The Afterlife of Emerson Tang

by Paula Champa

  By his formula, my awareness of love should have been colossal. Miguel was starting to sweat, adding a new, pleasantly musky note to the others in his cologne. It hit me with the suddenness of a crush. Other diners were pouring through the doorways and seating themselves around us as a waiter appeared and filled our glasses with a yellow wine I could not pronounce, a dry Riesling, according to the printed menu card beside my plate. Before long, the room was a traffic jam of tuxedos and gowns. Two elegantly dressed blond women skirted past the table, eyeing Miguel, and as they made their way forward an older man stepped up and kissed the shorter of the two women, taking her by surprise.

  “Alto!” she cried, gesturing to her friend. “Look, Iris, it’s Alto.”

  The man in question was stout, nearly square; beyond that, all I could see of him was the back of his tuxedo and an extravagant head of wavy gray hair. I tried to get a look at his nametag, but now he and the taller blonde were embracing.

  “I think most people get tired of being frustrated in love,” I told Miguel, watching them.

  “Maybe not,” Miguel argued. “Maybe they cling to that state because they sense that when it’s over they’ll miss the anticipation terribly.”

  Hélène’s Alto?

  I wondered.

  The man turned. He was at least sixty, maybe seventy, with olive skin hanging in thick ridges from his cheeks. His eyes were hooded, set widely beneath his temples like an ancient toad. When the woman released his arm, I zeroed in on the nametag: ALTO BIANCO.

  I turned to Miguel, eager to point out the man and explain my predicament with Hélène Moreau, but he was half out of his chair again, shaking hands and introducing himself to the other guests at our table—a group that included some auto journalists from the United States, judging by their tags.

  A few tables away, the blond women were seated on either side of Alto Bianco, like shining andirons around a weathered log. He clamped a cigarette between his lips and raised a lighter. Didn’t the Hindenburg explode in a ball of flames? He spun the wheel. I flinched. Then a pair of silver tongs descended and deposited a ramekin of duck-liver parfait on my plate.

  At my elbow, a man with a buzzcut and sharp blue eyes was interrogating Miguel.

  “I remember seeing a Beacon roadster cornering when I was six years old. This new concept tonight—a crossover-slash-SUV-slash-slash. Where’s the emotion? Where’s the sexiness?”

  Miguel extended his arms on the tabletop. “Well,” he began hesitantly, “you’re associating . . . sexiness with a specific set of design cues that are really . . . quite old at this point. So many of those came from when car design was in its . . . infancy.” He glanced around the table. “Can we move past that now?”

  When no one responded, I nodded in encouragement.

  He turned to me and spoke more passionately: “The excitement for my grandfather and his contemporaries was in mastering natural forces with a manmade machine.” He paused. “And they did this. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. But they were limited in their conception of speed—of progress, really.”

  “What’s your interest in this, Miguel?” asked an elderly journalist with a white mustache and a rumpled tuxedo. “Why are you helping a bunch of Germans revive your English grandfather’s company?”

  Miguel silently debated his answer.

  “Because otherwise someone else would do it,” he said finally. “And the result would be worse.” He scanned the faces around the table. “This concept you’re seeing out there tonight is just a start.”

  “Power trains are the problem—not cars,” joked a guest at the other end of the table.

  “Isn’t that like saying it’s not the gun, it’s the bullet?” another voice replied.

  “Well,” said Miguel, “what if I point a gun at you and it’s a squirt gun, just water coming out? Like that fuel cell down there—instead of billions of tons of carbon pollution.”

  “I would prefer that,” I volunteered.

  “It’s not just pollution and toxic emissions. It’s spills, seeps, irreversible damage to habitats and climate patterns . . .”

  I wanted to keep concentrating on what Miguel and the others were saying, but it wasn’t long before I lost track of their conversation while spying on Alto, who was ignoring the women next to him and talking on a mobile phone. I tried to read his lips, at least to determine what language he was speaking. Could he speak English? But his lips proved as unreadable as his cloudy eyes, fixed on some faraway point outside the museum’s balcony.

  I had to find a way to speak to him, even if I had to collar a translator, like Miguel, to help me. That didn’t mean I knew what I was going to say, though. Was I really going to walk up to him and start asking about a woman he knew four decades ago? Someone he’d called a whore for her artistic crimes? That would not be a friendly opener.

  There had to be some time to mingle after dinner, I reasoned. I glanced at the menu card. Shortly, we could expect the arrival of the main course: VENISON NOISETTES ON MUSHROOM ROYALE WITH CRANBERRY-PEPPER SAUCE, VEGETABLES AND SPAETZLE.

  When I looked up again, Alto’s seat was empty. I stalked the room, hopscotching visually from one table to the next while the others around me turned their attention to bowls of consommé.

  “Hey, is there any wine left on your end of the table?”

  “That’s why roller coasters don’t do it for me. Once you know the course, it’s speed with no mystery . . .”

  There he was, at another table, with a different woman. A brunette. Though she was seated, I could tell from the length of her torso that she was extremely tall. Her dark hair was braided into high coils; her cobra eyes were exotically frosted with blue eye shadow. She turned and presented a chilly expression to Alto, hunched listlessly beside her, glancing over his shoulder.

  The waiters began to serve the main course. There wasn’t much time for me to accomplish what I had come to do. As we ate, I considered that the journalists might know something about Hélène—a semifamous person who possibly owned a vintage Beacon, or at least the engine. I sat forward and announced:

  “An artist I know said that speed isn’t modern anymore. I believe she’s a Beacon owner—Hélène Moreau?”

  “Exactly,” Miguel said, slapping the table. “It’s not modern. Our whole concept of transportation is a holdover from a different world. How can we make it new again?”

  A few faces looked up from their venison.

  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer. “I’ve spent most of my life on trains and buses,” I said with a shrug. “Or walking.”

  The journalist with the white mustache rolled his eyes at me. “People like to have some form of personal transportation, you know. We can’t all be up on conveyor belts up in the sky.”

  Miguel reclaimed my attention by leaning in to me conspiratorially, his lips nearly touching my ear. “I know what speed is.”

  His sudden closeness and the bass notes of his voice combined to stun the normal function of my nerves. I could manage only a whisper: “What?”

  “Speed is the antidote to memory.”

  I breathed in his smoky green smell.

  “You feel these forces,” he said, “but they’re not real. One gives you the illusion of moving forward, the other backward.”

  I couldn’t form a reply. I just wanted him to remain there with the lapel of his tuxedo touching my dress. I sat in silence, inhaling him, feeling his slight movements, the drag of the fabric of his jacket over my bare arm. Then, no doubt in response to my paralysis, he sat forward and resumed his conversation with a woman seated to his right, a reporter from Intersection magazine, who excused herself not long after, complaining that she had broken her heel climbing the rope ladder into the Hindenburg.

  The waiters emptied more bottles of wine into our glasses.

  “Miguel, you’re showing a car on the turntable with a hydrogen fuel cell. So, is that your bet?” a reporter asked.

  “Not at all. It’s one idea
. We are also looking at electric, of course—electric cars being one of the earliest forms of propulsion a century ago. One that was quickly obliterated by petrol—”

  “The Betamax of its day.”

  He nodded. “But where does the electricity come from? Burning coal?” He shook his head. “I’m talking about broader, more integrated solutions. I want to look at all the options.”

  Someone bumped the back of my chair. I turned to find Alto Bianco’s latest date striding out of the room, defiantly balancing her tall crown of braids. Once again, Alto was no longer in his seat. The conversation around the table buzzed in my head as I anxiously scanned the perimeter of the room for him.

  “So it’s hybrids, electrics and diesels for the next twenty years?” someone offered. “Then biofuels?”

  “Think of it a different way,” said Miguel. “What if, by that time, the sun or some other source were cleanly generating the power needed to produce hydrogen? You see, there are many ways it could go.”

  There was no sign of Alto. I was beginning to panic when my eyes finally came to rest on a slouching figure silhouetted against one of the windows. He was out on the balcony, his hands in his pockets, apparently watching the rain fall. Not smoking. Not talking on his phone.

  “How many years of fossil fuels do we have left?” I asked.

  “Less than a hundred.”

  “Nah, less than sixty.”

  “They lost at least eleven million gallons just on that Valdez spill—”

  “We’re doing hydrogen at this unveiling,” Miguel insisted. “You noticed the zeppelin out there?”

  The table erupted with laughter.

  “Because the Hindenburg went over so well in its day!”

  “It only took three days to cross the Atlantic!”

  “As I say, we’re exploring other things,” Miguel said. “Maybe that’s next year’s press conference . . .”

  He was still speaking when the man I had seen with him earlier reappeared at the table. My heart sank when, with a few words, he escorted Miguel away to speak with guests at another table during dessert: an impressively airy zeppelin cake. I hadn’t taken more than a few bites when I looked up and saw that the balcony doors had been opened to cool down the room, but Alto’s form no longer occupied the space.

  Had he jumped?

  The building wasn’t that high.

  I couldn’t spot him at any of the other tables. People were beginning to stand now, blocking my sightlines. I picked up my things and pushed through the tangle of diners to look over the edge of the balcony. I saw nothing on the ground but puddles. Hurriedly, I took the stairs down to the main floor of the museum. There, in the midst of the empty hall, I abruptly came upon the man himself, standing before some type of technical display. On closer inspection, I saw that it was a car identical to the one I had seen onstage earlier, except cut in half, with its insides showing.

  Alto Bianco appeared to be studying the bisected vehicle. I moved closer. I still didn’t know what I was going to say to him, or how I was going to broach my questions. Then he glanced at me, scowled and spat some words in Italian.

  “Excuse me? I didn’t understand what you said.”

  “Oh, and you are from where?” he asked, switching to heavily accented English.

  “What were you saying?” I asked, relieved to know that I would be able to converse with him.

  He pointed to the flayed vehicle in front of us. “This car has no heart.”

  “No heart?”

  “What runs it?” With one of his polished brown shoes he kicked at the display. “Is no engine there. Is some batteries and chemicals, molto molto freddi.”

  In spite of my wandering attention at dinner, I had been persuaded by the arguments for the new ideas being proposed. Had Alto Bianco missed the headsets earlier?

  I began to explain: “What runs it is an experimental engine that doesn’t burn fossil fuels, doesn’t pollute.”

  Alto Bianco turned his bored, cloudy eyes on me. He coughed before resuming in his accented half-growl: “Let me ’splain something. An engine is made with the hands, an’ I can take it apart with my hands. Hand to hand. Mano a mano.”

  To demonstrate, he removed his hands from his pockets and clasped them around mine. His grip was weak, despite the weight of the aged flesh. He searched my face.

  “You see?” His eyes were ringed with desperation. “For me, I prefer the personal relation.”

  I flinched at the movement of his hands, damp as cutlets, and he withdrew them hastily and stuffed them back into his pockets.

  “Is a human connection.”

  “It’s a machine,” I said, correcting him. “And you were talking about the heart. A car like this has a critical idea at its heart.”

  “This? I think is very bad. Is not a car.” He kicked it again with his shoe. “Is a lab experiment.”

  “Okay, maybe it’s research right now. But it’s trying to solve some major problems,” I argued, as surprised by my own passion as I was by his density. “Some new form—maybe not this exact thing, but some new way of thinking about things could allow us to have a future.”

  He shrugged, unimpressed, his eyes now well beyond bored, bordering on stormy.

  “Future for who?” he demanded. “Not for me.”

  I was stunned by his selfishness. Then, out of nowhere, a devious smile appeared on his lips and he shrugged. “Anyway, no car is really valuable until it is personalized.”

  He seemed to be amusing himself with some private thought.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have personalized many cars.” He winked at me, and his face brightened by one less cloudy eye. “With female assistance.”

  A vision flashed through my mind of him in the getup of an unrepentant Mr. Toad—driving coat and gloves, goggles, cap—fresh in from one of his wild rides. As sleazy as his personalization sounded—who knew what bodily acts were involved?—I seized on it.

  “If you’ve personalized so many, you must have a favorite?” I asked, steeling myself with the thought that I was there for Emerson’s sake.

  “I do,” he said somberly. “Is long lost to me.”

  “It was a Beacon, obviously.”

  He dabbed at his lapel pin to remove a spot of cranberry-pepper sauce.

  “Did you have any problems with the engine? Did it need to be replaced?”

  “Never!” he roared. “This engine was perfect. Bellissimo!” He calmed himself enough to add, “La macchina—is not important, really. The woman—”

  He turned from me as the dining room expelled a noisy crowd down the stairs. The two blondes who had been with him earlier emerged from the swarm, dragging a new man along. They linked arms with Alto, sharing a private joke, and swept him off to the smoking lounge before he could even say ciao.

  Based on my previous observations, I calculated that he would grow bored of them again within the space of one cigarette. Ten minutes. Enough time for me to see if Miguel was free. I felt cheated that the other man had hustled him away after dinner. I climbed the stairs again and located Miguel at the far end of the dining room, shaking hands with another group lingering at one of the tables. I stepped out onto the balcony to wait, assuming Alto’s former post, and it was then that I saw what he had been staring at earlier: A short distance away, a bright red automobile was parked strategically in the glare of an outdoor spotlight meant to illuminate the landscaping around the museum. It appeared to be a new car, shiny and expensive. A car that asked only one thing: to be admired. Was he hoping to show it to someone in particular?

  Then, to my dismay, Alto himself appeared below in the light rainfall, shaking the kiss of a puddle off his shoe. His leather glove reached to pull open the driver’s door. Before I could turn for the stairs, I heard the engine thunder to life, then the headlights flashed and he was gone.

  I retreated from the balcony. Now what? I had learned nothing about the Beacon engine. Nothing about Hélène. Miguel appeared to
be settling into an intense discussion at the table. The room had thinned of all but a few guests. I had no reason to linger.

  I collected my coat and shared the guest van back to the hotel with some of the reporters from dinner. As the van bumped along the dark, wooded roads I asked them again about Hélène Moreau, determined not to let Emerson down. It turned out that a few of them had heard of her Speed Paintings, but no one knew anything about her ownership or interest in a vintage Beacon engine.

  At the front desk, a clerk handed me my room key along with a brief, misspelled phone message. It was printed on a sheet of hotel stationery that had been art-directed with the flair of a prescription pad:

  Hotel Bayerischer Hof

  Lindau im Bodensee

  D-88131 Lindau/Bodensee Seepromenade Postfach 11 26

  Telefon 0 83 82 91 50, Fax 0 83 82 91 55 91

  From: M. R. Son

  Please phone.

  Emerson wanted a report, that much was obvious. What would I say? I had flown thousands of miles and had nothing to tell him. It was an unimpressive display of my research skills.

  The light rain had stopped, and now the night was clear and black. In my room, I leaned out one of the windows to look at the lake. Above the stone lighthouse in the harbor, a promotional lighthouse was projected onto the night sky like a sailor’s happy hallucination. The reporters had been speculating about the number of prospective investors who had come from around the world for the event—I supposed the marketing had to be convincing.

  I heard a soft scraping sound behind me and saw that an envelope had been pushed under the door. Inside was another sheet of the hotel’s prescription pad with a handwritten message from Miguel:

  I’d like to help you with the engine. Please join me downstairs in the bar, if jet lag doesn’t prevent you. —M