Read Performance Anomalies Online
Authors: Victor Robert Lee
Performance Anomalies (34 page)
“I know, I can cross back and forth freely.”
“You may have to stay a long time, to be safe. I’ll send you money. I have some cash on me now. You’ll be able to buy a new place. But your work?”
“I will ask for a medical leave,” Dimira said. “Some of the teachers will be happy I’m away. And without Asel, what do I have there anyway, in Almaty?”
Cono was uncomfortable with what seemed to be her nonchalance. “Dimira, I think you will be out of danger in a few months. Maybe you are even now, but I was wrong last time, very wrong. It’s hard to know. Maybe there’s another Zheng in the wings who will try to get some leverage from you. Or maybe no one was in control of Zheng, and the only men from their embassy who knew about you are the dead ones. Maybe Katerina, the Ukrainian, or the man she had follow me to your apartment will find some way to use you. Maybe the Bureau will have some way of knowing about you. I don’t know. Maybe it’s best if you go somewhere far away. I’ll get the visas for you. You won’t need to worry about money. Maybe …”
Dimira clasped Cono’s head with both hands and pressed her cheek against his. “Maybe I’ll stay around here, in my homeland, and hope you come back.”
21
The Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai rises from a manmade island in the Persian Gulf like the great white spinnaker of a yacht about to crash into the mainland. More than fifty stories up, near the top of its mast, looking like the flat disk of a radar scanner, a helipad juts out. Just behind it is a wing, a white airfoil broad enough to give the illusion that it could lift the monumental vessel into the air before it was wrecked against the shore. Within the contours of the wing is a restaurant decorated in glass, polished chrome, and vibrant overhead panels of blue and green.
Cono is seated there, alone. Outside the broad sweep of floor-to-ceiling windows, the sun is lost in the haze of the gulf as it sinks down for the night. Cono looks across the table at his reflection in the curved glass partition running along the top of the banquette. The wounds inflicted by Zheng have healed shut; the swelling is long gone, but Cono’s tongue still involuntarily rubs against the cracked canine. He ignores his seafood salad as he reads again the computer-printed phone message from the hotel’s operator: “Don’t try to call again. Nice jumping with you, but it’s over. —Annika.” Cono rips the message into tiny pieces and sprinkles them into the ashtray. He thinks of the Swede as if she were a ghost from a previous life, a life he had tried to regain by leaving many fruitless messages for her. He picks up the prior day’s
Herald Tribune
. On page five there is something about Kazakhstan. Cono spears a shrimp with his fork, bites into it, and reads.
The government of Kazakhstan unexpectedly announced yesterday the dismissal of its prime minister, Mr. Zautbek Dukayev, along with several other ministers, notably Mr. Nartay Kurgat, minister of the interior, widely viewed by analysts as the most powerful member of the regime. The premier of the republic, Mr. Ural Gukdov, said in a prepared statement that the changes were in keeping with a more representative government.
Mr. Timur Betov, former chief of the Bureau for National Security, was named as the new prime minister. He was described by Premier Gukdov as “a brave man who nearly lost his life for the sake of the nation’s security in the fight against religious radicalism.” In a separate statement, Mr. Betov stressed the need for economic development of the country, the efficient exploitation of its oil and gas resources for the benefit of the people of Kazakhstan, and a permanent security pact with the country’s neighbor and largest trading partner, the People’s Republic of China.
Mr. Betov praised the “fatherly” guidance of his country by Premier Gukdov, who has been mentioned in connection with an action before a U.S. federal court alleging violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in a case dubbed “Kazakhgate,” concerning the sale of rights to the country’s abundant oil fields. The new prime minister gave no timetable for the naming of a cabinet. None of the former ministers could be reached for comment.
There is a photo accompanying the article. Timur is standing on a podium flanked by the premier and numerous other Kazak men, some in official poses, others, in the back, milling about. Cono looks closely at Timur’s face. The scars shaped like tears are there. In time, Cono is sure, Timur will have them erased by plastic surgery.
Cono thinks of a gnarled old woman he met at Zelyony Bazaar on his first visit to Almaty. She was talkative and short, waving flies away from her apples with a knitted orange scarf. Cono was asking her about Kazakhstan and how the new nation’s future looked, explaining that it was his first time in the country. “In
my
country,” she said, “when we think about the future, we shake.”
The old woman vanishes from Cono’s thoughts as he catches sight of the singer from Hong Kong who is about to start her number. When she passes him she smiles and says hello, as she has done on each of the previous three evenings. Cono’s eyes linger on her as she adjusts the microphone, then he returns to his salad. He picks up a shrimp tail that has fallen on the newspaper and looks at the photo again. A shape in it seems familiar. It’s faint, like the edge of a shadow, caught between two men near the back. It is a woman in profile, from her breasts to the top of her head.
Katerina
.
Cono folds up the newspaper. He tries not to think of Xiao Li, swallowing hard against her memory and his sorrow. Instead he sees Timur, imagining him with red tears cut into his face, pointing down at the sprawl of Almaty.
You never know when this tree or that tree will turn its colors. But come spring …
Author’s Note
“Savoring of the hot taste of life” (Chapter 1) derives from the poem
Black Marigolds
as translated from Sanskrit by E. Powys Mathers. Initial reports on the genetic basis of what the author calls human performance anomalies (Chapter 5) include the following:
Red-blood-cell over-production: de la Chapelle et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
1993;
Muscle hypertrophy: Schuelke et al.
New England Journal of Medicine
2004; and
Pain insensitivity: Cox et al.
Nature
2006.
Dr. Oliver Sacks notes the reaction times of Tourette’s patients (Chapter 5) and other aspects of human time perception in
The New Yorker
, 23 August 2004.
Incognito:
The Hidden Life of the Brain
(by Dr. David Eagleman, 2011) reviews surprising elements of brain function relevant to Cono, including awareness. The interpretation and time-parsing of facial “micro-expressions” (Chapter 6 and elsewhere) have been pioneered by Dr. Paul Ekman. The devastation of the Cultural Revolution (Chapter 6) is chronicled in
Mao’s Last Revolution
(by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, 2006); the Cultural Revolution’s brutality extended to cannibalism, as documented in
Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China
(by Zheng Yi, 1996). “Let us pull the oars together” and other lines sung by Cono during his torture (Chapter 9) are inspired in part by Qiao Yu’s Chinese lyrics for the 1955 song
Let Us Sway Twin Oars
. CIA ineptitude (Chapter 9 and elsewhere) has a literature all its own; see, for example, Tim Weiner’s
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
(2007). News items relating to Project Sapphire (Chapter 9) are from the Nuclear Threat Initiative,
Air Force Magazine
(August, 1995),
Reuters
,
The Washington Post
,
The Washington Times
, and
Nucleonics Week
. The word “Kazak” has been used throughout, rather than “Kazakh” (a Russian-derived convention) or “Kazakhstani” (a neologism) for simplicity and consistency with the original transliteration, “Qazaq.”
About the Author
V
ICTOR
R
OBERT
L
EE
lives on the road in Asia and writes under a pseudonym.
Performance Anomalies
is his first novel.
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