Zhang climbed out of the car and closed the door. It was hot in the car park, but the white lights in the ceiling gave off a muted chilly glow, like ice cubes. The Jaguar moved smoothly away. All was still. A dripping at the edge of his hearing again. The frosted lights unblinking. His phone vibrated, letting him know he had a message. His heart flared like a struck match. Naemi. But it was just a text from one of the European businessmen he had been entertaining earlier. What a night, Mr. Zhang! Thank you. The lift door opened. He stepped inside and pressed 39.
Once in his apartment, he poured himself a glass of water and stood at the floor-to-ceiling window in his living room. In a neighboring tower, a window clicked from dark to light. Far below, Puming Road was deserted. How could Naemi have texted him? He hadn’t given her his number. She hadn’t given him her number either. She had told him she would find him, though, and he knew he wanted to be found. It reminded him of a game he used to play at school. You stood with your feet together and your arms folded over your chest, then you closed your eyes and let yourself fall backwards. The idea was, someone caught you before you hit the ground. He had always been slender, and his classmate, Wang Jun Wei, who was almost twice his size, would squat behind him, only catching him when he was inches from the ground. He liked to imagine that he was standing on a precipice, his heels on the very edge, a thousand-meter drop behind him. When he let himself fall backwards, he would sometimes have the feeling that he might fall forever.
IT WAS YEARS since something like this had happened. How many, she couldn’t have said. She leaned against a pillar in her living room, all the lights still off. A glow from the streetlamps fell across the varnished floorboards, the burnt orange broken into blocks by thin black lines. Cool air closing round her. The smell of rich dark earth.
Zhang Guo Xing.
She had seen him first, standing at the edge of the dance floor in his dark suit and his crisp, open-necked white shirt. He watched people dancing the way you might watch cars passing on a road, his face relaxed, attentive. She wanted him immediately. Even before he noticed her, she wanted him.
When he approached her, as she had felt he might, he underwent a kind of change. It was subtle, like the lights dimming in a fancy restaurant. His expression became more subdued, more intimate. He hadn’t imagined he would meet anyone that evening—that wasn’t why he had come out—but he adjusted to her presence in an instant. The unexpected didn’t trouble him. Then he did something that took her by surprise. He spoke to her in his own language. In that moment, he appeared to know things about her that he shouldn’t have known. Things he shouldn’t even have been able to guess.
She pushed away from the pillar. Moving across the living room and on into the small room she used as a study, she opened her laptop. She typed Zhang’s name into Baidu, the main Chinese search engine, and was able, in the space of an hour and a half, to assemble a rough outline of his life. Born into a privileged family in Beijing—his father was a high-ranking Party member—he had studied economics at the university. After graduating, he relocated to Vancouver, where he took a master’s degree in business. On his return, he worked for various financial institutions in Hong Kong. In 1998, his mother had a severe stroke that left her incapacitated, and the family put her in a nursing home. At the age of twenty-nine, Zhang moved to Shanghai. At present, he was the senior vice president of a Chinese-owned private equity firm that was based in Pudong. He was married, with one son.
She clicked Sleep and sat back in her chair. It was almost five in the morning. The rain on the window blurred the city skyline, one shade of neon bleeding into another. If only I wasn’t attracted to anyone, she thought. If only there was no such thing as desire. But she got lonely. She was only human. She smiled to herself. A wistful smile, not much humor in it. Still, she felt reassured by the information she had unearthed. It would be normal for a Chinese man of Zhang’s wealth and privilege to have lovers. He would understand the rules, namely that affairs should be clandestine, finite. He would be adept at dividing his life into self-contained compartments, accustomed to the subterfuge involved. Perhaps, after all, she could afford to take the risk.
In the bathroom, she removed her photochromic lenses. She knew how her irises must look, the green so pale it was almost colorless. Over the years, her eyes had become more light-sensitive, and there had been a time—decades, in fact—when she’d had no choice but to live at night. Recent developments in science had liberated her, though. Opening the mirror door on the cabinet above the sink, she placed the contact lenses in a small plastic receptacle. Slowly, she closed the door again. The mirror stayed blank as it swung back into position in front of her. She liked the fact that she did not appear. It was a virtue, not a lack or a deficiency. Other people seemed to need the validation a reflection brings, even if that validation was deceptive, illusory, but she wasn’t in any need of proof that she existed.
She took off her clothes, then walked into the living room and used a remote to drop the blackout blinds. Back in the bedroom, she lay down on the bed of earth that she had shipped at great expense from North Karelia.
The earth of her homeland.
Turning onto her left side, the side where her heart was still beating, even after six or seven lifetimes, she slowed her breathing. Let her eyelids close.
DURING THE WEEK THAT FOLLOWED, it rained every morning, from dawn until midday. In the afternoons, the sun came out. The city steamed. Zhang worked late every night. Shanghai’s economy was booming, with foreign direct investment up 21 percent year-over-year and annual growth in the double digits. There were business opportunities everywhere you looked. Sitting in his office with his chair turned to face some of the tallest buildings in the world, he realized he was waiting for Naemi to contact him, but the days went by and he heard nothing. I found you tonight. I’ll find you again. How would she do that exactly?
When he called Beijing on Wednesday and spoke to Xuan Xuan, his wife, she asked if something was wrong. He told her he was fine. He was just calling to see how she was. But she insisted that he sounded different.
“Different?” he said. “How?”
“Impatient,” she said. “Like you’re standing in a queue and it’s not moving.”
On Thursday he spoke to a friend of his father’s, a man who happened to be the director of the Shanghai Museum. He asked if a brief after-hours visit could be arranged.
“Twice in a month,” the director said. “You’re addicted.”
“There are worse addictions,” Zhang said.
The director laughed. “That’s true.”
It was just after six in the evening when Zhang’s Jaguar stopped on the south side of People’s Square. He told Chun Tao he would be about forty-five minutes, then he walked round to the side entrance of the museum and pressed the bell. A security guard buzzed him in. The deserted interior had an air of peace and dignity it never had during the day, when it was crowded with schoolchildren and tour parties. It was as if the whole building had breathed a huge sigh of relief. His footsteps echoed as he climbed the marble stairs to the second floor. Otherwise, the only sound was the deep, hushed roar of the climate control.