Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  He drifted through the apartment, not bothering to turn on the lights, letting the glow of the city fill the rooms. Look at this, said Ellie's note on the dining-room table. The New Jersey retirement community brochure. It had the glossy lushness of pornography, happy senior couples standing proudly in front of their "custom mansions," expensively tacky matching boxes of vinyl siding and overlarge windows. Lounging around the Olympic-sized swimming pool. Tearing ass in a golf cart across the glistening sixteenth green. we will pamper you. we will care for you. come home to vista del mar. The place pampered you, all right, straight into your grave: "We look forward to providing you with every amenity, from maintenance-free condo living to the four-star Vista del Mar dining facility to the immaculate greens on our championship golf course to a staff of committed elder-care health professionals on call twenty-four hours a day." Guys keeling over every week, no doubt, flopping spasmodically around in their golf togs. He'd seen one heart attack recently enough, thank you. Cancer, too, trolling the quiet streets, stopping expectantly in front of each house like the Good Humor truck. He paged back and forth, intrigued. You had to spend real money to get in—a quarter million for the membership fee, plus annual clubhouse fees, pool fees, common charges. A big project, house prices well over a million dollars. They'd thought of everything. Tour-group packages to Moscow, tennis lessons, dog-runs, on-call electrician, plumber, gardening and lawn maintenance, computer classes, glass-blowing, ballroom dancing. Had they hidden a small morgue on the premises? A whole page was given over to "security features"—the winking promise that cars full of young, joy-riding blacks from Newark or Jersey City would never, ever be seen there. And if they were? Not quite shot on sight, but the protectors of Vista del Mar, claimed the text, were "experienced enforcement professionals"—code for retired cops who were pals with the local police force and thus could beat the hell out of any intruder with impunity. A safe place. So safe you could go there to die.

  He heard Ellie's key in the lock, the sound of packages landing on the kitchen counter. He looked back at the brochure. Something was not right. The women seemed too fit in their one-piece bathing suits; he saw no spiderwebs of varicose veins, no grape bunches of cellulite hanging from their thighs or underarms; and the men themselves were remarkably jaunty, trim around the middle, with suspiciously full heads of gray hair—impossible, Turkishly thick hair—with no skin sagging around their knees, none of the ravages, the proofs of time! No shrunken jawbones, no droopy earlobes, no bandy-legged, shrinking-spine postures, no low testicles flopping sadly inside a pant leg—nothing! These were models, men and women in their smug forties, dolled up in geezery cardigans and knee-length shorts, their hair sprayed gray. Well, screw them. No, screw me, Charlie corrected himself, for not realizing it from the first.

  "I hate this, Ellie," he called. "I hate everything about it." He picked up the retirement brochure and walked into the dining room.

  Ellie carried in a silver tray of cheese and crackers. "I know you don't like it, but I'm trying to get us thinking."

  Here was his wife, an attractive woman of fifty-seven, still with nice hips on her, still with lovely breasts, her eyes clear and ankles slim, and she was bunkering in for doom. "I don't want to think," he finally said. "Not about that."

  She put the tray down, careful not to bang it. "We need to plan."

  "What do we need to plan for?"

  She smoothed her blue sweater with her hands. "The time when we move out of the city." She disappeared back into the kitchen and returned with a glass of milk and his pills—the blood pressure, the cholesterol, the fall allergies, the replacement testosterone, the vitamins.

  He swallowed the pills dutifully, then waved the brochure. "Did you notice they have a morgue on the premises?"

  "I didn't see that."

  "Right there. They embalm the body and stick it in a lawn chair overlooking the golf course."

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  He sat down. "There's also a wishing well full of dentures and hearing aids."

  "Now you're being mean." She went into the kitchen.

  "Why don't we just move to Hong Kong instead? I'll watch the ships all day. Eat my pills with chopsticks."

  Ellie came back carrying silverware. "You'd rather move to Hong Kong?"

  "Better there than Vista del Muerte."

  "Vista del Mar." She laid his knife and fork on the table, the fork upside down.

  "It's nowhere near the ocean!" cried Charlie.

  "They just took an old truck farm—"

  "I know what they did." Charlie fixed his fork. "They chop up some great old place and put an idiotic name on it, like Vista del Muerte."

  "That's not right," Ellie said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "It would be 'Vista de la Muerte,'" she explained. "You're confusing the masculine and the feminine."

  "Isn't that the trend?" Charlie asked. "Doesn't that make me a cool guy?"

  Ellie ignored this. "It's got everything we're ever going to need," she said.

  "For God's sake, Ellie, you've got all you need here. A doorman, a gynecologist, a dry cleaner's, and a lot of weepy friends with fascinating tragedies you can talk about."

  Ellie rubbed her finger on the dining-room table. "Oh, Charlie, the city isn't the same," she said softly. "Everything is falling apart."

  "The city's been falling apart for the last two hundred years."

  She looked at him. "I know, but I was never almost old here. We're almost old, Charlie."

  "Who's almost old?"

  "Nobody, Charlie," she snapped. "Nobody is getting old. Barbara Holmes says her husband just leapt into multiple sclerosis last month. Woke up with it! And Sally Auchincloss upstairs is in a wheelchair—she's just so heroic about it—and I just heard that Bill's prostate cancer is all through him."

  "Yeah," Charlie breathed. "Good old Bill shoots a needle in his dick to get an erection. That is heroism, if you ask me."

  "Please!" she cried. "Can't we discuss this pleasantly?"

  "No."

  She looked at the dining-room table, remembered something, and went back to the kitchen. He flipped through the mail. "The Chinese work until they drop in their tracks, you know that?"

  "I honestly don't understand you," she called.

  "Yes, you do. We just disagree."

  "What do the Chinese have to do with it?" she asked with true irritation. "You're obsessed with the Chinese."

  And why not? The Chinese were reverse-engineering America's F-18 fighter jet, illegally buying old versions and spare parts in an effort to figure out how to manufacture the plane. They had stolen U.S. nuclear missile technology so that they could blow up Taiwan after they bought it. They were building the world's tallest building. They understood capitalism better than Americans, because they had seen it arrive, loved it as a new toy.

  "I said you're obsessed with the Chinese."

  He nibbled a cracker. "I heard you, Ellie. My hearing is still pretty good for a guy about to be buried alive."

  "You think the Chinese know something we don't?"

  "Yes."

  She returned, carrying his drink. "What?"

  "They know what time it is."

  "Sweetie"—she looked at him beseechingly—"that may be true, but it has nothing to do with where we live the next ten years."

  Of course. He took her hand, raised it to his lips. "Don't bother about me," he said. "I'm just—I saw a man die in Hong Kong. Heart attack. I tried to help him, but he was gone. I haven't seen someone die for a long time . . ." Except in his dreams, which occasionally came back to him, the villagers and water buffalo and smoking pieces of trucks flung fifty feet into the air—but that was an old story, a story everyone had forgotten.

  "Maybe we should talk about this after dinner."

  He tasted the drink. Not quite right. "What will we say?" he badgered her. "That I agree? That I see it your way?"

  "That would be expecting the impossible."

  She w
asn't going to back down, he saw. He put out his hand. "Come here."

  She smiled warily. "Oh no."

  "Come on. I'm your old pal, remember?"

  "I know what you're doing." But she came over to his chair.

  He pulled her closer. "You should have married someone nice."

  She shook her head in disgust. "I don't want someone nice. Never did."

  He pulled her tight against him, laid his hand on the back of her dress. Her rear was loose and fat, yet he loved it anyway. "But nice lasts a long time. You think you don't really want a man who is nice, and then thirty years with a bad man go by and you realize that nice would have been, yes, rather nice after all. All the other things wear out"—he rubbed her ass vigorously, watching her smile—"but nice? Well, nice keeps on going."

  "Oh, please." But she was letting him kiss her.

  "The mistake you made," he whispered in her small pink ear, "was that you married someone who was rotten. A mistake women often make, even the smart ones. They like the rotten guys."

  "You were never rotten." Her face was happy, her eyes were closed.

  He moved his hand between her legs. "Am I in the game here?"

  She opened her eyes. "You want to be?"

  "I always want to be in the game."

  She contemplated him. "All right."

  "Now?"

  "After dinner."

  TWO HOURS LATER, Ellie lay under the covers, her flesh a sentimental landscape.

  "Downtown or uptown?" he asked.

  "Stay up here." She pulled his arms.

  Despite the estrogen pills, she still had lubrication problems, and so dipped her hands into a small jar of petroleum jelly she kept in their bedside table, and worked herself and him.

  "My hands are cold," she said.

  "It's all right." He hadn't ejaculated in two weeks.

  "Come on now," she said.

  He pressed into her and she began to finger herself gently, lips pursed, eyelids fluttering. He counted strokes. Usually about forty-five strokes and Ellie would come, then again after another fifteen or twenty, and again after another ten. Very dependable, his wife, at least in this respect. At stroke twenty-three he paused. Twenty-three? What was the meaning of twenty-three? Manila Telecom's percentage market share? Something like that. Maybe MT's management had been talking to Marvin Noff, bad-mouthing Teknetrix, maybe trying to—

  "Don't stop," Ellie breathed, "not now."

  He resumed, the blood pounding in his ears. At forty-four, Ellie lifted her chin and cried out, banging her palm on his chest.

  "Keep going," he whispered. "The woods are burning."

  Ellie took a breath, spit on her fingers, then went at it again. She cried out sweetly and then pulled on him. "Now," she commanded.

  But as he pressed, he felt himself soften. He shifted his position, but it didn't work.

  "Want me to lift my legs?" Ellie asked in the dark.

  "Sure."

  She raised her knees up, slipping one hand behind each to hold them, something she had started to do in her forties, and he pressed again, but it was no good.

  She felt the change. "You want me to help?"

  He exhaled. It didn't seem worth the trouble. "I'm a dead dog," he said, rolling off.

  She rubbed his back. "Jet-lagged is what I think."

  "Maybe." He wondered how soon he'd see the responses to his advertisement.

  "You thinking about Manila Telecom?"

  "We have to get that plant going."

  "You will."

  "We've got some leeway built into the schedule but not that much."

  She held his penis, rubbing it with her thumb the same way the money changers in Shanghai fondled fat wads of dollar bills. Eight million, he thought, but no hard-on.

  "Sweetie?"

  Her dutifulness depressed him, and he brought her hand to his chest.

  They lay there in the darkness until he heard Ellie's breathing flatten out. He was running on China time, not sleepy, not even close, and after a few minutes, he got up and wandered into the office off the bedroom and stood at the window watching the taxis pulse through Central Park. He would have Jane transfer all of the GT proceeds to his private account at Citibank. There was no need to mix the sum with his other investments, and he could ask Ted Fullman, his private banker, to segregate half the money for capital-gains taxes. Don't let me touch it, Ted. There was plenty of money, piles of it. After he died, Ellie could live to one hundred and forty if she liked, and there'd be millions left over, thanks to the Teknetrix stock, which had first been offered at a laughable two and a half dollars a share, and now, sixteen years later, had reached one hundred and fifty-four dollars, not correcting for splits. And Julia was well provided for, Martha Wainwright having drafted all the documents that would paper over his grave. No, the Sir Henry money was genuinely superfluous; he could turn it into cash and hand it out in the Port Authority bus station if he so desired and his life would be unchanged; the sum would merely have moved through him in its endless transubstantiation, the regular heartbeat of a Hong Kong billionaire becoming dirty bills fluttering through Manhattan, a fortune atomized, only to reappear somewhere else in the future.

  How strange to be so rich, so comfortable. He had never expected it. On the wall, next to the old photos of Charlie standing stiffly, painfully, with the Secretary of Defense, with Nixon himself, next to the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Purple Heart, hung the framed Air Force T-shirt he'd been wearing when he was rescued—torn, rotted, stained with blood. The colonel at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where Charlie had been flown within ten hours of being found, had ordered the shirt retrieved from the base hospital and had it mounted and framed with a small brass plaque that noted the dates of Charlie's capture and release. While almost everything in his life had continued to change—Ellie, Ben, Teknetrix, China, how men and women made babies—the shirt, a gray rag blotted with rust-colored stains, just hung there in its frame, a battle flag long unused.

  After his rescue, he'd been in and out of hospitals for ten months. Because he was a former prisoner of war, there was a place for him in the Air Force as long as he wished. They made him a lieutenant colonel, in fact. They took care of you, they took care of their own. But implicit in the promise was the recognition that you might need such a promise. You might be broken. You might not be valuable anymore. And, truth to tell, he was broken. Wasn't worth shit. Couldn't walk right, couldn't sit right, couldn't lift up the kids and play with them, couldn't watch television without getting headaches. Pain in his neck, shoulders, back, arms, left hand where the bullet went through and hit him in the testicle, left leg, both knees, both ankles. He'd picked up all kinds of bugs while in captivity and been lucky he hadn't died from those alone—worms in his intestines, fungus in his anus, infection in his ears. Shrunken cartilage, bone loss, nerve damage. Vertigo, palsy, numbness. Limited extension of the left hamstring muscles, rotator cuff damage, permanent vulnerability in ankle pronation. Compression of the frontal eminence of the parietal bone, complete atrophy of the torn capsular ligaments of the right shoulder, degradation of the internal condyle of the left humerus.

  After his first surgeries, they took him up in an A-10, a green buffalo of a plane, just to get him back in the air, but his spine couldn't take the G's anymore. Like grinding broken beer bottles together. He felt uncertain and weak, he felt fraudulent—for the first time in his life. Get me out of here, I'm going to crash this thing. They tried going up three times, once with painkillers, which was against regs. Didn't work. His back was stiff, he had trouble even climbing into the seat. He couldn't shoot a basketball, much less fly a fighter jet. Once they knew that about you, you were no longer operational. You couldn't be forward-based, you couldn't train other pilots. The instructors were all the best pilots who had survived their own expertise. And anyway, new planes were coming through the procurement pipeline, F-14s, F-16s, F-18s. All advanced fly-by-wire avionics. Heads-up instrument d
isplays. More complicated tactical weaponry, the advanced versions of which had later been used to smoke up Saddam's pathetic army in Kuwait and then a couple of hundred Serbian tanks. By 1976, it had been clear that Charlie was washed up.

  They had been living in Virginia then, where he'd had a desk job at SAC in Langley. Ben and Julia almost teenagers. His salary twenty-one thousand a year. He was driving an old Buick, which he'd bought because it was soft on his back. A bad year all around. That was the year he did not fuck, not once. The nerve damage and the scar tissue adhesions had his back in a vise. No hip motion, no flex to the upper back. His legs were still weak. Ellie had tried sitting on him, but she didn't really like it. She performed the other possibilities, but it was a duty, not a pleasure.

  Yet there were many others like him, men whom the Air Force no longer needed, capable and hardworking and intelligent, and he found two of them, Merle Sokolov and Harold Cole, both Vietnam washouts like Charlie. They talked, they dreamed, they drank a lot of cheap beer and figured out that they trusted their fates with one another. Each man had children and an anxious wife, each man needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat. They fixed upon three essential pieces of information: One, computers and telecom switching equipment were soon to benefit from the massive R&D of the war effort and the space program; two, the demographics of the American population foretold a huge market of prime-age consumers; and three, most residential growth would continue to occur not in cities but in new suburban and rural developments, which meant investment in new telecom equipment. The key was to put yourself in front of the wave, let it wash over you, carry you forward.

  The three men, as it turned out, had separate skills. Sokolov was a natural salesman, a fellow of neckties and haircuts and cuff links, and they relied on him to raise venture capital. Harold, the gloomy genius, understood transistors and switches and was schooling himself in microchip technology, and that, he announced, was all that he could do for them, which was more than enough. Charlie's natural ability was organization and leadership. He set up the first corporate structure, made the first hirings. Negotiated the first office lease, the first supplier agreement, did all the traveling to the Far East to look for subcontractors.