Tash Aw - Five Star Billionaire

“But what?”

“But she has secrets,” Yanyan said. “She shares a lot of intimate secrets with me but not the most important ones.”

“Why?”

Yanyan sighed and laughed, as if explaining a simple idea to a child. “Because she wants to leave, but she doesn’t want to upset me. That’s why I have to read her journal — to know what is going through her mind. So that I will be prepared for the day she moves on.”

“Has she written in the journal that she’ll be moving?”

“No”—Yanyan shrugged—“but everyone does eventually. You can’t stay in a city like Shanghai forever. You will leave too, and so will I.”

It was true, Justin thought; he had left messages with estate agents who were now ringing back with proposals of swanky places in Luwan and Xuhui, where all the foreigners lived. All he had to do was return their calls and in a few days he would have a new apartment. He hadn’t mentioned any of this to Yanyan, but, then again, she hadn’t asked.

“So, tell me something about yourself,” Yanyan said. “You don’t speak much.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Justin said. “My life is very boring.”

“I think you have a lot of secrets.”

Justin laughed and stood up. “If I had a secret journal like your roommate’s, it would be empty.”

WHAT THE NEWSPAPERS CANNOT FIND IS THE MISSING PIECE of the puzzle: What was Gary’s life like before he moved into his uncle’s dismal house on the outskirts of Kota Bharu? Who was Gary’s mother, and what did she do? Was he already a miscreant at the age of nine or ten? Was he abused at a very young age? The trail has run cold, and it seems there are no more answers to be found in that rather depressed part of northern Malaysia. The out-of-town journalists who have been there for a couple of weeks are now beginning to tire of the second-rate hotels, where the AC breaks down twice a day and the combination of Islamic laws and lack of development means that there are no cool bars, no fancy cinemas, no dancing, little alcohol, and certainly no girls. Besides, the TV channels have moved on from Garygate, as someone has called this episode; they are no longer interested in him.

Maybe if they could track Gary down and get an exhaustive interview with him, in which he recounted every detail of his life and then broke down in tears while apologizing for his misdeeds — maybe then the story would be complete and his life could be restored. But Gary is not available for interviews. His record company says that he is in a period of self-reflection. According to most bloggers, this probably means he has had an overdose, but by now even the cheapest tabloid newspapers do not have the enthusiasm to speculate on Gary’s fate.

For once in Gary’s brief, glittering career, however, the press release is true. He is indeed thinking about himself. Not because he wants to but because he is barricaded in his hotel, immobile, for the first time in years. No meetings to attend, no chat shows, no dance rehearsals with girls dressed as sexy extraterrestrials, no recording sessions that last into the early hours of the morning. Trapped in his hotel room, he looks out at the Shanghai skyline, at the ribbons of elevated highways unfurling into the distance, at the brilliant gilding of Jing’an Temple amid the blue-glass and chrome façades of the office blocks, at the crowds of people hurrying along the streets, distant but still close enough for him to pick out individual details in their clothing: a scarlet raincoat, a Burberry scarf, a yellow satchel. Everyone hurrying to or from somewhere, every life full of something about to happen, everyone looking forward to the next heartbeat of their existence.

But not him.

He keeps the TV on the Discovery Channel, for he finds it soothing to have a backdrop of constant motion, of constant savagery. Killer whales devouring seals, snakes swallowing pigs. He sees a shot of a lizard eating another lizard that looks identical, only a bit smaller. But the bigger lizard can’t quite manage it — the smaller one keeps wriggling out of its jaws, its hind legs jerking as if electrocuted. Gary does not know why, but he starts to laugh. Many of the things he watches on TV seem comical to him nowadays.

In front of him, little windows announce themselves on the screen of his laptop, popping into existence like beautiful, short-lived nighttime flowers. These are the numerous online chat programs he is on — about half a dozen at once. Most of the time he doesn’t bother to look at the messages, which are greetings from total strangers who don’t even know who they are writing to. They don’t care — they are all lonely and in need of someone to chat with. Everyone uses a false name, hiding who they truly are, just as he does. The only thing on display is their solitude.

A small chat window with a girl’s face on it pops up with a bright bling . Gary has seen her before. It is rare to see a photo of a real face on these chat sites. The last time Gary saw it, he decided that it must be a fake — no girl would place a picture on the Internet that showed her smiling straight into the camera. The photo was taken in a public park, not in a studio, and the girl in it was not even dressed up or prettified in any way. He thought it must have been a stolen image — someone playing a joke, so he took no notice. Her message this time is the same as the last time: sassy and challenging. Hellooooo, anyone out there? Any human being, alien, even a talking monkey would be okay!

Yes, it must be a fake, Gary thinks as he clicks on the window to close it. Besides, he is bored of these chat rooms now, bored of inventing stories about who he is, bored of lying about his age, job, hometown — bored of the flattery and flirtation, the banality of the chat that is always the same and never goes anywhere.

Around him: an orchid in a stone-gray bowl, beige-and-black furniture — the same room for over two weeks now. Near the door there are two trays piled high with dirty dishes and glasses, unfinished food clinging to the white porcelain. He does not call for anyone to take the things away, because he is ashamed of being seen even by the humblest cleaning girl. He does not want to know that she is sneering at him, sniggering with her friends down in the kitchen below. Every few days he waits until 3:00 A.M., when even the lifts are silent, and then he pushes the trays out into the corridor. He collects his food in this way too, emerging swiftly to draw the tray into his den when he feels there is no risk of being seen, like a rat darting back into its burrow. For several days, therefore, while he gathers the courage to open his door and place the dirty dishes outside, the remnants of his meals sit in a pile, reminding him, just as his agent does every so often, that unless he gets some work soon, there will be no more money to pay the bills.

This is the reality of his life as it now stands: dirty, unchanging, helpless. There is nothing new or interesting for him to contemplate in his minimalist, sullied cell; he has exhausted all the possibilities of his life, cannot even look ahead into the future as those people down on the streets can. And so the only thing that can occupy his thoughts is the past, not because he wants to think about it but because he has run out of options. If the newspapers could see his past, maybe they would look more kindly upon him. But maybe not. Maybe they would see his childhood as a source of shame and ridicule, something else to make fun of.

He lived with his mother in a rural town called Temangan. If a town as small as Temangan were capable of having outskirts, the newspapers would probably say that he lived there, where the low rows of shophouses and cheaply built houses bled into the countryside, fading into the thin jungle that stretched for miles until the next town. There was something ridiculous about country people like them and their neighbors trying to become modern city folk, saving up their money for a scooter, then a car, and dreaming of a job in the capital down south. Now that he has traveled so far in life, he can see just how futile that dream was, how justified those sophisticated cosmopolitan people were in laughing at their aspirations, because it was clear that they could never change their lives.