Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

What did you think? That I had a private stash somewhere? Maybe I should have. Jesus Christ, it all went through him, okay? Tariko’s just out of his mind over it. It was his job, primarily. Watching her, I mean. Monitoring her movements. But she didn’t make any movements. She just sat there and stewed.

Our guy’s on it. Obviously. The important thing is to watch for noises in the press. What’s done is done. I’m not after any vendettas. I’ve made that clear. She’s untouchable as long as she stays in Korea, and I doubt she’s going anywhere else. No, there’s been nothing in the papers. Mai is helping out with that. We told the police he was alone in the office and the cameras were out for maintenance. Disgruntled former client. Apparently it’s a thing in Bangkok. They didn’t seem too interested. His family took the body. No idea where the funeral was.

Whatever you say. The important thing is, Sasha, we need chemists. An in-house staff. I couldn’t give a damn where they’re located. Put them in Vilnius, put them in São Paulo. Put them in Juárez. We have all his papers, but what good does that do us? Ten synthetic chemists, say, on a yearly contract. Get them straight out of grad school, get them from Sandoz and Merck and Pfizer, get them from meth labs, I don’t care. As long as they can do the work. We’re talking about a total reboot here. The drugs come first. Self-tanning. Yeah, okay, I said it, right? Silpa’s not even cold. So shoot me. Let’s talk primary markets. Then we develop the surgeons. Five years down the line, Orchid reopens. In the meantime, we’re Orchis Pharmaceuticals, Ltd. I just did the paperwork. Caymans.

No, my same office. Same address. Orchid Imports, 200 Light Street, Sixteenth floor, Baltimore, Maryland 21001. I’ll be back there in a week. Have to take care of some business first. Tariko’s wrapping things up, no. Sold the house to a Saudi. Six-fifty, that’s fifteen percent profit. Silver linings, right?

• • •

I wake up again, now, a haze of light filling the gauze bandages over my eyes. A white world, inside a fluorescent tube. The airplane window vibrates against my cheek. Sunlight above the clouds, the brightest sunlight, unfiltered, un-ozoned, cell-killing, cell-dividing. It’ll hurt to open them at first, Silpa said, under the bandages, but you shouldn’t hesitate. Move those babies around. You don’t want the eye muscles to atrophy. Anyway, by that time you’ll only be a day or so away from full use.

You there? Martin asks. You there, Kelly?

Curtis, I say, through a dry mouth. It’s Curtis.

Shit. Sorry. Curtis. Now I can stop taking your pulse. I was sure those Vicodins were really something stronger. Never seen anyone sleep so long.

I wasn’t asleep the whole time.

I hear him taking a moment to digest this.

The important thing, he says, is that we’ve got your back. Nothing changes. Payments as normal. Deliveries as normal. Here we are, landing in Shanghai in forty-five minutes. As promised. Passport in hand.

It didn’t sound that way to me.

Forget what you heard. You were addled. I could have been talking Klingon.

Silpa’s dead, I say. Isn’t he? Did I get that much right?

The alert bell pings overhead, and a voice comes over the loudspeaker. Dajia hao, the flight attendant says. She has a chirpy Shandong accent. A warm tear rests on my upper lip. How good it is, I’m thinking, to hear a language I completely understand.

Here. Martin presses a cold glass into my hand. Don’t worry, he says. Ginger ale. I’m not trying to knock you back out.

So I guess your plans are off the table.

For now, he says. For now. The moment has to be right. Think globally, act locally. You have to expand your consciousness. The world is Baltimore, remember? It just doesn’t know it yet. His face slackens; he might be, impossibly, about to cry. I’m always at home, he says. You know why? My money travels with me. There’s nothing more beautiful than stepping up to that ATM for the first time, wherever you are, putting your card in and watching the color of the bills shooting out. It’s like sex. That’s when I think, there’s nothing I can’t do.

Not me, I say. That’s never worked on me.

Tell me about it.

No, I mean, in my universe, Baltimore is a fixed point. It doesn’t expand and contract.

You’ll see how that changes when you come back to visit.

What do you mean, come back ? I’ve never been there before.

Heh-heh-heh, he says. Don’t fuck with me. Trying to give yourself retrograde amnesia? It’s not that easy. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Seriously, I say. I’m from Athens, Georgia. Didn’t you know that? Never been to Baltimore in my life. I mean, I passed through on 95 on the way up to Cambridge.

As I say it, I will it into being: an orb, a warm, pulsing thing, orange-yellow, the color of butterscotch candy, rising again out of my very center, up into my throat. My guide-light. It points only in one direction. The future vibrates in me; my legs are shaking. I want to tear off the bandages right now .

Do I feel sadness? I ought to ask myself that, but it seems like an impossible question. Should I grieve for them, for my lost girl, for the woman who could finish my sentences in two languages? And spend my life, waste my life, along with theirs? I’ve become them. I didn’t make the world. Should I give up on it?

My senses have grown sharper, I’m thinking: I can hear a magazine rustling in the seat behind us, keys clicking on a laptop, a can of Diet Coke snapping open. The rustle of life itself. The impatience of it. All these people fidgeting with their phones, drumming their fingers, feeling money trickling away with every waiting second. The towers of Shanghai, towers I won’t even recognize, floating up out of an electric haze. The light thrown off by assets multiplying. Isn’t this the pattern of heaven? I’ve grown old, I’m thinking. Old and slack, in my original habitat, in the cage of one body, hardly even aware that it is a cage. Time to wake up. Time to plant some seed capital. Who cares if it’s with Orchid, or with Hue, or Hue.2, or something I haven’t dreamed up yet? Money, I’m thinking, to paraphrase The Art of War , always finds its place. And when I have enough, whatever enough means, I’ll endow another wing of the Harvard Library. The Wang Center for Translation Studies. Or maybe the Miao Center for Translation Studies. Or, if the time is right, the Thorndike Center. The Wendy and Meimei Thorndike Center.

Because that story, too, will have to be told.

Don’t fuck with me, Martin says. I’m not your goddamned life coach. For the first time I can hear the ticking of fear in his voice. This isn’t about your journey, he says, so let’s get some things on the record. You signed a contract. You have duties to perform. A fiduciary obligation. And don’t think that you can hit the ground and go all renegade on us. We’ll find Julie-nah, and we’ll find you.

Okay, I say, just to keep him calm. You’re right.

We’ll be in touch when it’s all arranged, he says. In the meantime, you have a Bank of China account set up for you. Here’s the card. Here’s the passport. I’ll whisper the PIN in your ear. You ready? He leans over until I can feel the warmth of his lips glowing on my ear. 2526. There’s an easier way to remember it, though.

Because it spells Alan ? I say. Who’s Alan? Am I supposed to remember him?

The plane is descending now; I feel it in my knees, my hips, the pull of the atmosphere, the engines measuring out the shock of gravity in little tugs and dips. Martin says nothing. I remember, just now, something he said to me on the flight out of BWI, when we’d just settled into our seats. I love taking off, he said, but I hate to land. Gives me the creeps. Can’t get it over with soon enough. Those flaps, you know, that flip up on the wings? Doesn’t it just seem like a toy, when you look at those things? Like fingernails. All that momentum, and then they flick a switch and squash you like an ant.