Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  Karen looked up when he entered. “Bill McGellen called.”

  Charlie glanced at his watch. “The market just closed.”

  “Yes.”

  “How bad can it be if the market is closed?”

  “He can tell you, I guess.”

  “Okay. Did a package arrive from China?”

  “Not yet.”

  “A big bowl for my wife.”

  Karen smiled politely, but her eyes said, Call McGellen. Which he would. But first he dialed the toll-free number of Marvin Noff, one of the investment newsletter advisors who had made Teknetrix a strong buy several months before, partly on the announcement of the construction of the factory in Shanghai. Charlie listened to the automated chatter, then punched in his company’s stock exchange symbols. “Tek-net-rix,” the computer voice responded. “For our—technology growth—model, we have—downgraded—Tek-net-rix—to a—hold—position. This rating was adopted—” that same date, three minutes after the market close. Noff’s followers, thousands and thousands of them, the lemmings who made up the market, religiously checked his hotline and Web site each day, and now a significant portion of them would be selling Charlie’s company tomorrow. McGellen, the New York Stock Exchange specialist who handled Teknetrix, razoring a slight profit on every order, was not one to panic. Usually he had enough buy orders to accommodate a wave of sell orders. But not now.

  “Mr. Ravich, afternoon, sir,” said McGellen. “I’ve got about four hundred sell orders waiting for the market to open tomorrow.”

  “What’s the size?”

  “Some small, just a few large. But they add up to much more than I’m holding.”

  “Give me your numbers.”

  “I’ve got new sell orders on three hundred thousand shares at prices from this afternoon’s close of thirty-four all the way down to twenty-seven. As for very large buy orders, I have an old one for nine thousand shares at twenty-six.”

  Charlie sighed. The company was often criticized for not having enough shares on the market, only sixteen million, making it thinly traded and subject to unnatural volatility. “What’s your gut?” he asked.

  “Once some of these bad boys get involved, we’re looking at a big blow-off tomorrow, maybe even twenty percent. There’s a lot of fear in the market. The stock is going to get spanked.”

  “What do you think you’ll open at?”

  “Hard to say. It could be four points down.”

  He looked out the window, saw a piece of paper rise past, carried on an updraft. His stock was going the opposite direction. Teknetrix was going to have to defend its price—an ugly business—by buying back stock on the open market. So long as a company had a board-approved buy-back plan and this fact was public information, the action was legal. He called the company’s broker and told him to defend the price at twenty-nine dollars a share.

  “Noff fucking with you guys?”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie. “You want to call your portfolio boys upstairs and let them know our stock is cheap tomorrow, I won’t mind.”

  He was spending a few million to avoid losing forty or fifty million in market value. In another season he would’ve let the price ride down, but he didn’t want Mr. Ming to see a sudden drop in Teknetrix’s value and start wondering about the fifty-two-million-dollar loan. Nervous guys, Chinese bankers, chewed too much ginseng root. A lower stock price made a hostile takeover easier, too. For all he knew, Manila Telecom was quietly accumulating Teknetrix shares. All this because of Noff, some asshole newsletter guru, some hype-hopper who didn’t have suppliers and factories all over the Third World but instead just flooded select ZIP codes with direct-mail campaigns, sucking in new suckers.

  MARTHA WAINWRIGHT—gray, dependable, sixty pounds past a size eight, and maybe a lesbian, for all he knew—arrived in his office smoking a cigarette, and when he looked up from his papers, he could see the anger in her face, her mouth tight, her eyes accusatory. He closed the door. “Let me just get to my chair, Martha, then you can start—”

  “I see no reason for this, Charlie.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. Did the advertisement go in?”

  “Yes, it went in,” she answered, eyes glaring. “Charlie, there are so many homeless children, so many neglected kids. Why not choose one of them?”

  He breathed out. “That’s a reasonable question.”

  Karen came in with an ashtray, then hurried away when she saw Martha’s face. “Is it only vanity, Charlie?” she asked, taking the ashtray. “That’s what this strikes me as, vanity. Male vanity, I might add.”

  She meant well, of course; she wanted to present him with every argument in order that he know his own mind. “Hey, my daughter is infertile.”

  She shook her head in irritation, blowing smoke at him. “Your daughter could adopt.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s not good enough?” Martha protested. “You won’t feel warmly toward that child?”

  “Of course I will feel warmly toward that child. I’ll do everything I can to make that child’s life the best possible.”

  “And that’s not good enough?”

  “No. It doesn’t comfort me.”

  “You’re doing this for your own comfort?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  “You want something of yourself to go on.”

  “Yes, Martha.”

  She stood in irritation. He could hear her wheeze softly. “This is about vanity and fear and weakness. This is not about love. A woman would never have this attitude.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She glowered. “Yes.”

  “I think a woman would never have this attitude because a woman, Martha, could not be in this situation. Fifty-eight-year-old women still, for the most part, cannot have children. I can procreate, Martha, you cannot.”

  “It’s a mistake, an immoral mistake.”

  “Why? You’re saying that it’s immoral to bring a child into the world and give his mother the resources to raise that child properly?”

  “Yes, when the resources could go to children who are already born.”

  “You’re an estate lawyer, Martha. This is what you do. You help people to pass their wealth on to whomever they choose. You’re telling me I can’t do that?”

  “No, I’m saying as your counselor that I find this idea to be foolhardy.”

  “On what basis?”

  “Emotionally.” She stamped out her cigarette.

  “For whom?”

  “Everyone, Charlie. Dammit! The mother, the child. Maybe Ellie and your daughter if they ever find out.”

  “The mother can pick a good husband. The child will—”

  “That child will miss you all of his life!” Martha interrupted, her face reddening. “The child will want to know you! By the time he is four, he will want—”

  “And if the woman marries successfully? What then? She’ll be able to marry the fellow she loves, if I’m paying all her expenses.”

  Martha shook her head. “The child will always want to know.”

  Calm her down, Charlie thought. Pretend that you almost agree with her. He gave a couple of heavy nods, as if weighing all of her considerations. “If I decide to do this,” he asked softly, “will you handle it for me? I mean draw up the arrangements, supervise the interviewing of the women?”

  She paced to his desk, poked at his papers. “Yes, Charlie. Yes, goddammit, I will do it for you.”

  “Good.”

  She looked at him, mouth set. “On one condition.”

  “What?”

  “You tell Ellie.”

  The one thing he absolutely didn’t want to do. “Oh,” he said. “Sure.”

  AT SEVEN, he eased out of his cab, looking at the sky for information—an old pilot’s habit—but the only thing floating above him was the lunatic grin of Kelly the doorman, standing ready to torture Charlie with service. Every day Kelly smiled as if he had woken up wishing to smile just once at something worth smiling at—
at Charlie Ravich, his great friend, not the man who gave him three hundred bucks cash each Christmas, as was the custom of the building, which you never disregarded, upon threat of an immediate drop-off in service and a vague disregard from all the staff people. But Charlie paid, always, in a crisp blue Teknetrix envelope, and so here was Kelly smiling like a man charming the devil himself, pulling open the brass door to the apartment house. Charlie nodded gruffly, hobbled into the air-conditioned comfort of the lobby, and then was conveyed upward by Lionel, the seventyish night elevator man, who wasted no energy on salutation or manners, instead concentrating his exhausted animus in the precise thrusting and braking of the elevator’s brass lift handle. The thing resembled the throttle on the old T-37 trainer Charlie had first flown in 1962. Always Lionel pressed it forward to maximum upward speed just long enough to hit a momentum that, upon his pulling the handle back early enough, allowed the elevator to coast to a position exactly flush with the requested Boor—so dead even you could lay a carpenter’s level over the crack. This Lionel accomplished without change in expression or apparent contemplation, without, it seemed, even breath itself. Then he would pull the cage back himself and after being thanked by Charlie show no reaction. At most he scratched the skin flaking from his forehead. You could drop diamonds on the floor, a young woman could pull up her dress, you could cleaver off your nose and shake the bloody lump in Lionel’s face. Nothing. He’d been made dead by service, and paradoxically, his deadness passed into Charlie. Every time Lionel opened that cage, Charlie felt just a little less of something. He himself would love to throttle up the elevator, fondle the mechanical tremor of it, even get the braking wrong a bit and have to feather the elevator up and down to hit the mark perfectly, but he’d never had the chance and never would.

  The apartment was dark. No Ellie. Odd that she was still out. Where could she be at this hour? Funny old chick, his wife. Julia was right. Anxious these days, more anxious than in the past. Didn’t really know her anymore. Sex okay, not like it used to be. Familiar as an old shoe. A brief nudge of genitals. Habit and half-forgotten remembrance. Sometimes his dick worked well, sometimes not. He was tired, or his back hurt too much. Hadn’t kept up with the physical therapy, and after sitting in chairs all day, the thing just seized up on him. Plus, no Viagra because of the blood-pressure pills. Rotten all around. Ellie stayed patient. Loved her but didn’t know her. Not so bad, that, because she didn’t really know him. Didn’t know about the eight million! Eight million dollars was a big secret—bigger than a mistress, but smaller than disease. He needed a secret, everyone did.

  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, oncall 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 d
ining-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 Auchin-closs 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.”