How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (7 page)

She nods. “In the mountains. It's like magic. Like powdered hailstones.”

“Like what's inside a freezer.”

“When it's on the ground. When it's falling, it's like feathers.”

“Soft?”

“Soft. But it gets wet. If you walk around in it, it hurts.”

You envision her sauntering through a white valley, a mansion in the distance. The headwaiter returns and ties a striped cloth around your bottle, discreetly hiding all but its neck from view.

“What about you?” she asks, refilling your glasses. “What is this business of yours, exactly?”

“Bottled water.”

“You deliver it?”

“That too. I make it.”

“How?”

You tell her, nonchalantly, omitting mention of the many wrinkles, such as incessant natural gas shortages or long periods when the water pressure is too low and your pump screams idly, unable to fill your storage tank.

“That's brilliant,” she says, shaking her head. “And people actually buy it? Just like you were one of the big companies?”

“Just like that.”

“You're a genius.”

“No.” You smile.

“At school everybody always said you were a genius.”

“You weren't there often.”

“I went for long enough.”

You take a drink. “Did you stay in touch with anyone?”

“No.”

“Not even your parents?”

“No. They died.”

“I know. Mine too. I meant before that.”

“Some messages. From them, and later, when I started coming on TV, from relatives. Mostly abuse. Or asking for money.”

“So it's just been me.”

“Just you.” She rests her long fingers on the back of your hand.

You have sampled alcohol only twice before, and never to the point of being drunk, so this sensation of flushed, relaxed glibness is new to you. The two of you eat and chat, occasionally guffawing at volumes disturbing to your fellow diners. Warmth and a craving, a consciousness of your proximity, build within you. But your meal is over too soon, as is the wine, and you are steeling yourself for the evening to end when she says, “I have another bottle in my room. Do you want to come up?”

“Yes.”

She tells you the number and asks you to wait a few minutes before joining her. You are confused how to get there exactly, and reluctant to attract the attention of security by asking for directions, but you reason that you must take the elevator, and from there you are able to follow signs in the halls. She opens her door when you knock, brings you inside, and kisses you hard on the mouth.

“I don't have another bottle,” she says.

“That's all right.”

You hold her, encompassing this familiar, unfamiliar woman, feeling her breathe, tasting the place her words are born. You caress her as you strip her naked. You smooth the curve of her hip, of her jaw. You cradle her pelvis with your palm. No, you are not strangers. You are where you should be, finally, and so you linger.

Sex with you seems transgressive, which heightens her desire, although she is too preoccupied fully to enjoy the act. There is a whiff of home about you, emotionally, but also physically, in for example your lack of deodorant, and for her home carries with it connotations of sorrow and brutality, connotations that elicit signals from her to you to be punishing, but these you misinterpret, and so they remain unacted upon.

She is passing through a fragile period. Gravity has begun to tug at the arc of her career, and for the first time she earned a fraction last year of what she did the previous. She is aware that her future is shaky, that she could well end up impoverished, aged, and solitary, an elderly lady in a single room, buying rice and flour in bulk once a season, or, no less frightening, the wife of some cocaine-snorting man-child too chronically insecure to appear in his father's head office much earlier than eleven or to stay much later than three, prone to picking up teenage girls at parties in his muscular European limousine and to sobbing unpredictably when drunk.

Lying nude beside you, a used condom on the carpet and a lit cigarette in her hand, she strokes your hair tenderly as you doze. She does not let you spend the night, however. You ask when you will see her next and she is not dishonest, saying she does not know, but to your voiced hope that it be soon, she makes no reply. Afterwards she reclines alone in bed, recalling the comforting sensation of your figures pressed together. She imagines what a relationship with you might be like, whether you could possibly mix with her colleagues and acquaintances in the great city by the sea. She wonders also, as she inhales with shut eyes, the burrowing-termite crackle of paper and tobacco audible, if there will ever arrive a day she is not repelled by the notion of binding herself permanently to a man.

You drive off in a state of agitation, both happy and afraid. But it is the fear that has grown dominant by that weekend, when you take your nephews to the zoo. They long for their monthly outing with their prosperous uncle, for their ride in your truck and the sweets you give them, and on this occasion your longing for their company has been particularly intense as well. Your throat is thick when you collect them, and so you speak little, allowing them to chat among themselves. But in the presence of caged bears and tigers you relax, and you are able to talk normally when it comes time for their camel ride.

Your brother accepts their return with a handshake, and also, wordlessly, the rolled banknotes hidden in your grip. It shamed him initially to receive help from his younger sibling, but not so much anymore, and he no longer insists on telling you over and over the stories of his difficulties as a father in the face of runaway prices, even though those stories remain pressing and true.

Instead he sits you down on his rooftop and asks you about yourself, lighting a joint and sucking a series of shallow puffs into his scrawny chest. The evening sky is orange, heavy with suspended dust from thousands upon thousands of construction sites, fertile soil gouged by shovels, dried by the sun, and scattered by the wind. As usual your brother encourages you to wed, expressing by doing so an abiding generosity, for a family of your own would, in all likelihood, diminish your ability to contribute to the well-being of his.

“My business fills my time,” you say. “I'm fine alone.”

“No person is fine alone.”

Your discussion turns to your sister, whom he has seen on a recent trip to the village and describes as getting old, which does not shock you, though she is only a few years your senior. You are well aware of the toll a rural life exacts on a body. He says she complains often but fortunately her husband is terrified of her, and so her situation is not so bad. She could use some bricks, however, as the mud stacked around her courtyard keeps washing away. You say you will take care of it.

Weeks pass and the pretty girl does not call. You are surprised and unsurprised, unsurprised because this was surely predictable, and surprised because you permitted yourself to hope it might be otherwise. You have learned by now that she will call eventually, but you give up on guessing when that might be.

During this period you come to an important decision. You have amassed some savings, savings you intended to use to buy a resident's bond on your property, not outright title, of course, that being far too expensive, but rather the right to live rent-free in your rooms for a set number of years, after which your landlord must repay your principal. Such an arrangement is a great aspiration for those of modest means, offering as it does security akin to home ownership, temporarily, for the duration of the bond.

In the world of cooks and delivery boys and minor salesmen, the world to which you have belonged, a resident's bond is a rest stop on the incessant treadmill of life. Yet you are now a man who works for himself, an entrepreneur, and one smoky afternoon, as you pass along a road on the outskirts of town, a small plot for let catches your eye, the rump of what was once a larger farm, currently no more than a crumbling shed and a rusty but upon closer examination still functional tube well, and it occurs to you that with the money you have saved, you could instead relocate here and expand your bottled-water operation. Such a course would be risky, leaving you with no savings and no guarantee, should your business fail, of a roof over your head. But risk brings with it the potential for return, and, besides, you have begun to recognize your dream of a home of your own for what it is, an illusion, unless financed in full by cold, hard cash.

The night after you sign the lease, you lie by yourself on the cot that once slept your parents, waiting for exhaustion to push you beyond consciousness. Beside you is your unringing phone. You watch one after another of the ubiquitous, hyper-argumentative talk shows that fill your television, aware that in their fury they make politics a game, diverting public attention rather than focusing it. But that suits you perfectly. Diversion is, after all, what you seek.

SEVEN

BE PREPARED TO USE VIOLENCE

DISTASTEFUL THOUGH IT MAY BE, IT WAS INEVITABLE
, in a self-help book such as this, that we would eventually find ourselves broaching the topic of violence. Becoming filthy rich requires a degree of unsqueamishness, whether in rising Asia or anywhere else. For wealth comes from capital, and capital comes from labor, and labor comes from equilibrium, from calories in chasing calories out, an inherent, in-built leanness, the leanness of biological machines that must be bent to your will with some force if you are to loosen your own financial belt and, sighingly, expand.

At this moment, smoke and tear gas coil in the air above a commercial boulevard. A vinegar-soaked scarf hangs at your neck as you drive, ready to serve as a makeshift filter against the fumes. The riot is not ongoing, but neither is it entirely over, with packs of police out hunting stragglers. Around you broken glass and bits of rubble rest like five o'clock shadow on the city's smooth concrete.

The building at the address you seek has been hit with petrol bombs, its whitewashed colonial facade blackened by smoke. The structure and its interior are by and large fine. But this is not what concerns you as you dismount. What concerns you is the delivery truck in the service lane in front, lying on its side, its engine and undercarriage smoldering. A total loss. There is no need to bother with the extinguisher you have brought, and, after a lingering glance, you wave your mechanic back into your vehicle.

Your mucous membranes ooze on the slow return journey. You roll down your window, hawk deeply, and spit. Your office is adjacent to your factory and storage depot, in the city's outskirts, on one of a thousand and one rutted streets where a few years ago were only fields but now little green can be seen, unplanned development having yielded instead a ribbon of convenience stores, auto garages, scrap-metal dealers, unregistered educational institutes, fly-by-night dental clinics, and mobile-phone top-up and repair points, all fronting warrens of housing perilously unresistant to earthquakes, or even, for that matter, torrential rain.

Here along its spreading rim live many of the recent additions to your city's vast population, some of them born centrally and pressed out by the urban crush, others tossed up from regional towns and villages to seek their fortune, and still others arrived as castaways, fleeing homelands to which in all likelihood they will never return. Here, as well, resides the physical hub of your enterprise. You have thrived to the sound of the city's great whooshing thirst, unsated and growing, water incessantly being pulled out of the ground and pushed into pipes and containers. Bottled hydration has proved lucrative.

Your office, although structurally no different from its narrow, two-story neighbors, is distinguished by its gold-tinted reflective windows, selected by you and striking, to say the least. Stepping into your building, you feel an entrepreneur's pride at observing your people hard at work, hunched over their desks or, as you pass into the corrugated shed out back, over machinery humming in good repair. You built this. But today your pride is mixed with apprehension, reeling as you are from the destruction of the newest addition to your transportation fleet.

You call your accountant into your room and shut the door. Outside, through a tawny pane, you see the top of an overloaded bus snarled in telephone wires. Shouting rises from the street below.

“How bad?” your accountant mumbles.

“Gone.”

“Completely?”

You manage to choke off a string of profanities. “I'll need to replace it. Will we be fine for salaries?”

“We have enough cash.”

The right half of your accountant's face is stiff from stroke. He is not actually qualified as an accountant, but this does not matter to you. As is customary, you bribe the tax man, and your cooked books serve merely as a starting point for negotiations. What does matter to you is that he be adept with numbers, which he is, having spent decades as a clerk at one of the city's more reputable accountancies.

Your accountant suspects he has not long to live. His visage has already become a mask, its partial rigidity reminding him of his father's in the hours following his father's death, the body bathed but not yet committed to the soil. He often imagines the feeling of tiny blood vessels bursting in his brain, a sensory effervescence, like the prickles of a foot gone to sleep. But he bears his fate for the most part with equanimity. His sons are employed. His daughter is married, to you, a fellow clansman with proper values and excellent prospects. He has therefore completed what a father must most importantly complete, and while the yearning for another chance at youth tempts us all, he is strong enough to hold fast to the truth that time works not that way.

Because you have a lot to do and further because you believe it sends a motivating signal, you depart late this evening. A crescent moon hangs low in the sky, and a pair of flying foxes passes overhead, their giant bat wings thudding through the air. You drive along your customary route, listening to music on the radio.

At an intersection a boyish motorcyclist with delicate, curly hair taps on your window. You lower it to find a pistol pointed at your cheek.

“Get out,” he says.

You do. He leads you to the side of the road and tells you to lie facedown in the dirt. Traffic comes and goes, but no one stops or pays any attention. The smell of parched soil fills your nostrils. He places the muzzle against your neck, where your spine meets the base of your skull, and twists it from side to side, grinding. It presses painfully into skin and bone.

“You stupid mother's cock,” he says, his voice high-pitched, almost prepubescent. “You think you can buttfuck your betters?”

Your lips move but no sound emerges. You feel phlegm hit your scalp, neutral in temperature and thick like blood.

“This is a warning, sisterfucker. You only get one. Remember your place.”

He walks to his motorcycle and rides off. You do not stand until he is gone. You perceive a sharp discomfort in your upper vertebrae and notice that your car door has remained ajar, the engine idling this whole time. You pop open the glove compartment. Your revolver. Useless.

The ultimatum you have just received comes from a wealthy businessman, part of the city's establishment, who among other things owns a rival bottled-water operation, and onto whose turf you have begun to expand. He is powerful and well connected. So you are frightened, but not only frightened, you are also angry, seethingly furious, both emotions combining to cause you to tremble as you drive, and to think, over and over, while fighting a rising sense of dread, I'll show that fucker, I'll show him.

How you will show him, though, remains unclear.

You pull up at your home, a newly constructed townhouse in an unfinished, mid-price development, one of a choice of four designs repeated in multiple blocks of twelve. The trees on your street are still saplings, knee high, bound to wooden stakes for support against the wind. When your wife lets you in, she looks at you with concern and asks what on earth happened. You say it is nothing, perhaps something you've eaten. Later that night she hears you vomit in the bathroom.

Having recently turned twenty, your wife is a little less than half your age. She believes she has married well, the difference in years notwithstanding, your gap being the same as that between her parents. She grew up in better circumstances than you did, but not in circumstances as comfortable as those she currently enjoys. This, she feels, was to be expected, for she has always been regarded a beauty, with pale skin and a wide, sensuous mouth, and in arranged marriages looks such as hers fairly command a price.

In exchange for her assent to the agreement brokered between your accountant and you, she attached two conditions, first that she be allowed to complete her university, a lengthy course in law, and second that she not be tasked with producing any children while studying. She attached these conditions partly because she wanted them fulfilled and partly to test her power. You acceded, and you are honoring them.

She imagined during the negotiations that she was also testing your desire. Of this, however, she is now less sure. For while sex was a daily, sometimes twice-daily, occurrence in the first weeks of your marriage, it quickly subsided to a rhythm of about once a fortnight. She ascribes this to your being a man in his forties, even if her experience of your initial frenzy does leave her in some doubt. Nonetheless, she continues to look up to you, and feels ready for you to spark in her the flames of romantic love, although she has begun to wonder when you will take the time to do so.

The day you texted the pretty girl on her mobile to inform her of your impending wedding, the pretty girl was surprised, given how little you and she had come to speak in recent years, by the strength of her sadness. She had not consciously been aware of her expectation that you would always wait for her, and while her thoughts occasionally alighted upon memories of you, she had no specific plans for further encounters like the evening you shared in the hotel. So she was caught unsuspecting by her sorrow. Still, she texted you back to wish you happiness. And then, as usual, she did her best to master her feelings and buckle down to work.

A popular cooking show on TV has brought the pretty girl considerable success, which is all the more remarkable since she has never been much of a cook. But she packages a sassy, street-talking persona with a spicy nouveau-street cuisine, combining the dialects of her childhood with the skills of her assistant chefs to charming and profitable effect.

She lives alone in an elegant, minimalist bungalow, not far from the sea, reunited with a generous income after a dip in her fortunes. Her fears of a return to poverty have receded. She recognizes that her celebrity was erected on a foundation of appearance, and she is not blind to the reality that appearances shift. But she believes that there are ways to lift celebrity free of its foundations, indeed that beyond a certain point, celebrity, like a cloud, can become seemingly its own foundation, billowing, self-sufficient, resolutely aloft. Unburdened by the commitments of extended monogamy, she dedicates immense time to this goal, to perpetual publicity campaigns, to those who will sustain her future. To, in other words, her viewers.

Among these viewers is your wife, who finds the pretty girl endearing, like a cool aunt, and her recipes simple and tasty. So you often come home to discover the pretty girl talking to your wife in your living room, their eyes locked across the ether, and when you inevitably ask your wife in a brusque tone to change the channel, she does so with a smile, assuming it is because you, a typically macho man, are uninterested in the wonders of the culinary arts.

You make no mention of your gunpoint warning to your wife, but it leads you to request an audience with the local head of an armed faction to which you and other traders in your area pay protection money. You have not personally seen him before, but as a member of the same clan you expect him to agree to a meeting, and indeed he does not keep you waiting for long.

The encounter takes place in a house that is remarkable only for the two men with assault rifles who loiter outside. The faction head sits on a carpet under a slow-moving fan. He rises, shakes your hand with a mangled but healed appendage missing two of its fingers, and watches you appraisingly. Settling yourself beside him, you explain your predicament.

The faction head is inclined to help, first because you will pay, and second because you are kin, and third because he sees you as an underdog and he regards himself as a champion of underdogs, and fourth because the businessman who threatened you belongs to a sect the faction head believes deserving of extermination. But he tells you none of this immediately. Instead he informs you of his decision the next day, having in the meantime, since he is middle management, conferred with his superiors, and also having let you sweat.

You are given a guard for your personal security and an unelaborated verbal guarantee of further measures should the situation escalate. The guard arrives unannounced at your office, so quiet and calm as to be virtually opiated, but with sharp, unsmiling eyes. He is roughly your age though significantly heavier, packing a barrel stomach and four silver teeth. You cannot imagine him a father or a husband, so you do not ask him about his family, and he, for his part, makes no small-talk either. He spends the nights at your home, but even with him outside, in your single and otherwise unoccupied servant quarter, it troubles you to have this man living near your wife.

Whenever he sits in your car, the guard cocks his automatic noisily between his legs, whether for effect or to improve his reaction time or simply out of habit, you are not entirely sure. You wonder if you have made a mistake by engaging him, as the expense is crippling and he makes you uncomfortable besides. But, as you see it, your only alternatives are to ignore the threat, which might be suicidal, or to back down and submit to your rival, which would be unfair and a blow to your pride. Once, as you intentionally drive by the businessman's walled villa, an acre of prime property in an upscale district, you glimpse him through a closing gate power-walking on his lawn. His gray tracksuit and blue hand weights are evocative of a certain type of filmic villain, and this sight steels you in your determination not meekly to surrender.

Your wife knows that something is bothering you, perceiving you to be distant and uncharacteristically irritable, and she recognizes it is not without significance, of course, that her husband has newly retained a guard. She desires to be a comfort, and when her attempts to engage you in conversation fail to elicit an explanation of what is the matter, she takes another tack, proposing that the two of you go out to see a movie, or dine at a restaurant, but you are adamant about spending evenings at home, for security reasons, although you do not tell her this last, not wanting to frighten her.

The imported glossy magazines she reads offer advice on what to do in this situation, how to please your man when he seems unpleased, and so, greatly daring, as your anniversary approaches, she instructs her waxing lady to remove all of her pubic hair, a bracingly painful experience, purchases with the entirety of her month's pocket money an expensive, lacy set of bra and panties, in violet, her favorite color, and waits for you on your bed, semi-undressed, in the glow of flickering candles.