appeared. We stood, they bowed. They were solemn, early forties, ranged from slim to paunchy. Bureaucrats I imagined you could purchase by the pound in an office supply store. Li-Li sat at the distant head of the table, as though translation were a work of umpiring, and she wasn’t partial to either side.
My notes from that day reflect a circular conversation of platitudes and vague promises. China and the United States could work together “for mutual benefit”—a “win-win situation.” We prepared to sign some nonbinding documents of mutual praise. The pens they gave us were exquisite, worth far more than the pledges.
Leo, who never took a note himself, scribbled something on the back of a receipt. He had me announce that we were taking “a short recess,” our code for “emergency bathroom break.” I looked at Li-Li and waited for her to filter my English into Mandarin. Leo left the room, walking gingerly.
With Leo gone, the officials began to speak among themselves in staccato bursts, and I waited for them to acknowledge me. Li-Li clicked her fingernails against one another, and their polish shined in the light. I caught her eye and was about to say something to her when I saw her breathe in sharply and redden. Her eyes flicked toward the men, then back to me, and I wondered what kind of insult she’d understood that I hadn’t. I took Leo to be the target of the men’s mockery, if only because I was too insignificant to be worth denigrating.
When the congressman grumbled back into the room, the trade officials stood.
“This has been most productive,” one said, “and now we must adjourn for urgent matters.”
Whether this meeting would bring even a single shoelace out of their country and into ours was doubtful, even if we talked for three more hours, but Leo clearly felt that if they’d ended the meeting first, even if he was ready to leave, then he had lost their respect.
“We should have left half an hour ago,” he told the officials.
With every man in the room now annoyed or offended, we nevertheless posed for photographs. I took paired grip-and-grin shots and more inclusive group ones. The men who I suspected had just sat mocking the congressman clustered around him. The most important officials stood at the center, and a deteriorating line of nonentities were pushed out to the edges, a ghostly shoulder of the translator hovering barely into the frame. In the two shots where I wasn’t taking the pictures myself, Li-Li took them, and I came out half-faced.
AT THE MAIN entrance, a phalanx of suited men stood in a red-roped receiving line. Li-Li hurried us toward a side exit, but not before I saw the guest of honor. “El Presidente,” we called him, the latest fist-rattling Latin American head of state to become beatifically popular among the equatorial poor. He was built like a keg of beer, dressed in military epaulets and heavy black boots. Applause for El Presidente—thin-skinned petrotyrant, self-appointed heir to Simón Bolívar—turned to uproar. The congressman’s face soured in a way that made me smile. “That motherfucker,” Leo said.
Li-Li left us in a side parking lot where we waited for our Buick to come around. Still smog, no breeze. Disappearing at the edge of my sight line were two buildings under construction that looked to be falling into one another.
“I saw him in the bathroom,” the congressman said.
“El Presidente?”
“I’ve never seen a man who needs three bodyguards just to take a piss.”
“Just now?”
“I’m at the far pisser, but he pulls up to the middle one. Right fucking next to me,” Leo said. “I look over, and of course I know it’s him straight off, the fucking faker. Thinks he’s been to hell and back because he can put on a goddamn military Halloween costume.”
“Do you think he recognized you?” I asked. Leo hadn’t been in the military, either, though he had awkward lapses where he seemed to forget that.
“He thinks we were behind that horseshit excuse for a coup last summer,” Leo said.
“He thinks it was the CIA.”
“White men in suits,” my boss said. “We’re all alike to him.”
“You did sort of suggest you’d like him killed . . .”
“That was taken out of context,” he said.
“I’m not sure he reads the corrections in the Washington Post.”
Leo snorted. “I could feel him looking at me.”
“Did you say anything?” I asked.
“Longest piss of my life. He finished first and just stood there at the sink. I was racking my brain for something to say. Needle him, you know?”
“Was he really a general?”
“They don’t have an army, they have criminals with Kalashnikovs.”
“I didn’t know he even spoke English,” I said.
“Heavy accent.”
“He always uses that translator in interviews.”
“Translator. Right. It’s a good ploy,” Leo said. “What he said to me was, ‘You Yankees will never have me swinging by the neck.’”
“He meant us?”
“He didn’t mean the baseball team.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And he said, ‘Your government won’t hang me by the throat. That’s a promise.’ I told him not to go thinking his dick was so big, because if the United States wanted him by the balls, he’d squeal just like anyone else.”
“You said that?” I said. If some version of this story got out, I wouldn’t sleep for weeks from the volume of press phone calls. I’d go hoarse with adamant denials.
“Squirmy motherfucker. He smirks again. Says something in Spanish that I didn’t catch. Then he really starts letting it fly, about my mother and all the rest. Not that I understood all of it, but I’m not a fucking idiot. So then his guards hear the yelling and come busting in like I was going to cut him. They all line up and glare at me. I said to them, ‘The second we decide to, and this is a promise, we’ll have a big dick up your fucking ass.’ I gave him a good look at it. Then I zipped up and walked out.”
Our car slid up, and I opened the door for Leo. You hear about grown men, in government, behaving like children, but you’re never prepared for how much they have at their disposal that a playground kid could never dream of: swinging your dick around really can make embassies close and bombs fall, if you swing it right. I couldn’t always protect Leo from himself—my job was only to prevent, as much as I could, full public knowledge of the crooked timber he was made from. That meant I was the voice of the thinker after he spoke without thinking and the face of the family man when his family should have disowned him. I was hired as an adjunct to the congressman’s memory, but I found myself cast to play his conscience, too. I knew the next time I saw El Presidente railing from the floor of the United Nations I would think of the old raisiny dick of my American congressman, trying to shake menacingly at a Latin American head of state in a Chinese bathroom.
WE SPENT THE afternoon
