Chapter Two — Jesus

Jon arrived at the airstrip at six-forty in the morning, because Jesus had said seven, and Jesus had been arriving at places ten minutes early for long enough that Jon had adjusted himself to fifteen minutes early, and then, somewhere in China, to twenty.

The four-seater was already out of the hangar. Its wheels sat in two shallow puddles where the condensation had run off the wings overnight. The light on the apron was the kind of grey that would burn off by nine. Jesus was not in the plane. Jesus was in the hangar office with the mechanic, drinking coffee from a cup with a picture of a dog on it, and he turned as Jon came through the door and said, You're late.

"I am fifteen minutes early," Jon said.

"You used to be twenty."

The mechanic was a man called Lucas who had known Jesus longer than Jon had. Lucas slid another cup across the counter toward Jon without looking at him. Jesus drank without looking at Lucas. The three of them stood there without speaking for what was obviously a familiar length of time.

"¿A dónde?" Jon said, finally.

"Asturias."

"For what."

"An old friend is selling me some capacitors I don't need at a price I also don't need."

"Is it worth flying."

"It is worth seeing him."

Jesus finished his coffee, set the cup down upside-down on the counter — a small courtesy Lucas had been ignoring for twenty years — and walked out onto the apron.

The four-seater was old, and Jon's grandfather's half was visible in the wear on the left yoke, which had been polished by a palm not Jesus's, and the right yoke, which had been used once by Jon when Jon was fourteen and had not been touched since. Jon climbed in beside his father and got the smell — aviation fuel and warm canvas and something of the plane's own age — and he realised, as his hand found the seatbelt, that he had been looking forward to it since the alarm had gone off in the dark. Jesus spoke into the radio with the cheerful bored competence of a man who had been speaking into radios for forty-five years. The engine took, coughed, and settled. The propeller went from a shape Jon could see to a shape Jon could feel.

They rolled. The tarmac passed, in that specific way tarmac passes when you are sitting close to the ground and moving too fast to be on wheels. And then they were up, and the ground fell away, and Jon remembered, the way he did every time — the way a person remembers a particular grief or a particular joy they had lived through and had put down somewhere — that his father was extremely competent at exactly one thing, which was flying a small plane, and that almost every other thing his father did was underwritten by this one thing.

They climbed through the grey and came out on top of it.

Jesus said, Your mother is well.

"I haven't called her."

"You haven't called anyone."

"I know."

Jesus did not press it. Jesus, on a plane, had a different relationship to words; he said a sentence and then let a landscape pass. Jon watched the landscape. The country underneath them was the country he had flown over on his way out, four years ago, in the opposite direction, at about this height, and he had not been able to look at it then because he had been drunk in the window seat of a commercial jet with his eyes closed, and he looked at it now. It was strange and familiar, as the countries one is leaving always are, and as the countries one is coming home to sometimes are, too.

They landed on a grass strip outside a town Jon had been to once when he was nine. The supplier was already on the strip, standing next to an old van, with the kind of wave men use when they have known each other too long to bother with a handshake. Jesus said, Wait in the plane if you like.

"I would like," Jon said.

Jesus got out. The two men did not walk toward each other; they walked in the same direction, toward the van, with the conversation already in progress by the time they reached it. They drove off.

Jon stayed in the plane. He had a paperback in his jacket pocket — a novel a friend in Hong Kong had insisted on — and he read four pages of it without absorbing a word and put it away. He watched a hawk work a slow circle over the brown edge of a field. He thought about the doctor, and did not let himself think about her, and thought about her anyway.

Jesus came back after an hour and a half.

He climbed in with a small brown box under his arm, set it on the rear seat with a care that did not match the value he had just described, and sat for a second with both hands on his thighs. Then he said, You were right. It wasn't worth flying.

"It was worth seeing him."

"It was worth seeing him," Jesus said.

"What are they," Jon said, nodding at the box.

"Capacitors. I told you."

"May I."

Jesus shrugged. Jon reached back and turned the box toward himself and lifted the lid. Inside, in the old foam, were forty or fifty small canister capacitors in the rating and case size Jon had been looking at in three different factories in Taipei in the last nine months — old stock, low ESR, the kind of part a man building motor drivers for a biped prototype would spend most of a day on the phone trying to find. He read the brand. He closed the lid. He put the box back on the seat.

Jesus had not been watching.

They took off again.

On the way back, with the sun high and the country now the country you look down at rather than the country you come home to, Jesus said, without looking at Jon:

"There is a girl."

Jon said, Okay.

"I want you to meet her."

"Okay."

"On Friday."

"You told me on Friday."

"I am telling you again."

Jon did not say anything for a minute. The plane droned. Below them, a long reservoir caught the light.

"Is she a friend's daughter," Jon said.

"No."

"Who is she, then."

"On Friday," Jesus said.

They did not speak again until they were over Madrid.

#

They did not go home. Jesus drove from the airstrip into the city instead of out to the family flat, and when Jon asked him where they were going, Jesus said, There is a man I have to see for forty minutes.

"At nine o'clock on a Thursday."

"At nine o'clock on a Thursday," Jesus said, "because the man is married to a woman who does not like Thursdays, and on Thursdays he is at my disposal."

The street was the same street. The door was the same door. Jon had been taken here as a boy, and had been taken here again in his twenties, and had not been taken here in almost a decade. The doorman knew Jesus the way doormen knew men who had been keeping their doors open for them for thirty years.

They were shown up.

The room was exactly what Jon remembered it to be, which is to say lower-lit and better-upholstered than it looked from the street, with a small bar along one side and a set of low sofas in an arrangement of Ls, and a record on, something Jon could have named if he had wanted to. There were six or seven other men in the room, in two or three configurations. There were perhaps twice as many women. The women were young — all of them, and uniformly — in a way the source of their youth did not bear looking into. Most of them, Jon saw at a single glance, were not from here. They were from places Jon had been paid to like before he had been old enough to like anything. They were not dressed as anything in particular. They were dressed as women who wanted men to think they had chosen their own clothes, which was itself, Jon remembered, one of the things the place was.

Jesus's man was already there. He was sixty, small, with the contained gravity of a man who had been going bald in rooms like this since his own father had first brought him. A young woman sat on the arm of his sofa with her hand on the back of it just behind his head. She was not touching him. Her hand was an inch from the collar of his jacket. She had been placing it that distance from men's collars for so long that she was not aware she was doing it anymore.

He stood up when Jesus came in. He did not stand up when Jon came in. He took Jesus's offered hand in both of his and said, Jesús. The son.

"My son."

"Encantado." A nod for Jon. Siéntate.

Jon sat.

A woman appeared at Jon's elbow with a tumbler of something he had not ordered. She set it in front of him and did not look at him and did not go. She sat on the arm of the sofa the way the other woman was sitting on the arm of her sofa. Her hand settled on the back of Jon's collar at the same inch of distance. It was a trained inch. Jon had been inside this inch before.

She said, ¿Todo bien, guapo? and the accent was the accent of somewhere Jon had known from half his childhood, and Jon's body did what it had been doing for eighteen years in rooms like this, which was to say that it sat very still and listened more carefully than its owner would have chosen, and Jon took a slow sip of the drink he had not ordered, and did not answer her, and she did not expect him to.

Jesus and the older man began to talk about a subsidy.

It was not the kind of conversation that would have had a notary present, or a clerk, or a telephone on. It was the kind of conversation two men had in a room where a pair of young women were costing someone an hour's wage and would be costing someone else a week's. It was also, Jon understood, the kind of conversation that in that country at that time was not actually an exception — the papers signed in offices on Tuesday mornings had, most of them, been signed here first, on the sofas, on Thursdays, with the young women in the room. Jesus had not invented the mechanism. Jesus was only very good at it.

What Jesus was offering the older man, Jon could now see, was not a bribe. A bribe would have been simpler. What Jesus was offering was the room itself. The fact that they were sitting in it at nine o'clock on a Thursday, that Jesus had brought him, that the whisky was good, that the woman on the arm of the sofa was young and from a place the older man had never been and would never go — all of this was the offer. The subsidy would follow.

Jon drank. The tumbler had bourbon in it. He did not know why he had bourbon. He had not had bourbon in eight years.

He was sixteen, on another night, in another room, and his father had brought him up a different staircase to a different version of the same room to introduce him to the mechanism by which his father's business was conducted. A girl younger than Jon and older than Jon at the same time had settled onto his lap in the way a cat settles, which is to say in stages, with a small adjustment at the end, and her breast had been warm against the top of his shoulder, and Jesus, across the room, had caught Jon's eye and raised his glass. ¿Y el niño qué quiere tomar? she had asked, in the accent of somewhere Jon had known from half his childhood. A Coca-Cola for the boy, Jesus had said. Por favor. The girl's hair had smelled of a perfume Jon had never smelled before. Jon had drunk the Coke and not looked her in the face again. That had been the night Jon had understood what his father did, and how his father did it, and that Jon, if he was going to stay in his father's world, was going to have to learn how to sit still while a thing he could not yet name sat on his lap. And Jon had learned, in all the rooms after that one, that the thing he could not yet name was the thing he was going to spend his adult life being drawn to in low-lit places by women with exactly that accent, and that this, too, his father had arranged for him.

He was back in the room. The woman on the arm of his sofa had not moved her hand. Jesus and the older man had finished with the subsidy. They were onto the question of a man they both knew who had been hospitalised the previous week. The woman beside Jon was not listening. Her hand was.

Jesus leaned forward. He lifted his glass toward Jon in a small private toast that was almost a smile.

Jon understood then, with the cold clarity of a man who has just been shown the price of his own idea, that this was how the robots that walked were going to be paid for. Not this particular subsidy. But one like it. A Thursday night five years from now, with a woman's hand an inch from a collar, and Jon himself across the sofa instead of watching from it. He had asked his father for money the afternoon before over lamb, and this was the afternoon he was being shown what the money was made of.

"Salud," Jesus said. "You see how it is."

Jon lifted his glass back.

"Salud," he said. "I see how it is."

They were out of the room within the hour. The older man walked them to the door this time, shook Jon's hand, and disappeared back inside. The street was the cold street of a Thursday in Madrid at eleven, with a few cars nowhere in particular.

Jesus handed Jon the keys.

"You drive."

"You only had half."

"I am tired," Jesus said. "I do not want to drive tonight."

This was a thing Jesus had never said in Jon's life. Jon did not comment on it. He got behind the wheel. Jesus's car was still the car Jesus had bought the year Jon had first left for Asia, and the wheel felt small under Jon's hands, and the pedals felt close, and Madrid, from the driver's seat of his father's car, looked like a city Jon had not lived in, which, for the last five years, he had not.

"Her name," Jesus said.

"Tell me."

"Maribel."

"Maribel," Jon said.

"Matos Mendoza."

"Brazilian?"

"Brazilian."

"Where do you know her from."

"A place on the edge of town."

"A bar."

"A bar," Jesus said.

"Like the place we just—"

"No," Jesus said. "Not like that. A bar-bar. She is a barmaid. She cleans the glasses. She counts them twice. She has been doing it for seventeen months."

"And you have been going there—"

"For two months. Twice a week. Thursdays, mostly."

"Why."

Jesus did not answer for a while. Jon drove. They were on a long straight avenue of plane trees motionless under the sodium lights, and the whole broad street looked like a corridor in a building no one was using.

"She does not talk much," Jesus said.

"That is a low bar."

"Yes," Jesus said. "But it is a bar the women in that room tonight have never cleared."

Jon looked at his father. Jesus did not look back.

"I am not," Jesus said, "telling you she is a saint. I am telling you she is tired. I have been watching her pour wine for two months and she has been tired for all of it. I am telling you I have been wrong about women, and I am saying out loud to my son that I do not think I am wrong about this, and I would like to be told if I am."

Jon drove another minute. Then he said, Okay.

"Okay what."

"Okay, Friday."

Jesus sat back against the seat. He closed his eyes.

Jon drove them home. When they reached the family flat Jesus did not get out; he told Jon to take the car back to the house, which Jon did not want to do, and said they would sort it tomorrow, which Jon did not believe; and then Jesus opened his eyes and said, Friday, as a command, and Jon said, Friday, as a reply, and got out.

He let himself in. He stood in the hallway for a minute without turning on the light. He walked through to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. He stood at the window. The park was dark, the way parks in Madrid are dark, which is not very.

He did not know why he was not sleeping.