2034: A Novel of the Next World War(56)
“You aren’t going to do anything?” Chowdhury asked her.
“Like what?”
Chowdhury knew there was nothing that could be done, for either of them. In Europe, in Asia, here, a crisis was playing out, a global realignment, or you might just call it a war. Events had been set in motion and they would need to resolve before he or Samantha could determine what to do next. But he felt relieved that the two of them, who hadn’t agreed on anything for as long as Chowdhury could remember, had found it within themselves to agree on this one measure to protect their daughter.
Changing the subject, Chowdhury asked Samantha about her mother, who he knew was sick, or at least increasingly frail. Samantha was traveling one week a month to care for her. Then Samantha began to ask him about work, nothing sensitive, but more of a genteel checking in, the type of non-substantive professional chitchat that comprised most dinner conversations, at least in quieter times. She asked about “the Navy officer who was at school with us, what’s-his-name, do you see him much?”
Chowdhury spoke with some pride about the work he’d done alongside Hendrickson, who had been a far superior student—as if the fact that the two were now colleagues was proof that he had not been the academic basket case his ex-wife discounted him for. “We’ve all been under a lot of strain,” Chowdhury said between slurps of wonton soup. “Hendrickson is pretty close with the one-star admiral who launched the strike on Zhanjiang, Sarah Hunt.” Chowdhury glanced over his bowl, to see if Samantha recognized the name, as here and there the papers had reported it. Her expression didn’t register anything, so Chowdhury added, “She was one of his students when he taught at the academy. He’s worried about her. It’s a lot to ask of someone.”
“What’s a lot to ask?” replied Samantha.
“To have that on your conscience—all those deaths.”
Samantha paused from pulling a strip of meat off a thigh bone to point a greasy finger at Chowdhury. “Aren’t they on your conscience?”
Chowdhury flinched, almost as if the light of a projector had been turned on his face. “Stop it,” he said.
“Stop what? It’s a fair question, Sandy.” And then Chowdhury’s ex-wife began to hold forth on his moral complicity not only with respect to Zhanjiang, but also with respect to the entirety of American foreign policy, stretching back to the decades before his birth and before his parents’ migration to this country. Chowdhury could easily have formulated counterarguments to the case Samantha laid against him. He could have pointed out that her family, a brood of purebred Texan WASPs, had settled this country centuries before his own, making her the inheritor of every crime from slavery to Manifest Destiny to fracking; but he’d made those arguments before, even though he didn’t believe them himself and fundamentally disagreed with her worldview, in which history held the future hostage.
Instead he sat and said nothing, allowing her to say whatever the hell she wanted to say. He had gotten what he’d come for. Their daughter was safe. Samantha wouldn’t fight him. This was the only thing that mattered.
They finished their food and the waiter cleared their plates. Chowdhury caught Samantha glancing at her watch. “If you’ve got somewhere else to be that’s fine.”
“You don’t mind?” she asked.
Chowdhury shook his head. When Samantha reached into her purse, he told her to put her wallet away. “I’ve got this.” She protested, and he added, “Please, I’d like to take you out.” She nodded once, thanked him, and also elaborately thanked the staff of the empty restaurant. Then she was gone.
Their waiter presented Chowdhury with a little dish that contained his bill with a pair of fortune cookies on it. Chowdhury stared vacantly at the cookies and thought about what Samantha had said, about his complicity, about how each of us was bound together, from his ex-wife, to his mother, to his daughter, to Hendrickson and Sarah Hunt, and even to this waiter, who would likely only have one table to serve for the entire night.
“Is there anything else I can get you?” the waiter asked.
“Yes, actually,” said Chowdhury. “I’d like to place an order to go.”
He was returning to an empty apartment and ordered enough food to last him several days—another Peking duck, General Tso’s chicken, mixed fried rice, the works. And as he added to his heaping order, the waiter’s subdued expression raised itself into a smile. While the kitchen got to work, Chowdhury sat there waiting, either end of his fortune cookie pinched between his fingers. He then broke the cookie apart and ate it piece by piece, avoiding the fortune inside, which he didn’t read but instead tore compulsively into little pieces.
His food was soon ready. The waiter brought out four bags, saying, “Thank you very much,” as he bowed slightly and set them on the table.
Chowdhury nodded. He looked once more around the empty restaurant before replying, “It’s the very least I could do.” He lifted the bags and headed for the door. On the table all that remained was the little pile of shredded paper for the waiter to brush away.
* * *
10:32 July 06, 2034 (GMT+8)
South China Sea
The dream changed a little each time. Hunt would be back in Yokosuka, standing on the dock, all of her ships pulling in at once—the John Paul Jones, the Chung-Hoon, the Carl Levin. What altered was how many more ships kept showing up. Now the scuttled Ford and Miller arrived each night. So, too, did the ships from the South Sea Fleet sunk at anchor in Zhanjiang, the carrier Liaoning, the destroyers Hefei, Lanzhou, Wuhan, Haikou, as well as a blur of smaller ships—frigates and corvettes too numerous to count. Their dozens of gangplanks would fall, the boatswains would pipe their calls, and the crews—American and Chinese alike—would spill onto the dock.