How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

  Perhaps because of a persistent twinge in her hip, she ventures out less than she formerly did. She leaves most household chores to her factotum, a diminutive, middleaged man who cooks, drives, shops, and occupies a servant quarter next to her kitchen. She does however make a daily round of her favorite park, walking slowly but erectly, in the evenings during summer and fall, and in the mornings during winter and spring, when she particularly enjoys observing the youthful lovers who gather there for hurried, furtive liaisons before they report to class or to work.

  At home she watches movies and, especially, listens to the radio, often turning the volume high enough that it amuses her tenants, who might take a break from their busy lives to chat with her for a few moments as she nods her head to the beat and puffs along on her cigarette. Sometimes one of them will show her their latest work, a video clip or demo of a song, but this is rare. She is never invited to a set or a studio. Her townhouse is at the end of a cul-de-sac, and from her upstairs lounge she can see all the way down her street, past a stretch of shops and restaurants, to a telecommunications center from which red and white masts soar mightily, towering above satellite dishes, like electromagnetic spars built to navigate the clouds. She bought her place for its view.

  Hers is not by nature a temperament sympathetic to nostalgia, in fact the opposite. She refuses to visit the seaside metropolis where she spent so many productive years. Nor does she seek to scrape together the funds to retain, on a temporary basis, a new assistant who could translate and facilitate for her, making possible a final coda to her much-loved trips abroad. In her mind, her return to the region of her birth marked a decisive break from days gone recently by.

  And yet, whether because of her advancing age or the strange echoes this city sustains through its associations with her childhood, she finds herself pulled into frequent and unexpected turns of thought, dampness on a fingertip used to wipe dew off a glass of water reminding her of a gentle and now-dead photographer, say, or a sudden breeze felt on her balcony conjuring up a beach party long ago. Present and alert in this moment, she, unaccustomedly, might well be lost to reverie in the next.

  You re-encounter each other at a pharmacy, a crowded micro-warehouse stacked with pallets not much bigger than matchboxes, mostly white, bearing text too minute to be legible, even while squinting, and, on occasion, iridescent seals of hologrammed authenticity that shimmer like fish in the light. You are progressing incrementally to the counter, buffeted by those who push forward out of line, reliant on strangers who acknowledge you and are good enough to wait. Ahead you see a figure turn after paying for her purchase, a figure you think you recognize, and you are seized by a powerful emotion. This emotion is akin to panic, and indeed you consider shoving your prescription back into your pocket and making for the exit.

  But you stand your ground. As the figure approaches, she frowns.

  “Is that you?” she asks, not for the first time in her life.

  You lean on your cane and scrutinize the wizened woman before you.

  “Yes,” you say.

  Neither of you speaks. Slowly, she shakes her head. She rests her hand on yours, her skin smooth and cool against your knuckles.

  “Do I look as old as you do?” she asks.

  “No,” you say.

  “I thought you were an honest boy.”

  You smile. “Not always.”

  “Let’s find a place to sit down.”

  Near the pharmacy is a coffee shop, evidently part of a chain, and possessed of a franchise’s artificial quirkiness, its seemingly mismatched sofas and chairs and tables corresponding to a precise and determined scheme set forth in the experience section of a corporate brand guidelines binder. Its furniture and fittings evoke decades gone by. Its music, its menu, and, saliently, its prices are utterly contemporary. For affluent younger customers, the effect might be pleasant, transporting them from this street in this neighborhood to a virtual realm inhabited by people very much like themselves across rising Asia, or even across the planet. But for you, who remembers that a fruit seller occupied this particular property until a few months ago, the faux wornness of this establishment would be disorienting. Normally. Today you do not notice.

  Over tea you and the pretty girl discuss what exlovers meeting again after half a lifetime usually discuss, namely your health, the arcs of your careers, shared memories, yes, this often while laughing, as well as your present whereabouts, and, in passing, so tangentially as merely to be grazed, whether you are currently single. Your waiter is courteous, seeing a pair of elderly people leaning forward, engrossed in conversation, which is, of course, what you see also, except that it is not all you see, for you see too, overlaid on the pretty girl’s diminished form, or perhaps rather flickering inside it, a taller, stronger, more zestful entity, happy in this moment, and able yet to dance in the moistness of an eye.

  “How strange to be using the word retired,” the pretty girl says as she finishes her tea.

  “We’re unemployed,” you correct her. “Sounds more alive than retired.”

  “Are you looking for work?”

  “No.”

  “Retired, then.”

  You pour two glasses of water.

  “You should interview me,” you say, passing her hers. “And I’ll interview you. Then we’ll be unemployed.”

  She takes a sip. “Only if neither of us gets hired.”

  You call her the next day, and in the weeks that follow you spend time together, going to a restaurant for dinner one evening, on another converging in a park for a slowmoving stroll. You explore the city’s main colonial-era museum and its pungently aromatic zoo, attractions you last visited when your son was a schoolboy. At the zoo you are surprised by how inexpensive tickets are, and further by the size of the facility, which seems bigger than you recall, though you had expected the opposite to be the case. The pretty girl marvels at the aviary, you at hippopotamuses slipping daintily into a mud pool from the grassy banks of their enclosure. She draws to your attention the large number of young men who are here, their accents and dialects often hailing from remote districts. They call to the animals in amusement and wonder, or sit in clusters on plentiful benches, taking advantage of the shade. The zoo has signs listing the daily dietary intake of its most prominent residents, and occasionally a literate visitor is to be heard reading to his fellows the prodigious quantities of food required to maintain such and such beast.

  In the pretty girl’s company, you give up a small degree of the physical isolation you had imposed upon yourself, venturing out into the city a little more, having, through the presence of a friend, greater reason to do so than you did before, and also, when part of a group of two people, being less afraid than when alone. Yes, the city remains intermittently perilous, in, for example, the slashing thrusts of its vehicles, the ferocious extremes of its temperatures, and the antibiotic resistance of its microorganisms, not to mention the forcefulness of its human predators, and particularly at your age you must stay on your guard. But you savor your tentative, shared reentry, and think that the city may not be quite so fearsome, that indeed, when gazed upon with the good humor that can come from companionship, significant swaths of it appear mostly navigable, at least for the present, while a measure of bodily vitality endures.

  At times the pretty girl feels shocked looking at you, the shock of being mortal, of seeing you as a canepropped mirror, of your frail and gaunt form’s inescapable contemporaneity to her own. These impressions tend to occur in the first moments of your encounters, when an absence of a few days has run itself like a soft cloth over her short-term visual memory. But quickly other data begin to accrue, likely starting with your eyes and your mouth, her image of you resolving itself into something different, something timeless, or if not entirely timeless, still beautiful, handsome to behold. She sees in the cock of your head your awareness of the world around you, in your hands your armored gentleness, in your chin your temper. She sees you as a boy and as a man. She se
es how you diminish her solitude, and, more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.

  One night, after a movie in a theater that astonishes you with the size of its screen and the quality of its sound and the costliness of its popcorn, and also with the suddenness of the fight that breaks out among teenagers outside, in which you are knocked to the ground by mistake as a member of the crowd backs up, and you receive a bad bruise on your thigh, but nothing is broken, thank goodness, the pretty girl invites you over to her place. Her tenants grin as you enter, clearly delighted to see that their landlady has a gentleman caller, and with knowing glances make themselves scarce.

  “Would you like a drink?” the pretty girl asks.

  “I’m not supposed to,” you say.

  “A half glass of wine?”

  You nod.

  She retrieves an opened bottle from the refrigerator. “Sit, sit,” she says, and pours for you both.

  The two of you sip at your glasses. A silence descends.

  “Should we just go to my room?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  She leads you by the hand and shuts the door behind you. She does not turn on the light.

  “One second,” she says, heading to her bathroom.

  You worry about your balance in the darkness.

  “Where’s the bed?”

  “Oh, sorry.” She directs you with a palm at your waist. “Here.”

  You sit down. The mattress is firm. You grope with your hand and, finding a wall, carefully lean your cane against it. A faint light emerges from beneath the door of the bathroom, and sounds emanate from within, scraping, running water, the flush of a commode. You need to use a toilet yourself, but you suppress the impulse. The pretty girl is gone for a while.

  When she returns she sits beside you. You kiss. She tastes of mouthwash. She has changed into a nightie and through its fabric your hand can feel her ribs, her belly, the unbelievable softness of her breast like a second set of skin. She helps you undress. She tugs at you rhythmically, and fortunately you become hard, perhaps benefitting from the pressure of your full bladder on your prostate. She applies between her legs an ointment from a jar on her bedside table, and lies on her side with her back to your chest. You fumble a bit but are able to enter her. You move. She touches herself. You hug her with one arm.

  Neither of you reaches your finish. You begin to deflate before that moment comes. But, I should add, you do reach pleasure, and a measure of comfort, and lying there afterwards, temporarily thwarted and a little embarrassed, you unexpectedly start to chuckle, and she joins you, and it is the best and warmest laugh either of you has had in some time.

  TWELVE

  HAVE AN EXIT STRATEGY

  This book, I must now concede, may not have been the very best of guides to getting filthy rich in rising Asia. An apology is no doubt due. But at this late juncture, apologies alone can achieve little. Far more useful, I propose, to address ourselves to our inevitable exit strategies, yours and mine, preparation, in this lifelong case, being most of the battle.

  We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

  As you create this story and I create this story, I would like to ask you how things were. I would like to ask you about the person who held your hand when dust entered your eye or ran with you from the rain. I would like to tarry here awhile with you, or if tarrying is impossible, to transcend my here, with your permission, in your creation, so tantalizing to me, and so unknown. That I can’t do this doesn’t stop me from imagining it. And how strange that when I imagine, I feel. The capacity for empathy is a funny thing.

  As an illustration, let us consider a fish unable to burp. We can see it now, suspended in its glass bowl, floating weightlessly in a cloud-puffed sky. Its water is so transparent as to be invisible, and were it not for its bowl, it would look as if it were flying in the air, perhaps propelled about by the fluttering of its little fins. It has escaped from the seas, from the lakes, from the ponds, and it dangles now, free, bathed in sunlight and in warmth. And yet it is deeply troubled. It has a pang, a bubble trapped in its fish esophagus. Though heavenly, angelic, still it suffers. It strains. And do our hearts go out to it? Yes, they do. Burp, dear friend. Why do you not burp?

  Meanwhile, directly below this aerial ichthyological drama, a mountain’s height lower to be more precise, and therefore back on earth, an old man lives in a small townhouse with an old woman. You and the pretty girl have moved in together. She has lost a tenant, and your mind has begun slightly to drift, not always, but on occasion you are unsure where you are, and for this reason residing in a hotel has become problematic. You do not share a bedroom, the pretty girl never having done so before and being of the view that it is a bit late to start, but you do share much of your days, by turns cheerfully, grumpily, quietly, or comfortingly, and when the mood strikes you both, your nights, and you pool your dwindling savings, which are fast being eroded by inflation.

  The two of you venture out less often, and the only other people you see with regularity are the pretty girl’s one remaining tenant, the actress, and the pretty girl’s factotum, who assists you when you are disoriented, and who reminds you of your father, even though physically they are dissimilar. Maybe this is because he is an obedient man, and a house servant, and close to the age at which your father died.

  Sitting on a reupholstered chair, a newspaper in your lap and loud music in your ear, to which the pretty girl nods her head as she smokes, and enjoying a temperate autumn afternoon, you are surprised to hear the bell ring and find yourself in the presence of your son. You had forgotten he was coming. You stand to greet him and are swept up in a ferocious yet protective hug. He kisses the pretty girl’s cheek, and she too perceives time ripple as she sees a reflection of your younger self, albeit a better-dressed version with a mincing walk quite unlike your own. She offers him a cigarette, and to her satisfaction he accepts. You can sense she is taking a liking to the boy, which makes you happy. He has grown, though that must be unusual for a man of thirty, and even seated he towers above you.

  It is the first visit in many years for your son, finally a citizen of his new country and free to travel, and you try to suppress your undercurrent of resentment at his decision to absent himself from your presence in so devastatingly severe a manner. You feel a love you know you will never be able to adequately explain or express to him, a love that flows one way, down the generations, not in reverse, and is understood and reciprocated only when time has made of a younger generation an older one. He tells you he has just been to meet your ex-wife. She is well, he says, and their reunion was tearful and affectionate, and he agreed not to speak of certain things and she for her part did not ask.

  For a month you and the pretty girl are caught up in a whirlwind of engagements, mostly at home, your son cooking for you or bringing over a rented film, but twice outside also, at restaurants of his choosing, swanky places with newfangled decor, where he pays with his credit card. Then he is gone and your world shrinks to the townhouse once again. He has left you some cash, which is fortunate. A blast at a nearby bungalow, purportedly utilized to hold and interrogate suspects by an intelligence service in the past, shatters your windows, and you use the money to have them replaced.

  The city beyond is an increasingly mythological space. It intrudes in the form of power and gas outages, traffic noises, and airborne particulates that cause you to wake wheezing in your bed. It can be glimpsed around curtains and through iron grilles. Television and radio also bring in some news of it, usually frigh
tening, but then that has always been the case.

  Frequently you have the impression of gazing with the pretty girl, as if from the lip of a cliff, off into a valley where night is falling, a stark and dry and contaminated valley, where perhaps all sorts of bony, mutating creatures abide, many of them carnivorous, and having had your share of carnivorous tendencies yourself, you know that carnivores feed especially on the old and the sick and the frail, terms that have come to cling ever more tightly to you, eroding what once was your supple skin.

  But in other moments, meeting with a keen young repairman arrived to fix your telephone connection, or speaking with a knowledgeable young woman behind the counter of a pharmacy, you are pricked by a lingering optimism, and you marvel at the resilience and potential of those around you, particularly of the youth in this city, in this, the era of cities, bound by its airport and fiber-optic cables to every great metropolis, collectively forming, even if tenuously, a change-scented urban archipelago spanning not just rising Asia but the entire planet.

  Mostly, however, you do not think of the city, and focus instead on events transpiring nearby, in your living room and kitchen, or on reality-warping phantasms and reveries, transported by your brain as powerfully as by any manufactured technology, though with far less design, or on the pretty girl, with whom you settle for hours, alternating observation with argument or laughter. Together you and she have discovered a passion for cards.

  You sit at this instant, side to side, the person’s width of sofa between you your playing table. The hands you have been dealt are held close, averted. A wrinkled finger of ash hangs from her cigarette. You lift the ashtray so she can flick it, peering carefully to see if she twists and drops her wrist. No such luck, this time.