End of Days (20 page)

But ha! There might be some consolation! 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. 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. Maybe it was because of Julia, but maybe not. She bought expensive vegetables she let rot in the refrigerator, 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.
Finally, at midnight, he decided not to wait for Julia's 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 can handle this.”

“Tell me what they said.”

“They said I'll probably never have my own children, they think the odds are—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.”

They were both silent a moment.

“I mean, you kind of expect that
technology
will work,” Julia went on, her voice thoughtful. “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 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.

“They don't think it would work. The eggs aren't that viable.”

“And your tubes—”

She gave a bitter laugh. “I'm
barren,
Daddy. 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. “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.
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 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; she had long since ceased to be interested in his financial gamesmanship, so long as there was enough money for Belgian chocolates for the elevator man at Christmas, fresh flowers twice a week, and the farmhouse 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.”

“This is bullshit, Charlie. Male bullshit.”

“Is that your legal opinion or your political one?”

“I'm going to argue with you when you get back,” she warned.

“Fine—I expect that. For now, please just put the ad in the magazines and get all the documents ready.”

“I think you are a complete jerk for doing this.”

“We understand things differently, Martha.”

“Yes, because
you
are addicted to testosterone.”

“Most men are, Martha. That's what makes us such assholes.”

“You having erection problems, Charlie? Is
that
what this is about?”

“You got the wrong guy, Martha. My dick is like an old dog.”

“How's that? Sleeps all the time?”

“Slow but dependable,” he lied. “Comes when you call it.”

She sighed. “Why don't you just let me hire a couple of strippers to sit on your face? That'd be
infinitely
cheaper.”

“That's not what this is about, Martha.”

“Oh, Charlie.”

“I'm serious, I really am.”

“Ellie will be terribly hurt.”

“She doesn't need to know.”

“She'll find out, believe me. They always do.” Martha's voice was distraught. “She'll find out you're advertising for a woman to have your baby, and then she'll just flip out, Charlie.”

“Not if you do your job well.”

“You really this afraid of death?”

“Not death, Martha, oblivion. Oblivion is the thing that really kills me.”

“You're better than this, Charlie.”

“The ad, just put in the ad.”

He hung up. In a few days the notice would sneak into the back pages of New York's weeklies, a discreet little box in the personals, specifying the arrangement he sought and the benefits he offered. Martha would begin screening the applications. He'd see who responded. You never knew who was out there.

*   *   *

He sat quietly then, a saddened but prosperous American executive in a good suit, his gray hair neatly barbered, and followed the ships out on the water. One of the hotel's Eurasian prostitutes watched him from across the lobby as she sipped a watered-down drink. Perhaps sensing a certain opportune grief in the stillness of his posture, she slipped over the marble floor and bent close to ask softly if he would like some company, but he shook his head no—although not, she would see, without a bit of lonely gratitude, not without a quick hungered glance of his eyes into hers—and he continued to sit calmly, with that stillness to him. Noticing this, one would have thought not that in one evening he had watched a man die, or made millions, or lied to his banker, or worried that his flesh might never go forward, but that he was privately toasting what was left of the century, wondering what revelation it might yet bring.

 

Frank Lauria
was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Manhattan College. He has traveled extensively and published fifteen novels, including five bestsellers and the novelizations of
Dark City, Mask of Zorro,
and
Alaska.
He has written articles and reviews for various magazines and is a published poet and songwriter. Mr. Lauria currently resides in San Francisco, where he teaches creative writing. A film project based on his Doctor Orient series is in development.

END OF DAYS

Copyright © 1999 by Beacon Communications, LLC.

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ISBN: 0-312-97262-8

St. Martin's Paperbacks edition / November 1999

eISBN 9781466880290

First eBook edition: July 2014