Just a fag I met on the boardwalk in the part of New York City they call Bangladesh. I don't know if he'll ever call me again. 'No,' I say, 'I think I've been moving around so much I haven't had much chance,'
He nods. 'This might strike you as a difficult place to meet someone but you'll be surprised. We have number of single women on staff.' He smiles, 'I think that you are already a topic of discussion, an eligible bachelor. Someone like yourself should have no trouble making friends.'
I am shown a comfortable room in the guesthouse. There is a big double bed, carpeting on the floor, fantastically colored prints of the southwestern landscape. All very nice.(I wake up alone in the middle of the night, disoriented, and it takes me a moment to settle myself, to think, 'The door is THAT way, the window THIS way, the bathroom in the direction of my feet.')
We discuss salary and living conditions in the morning. The salary they have offered is extraordinarily high, 103 hundred. There would be a tax rate of forty percent, they will take care of all taxes. After taxes my salary would be in the area of 62 hundred. Plus they would provide housing, and I would have unlimited system time.
I tell them I think the offer is very generous. I will give it very serious consideration and I will be in touch with them through Office of Employment Resources. I am very polite, I thank Vice President Wang in Mandarin. I hear my own voice, my old-fashioned phrasing, my northern pronunciation. Haibao always found it so amusing.
Vice President Wang seems impressed, maybe pleased.
I am, in fact, terrified. I cannot live that way, I can't live in a compound in the middle of the desert, surrounded by chainlink. Like Baffin Island, except for the rest of my life.
I have to think. What do I want?
I want to keep teaching. None of my subsequent lectures have been as exciting as the first, but I like the work. I don't want to end up in a corporate compound. So I must make some money.
While I am thinking, I use the number Mang Li-zi showed me to access the job postings. There are well over a hundred of them. I go through them, stopping to look something up when it strikes my fancy. I get a call while I'm in the middle of the proposal specs for an office complex and I just switch over audio.
'This is Zhang,' I say, trying to decide if this complex is too big.
'Pardon me? I was given this number for Rafael?'
It is Invierno. I flick over to vid. 'That's me.'
'Rafael,' he says. 'Rafael Zhang. Or Zhang Rafael, which?'
I laugh, 'Neither. Either Rafael Luis, or Zhang Zhong Shan.'
'Okay,' he looks cautious. 'Which is your real name?'
'Both, my mother is hispanic and my father is ABC. I use Zhang when I work, but a lot of my friends call me Rafael.'
He bats his long eyelashes while he considers this.
'Hey, a man with a name like 'Winter' doesn't have a lot of space to complain. What are you doing?'
'Nothing much,' he says. 'My first name is Jeremy. Invierno's my last name, but I like it better.'
'Let's go to the kite races,' I say.
He ignores that. 'That's why you speak Spanish?' he says.
'Street Spanish. Nothing they would understand in Bogata.'
'You sure as hell don't look Spanish.' He is frowning.
'I'll tell you all about it at the kite races.'
'One more thing,' he says. 'Where the hell have you been?'
'What,' I say, 'you left your wallet over here or something?'
He gets visibly flustered, 'No, it's just a friend of mine had a party last night and I though you'd like to go. Look, I was just asking.' The matador look is back, pouty and sensitive to slights.
'I was in Arizona interviewing for a job.'
'Arizona,' he says, aghast. 'What the fuck do you want to go to Arizona for?'
'I don't.'
'Then why did you go,' he says, reasonably.
'Who made you my mother?' I ask, laughing. He makes me laugh, Invierno, and as usual, he doesn't really take offense. So we go to the kite races, and Invierno comes home with me since it's Friday and he doesn't have to work on Saturday.
He rolls over in the morning and I'm staring at the ceiling, thinking of Mang Li-zi. Thinking of myself stuck out in Arizona.
He pillows his chin on his arms. 'You sure as hell don't look like much fun.'
'I'm worried,' I say.
'Oh,' He says.
After a long bit of silence he says resignedly, 'What are you worried about?'
'I just had a job offer to make about sixty a year, but I have to live in a compound in Arizona and be an administrator, and incidently they'd really like me to marry someone within the company.' I climb across him and pad into the kitchen to start coffee.
'Sixty a year?' his voice follows me to the kitchen, he is astounded. 'I thought you were a teacher!'
'I'm an engineer,' I say.
I hear him shift on the bed. 'Are you going to take it?'
'No.'
'How can you turn down that much money?'
'Because if I live there I'll go crazy. I'd have to be a monk, those people live in each other's hip pockets.'
'I can see how that would be a problem.' Invierno's says. 'Couldn't you just work there a couple of years? You know, save it all or something?'
'No,' I say.
'Why not? That's what I'd do.'
'Because I just couldn't do it.' I'm irritated.
'Okay,' he says. I bring him coffee. 'Why do you always wear your hair in a tail?' he asks sitting up, 'I like it down.'
'Because I was in love with a guy one time and he told me he liked it back.'
Invierno sips his coffee, considering. 'Do you still see him?'
'No,' I say. 'He's dead. He jumped out a window, one of those big complexes in China.' I put my coffee down on the floor and rub my eyes. It's too complicated, too early in the morning to get into this with a twenty-two year old.
'Hey,' he says, 'Rafael, I'm sorry.' He sits up and rests his cheek against my back, a pleasant scratchy feeling. 'I just asked you because I wanted to change the subject.'
'Don't worry about it,' I say. Invierno doesn't ask anymore questions (although he's dying to) but he does stay for breakfast, which is very sweet of him. 'I'll call you,' he promises in the hallway. 'I will, I'll really call you.'
I'm suddenly invested with tragedy. The poet, Byron, once told a friend of his that he wished he had consumption. The friend-who had consumption-was appalled and wanted to know why. Because the women would think he was so interesting, Byron told him. Probably preening.
I'm not at all displeased to think that I have become interesting to Invierno.
I go back to the postings, thinking of Mang Li-zi. It would be better if I did some laundry, but I'm too lazy to go down to the basement. There is a proposal for an office complex, not very big. I print out the information and suddenly decide I should do something so I go down to the library and buy time on the system.
It's not a very good system, too many users. Sometimes you have to wait for it to do something. And it's expensive to use for long periods of time. I don't have that much money anymore. It's exasperating to think of something and have to wait for it to happen, knowing that I'm being charged for the time I wait. But it's the only system I have access to.
It's interesting, building this little office complex. It's crazy to try to build on a public system, but I have the advantage of knowing there aren't many organic engineers in this country. I can probably do a better job than the usual team.
I could start my own business. I wouldn't have to make that much, if I kept teaching that would just about pay
