Read an Excerpt
Prologue
He’d found a small way to resolve the future. The year he believed that, though in fact the belief would not last the year, was 2005. It was a various year, one he trusted those who euphemistically might be called his cohort and then didn’t, where he quit assuming a fake résumé and an ardor for details could occlude misfortune’s gaze. He decided to keep stories to the rooms where they’d happened, but he also aspired to sensible collations of evidence, although—or in particular because—it was a time of perfect aberration. It was when he met Alexandra Chen.
In his mind, there was a procedure to calm successions. It began with the call center. There, you could rely on emergencies. And so, the night before the year torqued, Jeremy Jordan turned on his headset. A red light in a grid lit. He asked how could he help, not in the manner of hopelessness.
My life’s action is gravity, callers said their own ways. Help me catch what’s falling; what’s falling is me.
His training was follow the slope of a suffering mind before it inflicts itself on the body, but listen too for what fills the air one cannot see. A source quivers energy off it, persuades the air around it to shake. Sound huddles waves into intimacy. That is the way of a voice or explosion, telephones. He could hear that somewhere in London a woman lay silverware in drawers, knives slapping knives, matching.
Signals: they were everywhere if you knew how to heed them.
There was some static, a rustle, the woman there and yet closer, in his ear at the center and her house, kilometers reduced as she recalled her husband slamming a door hard enough a mirror shattered. He slammed it so hard, she said, the image of his departure rained down in shards. From the caller’s unseen room, he heard reflections, noise returning. The word—it’s thrown and it strikes off the surface, arrives in homecoming a little different. Sometimes the waves ripple out. Other times, they die. It is water where the word travels clear. No-man’s-land.
Sometimes, she said, she wished it were too late for her.
He dispatched a mobile crisis unit. He aspired to totem comfort. He told her, “You are not alone,” meaning only any more than anyone else.
Jeremy’s head was heavy with the hour of night, and still to come was his putative real job at the fund, but he would remain on the line until the team arrived for her. And though his voice was reasonable, though his collar was crisp, this was talisman in action, superstitious math: offer safety so what life exacted from him would not be Alexandra.
He listened to the stranger survive. He said, “Stay with me.”
CHAPTER 1
Alexandra Chen saw that they looked at her in search. That unplaceable face. All her life people had wanted to fix her features on a map, and they couldn’t. It made people clamp down on her with their eyes. They would coast a room in gaze, then halt. They were trying to figure her out.
She had on a flat gray suit and spoke in her client voice, contained and reassuring. The front of a room did not come naturally to her, but she’d practiced how to land her eyes on a small audience and let her voice settle. She had practiced how to sell a country on her selling their country.
She’d done it in Uganda and Sweden, had successes enunciating small former Soviet states still in spinout from the Cold War. Her clients wanted investors from abroad or tourists, to unravage images, firm up legitimacy. Proper trade deals. That’s where they’d arrived in history. There’s the Lisbon Strategy on one hand, and then globalization means chunks of cartography are left behind. They did not want to be left behind.
The board room had no windows. There was the woman at the head of the table who had called the firm first. There was a man with pink hands like overstuffed sandwiches. These were individuals with government posts, commercial interests, ties to the embassy. They had clean-cropped haircuts and trim shirts, professionally empty faces. But her brother had taught her poker, had taught her, “In bets, you find out who the dreamers are at the table.” And she was in the business of dreamers. She was in the business of casting bets on national narratives, then waiting for them to gain ballast.
“And can it all happen by the game?” someone leaning over the oblong of the conference table said.
She was at the whim of FIFA.
When she’d practiced her pitch with Jeremy, he’d said he’d trust her with a country. He’d trust her with anything. But her firm, Orbet, had been called late to Germany. There was only a year until the World Cup, a blip of a lead-up. Already the business security firm Orbet often worked with, Tyle, had dug up evidence of meetings between Blair’s and Schröder’s people beyond the public-private partnerships.
“Germany does not have the problem of an Estonia,” she said. “Vast demographics couldn’t picture Estonia. They couldn’t point to it on the map. Germany has an image, and German culture can be globally competitive. Yet, there is delicacy to it. What is a German brand of soft power, one that travels, invites? Rather than a German nationalism.”
“You’re referring to the Anschluss and the Sudetenland,” the man said bitterly.
“Or emotion.”
She was a student of the image. The way at a certain angle a nation caught light. She believed in second chances, third, and so on. You pieced together the tropes, then turned them. Yet she did not yet know how to tell Jeremy that the account would mean a year away.
“In public opinion polling, what we see is the intellectual history, the art is submerged beneath an identity of engineering and Volkswagen, beer gardens, efficiency. It’s ridiculous, of course. But it’s an issue of foregrounding. This is the country of Goethe and Einstein. Herzog.”
“Miss Chen,” someone making a show of his watch said. “We know whose country this is.”
They were untucking their phones from the insides of their jackets. Typing. Slapping them shut. Someone’s whisper cut into her riff. The woman at the head of the table cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Miss Chen,” she said, already standing. “But we’ll need to end this meeting. There is a matter at the Foreign Ministry.”
Alexandra collected her things. She folded the computer and turned off the projector. She’d never persisted with a man, and still, if the Germans offered a contract, she thought she and Jeremy could once a month have weekends together in the aura if Alsatian Riesling and something like holiday, that perhaps it would defend them from the ordinary rhythm of fracture. She shook the hand of the woman from the Foreign Ministry.
“Please,” the woman said, extending an arm toward the door, walking her to the exit faster.
Alexandra moved into the hallway, and out the window there was a weather that could be described as early. It wasn’t rain or shine, just a sense of open time beating down.
By the elevator, she looked at her phone.
As fast as news, she forgot how to walk. Her legs could only stand in the manner of sprinting. There was a door registered only after the rush through, stairs above and behind and below and ahead. Something cold untied in her stomach. Bombs were exploding across London.
