Last Days in Shanghai. Casey Walker
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“It’s too late. I don’t think they’ll let you in the pool.”
“The hell they won’t.”
“You don’t want to go upstairs?”
“I need some air,” he said. Air wasn’t going to do it—I don’t know what would have sobered him up besides maybe dialysis. The hotel staff, skating by on secret errands, made a good show of not staring at Leo sprawled in the chair.
“Phone,” he said, pulling his out.
“They don’t work,” I said.
He punched his. “Phone,” he yelled.
“We can get it fixed tomorrow.”
“These people are jerking us around,” he said. “Typical.”
“Bund International?” I said.
Leo fondled his phone like a baseball, looking for its seams.
“Or you mean Lightborn?” I said.
He made a sharp half rotation of his shoulder, and threw his phone at me, high and tight. I cut it off with my left palm, which spared my face. I had a good chance with my right hand at catching the phone’s low rebound, but I let it slip. My reflexes weren’t professional-grade to begin with, but a few drinks and my hands were steaks. The phone hit the maybe-marble floor. It wouldn’t rise again. A young man from the hotel fell to his knees picking up the pieces.
“You’re going to Kaifeng tomorrow,” Leo said. “They’ll pick you up in the morning.”
“To where?”
“I told them you’re my chief of staff,” he said. “The fuckers.”
Our actual chief of staff, John Polk, saw me as a nepotistic hire and barely tolerated me. Chemotherapy had left Polk’s head sheen as a missile, but he still kept two cell phones holstered on either side of his cock and would scream at me even from a hospital bed. Fallen sick, Polk wasn’t any wiser or more empathetic a person, but much more was forgiven of him. He’d never traveled with us, even before leukemia, because he said it was my job to wash the shit stains out of Leo’s underwear in places without reliable plumbing.
The hotel clerk tried to hand the phone fragments back to me, and I refused them.
“What’s in Kaifeng?” I asked Leo. He was beyond answering. He held both hands to his forehead like they were the brim of a hat.
“You speak English?” I asked the clerk. He nodded, not enthusiastically.
“If he wants to stay down here, then fine,” I said, pointing to Leo, who had slouched until his dress shirt was tight around his belly.
“But you don’t let him go anywhere,” I said. “And tell them.” I pointed to the attendant by the lobby entrance, and the girl behind the front desk. “He stays here.”
I fished out two notes with Mao’s face—two hundred yuan, what I understood was about twenty dollars. The clerk refused and chewed his lips. I pressed the money on him, and he followed me trying to give it back. I didn’t turn toward Leo again until I got to the elevator. The last thing I saw before the doors closed was Leo huddled over a lobby courtesy phone, like it was a toilet he was going to be sick into.
BACK IN MY room, the windows didn’t open. Gray night like gray day. I didn’t like the bed. I slept on and off—mostly off—in a chair until about five a.m., but then there was the hammering. At the foot of the hotel, a few courtyard houses were being demolished. They were single-story structures with shingled roofs, four buildings set in a square so that each house’s central garden was steeled against the wind, against the world—or had been, until now. Narrow alleys threaded between the falling gray walls. Workers pried off tiles, swung sledgehammers.
I thought to call Alex. It was early evening in New York City. My working day was often no more than a fourteen-hour break from my insomniac half dreams of ex-girlfriends, dead relatives, distant friends, and old tormentors. Alex knew something about China—the food anyway. She’d introduced me to hot pot restaurants and soup dumplings. There was a place in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge we both adored. The staff knew what we were there for and brought out crab and pork dumplings in bamboo steamers and we hardly had to ask.
The whole time we’d dated, whenever I’d told Alex she was pretty, she would always find something. She would say her nose was too sharp at its point or her earlobes too long. I told her no one had ever once looked at her earlobes and her nose was cute, like a little bird’s beak. “Words to avoid in reference to a girl’s appearance,” she had said. “Beak.” Plenty of people I worked with would say they didn’t take any bullshit, that they “call it like they see it,” and what they were really saying is it made them feel important to yell at waiters. Alex would never throw a tantrum and was so polite to people she could come off as stiff, but her resistance to bullshit was a layer hard inside, gem in a rock. It was the thing I missed most about her—that she wanted to set the world straight.
I felt Alex and I were still close. Well, close-distant, near-far—these were relative terms. We didn’t hate each other as people who had once had sex often did. Sometimes I imagined trying to explain that idea to a robot, or a child, about two people loving each other very much, or thinking they do, about the awkward grappling in the dark, and then, so much of the time, within a year, wishing that person were never born. You’d get asked why—why is it that way? How does close not stay close? I had nothing to add to the paucity of the world’s collected wisdom about love and its disappearance. I did know that despite the odds—which were all in favor of hatred or indifference—Alex and I were better off in our breakup’s aftermath than most. I rattled my fingernails on top of the hotel room phone.
We’d met while we were both working on the Hill, though Alex hadn’t ever liked DC. There wasn’t enough of a city in the shadow of those monuments, she thought, not enough free air: all of it was requisitioned by government business. When the Ohio congressman she’d worked for died in office—physically in office, below his wall of honorary degrees—she took a vague-sounding program coordinator job for a ludicrously named nonprofit in New York City. She had a lot of extra time for email, I noticed, working at Give the World A Hug. They had a tiny office carved between the load-bearing columns of a flat-topped financial district tower, the barest sliver of the Hudson River visible through the hallway window.
For a while after she moved, I spent a lot of hours on the Acela Express. I had the Friday-evening trains memorized and waited all week to be discharged into Penn Station, that horrid, wholly unredeemable hallway. Every week I marveled that I was in the busiest train station in the country, and not once had an architect ever considered how a human would get on or off a train. Invisible entrances, mousehole stairwells. I had, more than once, been walking out of the train station and had a bewildered tourist ask where Penn Station was. I liked to imagine what it might have been like if Alex could have met me in the old Penn Station, the Beaux Arts one built a hundred years ago, with Roman vaulted ceilings and pink-hued travertine marble. We would have had to meet in another time, years before we were ever born, before that old station was demolished. But it would have been a beautiful thing.
I would walk a cross-town block from Penn Station and take the Q train to her out in Brooklyn. I liked to ride over the river, take stock of lower Manhattan, make sure everything was still in its place. My weekend visits never stopped as much as work intervened, and they trickled. Finally, it seemed like we were being realists to cut the official strings. Amtrak talked of cracks in the disk brakes on their Acela trains, and I got stuck in Baltimore about every third trip. Broken-down Baltimore might have been the sourest note—the boarded-up sections of the city you could see from the tracks made visible all the consequences of neglect.
It hadn’t been too long since I had seen Alex, probably about four months. No, more—five. She’d switched apartments, taken on roommates, trying to save money. When I imagined men she was dating now, I thought of bankers having affairs. I pictured men of a different infrastructure: a pied-à-terre; the Metro-North; Greenwich, CT. Lonely weekends