and fifty million people under the age of thirty-five. They wanted everything Americans now took for granted, including the right to piss on the shoes of any other country in the world. The Chinese could actually get things done, too; they were rewiring with fiber-optic cable, they were tearing down Shanghai, a city of fourteen million, and rebuilding it from scratch. The central government had committed a trillion dollars to the effort, bulldozing any neighborhood deemed standing in the way of progress. If you didn't like it, and announced as much, the Chinese tied you spread-eagle to a door for a month or so. With a hole to shit through. They knew America didn't care-not really. There was too much money to be made-he could see that right now, the boats on their way north, the slide of time.
But ha! There might be some consolation after all! He pushed back in the seat, slipped on his half-frame glasses, and did the math on a hotel napkin. After commissions and taxes, his evening's activities had netted him close to eight million dollars-a sum grotesque not so much for its size but for the speed and ease with which he had seized it-two phone calls! — and, most of all, for its mockery of human toil. Well, it was a grotesque world now. He'd done nothing but understand what the theorists called a market inefficiency and what everyone else knew as inside information. If he was a ghoul, wrenching dollars from Sir Henry Lai's vomit-filled mouth, then at least the money would go to good use. He'd put all of it in a bypass trust for Julia's child. The funds could pay for clothes and school and pediatrician's bills and whatever else. It could pay for a life. He remembered his father buying used car tires from the garage of the Minnesota Highway Patrol for a dollar-fifty. No such thing as steel-belted radials in 1956. Charlie-boy, I'm going to teach you how to fix a broken fan belt. Kinda useful thing to know. See, you could be on some road somewhere and… He'd shown his father an F-105 in 1967, told him that NASA would make it to the moon in a couple of years. His father had never believed it. He'd told his father that he'd carried a small nuclear warhead in test flights in 1970. His father had never believed that, either. You cross borders of time, and if people don't come with you, you lose them and they you. Now it was an age when a fifty-eight-year-old American executive could net eight million bucks by watching a man choke to death. His father would never have understood it, and he suspected that Ellie couldn't, either. Not really. There was something in her head lately. She was going some other direction. Maybe it was because of Julia, but maybe not. She was anxious and irritable these days, jabbering at him about retirement communities, complaining that he traveled too much. She seemed distracted, too. She bought expensive vegetables she let rot in the refrigerator, she kept changing her hair color, she took Charlie's blood-pressure pills by mistake, she left the phone off the hook. He wanted to be patient with her but could not. She drove him nuts.
He sat in the hotel lobby for an hour more, reading every article in the International Herald Tribune and eating a piece of chocolate cake. He wondered how Mr. Ming knew about the quad-port transformer. The factory Ming was financing would initially manufacture Teknetrix's existing line of datacom switches, not the Q4. It was possible, of course, that one of the company's salesmen had bragged about the Q4, or the tech research people had let slip some information at one of the industry conferences. His main competitor, Manila Telecom, might know of the research on the product-Charlie's company certainly knew of theirs.
He wouldn't worry the question now. Julia was more important. He checked his watch and finally, at midnight, decided not to wait for her call and pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed her Manhattan office.
'Tell me, sweetie,' he said once he got past the secretary.
'Oh, Daddy…'
'Yes?'
A pause. And then she cried.
'Okay, now,' he breathed, closing his eyes. 'Okay.'
She gathered herself. 'All right. I'm fine. It's okay. You don't have to have children to have a fulfilling life, I just keep reminding myself. It's a beautiful day outside. I can handle this. I don't want you to worry about me.'
'Tell me what they said.'
'They said I'll probably never have my own children, it's probably impossible, they think the odds are-I haven't even told Brian, I'm just sitting here, not even-I mean, I can't work or think or anything, all I know is that I'll never hold my own baby, never, just something I'll never, ever do.'
'Oh, sweetie.'
'We really thought it was going to work. You know? I've had a lot of faith with this thing. They have these new egg-handling techniques, makes them glue to the walls of the uterus, and they say it increases the odds.'
They were both silent a moment. He rubbed absentmindedly at the scar on his hand.
'I mean, you kind of expect that technology will work,' Julia went on, her voice thoughtful. 'It's the last religion, right? They can make a sixty-three-year-old woman give birth. That's the actual record. They can pull sperm out of a dead man. They can clone human beings-they can do all of these things and they can't-' She stopped.
The day had piled up on him, and he was trying to remember all that Julia had explained to him previously about eggs and tubes and hormone levels. 'Sweetie,' he tried, 'the problem is not exactly the eggs?'
'My eggs are pretty lousy, also. You're wondering if we could put my egg in another woman, right?'
'No, not-well, maybe yes,' he sighed, the thought of it abhorrent to him.
'They don't think it would work. The eggs aren't that viable. You could have someone go through a year or two and fail, just on the basis of the eggs.'
'And your tubes-'
She gave a bitter laugh. 'Daddy, they could poke the perfect eggs of some eighteen-year-old girl into me. But the walls of my uterus are too thin. The eggs won't stick.'
'Right.'
'I'm barren, Daddy. I finally understand that word. I can't make good eggs, and I can't hatch eggs, mine or anyone else's.'
He watched the lights of a tanker slide along the oily water outside. Say something useful, he thought. 'I know it's too early to start discussing adoption, but-'
'He doesn't want to do it. At least he says he won't,' she sobbed.
'Wait, sweetie,' Charlie responded, hearing her despair, 'Brian is just-Adopting a child is-'
'No, no, no, Daddy, Brian doesn't want a little Guatemalan baby or a Lithuanian baby or anybody else's baby but his own. It's about his own goddamn penis. If it doesn't come out of his penis, then it's no good.'
Her husband's view made sense to him, but he couldn't say that now. 'Julia, I'm sure Brian-'
'I would have adopted a little baby a year ago, two years ago! But I put up with all this shit, all these hormones and needles in my butt and doctors pushing things up me, for him. I mean, I've done Lupron nine times! I made myself a raving Lupron bitch nine times, Daddy. That has got to be more than any other woman in New York City! And now those years are-Oh, I'm sorry, Daddy, I have a client. I'll talk to you when you come back. I'm very-I have a lot of calls here. Bye.'
He listened to the satellite crackle in the phone, then to the return of the dial tone, then the announcement in Chinese to hang up. His flight was at eight the next morning, New York seventeen hours away, and as always, he wanted to get home, and yet didn't, for as soon as he arrived, he would miss China. The place got to him, like a recurrent dream, or a fever-forced possibilities into his mind, whispered ideas he didn't want to hear. Like the eight million. It was perfectly legal yet also a kind of contraband. If he wanted, Ellie would never see the money; his brokerage and bank statements were filed by his secretary, Karen, and Ellie could barely be troubled to sign the tax returns each April. She had long since ceased to be interested in his financial gamesmanship, so long as there was enough money for the necessities: Belgian chocolates for the elevator man at Christmas, fresh flowers twice a week, the farmhouse and pool in Tuscany. But like a flash of unexpected lightning, the new money illuminated certain questions begging for years at the edge of his consciousness. He had been rich for a long time, but now he was rich enough to fuck with fate. Had he been waiting for this moment? Yes, waiting until he knew about Julia, waiting until he was certain.
He called Martha Wainwright, his personal lawyer. 'Martha, I've finally decided to do it,' he said when she answered.
'Oh, Christ, Charlie, don't tell me that.'
'Yes. Fact, I just made a little extra money in a stock deal. Makes the whole thing that much easier.'
'Don't do it, Charlie.'
'I just got the word from my daughter, Martha. If she could have children, it would be a different story.'
