This Is How It Really Sounds (37 page)

The fondue pot came with its bubbling white contents, along with cubes of bread and pickles. He paused from their conversation to taste the wine and to dip the first cube of bread. She followed his example.

He sighed. “It is embarrassing. It's been a really hellish week.” He told her the whole fantastic story, describing how the old man had pretended to be his friend and then led him to a place where he could be attacked, and how it was even possible that the singer had somehow arranged the videos simply to embarrass him and to make himself look like a hero. “And he succeeded. You can't imagine how it feels to know that there's millions of people watching you get punched in the face and cheering.”

“That's terrible,” Camille said softly.

“And it doesn't end there. It's ruined our business. Kell and I had to dissolve our whole corporation and have him reconstitute it without me. I'm too much of a liability. I lost face, as they say here.”

She nodded sympathetically and reached across the table to put her hand on top of his and squeezed it. “That's just face, Peter. It's only appearance.”

“But if you lost face, publicly, in front of millions of people, you would feel bad, right?”

“Yes. But I would be stupid to feel bad.”

“But you
would
feel bad!” he insisted. “No matter how much you told yourself not to. And in this case there've been real consequences with my business, my loss of an investment opportunity, physical pain—all of those things!”

She withdrew her hand and picked up her wineglass.

“So, naturally, I'm not going to just lay down and die on this.”

“What will you do?” she asked, looking at the piece of bread on her skewer.

“I'm going to punish him.” He sounded cold and arrogant. “I have a PR firm that specializes in dealing with exactly this sort of problem and they will crush him like an egg.” He told her how they worked, how they could destroy Pete Harrington's image forever. Now Peter's face had become almost red. “He's not getting away with this! He thinks he can just walk up to me and assault me with no provocation whatsoever then use it to relaunch his career? That's bullshit! It's twisted! I'm not going to take that from some two-bit has-been rock star!” He noticed her reaction, and he leaned back in his chair. “I'm sorry. I get a little bit overwrought.” He sipped at his water, calming himself. “So. What do you think?”

She was quiet for enough time to dip a piece of bread into the cheese and drink a few sips of wine. She reached over and squeezed his hand again. “Do nothing,” she said.

“Why?” He looked puzzled and irritated.

This was the moment to be unattached. She looked directly at him. “Because you deserved it.”

He pulled his hand away. “What?”

She smiled. It was really rather simple. “Of course you deserved it!”

He shook his head, stunned. “How can you say that? Everything I did was legal, and it was done in good faith. Every investment—”

“You made
so much
money, Peter!” He didn't like being interrupted, but she went on anyway. “And you got to keep that money. That's good! You were trying to find your other life. But people like Pete Harrington—they lost money. Maybe for him, a lot of money. For
your
other life. Your life swallowed his. So, yes, he has a right to hit you.”

“I can't believe this! You're basically saying you agree with all those people who've been posting hate messages all over the Internet about me? You're saying they're right?”

“They are right to be angry! Of course! And when you accept that, I think you will be much happier.”

“You think I'll be happier?” He struck his forehead with his palm, chuckling bitterly. “This is crazy!”

“Is it really crazy, Peter? How happy are you now?”

“How happy am I now?”

“Yes. At this moment.”

The question stopped him completely. “Well…” He lifted his shoulders and tossed his hands to the sides as if he'd forgotten where they belonged. She saw his throat move up and down as he forced a smile to the surface. “Not so very happy, to be honest with you.” He brushed his eye with the back of his hand, beaming at her at the same time as he looked deeply sad. “It's confusing, actually. Fairly confusing. I'm supposed to be very successful.” His voice became thin. “I mean, as people measure success. I've got a ton of money. I've got a son that I love, though I guess really, I'm not much help to him. I've got great friends all over the world—not so much in Shanghai, but in other places. I have everything. What else could I wish for?” He laughed, and it made his teary eyes overflow. He wiped it with the napkin. Other diners were staring at him, but he didn't care. “This is so crazy!
Happy!
”

She let him sit with his thoughts for a time. Neither of them were touching the fondue. She poured them both a bit more wine and waited for him to begin again.

“I have no real reason to be here now,” he finally offered.

“You never had a reason.”

He looked down toward the table, then back up at her. “You could tell?” She didn't answer him, so he answered himself. “I thought China would be a change from New York, but the whole thing with Metropolitan Partners was more of the same. Or worse. I mean, look at me: I'm incorporated in the Isle of Man. My official home is a post office box in Bermuda. I pay nothing in taxes, and my most recent business venture is based on taking advantage of distressed public infrastructure. No wonder people hate me.
I
hate me! I'm a bored, selfish rich man of a type that's existed throughout history. The only dignity I have left is trying not to tell myself I'm anything other than that.” He opened his fingers in a gesture of helplessness and sat back in his chairs to wait for her reaction.

“That is all true,” she said at last. “But you take it too seriously.”

He looked at her, surprised. “I'm sorry; I'm in the middle of a major life crisis, and you feel I'm taking it too seriously?”

“Far too seriously, Peter!” She could see he was becoming quite annoyed. It made her laugh. “It's so simple! You keep looking for the Other Life. But your own life
is
the other life.”

He opened his mouth to throw back a sharp answer, but he held it back, then stared down at the table with his lips half-apart. He smiled and looked back at her. “I'm trying to understand what the hell you just said.”

“Peter! Look around! This is what the Other Life looks like. Close your eyes and listen. Right now!” She watched him shut his eyes and listen to the clattering and clinking and bits of conversation. She leaned toward him as if she was telling him a secret. “This is how it really sounds!”

He opened his eyes and looked around the restaurant and at her. He gave a single dry laugh. “I'm sorry, Camille. I'm just not getting it.”

“It's okay. You can think about it if you like.” She leaned back again. She was suspicious of long talks about philosophy. They always turned back on themselves and lost their real meaning. “And something else on another subject: that picture, by Xu Ruoshi? It is too expensive. Offer half of what she asks. Then pay a bit more. Diana made the price three times higher after Xu Ruoshi won that prize. But don't tell her I warned you, or it will create problems for me.”

He considered it, knowing what it meant that she had told him. “Thank you, Camille.” For the first time that night he actually seemed happy. They each ate a few pieces of bread dipped in cheese, and talked about the food in Switzerland. They speculated that this restaurant must have an exact fake-Chinese counterpart somewhere in Geneva or Bern, where people were looking at outdated Chinese clothing and musical instruments and imagining a China that no longer existed. For a little while they were simply two people out for the evening, though she knew that everything had not simply gone away with a few pronouncements. At last he let the conversation go silent so he could speak.

“So, Camille, what would you do if you were me? Seeing as I have no purpose in Shanghai.”

“I thought of that. If I were you, I would go to Cold Mountain for a while. Look for Han Shan.”

“Who's Han Shan?”

“The sage of Cold Mountain. I told you about him last week. That poem.
The mountain is massive. The mountain is mist.
” Peter didn't understand anything. “In the Tang Dynasty. More than twelve hundred years ago. No one knows if he was a real person: all we have are poems.” She told him about Han Shan and his poems about the mountain and the high paths and the mist. How the legend said that he had gone finally into a cave and closed it up behind him.

“I give you credit for one thing, Camille. You're not a slave to linear thought.” She merely indulged him with a smile. “Let me make sure I've got this right: I'm a global laughingstock who's been physically assaulted, dumped by his girlfriend, and kicked out of his own business, and you think I should go and look for a legendary poet who's been dead for twelve hundred years?
That
should be my next move.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

He pressed his lips tightly together and looked down at the tablecloth. He considered it for quite a while, and she could see different expressions going across his face. Finally he turned back to her. “Where is Cold Mountain?”

 

6

The Elephant Hunt

The chorus of
Pete Harrington's newly rediscovered fame didn't start going out of tune until a few weeks after he'd gotten back. He'd been putting together a touring band, auditioning players with Duffy and seeing how things felt. They were doing well fleshing out the songs he'd written with Duffy, but he hadn't come up with anything new since Shanghai. Strangely, he felt dry again.

The days of going to the Rainbow to write, or even pretending to write, were over. People recognized him everywhere, and though it had been fun to have that back the first week or two, he gotten pretty sick of fending off the same questions over and over again. People wanted his autograph, or to know how he'd felt, or to congratulate him, or to shake the hand that had punched Peter Harrington in the face. The babes were back, too, or rather, the babes had gotten younger. But it wasn't like being twenty. The game felt old.

He was spending a lot of time in front of his computer. Before Shanghai he never ego surfed because there was nothing new anymore, just the same stale pages and outdated hero worship going back twenty years. Now, though, everyone was talking about him. Entertainment and celebrity sites, people who'd lost money in Crossroads, sites that specialized in fight videos, fan sites, political sites, social media pages, blogs of every stripe. It had even spawned sites of its own. He turned up one called BitchSlapBankster.com that featured his videos and a list of banksters still in need of bitchslapping, complete with their pictures and addresses. The comment board was a sinkhole of ugliness, the hatred slopping over to Republicans, Democrats, Jews, Chinese, traitors who didn't carry a copy of the U.S. Constitution in their pocket, even to Pete Harrington himself:
If a d1ck head like Pete Harrington can do it, anyone can!
Or,
This video makes me laugh. 2 f@ggots getting it on!
These were the people he was trying impress? He registered under a phony name and wrote,
You r all just fat shyts in undershirts writing comments and jerking off to porn. You wouldn't have the guts. F&ck U Pete Harrington
. Let 'em figure that one out.

He tried to imagine what Charlie would say about this. Charlie didn't worry about his online reputation, or downloads, or what people thought of him. He was beyond reputation. It had been simpler back in his day: you just do hero shit and nobody ever knows except your buddies, or the president, or some guy back at CIA headquarters who calls you into his office and says something like “Well done, Pico. You saved the Free World.” He missed the old man. Charlie'd pulled him into a universe where you put your fear aside and did it, period, because that's who you were. He didn't have Charlie by his side anymore, though, and he wasn't sure what new universe he'd ended up in. The universe of
2 f@ggots getting it on!

A music video of “Kickin' It with The Man” had showed up. It was footage from the “Chinese Justice” video mixed with other footage of Shanghai, and then some cuts of him singing a sort of demo video of “Kickin' It” that they'd put out, all lifted from the Net and spliced together with his new song so it cut to the beat. Not professionally produced, but witty and cool, a good mix of angry footage with lighter stuff—street scenes of Shanghai and clips taken from commercials for insurance companies and banks. Foreclosure-sale signs and shots of people with all their belongings out on the front lawn. Always cutting back to him singing “Kickin' It” and the banker going down to the pavement over and over again. It looked almost too good to have been produced by an amateur, but there were all sorts of obsessives out there these days, and they all seemed to have access to a laptop and editing software. His favorite version of the song used LEGOs: his square-bodied styrene persona kicking the crap out of a plastic guy with a top hat and tuxedo. It had two million views.

He noticed a mention in one of the trade papers about the songs he and Duffy had written.
DREAMKRUSHERS DUO BACK IN THE GAME
. “Riding high on interest in their new Internet-driven hit, ‘Kickin' It with The Man,' '90s troubadours Pete Harrington and Duffy Scofield are going into the studio to record new material for an upcoming tour.” It had been years since he'd seen his name in
Variety,
and he knew things didn't just appear in
Variety
by themselves. Beth was on it.