Waxwings

by Unknown

  He was still sleeping on the ship and doing jobs for Mr. Don—either on his own or with Lázaro and the other Mexicans. He was learning things from Lázaro. Most days now, he bought the Seattle Post-Intelligencer from the 7-Eleven on Nickerson. He hoped to improve his English by trying to read bits of it, but always turned first to the “Deaths” column, looking for young men with Chinese names.

  “Have you noticed?” Tom wrote. “People are getting nostalgic about money. Like so many middle-class Americans, I’m a fan of ‘Antiques Roadshow’ on PBS—the last refuge of real old-fashioned money.

  “We live in a world now where money is nearly always expressed in decimal points, with little m’s and bn’s at the end of it. To drum up interest in a TV game show, the winning contestant now has to come away with a cool million. Only on ‘Antiques Roadshow’ does money that you or I might earn in a day, or a week, or a month, or a year, have any real meaning.”

  The night before, he’d watched an elderly man bring in a painted glass beer stein, circa 1890, put out as an advertising gimmick by a Milwaukee brewery. His granny had kept string in it. When the appraiser estimated its value, the old man cracked up. Tears dribbled down his cheeks, and in a shuddering, weepy voice, he said, “Oh . . . Oh, my . . . Two thousand dollars?” Across the country, Tom sensed, millions of viewers were tearing-up in sympathy.

  That was the real secret of “Antiques Roadshow”: it restored value to sums that were important to people—as they certainly were to Tom— but which had become contemptuously devalued in the public discourse. GetaShack’s “burn rate” alone was running at $2.7m a month, according to Beth, while its assets were said to be $4.1bn. No wonder, then, that the audience ratings for “Roadshow” were themselves expressed in the kind of figures that—

  The phone went off at his feet.

  “Thomas? It is I—Shiva. We’ve just taken off from LAX. I’m on my way to D.C.”

  “Funny, some people were just—”

  “Thomas. I have been reading Reisz. I think I am turning into a fan. He has extraordinary irony and pathos.”

  “Sorry—who?”

  “Reisz,” Ray said, sounding offended. “Dave Reisz. Crystal Palace.”

  “Oh, that. Really? I thought it was quite funny, but—”

  “Thomas, you sound blasé. I don’t like blasé. We are living in a world nowadays where there is far too much blasé, and far too little passionate enthusiasm.”

  “ ‘. . . the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,’ ” Tom said, playing Shiva’s usual game.

  “What is that?”

  “W. B. Yeats. ‘The Second Coming.’ ”

  “I do not agree. In my business, I have time only for people with the passion. I chose to talk with you because I thought you had the passion. For literature.”

  “I don’t think you could accuse Yeats—”

  “No time for Yeats. Here I am busy, busy, busy. To come to the point: will Reisz play?”

  “Well, I’m sure he would, but—”

  “Get him. You know who his agent is, his man of affairs, or will you write to his publisher?”

  “I’ve got his e-mail address.”

  “You have?” Ray sounded surprised and admiring. “For a man like Reisz, I think we could definitely push out the boat. You think he might say yes if we offered him a lakh? One hundred large?”

  Resisting temptation, Tom said, “Yes, I really think he might.”

  “For a writer of this calibre, Thomas, one must be willing to go the whole hog.”

  “I’ll write to him today. Shiva—we were at dinner the other night, and there was a great debate about where your house actually is on the lake. The entire party divided between the East Siders and the West Siders, Medina or Leschi. Where is it, in fact?”

  “Ah,” Shiva Ray said. “I oscillate. Furiously.” Then the connection was lost.

  When Tom had finished writing his commentary on money, he wrote to David Scott-Rice, offering him some. The exact amount was hard to arrive at, and he kept on changing it, but finally settled on $21,500, which he thought looked nicely precise and should set something of a barrier against flighty upward negotiation. When—as must inevitably happen—he had to raise it to $25,000, he wanted it to seem like a hard-won concession. Still, he wished he hadn’t mentioned Don DeLillo’s offer over dinner, and wanted to imply that he’d wrested this lesser sum out of the authorities in the face of substantial opposition.

  Dear David,

  Emerging—only slightly scarred—from the briar patch, I’m thrilled to say that, following our conversation in the bar, I can now report back that . . .

  His message ended:

  We can arrange accommodation for you on campus (a quite prettily furnished one-bedroom apartment), or, if you preferred, we could put you up at the University Inn. I have the feeling that you’ll be happier in the apartment, and we can arrive at a reasonable per diem. As for airfare, I very much doubt if we can run to Business Class, but I will of course do what I can.

  I greatly enjoyed our vinous evening in Seattle, and very much look forward to seeing more of you here in the spring. You can count on our house as a home-from-home, and I badly want you to meet Beth and Finn.

  My best,

  Tom.

  Scott-Rice had a demon return-of-serve. Barely ten minutes later, Tom’s computer pinged, and the stamped-envelope icon appeared on the bottom of the screen. There were a couple of opening pleasantries, then a sentence that began “Given my American reputation . . .” He was busy, just starting a new book, and holding out for $40,000, with Business Class assured. He wrote: “I don’t suppose you happened to see the review of CP in the Times-Picayune did you? They put me in the best possible company . . .” And which company was that, Tom wondered sourly, Homer and Tolstoy, or IBM?

  He checked the time. At 3:25 P.M. in Seattle, it was thirty-five minutes short of midnight in London, so Scott-Rice was likely to be in a vainglorious mood after taking in a skinful, and with any luck the sober morning would find him in sackcloth and ashes. Tom decided to do nothing for the next couple of days, then respond late in the evening so that Scott-Rice could reappraise his American reputation over his breakfast coffee.

  “See, it’s like this, pardner. Properly speaking, you don’t exist.”

  Mr. Don was chewing on his cigar, and the dog Scottie gazed at Chick with rheumy, blameful eyes.

  “Twelve bucks an hour is a big chunk of change to give somebody who’s no better than a spook.”

  “Please?”

  “Spook. Ghost-man. Like you say in Chinese, gweilo. Funny, that.

  You see, Chick, you’re the gweilo around here now, and the way I look at it, you got a pretty good deal for a ghost. You got a nice place to live, you got eight-fifty an hour, cash. You thought about the IRS?”

  “INS?”

  “That’s a whole different outfit. The INS, they just lock you up and send you back where you came from. But the IRS, they take your money and then throw you in jail. So between the INS and the IRS, people like you get kind of squeezed, especially when the ghosts get uppity and start talking twelve bucks an hour. See what I’m saying, pardner?”

  “I think, Mr. Don.”

  He leaned back in his chair, blowing smoke. “It strikes me that you’re a pretty sharp guy, on the whole. But you’ve got a lot to learn about some of the institutions we have in this country. The INS and the IRS, the EPA and the FBI, the SSA—and that’s just the federal ones. Then you got to think about the state and the county and the city—and all of them got their own institutions. You run a little business like mine, you got every one of these fine institutions on your back. I take a piss in the dock, I get the EPA after me. I even talk to a gweilo like you, pardner, I’m in big trouble. That could get me put on McNeil Island for a good part of the rest of my life. McNeil Island’s a jail. You know about jails?”

  “Yes, Mr. Don.”

  “I figured you did.”

/>   Chick was saddened by this interview, having hoped to reach a compromise, to make a deal. For the last two days, Mr. Don had put him in charge of the Mexicans, so he was a manager now. When the Mexicans slacked off, he goaded them. Under his supervision, they worked twice as hard as they’d done before. A manager ought to be making $10 an hour, minimum.

  He had now saved $1,914.50. He kept it in a long inside pocket he’d sewn into his jeans. At night, he rolled them up tightly, and used them as a pillow in his cabin on the ship.

  His haircut and moustache were working wonders for him: on the streets, people now treated him as an American, and not a homeless American, either. The men, especially. Often now, he saw them smiling in his direction. Sometimes they brushed his hand with theirs. He would smile back, but walk on. His English, though improving fast, with many new words learned every day, would betray him; yet he felt the day would soon come when he’d be able to stop and talk with one of these friendly men.

  But Mr. Don was right. He had no identity, and in this country a man without identity would never go far. Lázaro had one, and still was paid only $8.50 an hour, but Lázaro was slow-witted. Chick knew he could do a whole lot better than Lázaro, if he, too, could get ID.

  On November 27, he found what he was looking for in the Post-Intelligencer. Charles Ong Lee—born 02/13/74 in Tacoma—had died in an automobile accident on Highway 99. From talking with Lázaro, he knew what to do now.

  The helicopters were back.

  From the gabled window of his study, Tom saw seven or eight of them hovering above downtown, like a flock of chicken vultures circling a carcass. One appeared to be buzzing the Klondike building. Tom dug out the binoculars he’d bought for spotting American birds when he first arrived in Seattle. The ’copter shimmied in the glass, the word POLICE stenciled in large blue letters on its pod. Anxious, he called Beth.

  “Oh,” she said, “it’s just the WTO demonstration.”

  “The what?”

  “Tom: people have been talking about nothing else for weeks. The World Trade Organisation!”

  “Ah. Yes, I suppose I did know about that.”

  “There’s a parade of old hippies going by right now. It looks kind of fun. Apparently, Madeleine Albright can’t get out of her hotel.” She laughed.

  “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “I put it in the underground garage this morning.”

  “I didn’t mean the car. I meant—”

  “Of course it’s safe. We’ve got a grandstand view from up here. Now there’s a lot of people in turtle-costumes marching by.”

  Tom went downstairs and switched on the TV, where it didn’t look safe at all; it looked like Kosovo, or worse. A ragged line of masked police with riot shields was holding off the crowd with tear-gas. As grenade after grenade exploded at the heels of the running demonstrators, the gas stained the air a brownish ochre. It was bewildering that Beth should make such a fuss about the shipyard shootings yet be so flippant about this. He gazed at the picture on the screen: familiar streets rendered scarily foreign by the stampede of people holding caps and scarves up to their faces as they bolted from the gas. A panicked reporter was yelling into the camera, which in a sudden lurch turned the street completely upside down.

  Back in the newsroom, the anchor was badly rattled. “Brian? Brian!” he shouted, and the reporter’s head bobbed briefly back into view before being lost again in the scrimmage. Over the image of the swirling street, the anchor announced: “We’re just hearing now that Mayor Schell has declared a state of emergency . . .”

  The news burst through in distraught fragments. “Anarchists and looters” were sacking McDonalds, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Niketown, Planet Hollywood. Christ! Tom thought: if Starbucks is a symbol of global capitalism, what does that make GetaShack.com?

  He dialed Beth again.

  “Hello, this is Beth?”

  “Beth!” He bawled over the noise of the riot on the screen.

  “Yes? What’s up now?”

  The words came tumbling out of him—tear-gas, looting, state of emergency!—and then he heard Beth’s impatient sigh at the other end.

  “You know how the media is—”

  “—are,” he said, immediately wishing he hadn’t.

  “Well, thanks for the grammar lesson. But honestly, Tom, I’m hideously busy right now.”

  After hanging up, Tom decided that she must be in shock. This was how situations of extreme stress often took people: they went numb to it, and behaved with exaggerated ordinariness. Like that scene in Sink the Bismarck where Kenneth More . . . He gazed at the TV, at a group of policemen mustered behind their lines; with their gas masks off, they looked scrawny, young, and terrified. Then there was a shaky handheld sequence involving a blazing Dumpster and some black-hooded characters smashing the windows of a department store with sledgehammers.

  It came to him that he really ought to rescue Beth, if only from herself. That defensive cool was liable to crack at any moment, and who knew where that would leave her. The trouble was, the police were closing all the downtown streets—and he had to pick up Finn from Treetops at five sharp. Feeling quite maddeningly powerless, he dialled Beth’s number again and got a busy signal. The second he replaced the phone in its cradle, it warbled shrilly.

  “Beth!”

  “Tom? It’s David here. You got my e-mail?”

  “I can’t talk now. There’s fighting in the streets, and Beth’s right in the thick of it!”

  “Really? In laid-back Seattle? Is Beth some sort of urban guerrilla, or is she—”

  Tom slammed the phone down. On the screen, protesters were pitching rocks and bottles at the police, who were firing back, said the reporter, with rubber bullets. In the background, Tom thought he recognized the ornate molded frieze of the Klondike building. He pressed the Redial button—still busy. Yet Beth had voice-mail—she was always “on the other line”—so maybe the whole system was down.

  He raced upstairs and typed a frantic e-mail:

  Beth—please acknowledge. Are you okay? Call when you get this. I’m so worried for you. Take care. All love—Tom.

  The message did not immediately bounce back to him as undeliverable, which he took as a good sign, but the phone stayed silent as he raked the downtown waterfront through his binoculars. Apart from the helicopters, everything looked normal.

  He returned to the living room. A police car had been rolled over, and people were trying to set it alight. Farther down the street, there were more fires. Tom gazed at the TV for thirty seconds, then ran back upstairs to his computer, clicked on Send/Receive, and got a message from rourkee@getashack.com:

  T—do stop fussing, PLEASE. Everything’s fine here. When you get Finn, can you stop at Ken’s and pick up . . .

  A brief shopping list followed. He scanned it with wonder. At a time like this, how could anyone possibly be thinking about arugula?

  The following day, Beth worked from home, to Tom’s huge relief. And when he went up to his study after dropping Finn off, he found a decently craven message from David Scott-Rice, who’d “had no idea” of the seriousness of the situation when he called, and realized that he must have sounded “callow and heartless.” Since then, the events in Seattle had been at the top of the news on BBC TV and on the front page of the Guardian. He was very sorry to hear that Beth had been caught up in the mêlée, and hoped that she was now safe and well. Etcetera.

  It was a pretty good letter, considering; and it showed a sensitivity to Tom’s reasonable concerns that was bafflingly absent in Beth when she had arrived home the evening before on the dot of six. Her chief line was one of self-congratulation for having the good sense to put the Audi in the underground garage. One of the techies had left his car in the open parking lot. “They totaled it,” she said. Otherwise, it was all turtles and marijuana smoke—and not a word of acknowledgement that Tom had been half out of his mind with worry.

  All this made him feel a sudden kinship with Scott-Rice, who from
a distance of more than four thousand miles nonetheless seemed to understand. Tom had no difficulty upping his offer to $32,000, and even paused over the ridiculous demand for premium air travel, then wrote: “It’ll have to be Economy, I’m afraid. But we’ll pay the full fare, so it may not cost you the earth if you want to upgrade.”

  An hour later, Scott-Rice accepted, without a haggle. When Tom e-mailed Shiva Ray with the good news, he didn’t say anything about the money. In the mid-afternoon, a three-word message came back from shivaray@home.com:

  VIRTUE IS BOLD!

  Tom needed to consult the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to confirm that it did, indeed, come from Measure for Measure.