Colin Harrison - Afterburn

Yet life doesn't work that way, he told himself. Life is fuck-ups and plane crashes and your wife acting strange. Having sex with some hot little chick in a room at the Pierre Hotel was not the way to go about making a child. Pleasurable, yes, but not part of an intelligent plan. The wise action at this point would be to forget how much he had enjoyed himself, how sweet and smart she was, and bring whatever further conversation ensued to a graceful close. Maybe one or two more meetings, just so that the ending was not too abrupt. Make sure she did not feel angry or furious. Angry women had a way of being very costly. Better to keep things at arm's length, to continue his plan with Martha and the women who'd written him letters. If she gave him trouble, he would-he didn't know. Pay her to leave him alone, or have a lawyer send a-

Was he as horrible and paranoid as that? Couldn't he have more faith? He had no reason to think she was not just a nice girl who found a bit of comfort being with an older man. A lot of women were like this-they felt safer, better understood, fathered. He had long suspected that Julia had slept with a couple of her professors in college and did not regret it. How wrong was it? Certainly he was never going to leave Ellie. He wondered how she would take it if she knew. Not well.

He shifted miserably in his seat. He'd made matters worse by skipping the night in Hong Kong, deciding instead to bounce north to Shanghai on Tiger Air with no layover. Getting too old for this kind of travel. Dinner that night with Tom Anderson. I'll give him holy hell, Charlie thought. He hoped to stay only three or four days, depending on how severe the problems were. The construction schedule had been fine just three weeks prior. He assumed that someone working for Mr. Ming out of their Shanghai office had already checked on the status of the construction. How much did Ming know? Did he read Marvin Noff's pronouncements?

Bad mood, bad air. The car hummed along toward the Bund, the string of massive European buildings fronting the Huangpu River, where beneath encrustations of neon and television antennas he glimpsed the profile of the great nineteenth-century trading city-the orifice that China had presented so self-exploitatively to the West. Full of Englishmen in bowler hats going about in rickshaws. Opium dens. Chinese girls with cigarette holders and the latest haircuts from Paris. All obliterated by World War II and then the 1949 revolution, after which Shanghai, symbol of Western corruption, was starved by the central government, allowed to rot and rust.

Now all was being rebuilt, to twenty-first-century specifications. Using the same damn bamboo scaffolding techniques that they had practiced for more than a thousand years, erecting splendors long before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. The wood was extraordinarily strong and light. The Vietnamese had also used it, on bridges, walls, anything. He remembered seeing bamboo scaffolding in reconnaissance photos. Trouble then, trouble now! Here was Teknetrix with a market capitalization of $500 million, embarked on a $52 million construction project that was threatened- imperiled — by the inability to get a few dozen illiterate peasants to string up a pile of long sticks. Insanity! And it wasn't as if the place suffered a shortage of labor, either. Sixty million people lived within a one-hundred-mile radius of Shanghai. Beneath the elevated highway swarmed cabs, bicycles, bicycle rickshaws, motorcycle rickshaws, and trucks piled high with tubing and cement block or bricks. He wished Ellie could see it. She never traveled to China with him anymore. Too dirty and full of disease. She preferred sitting in Italian cathedrals, reading about who painted what mural. Fine, then. Go live in Vista del Muerte.

His unfinished plant lay on the other side of the Huangpu, in the Pudong section, itself a most audacious undertaking, considering that two decades prior nothing had been there. Historically an alluvial flood plain and then a place of fishing shacks and low brick factories, Pudong was now the site of a new financial district, the glass-and-steel fingers there achieving a staggering density meant to rival that of New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, or London. The West was full of doubters about such development in China, that it would ever be done, or done well, or done without great economic dislocation. As if the histories of the United States or Britain or Germany had not been wrenching and destructive. But the only way you made something new was by destroying something old. On the other side of the river, the cab passed the Mori building, China's third tallest, a massive pagoda-roofed rocketship, terrifying in its scale.

"Stop," insisted Charlie. "See big building."

The cabbie proudly flashed his teeth. "Yes, very good. Number one."

Charlie unrolled his window and peered upward; the top of the building was lost in the haze. America doesn't know, he thought bitterly, doesn't want to know. We're too young, too ignorant of history. China's ascendancy was not merely a business cycle or a set of policy changes; no, it was a civilization stirring-again, as China had always stirred again. The recent problems in Asia would be gone within a year or two. Next to the Mori Building rose the World Financial Center, destined to be the tallest building in the world. He remembered two years earlier, when the construction site was merely a muddy field with giant pile drivers hammering steel footings into the mudflats. Now the building was roofed, walled, windowed, and wired, and included a hotel so high up that guests could look out their windows at clear skies, then take the elevator down to the street and walk outside into rain.

And what about his own goddamned little project? He gave the driver the address, and a minute or two later they entered Pudong's manufacturing zone, passing huge buildings marked Kodak, Ericsson, Motorola, Seimens. Here it was, a walled site with a sign announcing in already-faded paint the factory's completion one month hence, a goal now impossible. Lucky to make it in the next three. But don't tell that to Marvin Noff or Mr. Ming.

He asked the driver to wait while he got out. His back! He staggered out of the car in his wrinkled suit and hobbled toward the fenced construction driveway.

"I help you," said the driver, running up to him.

He leaned on the man's arm until they reached the fence. "Thank you," Charlie said. "I appreciate that."

"Very bad back, I think so much," said the driver, pointing.

"Yes," he breathed between spasms. "Will you take me to the friendship store?" Charlie remembered that the department store for foreigners usually had Western over-the-counter remedies for sale. "We can go there and then to the hotel."

"Friendship store closed now," said the driver. "I take you better."

"I'll go to the hotel's doctor."

The driver laughed.

"What's funny?"

"Hotel doctor, many people die."

"I don't believe it."

"Hotel doctor good, traditional Chinese medicine very, very good. Number one."

"You sure?"

"Very, very good, I promise. Medicine very good."

"Okay." He clutched the fence in misery. "I'll try anything."

The driver pulled out his phone and began to chatter in Chinese. Charlie turned to look at his factory, his dream. The building-five windowless stories, thirty thousand square feet on each floor-had progressed minimally since he'd seen it last. Stacks of copper piping and pallets of bricks stood in the same places they had before. No scaffolding. He could see a load of steel, edges starting to rust. Loose trash blew across the site, catching on the locked gate. He gripped its bars, imprisoned from without. But he could see enough to know the trouble he was in; the subcontractors were gone-no electricians, no climate-control people, no plumbers. He'd have to lie to Mr. Ming, fudging the factory's progress reports in order to get the next installment of financing released. Such a fraudulent statement was grounds for termination of the loan. The thing was sinking him. Every day the plant was late getting on-line was a day less of revenue in the second quarter of the next year-a disastrous deficit, what with revenue streams from other products tapering down as they became obsolete or as Manila Telecom stole market share, chewing his feet off. If Marvin Noff knew how behind they were, he'd stick a knife in Teknetrix's stock-urgent sell. I'm getting killed here, Charlie thought, killed big.