The Privileges (34 page)

They hadn’t spoken much. Fear made her clam up and she was still mad at him for making her come. She wondered when they were going to get out of this district they were crawling through, which was full of these gigantic, toxic-looking factories, and then, incredibly, the driver coasted to a stop in front of one of them and turned off the car.

“Do I have to go in?” April said. “Can I just wait out here?”

Her father and their driver, who was also their interpreter whenever they got out of the car anywhere, traded amused looks, like it was all just hilarious. “Absolutely not,” her father said.

The first thing that happened was that they were given these huge headphones to wear, and she didn’t get more than ten feet through the door before she understood why. Even with the headphones on it was deafening. But at least this way your ears wouldn’t actually bleed. All the workers wore them too, and helmets and goggles and jumpsuit-like uniforms. It had to be more than a hundred degrees in there. The workers all stared at her as if she couldn’t see them too. They were girls—not all of them, but most of them—April’s own age or younger.

Some very nervous guy in a suit was giving them the tour, shouting at Adam and pointing to a clipboard, even though he must have known that there was no way to hear anything anybody said. Then a strange thing started to happen. Word began to get around the factory floor who the visitors were. April could see the workers talking to one another. One girl’s mouth fell open, as Adam stood nearby still leaning into their guide and nodding as if they were actually conversing, and then she boldly left her place on the line and skipped over to him. April froze. The Chinese girl was speaking rapidly and smiling and lowering her head. She took both of Adam’s hands in hers, and when he gave her a small smile in return and said
You’re welcome
, that was like a signal to the others, many of whom broke from their place on the line and came to gather around him. It was all happening in front of April not silently, exactly, but like a movie whose soundtrack has been replaced by roaring industrial static. Adam took the women’s hands and nodded courteously as if this were all the most natural thing in the world. When the wait to touch him got too long—at least one red-faced supervisor was screaming at them—another group broke away from the first and rapidly surrounded April herself. She was terrified. The girls lowered their heads and jabbered and took April’s hands in theirs, and when she looked down at one pair of hands that seemed unusually fair, almost pink, she saw that those were burn scars, and that was the last thing she remembered.

Her father was sitting in the front seat this time, twisted around to face her, and she was lying across the back. “Good morning, Sunshine,” he said. “I believe you fainted.”

Her neck hurt. Two minutes later they were back at the hotel, unless she’d fallen asleep again and it was longer than that. He decided they would just have dinner in the room that night; as she lay on the bed he called room service and ordered her a Reuben, but when it came and he lifted the silver cover off the dish, she started crying.

Adam pulled a chair closer to the foot of the bed and sat with his feet up next to hers.

“I want to go home,” April said. “I’m afraid of this place. I know
I shouldn’t be, but I am. I’m scared of poor people, basically. What kind of a hideous person does that make me?”

“Poverty is scary,” Adam said. “The thought of not having what you need is terrifying. That’s why people try so hard to avoid it.”

“Okay, so, good, we avoided it. Why do you have to come here at all, then? Why isn’t it enough just to be us?”

“Your mother and I are trying to make the world a better place,” Adam said.

“Okay,” April said. “But why?”

“Well, you can’t just do nothing. Otherwise it’s like you were never here.”

He picked up half the Reuben and took a bite. “Wow,” he said. “Pretty terrible.” April took the pillow from behind her head and put it over her eyes. “But what if you
do
do nothing?” she said. “What if nothing is all there is for you to do? I try not to look forward but sometimes I do and it’s all these days and I have no fucking idea what to fill them with. That’s why sometimes I wonder if maybe what I’m really trying to do is, you know, shorten it.”

He stopped chewing. “Do not say that,” he said darkly. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from you ever again. Understand me?”

She reached under the pillow to wipe her eyes. “I’m sorry I fainted,” she said. “I’m sorry I embarrassed you. It’s just that I couldn’t handle it when they all started thanking me. Thanking me? For what? All I wanted was to be as far away from them as possible. I so don’t deserve to be thanked.”

“You are loved,” Adam said. “Okay? And if you know you’re loved then you might make a mistake once in a while but you are never in the wrong. I know this isn’t a great time for you but I have total faith that things will get better, because that’s what things do. They get better. This is something I know something about. It is, as they used to say, the American way. You may feel a little lost right now but you will know what to do. For now maybe just focus on what not to do. Like hang out with Eurotrash dealers with names like Dmitri.”

“Fine,” she said. “He’s an asshole anyway. I’ll never find someone like you and Mom did, though. You two are ridiculous.”

“Sure you will. I know it will happen. It has to. Put it this way: there’s always someone out there who can save you.”

“So then you believe in fate or whatever?” April said.

He licked his fingers. “Maybe not for everybody,” he said.

He tried to get her to eat but he couldn’t really blame her for refusing; the Reuben, like most of the American-style food they’d seen in Dongguan, was like an approximation based on photographs. Even the ingredients seemed like a best guess guided mostly by color. Instead she closed her eyes, and he sat there at the foot of the bed and watched her, and when she was asleep he got up quietly and went back to his room, leaving ajar the connecting door of their suite.

He’d had to cancel one of his two meetings today in order to stay with her, but the other one had gone well, and everything else he could think of was as it should be; still, something made him uneasy as he stood there staring out the window, which could not be opened, at the gray sky fading unpicturesquely to black. It was the hotel room itself, he decided, the sense of restless distaste these rooms always engendered in him. They made him a little crazy; sometimes he’d wake up in one and it would seriously take him a minute to remember where he was and how he’d gotten there. Having come halfway around the world, you’d think it might feel different. But this room was the same everywhere: blank and haughtily self-sufficient as if it knew it would outlive you by a thousand years. It made you reflective, which was not a state he welcomed or thought highly of, in himself or others. The best thing would have been just to go to bed, but Adam knew his body well enough to know that there was no way he would fall asleep for another hour at least. Just lying there awake in the dark would be worse.

Cyn had told him to call her anytime, but when he tried her now he got bounced straight to voice mail. She might have left her charger back in New York. He left a message at her hotel saying that he hoped her dad was still comfortable and that he loved her.

End of an era, he thought: somehow the fact that his father-in-law had been such a ghost while he was alive made it harder to imagine he’d soon be gone for real. Here was a guy about to pass from the earth having left no trace of himself at all—having lived, in fact, in such a way as to take care that he wouldn’t. It made no sense. Adam had never told Cynthia this but if that child Charlie Sikes had abandoned thirty-odd years ago had been him, the guy could have died alone in a ditch for all he cared. He would never have given him a nickel, he wouldn’t have contacted him or spoken to him or even thought about him. But Cynthia had a bigger heart than he did, in all things. “Better half” was one of those expressions people used without thinking, but she was absolutely the better half of him, and without her he felt like he knew exactly the sort of abyss he would fall into. He’d probably see Charlie there. But family civilized a man. See, this is the kind of shit I hate thinking about, Adam said to himself, and he got up and turned on the TV; but the only thing he could find in English was Larry King and he wound up muting it anyway for fear of waking April.

Outside the window the whole panorama of squared-off roof-tops was swallowed into the grimy dark. That morning he’d gone downstairs to the lobby in shorts and a t-shirt for a run but the concierge had literally sprinted to the door to block his path and said the air quality was too bad for such an activity. Which was plausible. Or maybe the concierge just didn’t want Adam to get kidnapped or shot on his watch, or to see something an American wasn’t supposed to see. This was a ruthlessly ugly city. It was the future, though. Everybody nodded when you said that but only a few people got off their asses and acted on it.

Even inside the fund there were a few people who felt that someone in Adam’s position shouldn’t be doing business in China at all. Most of his employees thought of him, for better or worse, as apolitical, but that wasn’t really true. He was perfectly aware that what he was doing here affected many more fortunes than just his own. Money was its own system, its own language, its own governing principle. You introduced money into a situation and it released the potential in everybody. Maybe you got rich, maybe others around
you got rich while you didn’t, but either way it had to be better to learn the truth about your own nature.

The room was as silent as if he’d had earplugs in and so he jumped a little bit when he heard a noise at the door: someone from the front desk was trying to slide a thick stack of what looked like fax paper into his room. He didn’t really feel up to going through it just now. He could feel himself starting to tire. Tomorrow first thing he would get out there and run through those toxic streets even if he had to lay out that concierge to do it. The more he thought about it, the more pissed he was that he’d let himself be turned back this morning. That was five days in a row now—ever since they’d left New York—with no exercise. He was in better shape than most men half his age but what people didn’t appreciate was how fragile a state it was. You had to work so hard just to maintain it: let up even for a moment and that was where time took over. He pulled up his shirt as he sat there on the bed and was able to pinch a small roll of fat between his thumb and forefinger. That was no good. He made himself a solemn promise to double his workouts the moment he got back home.

Back to the hospice at dawn, but her father was already awake. He was staring at the slowly turning ceiling fan, in something like alarm. “What?” Cynthia said. “You want it off? Are you cold?” She switched it off, but the expression on his face stayed the same. She saw his lips moving and went to lean over him at the head of the bed.

“What is that?” he said. “That is, how far away is it?”

You’d answer a question like that, and he’d nod, as if you’d made perfect sense, but then half a minute later you’d see the same look in his eye and you’d know that the question was just more substantial than any answer you could provide. The detailed aspects of himself that would resurface from time to time—the wink that used to mean he was putting you on but couldn’t possibly mean that now, or the particular clicking noise he made with his tongue when he understood something he hadn’t previously been able to figure
out—were, Cynthia realized, just vestiges, tics that no longer signified what they used to but that had somehow outlived the more essential parts of him, as if he were fading away from the inside out.

“Who are those idiots?” he said. He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the sun even though the room was darkened almost completely. “Clear the green!” he said. “For Christ’s sake!”

“Oh my God,” Irene said nervously. “There’s nothing there. You’re seeing things.” She took his hand; he jerked it away and started swinging his legs toward the side of the bed. The rails weren’t up, and Cynthia didn’t know how to operate them. The two women began trying to force him back into a prone position.

“Are you crazy?” he said to them. “It’s a shotgun start. We have to get out there! Where are my shoes?”

“Ring for the nurse,” Cynthia said to Irene, but Kay was already behind them. One look into his eyes was apparently enough to satisfy her that he was beyond the reach of her usual charms; she touched a button beside his bed, and another nurse came in holding aloft a needle.

“Oh shit,” Cynthia said. She and Irene backed out into the corridor and tried not to listen. “Shit shit shit. It’s not supposed to go like this. I mean, is it?”

“It’s just a bad moment,” Irene said, though she was shaken too. “It’s not his last. He won’t go out struggling like that. He’ll be ready.”

God, it hadn’t even occurred to her, until Irene mentioned it, that her father might be in the process of dying right now. One of the nurses came over and gently closed the door. Cynthia stared at it. “How do you know?” she said.

“The Lord won’t allow it,” Irene said. She smiled and laid her hand on Cynthia’s arm. Her expression suggested that she was trying to convey something important and soothing. Cynthia wasn’t sure whether Irene was choosing this moment to out herself as some kind of Jesus freak or whether she was just saying whatever came to mind to calm Cynthia as if they were mother and child, but either way, that hand on her arm sent a bolt through her that made her whole body stiff with revelation. Oh my God, Cynthia thought.
There’s no more time. She drew her arm away as cautiously as if she were pulling an arrow out of it.

“The Lord won’t allow it?” she said. “The Lord won’t allow it. Okay.”

A few minutes later, Kay came out of her father’s room and left the door open behind her. “He’ll be sleeping for a while,” she said, her eyes moving back and forth between the two women. “We really don’t like to do that unless we have to, but as I guess you saw, he was getting very agitated. The only other option was restraining him. I’m sorry.”