How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

TEN DANCE WITH DEBT

WE MUST HURRY. WE ARE NEARING OUR END, YOU and I, and this self-help book too, well, the self in it anyway, and likewise the help it offers, though its bookness, being bookness, may by definition yet persevere.

As my writer’s fingers key and your reader’s eyes flick, you stand at the cusp of the eighth decade of your life, substantially bald, mostly thin, resolutely erect. Your parents have died, your surviving sister and brother survive no longer, your wife has left you and married a man closer to herself in outlook and in age, and your son has chosen not to return after studying in North America, which, despite Asia’s rise, retains some attraction for a young conceptual artist with craggy hip bones and lips like buttered honey.

Through the window of your office you see your city mutating around you, its zoning and planning restrictions slipping away, deep foundation pits and skeletal building sites occupying land that only a few years ago aerial photography would have shown puffed over with opulent, pastryesque villas. The sun is low and fat in your line of sight. A voice can be heard. It emanates from your former brother-in-law, still your deputy, sitting behind you and once again entreating you to take on more debt.

In this he is surely right. With borrowed funds, a business can invest, gain leverage, and leverage is a pair of wings. Leverage is flight. Leverage is a way for small to be big and big to be huge, a glorious abstraction, the promise of tomorrow today, yes, a liberation from time, the resounding triumph of human will over dreary, chronology-shackled physical reality. To leverage is to be immortal.

Or if not, your deputy asserts, at least the converse is true.

“If we don’t borrow,” he says, “we’ll die.”

You turn from the window and reseat yourself opposite him. “You’re getting carried away.”

“We don’t have scale. The sector’s consolidating. In two years, there won’t be a dozen water firms operating in this city. There’ll be three. At most four. And we won’t be one of them.”

“We’ll compete on quality.”

“It’s fucking water. We just provide to spec.”

Increasingly, your deputy has begun speaking to you in tones that veer almost to the aggressive. Whether this is because he blames you for the collapse of your marriage to his sister, or because he, a younger man, fears you less and less as age exacts its toll on your body, or because he is at last confident of his own indispensability to the smooth running of your operation, you do not know.

“That’s not true,” you say.

“It’s true enough. Either we buy a competitor or we sell. Or we’ll rot away.”

“We’re not putting ourselves up for sale.”

“That’s what you always say. So let’s buy.”

“We’ve never taken on that much debt.”

“It’s risky. A gamble. But one we’ll have a good chance of winning.”

You catch at that moment a reflection of your ex-wife in the form of your deputy, glimpsing, as you do periodically, a telltale flourish of the genetic hand that drew both their lines, beautiful in her case, rather comedic in his. You trust him. Not entirely, but enough. And more than that, you sense he may have a better understanding of the future course of your business than you do. But most of all, you no longer care so passionately about the outcome. Of late, you have had the impression of merely going through the motions of your life, of rising, shaving, bathing, dressing, coming in to work, attending meetings, taking phone calls, returning home, eating, shitting, lying in bed, all out of habit, for no real purpose, like the functioning of some legacy water meter, cut off from the billing system, whose measurements swirl by unrecorded.

And so you say, “All right. Let’s do it.”

Your deputy is pleased. For his part, he regards himself as a mostly loyal member of your team. Mostly loyal because he has secretly skimmed only enough funds from your firm over the past two decades to cause no real harm, money he has squirreled abroad, far out of sight, as a measure of insurance should his employment come suddenly to an end. But testing times lie ahead, the viability of your enterprise is itself at stake, and despite being well paid, your deputy has saved too little, living the lifestyle of an owner rather than a manager, and now may be his last chance to capture a more meaningful slice of the pie. Buying another company offers him the prospect of pocketing a sizable kickback, an unofficial golden parachute he considers very much his due.

That evening you ride home alone, in the rear of your limousine, behind your uniformed chauffeur and a guard who clutches an assault rifle upright against his torso. At each traffic light people attach themselves to your window in supplication, beggars, one armless, one toothless, one a hermaphrodite with white-powdered face and down-slanting smile. You see a man on a motorcycle bearing also his wife and children turn off his engine as he waits for the signal to change. Through fourteen speakers and four subwoofers your radio purrs a report of a series of bomb blasts in a crowded market on the coast. You curse resignedly. If riots flare in protest, a consignment of yours could be stuck in port.

Over the coming months your business is quantified, digitized, and jacked into a global network of finance, your activities subsumed with barely a ripple in a collective mathematical pool of ever-changing current and future cash flows. A syndicate of banks is rallied, covenants sworn to, offices and trucks and equipment and even your personal residence pledged as collateral, an acquisition war chest electronically credited with booty, a target hailed, and the basic terms of its capitulation negotiated. The proposed deal is high priced but not exorbitant, with a plausible opportunity for success.

Thus the matter might have rested had fate, or narrative trajectory, in the form of coronary artery disease, not taken a hand. You are attempting to sleep when the pain begins, mild, a numbness proceeding down one arm. You turn on a lamp and sit up. It is then that an invisible girder slams into your chest, surely flattening it, forcing you to shut your eyes. You cannot breathe. The pressure is unbearable. But it recedes, and you are left weak and vaguely nauseated, your scrawny limbs sweating inside your thin cotton pajamas despite the chill. You open your eyes. Your thorax is intact. You unfasten a button and run your fingers along your ribs, your nails too long and slightly dirty, your hair there white and coiled. No wound can be seen, but the man you touch feels brittle. In the morning, still awake, you go to see your doctor.

The hospital is large and crowded, charitable donations, including from you, ensuring many of the patients it admits are desperately poor. A village woman on the verge of death lies on a bench, her look of bafflement reminding you of your mother. You are unable to walk unaided and so you lean on your chauffeur. You stumble, and embarrassingly he lifts you off the ground, easily, as he might a child or a youthful bride. You order him to put you in a wheelchair. Your voice is hoarse, and you have to repeat yourself. A man dabs with a filthy mop at what appears to be a trail of urine, telling people mostly ineffectually not to step in it.

Your doctor has come out of his examination room to greet you, an unprecedented honor. He smiles in his usual manner, but forgoes his customary wagging of the finger as though you have been naughty, and instead says in a cheerful tone, “We’ll be going straight to the intensive-care unit.” He wheels you inside himself, telling your chauffeur he is not permitted to follow but should certainly remain in the hall, as he may be needed.

You are fortunate that your second heart attack takes place in the ICU. When you regain consciousness, you have become a kind of cyborg, part man, part machine. Electrodes connect your chest to a beeping computer terminal mounted on a rack, and a pair of transparent tubes channel oxygen from a nearby metal tank to your nostrils and fluids from a plastic pouch into your bloodstream through a needle taped at your wrist. You panic and start to flail, but your limbs barely move and you are gently restrained. A nurse speaks. You have difficulty following her words. You understand, though, that for the moment this apparatus and you are inseparable.

To be a man whose life requires being plugged into machines, multiple machines, in your case interfaces electrical, gaseous, and liquid, is to experience the shock of an unseen network suddenly made physical, as a fly experiences a cobweb. The inanimate strands that cling to your precariously still-animate form themselves connect to other strands, to the hospital’s power system, its backup generator, its information technology infrastructure, the unit that produces oxygen, the people who refill and circulate the tanks, the department that replenishes medications, the trucks that deliver them, the factories at which they are manufactured, the mines where requisite raw materials emerge, and on and on, from your body, into your room, across the building, and out the doors to the world beyond, mirroring in stark exterior reality preexisting and mercifully unconsidered systems within, the veins and nerves and sinews and lymph nodes without which there is no you. It is good you sleep.

When you next wake, your nephews are here, your brother’s sons, and also, surprisingly, your ex-wife, along with her new husband, a bearded man with a fatherly demeanor that disorients you because he is practically a generation your junior. The illumination of your room is odd, futuristic, the artifact of either some advanced bulb technology or your addled mental state. Your doctor pats your hand and summarizes for you, in everyone’s presence, your overall position and course of treatment. Your prognosis is less than peachy. The muscles of your heart have been damaged and the fraction of blood it is pumping per beat is dangerously low. Such a condition need not be immediately fatal, your doctor has himself had a patient who improved and lived on for years after a similar level of impairment. But you also have extensive blockages of the coronary arteries and so you face the imminent likelihood of a further heart attack, which would almost certainly be terminal. Yet in your situation a bypass or angioplasty is out of the question, and leaving the hospital, in your doctor’s judgment, would also be unwise. It would be best to wait and see.

You understand this advice as a coded instruction to prepare to die, a thought reinforced by the wet film you observe dancing in the eyes of your ex-wife. She returns to the hospital each day, usually minus her husband. She is formal with you but also efficient, as though playing the role of a dedicated administrator in a movie. Under her supervision, second and third opinions are sought, a new cardiologist identified, and you moved to a different institution. A renowned world expert has agreed to see you in a few weeks, when he is next in your city, and it is on him that your ex-wife appears to pin her hopes.

This world expert is like a man from another planet, with an orange glow to his skin, unnaturally white teeth, and hair so thick he could safely ride a motorcycle without a helmet. Upon examining you and considering your file, he says there is no reason that a few stents in your arteries should not do the trick. There is, of course, a modest chance of dying on the operating table, but since there is a very good chance of dying soon off of it, the risk seems outweighed by the potential reward.

You agree to the procedure. It is performed while you are awake, disconcertedly watching on a monitor the camera feed from a robotic probe inside your body as tiny mechanical contraptions unspool and expand within you, forcing the flabby walls of your arteries open and locking them in place. You wonder whether, should anything go wrong, you will see your death depicted in the micro-battlefield on-screen before your brain ceases to function, or whether the internal chain of events will outpace the external relay, leaving you with simple blackness, despite everything this spaceship of an operating theater has to offer. The question remains theoretical, however, for the world expert declares your surgery an unmitigated success.

The following day, after your post-op checkup, he tells you that if, now resupplied with blood, your heart recovers as much as, despite your advanced age, he thinks it might, you are looking at many months, or even a few years, of unhospitalized life. You thank him. You also thank your ex-wife. It is in this moment, glancing at the world expert and receiving a solemn, orange-hued nod, and asking you to relax and try to take the news without allowing yourself to get too agitated, she informs you that her brother, whom she now wishes had never been born, has absconded abroad with the funds your company raised for its planned acquisition, unable perhaps to resist the opportunity presented by your absence, and further that your company is consequently bankrupt, as are you, and that the policemen stationed outside your room are not there for your protection, as you have heretofore assumed, but rather because you are technically under arrest.

You take this news as well as possible, which is to say you do not die. You tell your ex-wife you have no doubt she had nothing to do with it, the error in hiring and trusting her brother being entirely yours, and you point out that, health-wise, you are feeling much better than you have in weeks. You do not mention that the earth’s gravity and atmospheric pressure seem to have increased since your heart attacks, or that walking unassisted to the bathroom this morning was like circumnavigating the surface of an alien and inhospitable moon.

When she leaves, you sit in silence for an entire day. Then you get to work. Your nephews access pockets of funds you have secreted away, which, because hidden, your creditors have not seized, and so you are able to hire a criminal lawyer, pay the necessary bribes, secure bail, and rent a room in a two-star hotel, all without needing to burden further your less-than-wealthy ex-wife. She refuses, though, while hanging her handsome, covered head, to allow you to reimburse her for the sizable costs of your medical treatment. It was the least she could do, she says.

As you now lack a driver or a car of your own, your nephews drive you to the hotel, railing against your deputy, whom they suspected was rotten ever since he eased them out of your firm years ago, adding quickly that they harbor no ill will towards you, you are their uncle, and blood is stronger than such disappointments. They ask you to move in with them. You express gratitude but say you are more used to being alone. Through the windscreen you see dust and pollution suspended over the city like a dome, transforming the sky to copper and the clouds to irradiated bronze.

In the months that follow, you receive anonymous death threats and meet with politicians you thought were allies but prove barely able to conceal their gloating. You are caught up in one of the cynical accountability campaigns periodically launched by your city’s establishment, tossed to the wolf pack of public opinion, unsubstantiated rumors of your shady dealings receiving scandalized attention in newspapers. You have always been an outsider, and finally you have been wounded. It is only natural that you be sacrificed so that the rest of the herd may prance on.

Once this outcome is clear, you accept your fate without too much resistance, struggling, to the extent you do, largely out of habit and a sense of responsibility for your ex-employees. It almost seems that a part of you perversely welcomes being humbled in this way, that you suffer from some mad impulse to slough off your wealth, like an animal molting in the autumn. Perhaps this contributes to the frenzy with which you are attacked. When it is over, your financial bones retain only tiny slivers of their former meat, but you have not been picked entirely clean. You are not destitute. You remain unincarcerated. You are an old man in a hotel room, taking your medication, looking out the dirty window at the street below, traveling by taxi when you must.

In person you sometimes appear timid, hesitant, though whether this change is due to your economic misfortune or the decline in your health, it is impossible to say. You have encountered the reality that with age things are snatched from a man, often suddenly and without warning. You do not rent a home for yourself or buy a secondhand car. Instead you remain in your hotel, with few possessions, no more than might fit in a single piece of luggage. This suits you. Having less means having less to anesthetize you to your life.

Near the hotel is an internet cafe. You walk there now, slowly. Because you are easily winded and must pause to rest, you carry the ultra-light shaft of plastic and metal your doctor refers to, perhaps nostalgically, as a cane. You have spent more time on this earth than have all three of the young technicians who work in the cafe combined. Their T-shirts and tattoos and stylized whiskers are symbols of a clan with which you are unfamiliar. They are not pleased to see you. But their leader, a youth with a notch razored into his brow, at least rises with a semblance of respect.

“If you wouldn’t mind helping me again,” you say.

He nods. “Number five.”

His manner is brusque, but he is thorough as he ensures you are set up and ready to proceed. You are seated in a cubicle, on a chair of firm yet comfortable mesh. In front of you is a flat monitor with a readout of time utilized and money owed. Invisible below the surface of your desk, but touchable with your feet, is a shin-tall computer from which you carefully pivot away lest you do some harm. Though small, these cubicles have partitions higher than those in your late firm’s offices, designed to afford users a maximum of privacy. The cafe is dark, with no active source of illumination other than its screens, and smells vaguely of women’s hair spray, sweat, and semen.

Your son materializes before you at an angle suggesting you are looking down at him from above. You sit straighter, unconsciously trying to raise your head to a height from which this perspective would be normal, but it has no effect on your sense of slight disorientation. You do not know what to do with your hands, so you grip the armrests of your chair. Your son freezes, pixelates, and then, flowing again, speaks.

“Dad.”

“My boy.”

He is in his apartment, a warehouse of a room sparsely furnished with reappropriated building materials, his dining table two stacks of cinder blocks supporting a horizontal door with hinges intact. Outside his windows it is night. He inquires concernedly after your health, you reassure him that all is well, and you chat about politics, the economy, his cousins. He has been unable to visit you because his visa status is linked to a long-standing asylum petition. A trip home would undermine his claim that he is in danger.

“Have you spoken to your mother?” you ask.

“No. Not in a while.”

“You should. She misses you.”

“I’m sure she does, in her way.”

Your son’s friend passes behind him, shirtless, unshaven, sleepy. The friend is brushing his teeth, preparing for bed. He waves to you and you lift a palm in reply. Your son smiles, half turns to his friend, voices something inaudible, and redirects himself to the camera of his computer.

“It’s getting late,” he says apologetically.

“Yes, don’t let me keep you.”

“When’s your next doctor’s visit?”

“Today.”

“Promise to text me how it goes.”

You say you will. The sticky headphones on your ears emit an aquatic plop and your son’s image disappears as though it has been sucked down a hole the size of a single pixel in the center of your screen. Where before there were brightness and movement there is now only stillness, save for the time and money counters ticking along in a corner. You settle your bill and pass on.

At this moment the pretty girl is also scrutinizing a computer, reviewing with her assistant the month’s sales figures, which make for somber reading. Tonight she too will journey to a hospital, though of course presently she does not know it.

“It’s shaping into quite a drop,” she says. She smiles tightly. “I hope you’re ready for the bounce.”

“More than ready,” her assistant says.

She considers. “Doesn’t look like we have a choice.”

“No.”

“Fine. Cancel the spring procurement trip.”

The two of them are silent.

“There’s always the fall,” her assistant says.

The pretty girl nods. “Yes. There’s always that.”

She leaves her furniture boutique at her customary hour, five o’clock, her driver making haste to beat the traffic, though his efforts must contest with dug-up roads. The pretty girl peers out her window at recurring series of slender pits. Cabling is going in, seemingly everywhere, mysterious cabling, black- or gray- or orange-clad, snaking endlessly off spools into the warm, sandy soil. She wonders what on earth it binds together.

It is her assistant’s job to close the boutique, later that evening, and her assistant has done so, and is supervising the manager’s counting of the day’s take, in preparation for placing it overnight in the safe, when a brick is thrown beneath half-lowered steel shutters to smash the glass shop door. The pretty girl’s assistant hears this in a small office out back and sees, in crisp monochrome, on a CCTV display, three armed men enter, their faces partially concealed. Instinctively, she activates a silent alarm, locks the money away, and spins the combination wheel, all to the horror of the manager, who now fears getting out of this situation alive.

The armed men appear to know an alarm has been triggered, and perhaps as a result their leader makes as if to shoot the manager through the forehead without a word. But he thinks better of it and tells the pretty girl’s assistant to open the safe. When, out of confusion rather than bravery, she hesitates, he hits her on the temple with the butt of his rifle, not too forcefully, given her age and gender, but firmly enough to knock her to the floor. She rises and complies. The armed men pocket the money. In total, the robbery lasts no longer than five minutes. Private guards arrive in nine, the pretty girl in twenty-two, and the police in thirty-eight.

As a precaution, due to the blow her assistant has received, the pretty girl brings her to an emergency room. She puts her hand on her assistant’s in the car, holds her fingers gently, the less elderly woman stunned and staring straight ahead, mostly unspeaking. A harried nurse glances at the pretty girl’s assistant, says it is a bruise, nothing more, suggests an ice pack and some analgesics, and sends them on their way. During the drive home, her assistant complains of dizziness and nausea. The pretty girl takes her back to the hospital, her assistant convulses and loses consciousness in transit, and when a doctor pries open her eyelids and shines a torch at her pupils she is already past revival and soon dead.

It is on this evening that the pretty girl’s forty-year affair with her adopted metropolis comes to an end, though she does not leave right away. Time passes as her decision gathers within her. She must also sell her shop and conclude certain practical matters. But something has changed, and her direction is not in doubt. She will sit alone in her living room, gazing out through bars at the night, at the lights of aircraft ascending in the sky, and feel a tug, of what she cannot say, no, not exactly, only that it pulls her with soft finality, and that it emanates from the city of her birth.