Zeitgeist (24 page)

Domestic routine invaded the lives of Zeta and Starlitz, conquering all before it. Every morning Starlitz would haul the reluctant Zeta out of bed. He would cajole some cereal into her, get her into her clothes, insist that she brush her tangled hair and greenish teeth. He would make her a bag lunch: Hostess snowballs, crustless tuna sandwiches, the palest packaged club-crackers, a banana. He would walk Zeta the six blocks down to her Boulder elementary school, unless it rained, in which case they would take the divorced carpenter’s beat-up orange truck. Then he would trudge back, ride a pawnshop single-speed Schwinn to his retail job, and handle the candy, cig, cappuccino, and gasoline purchases for eight hours.

Then he would retrieve Zeta from her state-supported day care. The two of them would go back to the trailer park, with its wind chimes, dogs, bird feeders, towering aspens, and aging hippies playing mellow old Eric Clapton albums on vinyl. They would eat nuked TV dinners in front of cable cartoon programs, which featured comic ensembles of fast-talking monsters, and cosmos-exploding Nipponese anime cartoons.

“Hey, Dad.”

“What?”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Yeah?”

“Hey, Dad, how come I have to waste so much time in that stinkin’ school with all those stupid kids?”

“Because I say so.” Starlitz put down his bean-smeared
tin fork and sighed. “Because I’m the dad and you’re the kid. See, Zeta—it’s like this. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to
become
what you say you are, than it is to try and pass for it.”

“But, Dad—you and me, we could pass for
anything
. I mean—you manage G-7, the coolest band in the whole world! Why don’t you pass for—like—the guy who owns the Nintendo company? Then you’d be a zillionaire and I could be Japanese! That would be super cool!”

“That’s just not the narrative, Zeta.”

“Why not?”

Because she was the narrative. And she was not his cute moppet sidekick, offering local color, as they jetted from city to city in the company of muso hustlers and coke-snorting pop starlets. Sure, of course
he
could pass there, that was his natural world. But it was also phony-baloney tinsel crap with no staying power.

He couldn’t depart this century without becoming her father, fully and irrevocably, with everything that entailed. And that meant fatherhood. Not some made-up, sentimental, sitcom-TV version of fatherhood, where the dad figure shuffles in and out of camera range, stage left, without ever getting blood and vomit on his shirt. No, it meant no-kidding, down-and-dirty,
parental life
.

No ifs, ands, or buts. No backsliding, fast talking, or soft-shoeing. Stark confrontation with the consequences of the human condition. He had to genuinely commit. He couldn’t park Zeta in the closet between camera setups, and pay other people to raise her.
He
had to raise her.
All the time
. He had to feed her, dress her, get her the obligatory booster shots, teach her to swim and ride a bike. He had to give her an allowance. He had to watch her kick, and scream, and fuss; he had to look after her, during nightmares, when picking bloody scabs off her knees, losing her teeth, breaking out in virulent spots, and running a fever of a hundred and four. He had to chill her out when she was hyper, cheer her up when she was sour. Mom One and Mom Two had done this grueling labor for
eleven solid years
—he couldn’t complain, now the time
had come for him to ante up. She was his child, and there just wasn’t anybody else up for that job.

“But, Dad, why not?”

“Because this is the world and we live in it. I gotta show you the ropes of consensus reality. God knows your mothers never would. We’re gonna get IDs, Zeta: social security, legal American passports. I’m gonna get exclusive custody, granted by the Colorado state court, signed, sealed, delivered. Paid for. Witnessed. In the files. When we’re done here, we’ll be real, a real dad, a real kid. We’ll be
better
than real. We’ll be official.”

“Oh.”

JUDY, MOM TWO, THE LEGAL ENTITY FORMALLY RESPONSIBLE, failed to contest the custody proceedings. Most likely she simply never got wind of them. The Colorado court gave Starlitz sole custody. He paid off the lawyer’s crippling fees through merchandise shrinkage at the convenience store.

Then two grainy blue passports arrived, shipped overnight directly from Washington in a handsome string-tied manila envelope. Starlitz gazed at the documents in wonder. They were sublime. Even the kid’s photograph looked terrific. The photo was nine-tenths fictional; he’d had to tart up Zeta’s blurry, camera-shattering image with Adobe Photoshop; but at last his daughter, all grinning and pigtailed, had that hotly coveted prize of economic globalization, a genuine, fully attested, stamped and legal United States passport. The fact that her name was misspelled “Zinobia” was but a small gnat in the ointment.

He couldn’t quite believe that O’Houlihan had gone through with it. She’d actually come up with the documents. But there was no getting around the fact: Jane O’Houlihan was an honest public official. True, she was a federal prosecutor from the Department of Justice, so attracting her sustained attention was a more dangerous and lasting misfortune than shattering both your thighbones, but the woman had her own kind of merit. She
wasn’t simply lining her own pockets, like most of the planet’s legal apparatchiks. She was a sworn nun of American federal law and order, a stainless paladin of bourgeois constitutional democracy, one of the scariest and most authentic entities that the dying century had to offer.

Zeta thumb-flipped through her passport, bored. “Why are you so happy about this, Dad?”

“Zeta, we just joined a very privileged fraction of the human race. We are documented! And by the world’s last superpower too!”

“It’s a crappy little blank book, Dad. It only has one picture.”

“Yeah, that’s the truth, but that’s a
kid’s
version of the truth.” Starlitz sighed. “Zeta, we need a serious talk now, okay?”

Her narrow shoulders hunched in embarrassed pain. “Aw, Dad, not another one!”

“Honey, this is vitally important. You see: we have a choice among contingencies here. You got no idea how tough it is to become fully documented, but … well … we are no-kidding legal now, both of us. It’s a huge accomplishment. There’s nothing to stop us from living just like this indefinitely. You can go to junior high school next year. I’ll buy you cool new teen-girl subculture clothes, you know, whatever Britney Spears is wearing on MTV. I’ll help you with the math homework, I’ll get you a moped, I’ll see you through the whole nine yards. Because I’m legal, clean, and sober. I’m holding down a straight job. I show up on time for every shift, I can make proper change, and I never rob the till. I’m a great employee. They’d have promoted me to district manager already, if it weren’t for that shrinkage rate out the shop’s back door.”

“Dad, I dunno how much more Bit-o-Honeys I can eat. I mean, I used to love ’em, but three cases? That’s a lot!”

“Zeta, we have a path forward. It’s the Bill Market, here in the USA. Times are booming. Employment is sky high, inflation is dirt low, and thanks to two million guys who are stuck in the domestic gulag, crime rates have
crashed all over the country. It’s the fat of the Yankee land. We can move to a better apartment. I’ll get out of this high-risk package-retailing on a stick-’em-up urban street corner. That’s way too twentieth century, anyway. I’ve got some plans for us: I’m thinking: four or five personal eBay accounts, and some Internet-stock daytrading. We’ll get all upwardly mobile, middle-class-American-Dream style. We can buy health insurance. We’ll eat vitamins. You’ll grow up tall and strong and literate, with fluoride in your big white teeth, and no scars and no criminal record. And the best part is: since we’ve placed ourselves in a yuppie town right into the fat center of a major demographic median, we’re practically certain to
slide right through
Y2K!”

“Is all that s’posed to be
good
, Dad?”

“Well, I’m not saying we’ll go totally unscathed. There might be a few power outages here in Boulder, some screwed-up traffic lights, a bank collapse or two.… Big deal; we’ll just buy a bag of rice and some tiki torches. But see: we’ve established ourselves in a massively augmented part of the narrative. We’ve got it made now. You’ll cruise right through the year 2000, just like you were always bound to do anyhow. I’ll tag along with you, in my kindly supportive role of your dear old dad. I’ll do only predictable, single-dad-style things from now on. Buy us a used car, maybe. Maybe I’ll take up some Rocky Mountain trout fishing. Or go to some baseball games. I might even get married!”

“Dad, that is all so totally
boring
!”

“Honey, it’s only ‘boring’ if you don’t know any other life. If you thought about this from a different angle, behaving in a totally conventional middle-American way would be a huge challenge. An incredible adventure. Just try to imagine living that way with
total conviction
and without a
single moment of self-doubt
. It would be like searching for the source of the Nile. It’s practically
beyond imagination.
”

Zeta pondered this. “Okay. What’s our
other
lifestyle choice, Dad?”

“Well,” Starlitz said, his voice growing thicker and grainier, “we have new passports. So: maybe we boost some air fare, pick up our loose ends, and get back in the pop hustle. Somewhere, about a million shades of strange away from the other kids in Boulder’s sixth grade, the Serbian scene is blowing big-time. NATO’s a fire-breathing dragon. It is McWorld versus Jihad, kid: it’s the high-tech souped-up Lexus smashing head on into the ethnic Olive Tree. The nineties version of reality is cracking up, the body count is stacking up, and it is culture war to the knife in Kosovo, Montenegro, Greece, Italy, Macedonia, Croatia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, and Azerbaijan. My Russian maphiya contacts are gonna be in this neck deep.”

“That means you’d pull me out of school, right? Before my next report card?”

“Absolutely. I’m thinking, maybe, university extension classes and a private tutor. You’ll need a laptop. I’d have to make some phone calls.”

“Dad, get a satellite phone.”

STARLITZ MAXED OUT HIS CREDIT CARDS AND TRIPLED his money in a week, fronting Beanie Babies in the Internet auction market. He bought into collectible phone credit cards, and used one to call a cell phone in Cyprus.

“Shtoh vy khoteti
?”

“I want to speak to Viktor, please.”

“This is Viktor Bilibin Efendi. And you are?”

“Viktor, it’s me. It’s Lech Starlitz.”

“Who? What?”

“Lekhi Starlits!”

“Oh, yes,” said Viktor gruffly, “now I remember. My former uncle’s former friend.”

“You’re not drunk, are you, Viktor?” Starlitz could hear a radio blaring and girls singing in the background. They sounded like Russian girls. Some kind of Balkan radio tune, lots of diatonic quavers and Yugoslav synth-washes.

“Why should you care?” Viktor demanded thickly. “Off to America! Leaving us in the lurch!”

“Uh … is your uncle around? Put Pulat Romanevich on the line.”

“My uncle was in an aircraft hangar in Belgrade! The first wave of NATO attacks smashed everything! He is missing and presumed dead, you butcher of the Balkan nation! Bomb-flinging NATO aggressor!!”

This was heavy news. It didn’t feel quite right, though. It had a certain ritualized phoniness about it. “Did you actually see Pulat Romanevich inside a zinc coffin, Viktor?”

“
Nyet
. They’re still sweeping up pieces of the MiGs!”

“Then don’t count him out, okay? Those Afghantsi veterans are hard men to kill. If the mujihadeen couldn’t get him with Stingers, he’s not gonna be knocked out by some Dutch greenhorn in a French Mystère.”

“Anything can happen in a war,” Viktor said glumly. “Even people getting killed.”

“Tell me about the band, Viktor.”

“He is huge,” Viktor blurted.

“Who is huge?”

“The Turk. Ozbey. Ozbey has become huge. Since the war in the Balkans he is incredible. He’s an evil genius, that man. The Turks never believed that NATO would bomb Christians for the sake of Moslems. But they were wrong, because it happened. They never believed they would catch the Kurdish leader, Ocallan. But they were wrong. Because the Yankee spies sold out the Greeks, and fingered Ocallan to the Turks. The Turkish Special Operations kidnapped the Kurd in Kenya. The Turks danced with joy in the streets of Istanbul. Ozbey and his spies are national heroes.”

Viktor took a deep breath. He was on a big Slavic confessional roll now; the cork had been pulled from his neck and he was emitting a fiery stream of painful confidences. “Then, Starlits, listen to me: the Kurds broke into Greek embassies all over Europe, and set themselves on fire. Can you believe the drama? The hated Kurds, seizing
Greek embassies, and setting their flesh on fire! In front of CNN cameras! Turkish cameras! It is a Turkish miracle! It is a Turkish dream! And now, as I speak to you: Turkish jet pilots are bombing a Christian air force! NATO is patting them on the back and underwriting all expenses! Ozbey is walking around like a minister! Ozbey is ten meters tall! He can’t be touched!”

“Viktor, calm down. Tell me something—has there been any trouble locally with that, you know, underwater postal service thing? Like, any American antidrug people sniffing around, Interpol, anything like that?”

Viktor laughed harshly. “Hah! Can you imagine a Turkish heroin-smuggling scandal when the Balkans are on fire? No American cop is that stupid! They’re crushing a heroic Slavic people in their innocent heroic homeland. Heroin means nothing to the Yankees now! Their new Yankee darlings are the KLA, an Albanian terrorist mob. They steal cars and sell heroin! It’s how the KLA bought the guns to massacre pregnant Serbian women and gouge the eyes out of children.”

“Yeah, that’s some story, all right.”

“The KLA were all trained by Osama bin Laden. You know that, don’t you?”

“Oh, yeah, millionaire philanthropist and all that, he’s a heavy guy, Osama bin Laden. Look, Viktor, I can see you’re taking this temporary air strike pretty hard, and I’d love to discuss regional politics with you some other time. But frankly, I just called to see how the band is doing.”