Starlitz nodded respectfully. “I am so with that!”
A pair of Cypriot boys had arrived from the neighborhood, pedaling bikes. They looked about six and nine, and wore striped-sleeve football shirts and big goggling grins.
“Tell them it’s a magic gypsy tent,” Starlitz recommended to the station attendant. “Tell ’em we want ’em to step inside.”
Given this tale of terror, the kids vanished immediately, peeling out so fast that their tires shrieked.
“Ladies first,” said Khoklov. He offered his arm to help Zeta climb aboard, through a long, zippered slit.
Starlitz followed.
“I hate it in here,” Zeta hissed fretfully. She was crammed into a thrumming fabric space the size and shape of a sleeping bag. “There’s no peanuts or anything! There’s no movie, even! Why do we have to do this?”
“He’s Russian, okay?” said Starlitz. “Uncle Pulat’s going through a kind of transitional period. We gotta be polite about it.”
The twin engines started, with a cough and a startling whine.
Khoklov wriggled aboard. He thrust his pale head into a transparent bubble and gripped a lozenge-shaped Nintendo joystick.
The aircraft wheeled reluctantly in place. Then a laboring plastic piston came down and painfully levered the plane into the air. The propellors caught. They began to climb, and headed out to sea.
DAYS LATER, THIRTY THOUSAND FEET OVER THE Atlantic, Starlitz knocked back a last sip of airline whiskey and leaned his sorry head against a skimpy pillow.
He had once heard from an elderly German that mankind’s ultimate luxury was an unbroken night’s sleep in a soft bed. Before that leaden, brutally sincere revelation, Starlitz had never been a devotee of slumbering. Nowadays Starlitz took sleep very seriously. Starlitz felt sure that if he ever lived as long as the old German had, his nights, too, would be flaking, restless, and broken by sinister flashbacks: not the thunder of Stalin organs on the frozen Eastern Front, necessarily, but other, more personal equivalents.
Zeta lay curled in a tight, twitching ball under her thin airline blanket. When you were eleven years old, even sleep was frenetic.
A stewardess passed down the aisle, with the trancelike step of a professional who lived between time zones.
Starlitz passed her three empty plastic liquor bottles and five disemboweled foil bags of peanuts. She collected the trash impassively, never meeting his eyes, and left him without a glance. He watched her vaguely as he secured his airline tray. Something about her hip roll and soft-footed shuffle struck Starlitz deep in his core. What was it?
Then he had it: good old what’s-her-name.
That Chicago girl. She came in every night, to tidy up the lair of a Chicago machine politician. She was an office cleaner. Starlitz had been up late one sleepless night with the other hustlers, counting the kickbacks and smoking cigars, when little what’s-her-name had first meekly entered his life, propelling her bucket and mop.
Little what’s-her-face, though only five feet tall, was about a yard across. Anything but frail, she was as sturdy as a tractor. She could have hauled a goat carcass on her shoulders across a Mexican desert while wearing nothing but rubber huaraches, and with never a wince or complaint.… Not promising material to most young guys on the make, granted. No one else in the office had even been able to see her. They had never said a word to her. No other man in the room would ever bother. She was totally beyond their ken.
But he could see her. When she realized that his eyes had focused on her body, she looked up from her mop handle and shot him an opaque, deer-in-the-headlights look. Not so much a feminine come-on, really, as a deliberate, daring step into his story line.
Now it was all coming back to Starlitz, on an interior tide of pained nostalgia and dessicating airline booze. He plucked at his sorry pillow, struggling fruitlessly for comfort. He had the bedroom they’d been in, her smell, her tatty underwear, her face, everything but her name.
As a first hook he’d told her he would help her with her English. She possessed enough bits and pieces of English to pay rent and to buy Mama’s bread and sundries. But she had no real command of North American lingo, and she was never going to get any. There just wasn’t any room for the world’s biggest and pushiest language inside of her rock-solid head. Everything inside her skull was totally occupied with the tremendous, preternatural effort it took to adjust, oil, lubricate, and maintain her remote interior universe.
Their affair, if he could call it that, had lasted eleven months. Mulling over it in his stingy tourist-class seat, Starlitz realized that this was the longest single period that he had ever put up with anyone. After the fruitless English lessons he liked to dress her up to pass, and take her out on the town for disco nites, fine Irish whiskey, and cripplingly expensive steak dinners. It was especially good that she could not read the menus or speak English to the waiters, and yet she wore the classy, intimidating garments of an upper-class WASP matron who could buy any waiter ten times over. He would take her to Chinatown and shovel her full of rice wine and the finest pepper-blazing Szechuan. It was a visceral thrill to see her white teeth crunch through those baby-corn ears.
Twenty years on, and the vitalizing incongruity of it still made Starlitz grin. He’d cared so much about it, their little scene had meant so much to him. It had all been so much … fun. Now that he could see it in the muddled clarity of middle age, all in amber, tintype retrospect, he realized that little what’s-her-name had first claim as the love of his life.
She had the most intense and utter self-possession Starlitz had ever encountered. They could barely speak to each other, but such was life. She might be ugly as a fence post. To get to second base with her was like ground war. He’d never seen her entirely naked. He didn’t much want to. It was never remotely like a boy-meets-girl thing. They were two alien worlds in near collision; it was all about earthquakes, gravity, and terrifying primal forces.
Most of the time she silently fought for her virtue, and about one time in three she would switch sides and silently fight against it. It wasn’t that the sex was any good, because even for a young guy, as he’d been then, sex with her was way too much like work. No, the reason that Consuelo—and yeah, that was it, her name was Consuelo, or something very much like it—had worked out for him was her titanic, liberating reservoir of uniquely personal dissident reality. She could never be described as hot in the sack, but it was life after the sack that amazed him. He would storm out in the middle of the night, freezing and half crippled with unmet male needs, and Chicago would almost vaporize. That enormous, gimcrack, heartland metropolis turned into van Goghian ethereal fire. He felt as if he could walk straight through the city’s skyrocketing steel walls. He’d been able to live for months off the great bloody sparks she threw off, from the enormous, invisible friction between herself and Yankee reality. Being with her was like visiting the moon.
She never questioned anything he did. Nothing shocked her—or rather, everything he did shocked her equally, which was to say, not at all.
As the months wore on and his frustration grew, he got crueler and crazier. He would try elaborate gambits to disrupt her fortresslike status quo. He sensed that if he could just impale a secret hole below her waterline, elements of his universe might somehow leak through. So he experimented. He equipped her with closetsful of stolen clothes from the mansions of Oak Park. A mafia-hijacked color TV. Then a big set of zircons. A tiara. Once he stole her a mink.
She sold the clothes at rag sales. She gave the TV to her mother. She put the jewelry in a locked box, and lost it. Even in the dead of Chicago winter she wouldn’t wear the mink, although he once spotted her gently stroking it with a look of sorrowful bemusement. As for the rest of it, the vibrator, the thirty-four DD push-up bra, the edible underwear, that was all part of one vast, homogeneous, demonic landscape; the obscene roiling chaos beneath the tightrope wire of decency. She was utterly commonplace, and utterly remote. Knowing her was like shaking a C
oke bottle, popping the top, and having the lava of Kilauea pour out.
She wasn’t nice to him. She didn’t get it about boosting his ego, cadging favors, or pretending any girlish happiness. She even took out her own garbage. His role in her life was entirely symbolic. For Consuelo he was any man and every man. He represented her existential confrontation with the masculine principle. No other man was knocking to get in, and after he left her, she would just settle down with the memories. Higher forces had yanked him out of the properties backstage, and dusted him off and sent him along, because Consuelo’s private mythos somehow needed an incubus.
Then, one day, he met her mother. That was all about long white hair, rattling yellowed blinds, and Olmec Santeria. He found himself clawing his way off the sacrificial pyramid in about thirty seconds flat. After that there was no way forward. So, he offered her a stolen diamond ring cut like a hockey rink, begged her to marry him (in neutral ground, a synagogue), and to fly with him to Libya. Consuelo considered this proposal soberly, reached a just and final conclusion, and said absolutely not, never ever. So he threw the diamond into Lake Michigan, wept for a few minutes, and flew to Libya the next Monday, by himself. And that was a swift and final end to all that.
Libya had been just great, everything he expected and more. Except—and he knew this now—he was never going to care about a woman that much again. He could still go through with sex, but the motive force was slacking off. He would never bang his head that hard again; at the best he would shave, dress up, hold out a wad of money, and wait. If they came, they came; and if they didn’t come, they didn’t come. Big deal. Anything remotely like romance was farther and farther behind him now. Sex would never have a meaning that he couldn’t control, there was no danger of its having any genuine consequence for him. In the secret depths of his blood and bone there was no future.
“Hey, Dad.”
“What?”
“Hey, Dad.”
“Yeah?”
Zeta put her tousled head above the edge of the blanket. “Hey, Dad, my thumbs are all sore from playing Nintendo. Are we there yet?”
“We’re in the middle of the sky above an ocean, but we’ll get where we have to be.”
• • •
THE CUSTOMS IN MEXICO CITY WAS EASYGOING ABOUT passports that looked American. Starlitz emptied his wallet at the currency exchange, taking on a ballast of pesos. He bought himself a duty-free carton of Lucky Strikes and a glass-ribbed three-quarter-liter bottle of Gran Centenario tequila. He bought Zeta a pack of Chiclets.
“I don’t like these colored Chiclets,” Zeta complained, her eyes red rimmed with jet lag. “I only like the white ones.”
“Then only chew the white ones. We’ve got some shopping to do.”
Starlitz threw their meager luggage, and both their passports, into a rented airport locker. He slammed the metal door with finality, went into the airport men’s room, and flushed the key. He was looking for his father now. That was the central task at hand. It absolutely had to be done, and it was never an easy job. It was entirely impossible, unless you had entered the vast and shadowy realm of the Undocumented.
Starlitz bought a cheap canvas shoulder-bag with a crude four-color logo of the goat-sucking Chupacabra. He bought a woven Baja jacket with wooden toggle buttons, and with some effort he acquired a hat that was not a “Mexican” hat, but an actual Mexican hat.
“You need a total makeover,” Starlitz told his daughter. “Because I’m taking you to meet your grandpa.”
“Doesn’t Grandpa like G-7 clothes?”
“Grandpa’s never heard of G-7.” Starlitz shook his head. “You see, when you meet my dad—your grandfather—you can’t just ‘go see him.’You have to really let go, and then, just maybe, you can get a glimpse of him. Because if we’re lucky, and the time and the place are just right, your grandfather sort of … shows up.”
Zeta nodded thoughtfully.
Starlitz tried his best to sound earnest. “You see, Zenobia, now that we’re together, you’ve got to get to know my side of the family. And my side of your family really isn’t much like Mom One and Mom Two.”
“ ’Cause they’re New Age lesbians?”
“Oh, no, no. That would be way too simple.”
“I’m not much like my side of the family either,” Zeta said bravely. “It’s okay, Dad.”
Starlitz patted her band-T’d shoulder. This heart-to-heart was going rather better than he had expected. “Yeah, Zeta, and it’ll help us a lot if you give up your super cool nineties clothes for a while. You need to be wearing different clothes now. Clothes that could have been worn at any and all periods between the years 1901 and 1999. Okay? There’s a pretty serious locus of affect around 1945.”
“Nineteen forty-five, Dad? Wasn’t that World War Three?”
“World War Two.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“The past is a different country, Zeta. We have to be different now too. We don’t take cabs anymore. We’re poor people now, you and me. We’re poor, and we’re invisible. We don’t have any ID, so we can’t let cops catch us. We don’t know any lawyers or doctors, and we don’t have a bank. Don’t talk to strangers, ever. Pretend you don’t speak any English. Never write your name down, never tell anyone who you are.” Starlitz drew a breath. “And most of all, stay away from videocams. If you see a security video, just get the hell away from that whole neighborhood, right away.”
“What’s wrong with videocams?”
“Haven’t you noticed yet?”
She shrugged. “I know that videocams don’t like me. I break ’em all the time. I even break cameras sometimes.”
“That’s because of two important things, babe. Surveillance and documentation. It’s all about mechanical objectivity, proper observation, the scientific method, reproducible results, and all of that scary crap. If we’re going to find your grandpa, we can’t be pinned down like that, not even one little bit. We’ve got to be looser and farther away from the consensus narrative than you’ve ever gotten before. You understand me? I know this is kind of hard to understand.”
Zeta wrinkled her brow. “It’s like hide-and-go-seek, sorta, right?”
“Yeah. Sorta.”
“We’re hunting for Grandpa? We’re sneaking up on him in disguise?”
“Yeah. That’s the story. Pretty much.”
She looked up brightly. “We’ve got to go underground to nail his sorry ass?”
“Absolutely!” Starlitz beamed. “Now you’re really with it!”
BY EVENING THEY WERE ON A BUS TO JUAREZ. ZETA fell asleep against his shoulder, a torn ticket and a half-chewed flour tortilla still in her hand. Starlitz sat chain-smoking amid his neighbors, the cheekboned widow in the frayed black shawl and the pear-shaped gent in the seersucker suit. The night outside the window was full of Central American stars.
Starlitz enjoyed a Mexico City–style coughing fit, tossed the butt, and lit another. He was dead broke now, his baggy cotton pants holding scarcely a peso, but he was far from lost in the world, because he still had cigarettes. Cigarettes, always the primal currency of the twentieth-century underground, the war stricken, the occupation forces, the resistance, and the jailed. The secret wealth of the gulag, Occupation Paris, stilyagi Moscow, of Hong Kong boat people, and a thousand county clinks and rehab clinics. He’d been smoking all day, because it hid his face, it fit him in, it made him commoner. As long as he never took the trouble to check inventory, he knew that there would still be cigarettes left, in the bottom of the bag.
Starlitz and Zeta spent nine days in Juarez, locating a coyote, and waiting for the mighty coyote to deign to take them across the Big River, to The Pass. Rio Grande, El Paso, the pass into El Norte, that vast, legendary realm of cruelty and gold.
Starlitz saw that El Norte had sent its writhing, unnatural tentacles over the border, and El Norte had come to stay. El Norte had sunk down great big solid roots here in the maquiladora country; there was no more slumbering mestizo vi
be about this part of Mexico now, there was nothing here you could successfully repel with any bandolier and any machete. Japan was here building gizmos of plastic with double-A batteries, multinat Europe had blown into town with the silicon and the big wheels. This place was Mexico, all right, still definitely a wholly owned family enterprise, but it was Mexico 1999, La NAFTA, Mexico as the world’s first and only Latin American economic superpower. The snake and eagle were a hiccup and sneeze away from the third millennium.
The down-market streets were full of wandering, booze-dazed Yankees, so they ate quite well and slept better after Starlitz had lifted a wallet.
Zeta looked a little downcast over her greasy stack of white corn tamales. “Dad, it’s not right to pick people’s pockets, is it?”
“Absolutely not!” Starlitz assured her firmly, chasing the beans on his flowered tin plate with a Taiwanese fork. “The margins in the pickpocket racket are razor thin. Lifting wallets the right way takes organization: the bumper, the lifter, the getaway guy.… That’s way too much labor for the rate of return. The only cats who make out picking pockets are specialists, they farm people out to hit airports and trains. It’s a franchise. Forget about it.”
“Is it bad that you stole that drunk guy’s wallet?”
“You bet it’s bad, but it’s worse not to pay your coyote when you cross the big river.”
“Okay, Dad.” She put a semicircle of toothmarks into her tamale.
THEIR COYOTE WAS THE KIND OF SORRY, AMATEUR coyote you could find in a border town, on a bad weekend, with broken Spanish. The coyote was an acne-faced Tejano kid with a silver buckle and a big black cowboy hat, who figured he had la Frontera sussed because he carried the proverbial pistola en la mano.
After midnight their little cluster of the adventurous unemployed waded the concrete-lined Rio Grande, and were almost immediately flushed out by a pack of Migra with infrared cams. Luckily, thanks to a recent shoot-to-kill scandal, the uniformed agents of the INS were a little more sluggish and tentative than usual. Scrambling up the harsh concrete incline, Starlitz and Zeta hit the thorny dirt and froze in a meager patch of tumbleweed, while a thundering herd of booted feet and whining dogs passed them not ten feet away. Then they climbed and plucked and lightly bled their way through the barbed wire, and slithered and tiptoed between and among the various spotlit free-fire zones, until, finally, they emerged onto a cracked, weed-grown sidewalk of a formally American street.
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