There were five people exercising, all men, running on treadmills and wrestling with Nautilus machines. The smell was a chemical clean and the TV, showing CNN, was loud. The fitness person glanced Alan’s way, and Alan nodded seriously while looking at one of the machines, as if to say Yes, I will do some of this tomorrow in my fitness clothes.
Then he left. He wandered the lobby for a while, and decided to sit and observe. He ordered an iced tea and watched as Saudis and Westerners glided across the reflective surface of the floor. He listened to the fountains, the occasional raised voice echoing a hundred feet up into the atrium. The hotel was really without any character whatsoever. He loved it. But it was also a hotel without a bar and so there was very little to do down there. Upstairs, the bottle was waiting. So he stepped back into the glass elevator and floated back up to his floor.
Inside, he poured a few fingers in and began.
‘Dear Kit, Something is different about me. Either this thing on my neck is causing me to lose my mind, or I’ve already lost it.’
No, he told himself. Stop the blubbering. Do something useful. He took a sip. It burned his tongue, strained his gums. His eyes watered. He took another long pull.
‘Dear Kit, I have made some mistakes. That’s why you won’t be in school this fall. It’s simple, true. I fucked up. But they do not make it easy on guys like me.’
He started again.
‘First of all, let me tell you the good news. It looks like this Saudi deal is going through. You can sign up for classes in the fall. I’ll have the money. I’ll have enough to pay full-freight. The whole year up-front, if those bastards want it that way.’
Now he was lying. She didn’t deserve that. She’d done nothing wrong. And yes, the economy was this, the world was that, these schools were overpriced, ridiculously overpriced — my God, did they simply pull that tuition number out of the wind and then add ten percent? — but still. Had he planned better, had he not been so incompetent, he would have whatever she needed. He had twenty years to save $200k. How hard was that? It was ten thousand a year. Much less assuming any kind of interest on the money. All he had to do was save $60k and leave it alone. But he didn’t leave it alone. He played with it. He invested it, invested it in himself and others. He thought he could make the $200k at will, in any given year. How could he have predicted the world losing interest in people like him?
A year ago, he’d had the idea that he’d pioneer a new line of bikes — classic, durable, for the collectors and the tinkerers and the families who just wanted something indestructible. And so he went looking for a loan. He figured half a million would allow him to rent a small warehouse, some machinery, hire some engineers and designers, get a few prototypes made, buy a few trucks. He knew what he wanted — strong simple bikes with clean lines, tons of chrome, everything built to last a thousand years and never look weary.
He came up with a viable business plan, but the banks laughed him out the door. You want to make what? Where? I want to make bikes, he said. In Massachusetts. That amused everyone. Lots of amusement from the people holding the cash. One venture capital guy had actually laughed, a big and genuine laugh, on the phone — laughed a good long time. Alan, if I gave you five grand, let alone five hundred, that would be the end of us both! They’d have us committed!
This was not a good time to be asking banks for money for what they deemed a project of quixotic dimensions. The kindest among the loan officers referred him to the government. Have you heard of the Small Business Adminstration? they asked. Check out their website. It’s very informative and easy to use.
So Alan went to smaller and smaller banks, whose officers were more and more quizzical about just what the hell Alan was talking about. They’d never heard of anything like it. Some of the bank people were so young they’d never seen a business proposal suggesting manufacturing things in the state of Massachusetts. They thought they’d unearthed some ancient shaman, full of clues to a forgotten world.
Now he wants to be the union man! Ron chuckled. Alan had made the mistake of telling his father about his plans. He thought he’d be impressed. Maybe it was a shot at redemption? Ron was not supportive.
—Too late, Sonny.
When he said Sonny, he meant Pissant.
—I don’t think so.
—You helped all that move to China. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle. But why listen to me? Why not get some consultants to tell you what to do?
Ron had always been dismissive of consultants. —What can they tell me about my own business? They’re paid obscenely to misread spreadsheets.
Alan stopped asking advice from his father.
On the few occasions when Alan had been invited to start filling out the loan paperwork, it went from hopeful to tragic with alarming speed. And the factor that seemed to move his proposal from risky to toxic was not American infrastructure, or the market for American-made goods, or the competition from China. It was Banana Republic. Banana Republic was killing the ability of entrepreneurs like himself to move this country forward. Banana Republic killed his credit, and that had killed America.
Alan had never checked or known his credit score but was told, by every bank and even a few venture capital firms, that his score made him untouchable. His score, 698, was 50 or so points below what would qualify him as trustworthy or even human.
After days of digging he realized that the defining moment of his current financial life, and the barrier to his being considered for any and all loans, was a certain purchase at Banana Republic six years earlier.
He needed a new jacket, and the salesperson told him that if he signed up for a Banana Republic store card, that he’d get fifteen percent off that day, and he could cancel the card shortly thereafter. But somehow, after he’d canceled the card, it had not been canceled, and bills continued to be sent, but because he’d canceled the card, he hadn’t opened the envelopes, figuring they were junk mail.
So he went to 30 and finally 90 days overdue, and then 120, and collection agencies were called, and at that point he paid the $32.00 due, some kind of finance fee, and he killed the card dead, again.
But all that had pushed his credit score below 700, and any kind of loan, let alone a third mortgage — he’d taken out a second before the Banana Republic debacle — was out of reach.
The bank people would point to the score and throw up their hands. When he would explain that he had paid his mortgages, all of his actual credit cards, dutifully for thirty years, they seemed to care, and value this, but then not so much. There was the score.
Alan tried to reason with them.
—You’re seeing my actual credit report.
—Yes sir.
—And you see that the only blemish is this Banana Republic card.
—Yup. That’s the main one, I’m pretty sure.
—And you recognize that a $72 charge on a Banana Republic card six years ago is not a very significant indicator next to thirty years of perfect performance with bills and mortgage payments?
—Yes, I agree.
Alan thought he’d broken through.
—So we can get around this?
The man laughed. —Oh, no. I’m sorry sir. The score is below our threshold. We can’t grant loans if the applicant’s score is below 700.
—Mine is 698.
—Yes. But even below 740 prompts a review at the highest levels.
—But you don’t even compile these scores yourself.
—Right.
—Some outside agency does. Experian.
—Right.
—Do you know how they assess what cards or payments trigger what kinds of deduction to your credit score?
—No, no. That’s proprietary information. The man chuckled, as if the two of them were considering the motivations of God himself. They protect that very closely, the man said.
Alan tried to call Banana Republic. They had no idea. —We don’t deal with the credit cards on that level, a rep said. She referred him
to a company in Arizona. The number in Arizona repeatedly hung up on him, as if by design.
The age of machines holding dominion over man had come. This was the downfall of a nation and the triumph of systems designed to thwart all human contact, human reason, personal discretion and decision making. Most people did not want to make decisions. And too many of the people who could make decisions had decided to cede them to machines.
Alan stood. The lines of the room went everywhere, like a game of pick-up sticks. He found the bed, and allowed it to swallow him. It spun like a pinwheel. —Maybe I drank too much, he said, chuckling. He put his hand flat to the wall and the spinning slowed and stopped.
Not bad, he said, thinking he was very funny and capable. He wanted to stop the spinning and did. —Congratulations, young man! he said.
Alan looked in the mirror above the desk, and then at the phone. And while looking at it, it rang.
—Hello?
—It’s Hanne.
—Good. How are you?
She laughed. —I didn’t ask you how you are.
—I guess I just felt you should know.
She laughed again, her low strum of a laugh. —Are you already in bed?
—No. Why?
—There’s a party at the embassy tonight.
—The Danish embassy?
—Yes, and it will be bacchanalian.
—I’m already drunk. That moonshine.
—That’s good. You’ll fit in. Will you come?
XIX.
HE TOOK A CAB to the embassy, and within twenty minutes witnessed two women licking a man’s pierced nipples, bestride him like barbarian consorts. There were people in their underwear and so many pills. Barrels of moonshine. It was desperate and deranged and even intermittently enjoyable.
There was a fat man dancing by the pool, dancing well. Such tight pants for a bigger man. Hanne was gone, to the bar.
Alan was alone and wandered. He did not need a drink.
The fat man’s pants glittered like the scales of a fish. Alan had doubted the man, had wondered why there were women so close to him, intrigued by him, but then the fat man had started dancing, and all was justified. He was fantastic. And Canadian. A fat Canadian dance phenom.
There was a game being played in the pool. People diving for pills. There was no pot at the party — that might have been too easy to detect by neighbors, the smell on the wind — so instead there were pills. There were so many pills, and wine and liquor in unmarked bottles. It was a bootlegger’s paradise.
There was the tall man, built like a Viking, straw hair in a ponytail, throwing the pills in the deep end, hundreds of them. He threw them in and people dove. You must eat them so I can see, he said to the party-goers, in their underwear, diving in. You could only play the game if you waited till you resurfaced and swallowed the pill in front of him. And so people jumped, in their underwear, into the pool, diving for the drugs — white and blue pills that were very difficult to see in the pool floor at night. What were they?
Someone said Viagra, someone said Ambien, but that couldn’t be right. Soon someone emerged from the pool naked, and that created a stir. In the pool, there were men and women entwined, flesh refracted and moving rhythmically, and there were the pills, the moonshine, but the man who emerged from the pool naked apparently crossed a line. He was quickly covered in a towel and ushered inside.
Where was Hanne?
The people were older than he had ever seen behaving this way. Old people, people his own age, in their underwear. Old people with the pills, throwing the pills into their mouths and washing them down with giant bottles of homemade liquor. Something pent up had been unleashed. What about the woman with the cleavage? She carried it like a tray in front of her. Just walking around the party, around and around, with no other plan or purpose, it seemed. Never seemed to talk to anyone. As if she’d been hired to do what she did, walk around, be admired. Such things were done in New York and Vegas, but here?
Alan drank out of a dozen clear bottles, the contents always looking like water and tasting like broken machinery.
Alan ran into an American architect. He said he’d designed part of KAEC, the financial center. He had designed at least a few of the tallest buildings in the world. He was from somewhere very surprising, very flat. Iowa? He had been warm, humble, maybe a bit haggard. They compared notes about lack of sleep. The architect had just come from Shanghai, where he was building a new tower, taller than anything else he’d done. He’d been working for ten years in Dubai, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, all over China.
—I haven’t worked in the States in, wow, I can’t think of when I last did, he said.
Alan asked why, though he knew the answer. It was about money, sure, but also vision, courage, even a bit of competitive ego.
—Not that it’s about the biggest or tallest, but you know, in the U.S. now there’s not that kind of dreaming happening. It’s on hold. The dreaming’s being done elsewhere for now, the architect said. Then he left the party.
—Come talk to me.
It was Hanne.
—Where have you been? she asked.
Alan didn’t know.
She pulled Alan’s hand. He followed.
—Let’s make a mistake, she said.
They went to the garage. Three refrigerators still in their boxes.
And her face in his chest, then those small eyes looking up to him, trying to be sultry but achieving something more like searching. He felt found, and looked away.
But they kissed for a moment, and then he stopped. He pretended it was an issue of chivalry. A matter of dignity.
—This feels silly, rushing like this, doesn’t it? he said.
She stepped back, looking at him like he’d revealed a terrible secret, that he’d been a member of the SS in his youth. Then she laughed. Admirable caution at your age, Alan!
He brought her close to him, and held her for a long time. He kissed the top of her head. That was too far, and he knew it. Now he was her father. Her priest? He was an idiot.
She pulled away. —Don’t patronize me.
He apologized, and told her how much he liked her, because he did.
—You can’t hurt me, you know, she said. I’m indestructible.
This was the go-ahead, one person telling another that her eyes were open, and he needn’t worry about her falling in love with him or even remembering him.
Was she being cruel? People don’t like to be kept from what they want. Especially when it appears within their reach. It makes one doubly angry. Clearly Hanne felt she was doing Alan a favor. And then he had tasted her and said no. She didn’t talk to him the rest of the night.
But by then the party was almost over anyway. This happened at the end, near the end, at least near the end of his time there. The spaceman! A man in a spacesuit. It was a costume, but it was very good, very realistic. Something like a cross between the Apollo suit and Kubrick’s 2001, angular like that, the ribbed arms and legs. He just walked around in that suit, feigning weightlessness, and then he went back inside. He emerged later without the helmet and he turned out to be in his mid-sixties. What had he been drinking or taking? A man in his sixties walking in slow motion around the party, pantomiming with people, pretending to grab the breasts of the cleavage woman.
There was music in the basement, a kind of dance floor, a disco ball crafted with tin foil. Motown was the only thing, Diana Ross and the Shirelles. The Jackson 5. Men and women in their forties grinding, ass to crotch. It was unsettling, how they were doing it. Alan had had to leave the basement.
There were bright young people. Out by the pool.
They had their moonshine in hand, in red cups, and they made their way to the dance floor for a song or two, and Alan found himself next to them, on deck chairs, watching the pill-diving. There were three of them. One, a young woman, from Ethiopia but speaking like an American. Born in Miami, now working for the Ethiopian embassy. Her hair leapt out of her head in all directions, with
her thin straight nose, her enormous eyes, eyelids painted as if with blue smoke. With her were two earnest young men. They looked sixteen, faces like ripe fruit, eyes small and alight. One was Dutch, the other Mexican. They were interested in Alan, in KAEC, in everything.
—This place is about to pop, the Ethiopian woman said.
—This place is about to pop? Alan thought she meant some kind of war. Some kind of terror. Something like the 1979 massacre at Mecca, all those pilgrims dead.
—No, no, she said. The women. The Saudi women have had it. They’re done with all this shit. Abdullah’s trying to open doors, hoping the women plow through, take it from there. He thinks he’s Gorbachev. He’s setting up the dominoes. The co-ed college was the first. KAEC is the next.
Alan turned to the other two. —You agree with this?
The other two nodded. They probably knew more than he did.
There was foosball. Some kind of tournament, very serious, with names on a chalkboard, single-elimination. A big flatscreen TV playing the films of Russ Meyer. The astronaut was watching, leaning forward, his helmet in his lap.
XX.
JUMBLED MEMORIES AND REVELATIONS assaulted Alan throughout the next morning as he showered and dressed and read his copy of Arab News. What was that by the sink? Another bottle of illicit alcohol. Hanne had sent him home with one. Hanne cared about him, the fool. He thought of the kiss on her head. A terrible thing to do. Underslept and with a foot still in the nocturnal world of the Danish embassy, he knew he would be brittle this day. He drank his coffee and flipped through the newspaper, seeing a small photo of King Abdullah and caption noting that he was back in the Kingdom.
This was the first day, then, that the King might actually visit KAEC. However unlikely he’d arrive at the city, and even though Alan felt like he’d spent the night in the trunk of a car, he and the Reliant team had to be on time, ready and presentable.