plane, expecting to see the stewardesses talking or doing their chores, or perhaps a few passengers waiting to use the bathrooms, but no one was there. The stewardesses had fallen asleep in their seats, heads tilted backward, faces still bright with makeup like mannequins, cheeks pink, lips red, hair pinned neatly back, but eyes closed and the cheeriness of them gone. He glanced up at the computer graphic on all the screens that cycled through indications of the plane's global position, the tailwind, the ground speed-609 mph, he remembered-and the estimated time of arrival. They would all get to New York the next day, having all been dead together if only a moment, which, of course, was a reversal of the true nature of things-that they were alive together only a moment, all time prior never possessed and all time following forever lost. Six hundred and nine mph, tailwind 58 mph, didn't seem that fast to Charlie, not fast at all, really, and not because he had flown more than twice as fast on many occasions. No, such a speed was nothing when you saw how fast time itself was flashing forward-mockingly, tauntingly, a piece of trick-mirror light jumping discontinuously in front of him, uncatchable. Six hundred miles an hour, by contrast, was nothing, a pitiful speed, standstill, virtually flowing backward; it could get you from Hong Kong to New York City in seventeen hours, but nowhere beyond that.