“Hey, Dad,” Zeta panted, picking vicious burrs out of her hair.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Dad, you know something?”
“What?”
“Hey, Dad, you know something, I never did anything like this before. This is terrible. I’m hungry, I’m hungry all the time. I feel cold, and I’m dirty. We have to walk everywhere. We go to the bathroom right on the ground. I don’t have my own house, or any water.”
“Yep. That’s the story line, all right.”
“How come this feels so normal?”
“Because this is normal. Most of the people in the world live like this. Most people have always lived like this. Most people have always expected to live like this. This is the great untold back-story, it’s the genuine silent majority. Most people in the world are totally poor, and totally obscure. Billions of people live like this. It never makes a headline. No camera ever looks at it, they’re never on TV. Nobody who matters ever pretends to care.”
They walked on silently for some time, passing cracked streetlights and shabby convenience stores boasting of lottery payoffs. “Hey, Dad.”
“What.”
“Hey, Dad.”
“What?”
“Do poor people eat lightbulbs?”
“Why would they wanna do that?” Starlitz paused thoughtfully. “Do you eat lightbulbs?”
Zeta fell two steps back and muttered inaudibly.
“What was that?”
Paralyzed with shyness, she looked up. “I said, ‘only the frosted white ones.’ ”
“Did anyone ever see you eat lightbulbs?” His voice grew sharp. “Did you ever tell anyone that you eat lightbulbs? You never ate lightbulbs in front of a camera, did you?”
“No, no, no, no, Dad, I never told anybody.”
“Well, I guess you ought to be cool, then.”
“Really?” she brightened. “Great.”
They walked on silently. “I would watch it with the lightbulb thing,” he said at last. “I mean, they’re made of glass and metal, when you think about it. That’s inorganic.”
Zeta said nothing.
“It’s okay,” he soothed, “I’m your dad, and you can tell me about these things. It’s all right, Zeta. It’s good to tell me.”
AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL HAD NO TROUBLE HITCHING rides with the kindly and supportive rural populace of New Mexico. They were a little disappointed to discover that she didn’t speak border Spanish, but they wouldn’t make an issue of this when she was accompanied by her large, silent, hat-wearing dad. Their migration was slow and semirandom, full of long, dusty roadside waits and many doublings-back, but the continent’s crust moved below their feet, and their destination was no particular place. Their destination was a state of mind.
Except for the possible interest of bored sheriff’s deputies, there was no real hazard in hitchhiking. The locals were people of the mountain-studded North American Empty Quarter. Under no circumstances would they dream of turning in Starlitz and Zeta to the loathsome minions of distant Washington. A couple of their drivers even pulled off the road, fed them chile, and picked up the tab. One generous matron offered to buy Zeta better shoes.
They slept in culverts and under bridges, slowly climbing up toward the arid, piney reaches of Socorro.
Now they walked up the side of a broken road, built for some long-forgotten military encampment. Zeta was browner and thinner. Despite their hard nights and their meager, irregular rations, she seemed to have grown an inch. She was alive, in motion, and breathing mountain air. Every day, every hour, put a new, visible lacquer of experience on the fine surface of her young soul.
“Dad, are we there yet?”
“Almost. I can feel it. We’re definitely closing in.”
“Does Grandpa live around here?”
“No, he doesn’t live anywhere in particular, but this is the place that turned him into what he is. Or what he was. You know. Whenever.”
Starlitz finally settled on a broken, paint-flaking Quonset hut, in a declining suburb of Socorro. Someone had forgotten to buy the place out and develop it; likely it was fatally out of code, commercially hammerlocked by some distant federal registry of toxic sites.
As Starlitz and Zeta settled into the place, chasing its cobwebs and dropping candy wrappers, the nature of its allure slowly clarified. This eldritch structure had once been part of a great, reality-shattering research effort, the bloody midcentury parturition of Big Science. The place definitely had the smell and taste of Major Technological Advent, a faint metallic isotropic tang of anomalous Geiger activity, from backyard lab procedures dating back to the Belle Epoque of Marie Curie, when stuff that glowed in the dark was considered a nerve tonic.
Some local mestizo junk guy had picked the metal barn up off the atomic security lot, sometime after the mighty Fall of Oppenheimer, and some small, tax-evading businessman had hammered and wire-tied the military lab back together, put up its arching iron bands and its waffled sheet iron. It had acquired a series of cut-through, tie-on, handmade wooden shacks, like a series of paradigmatic airlocks into the world of proletarian poverty.
As the southwestern decades passed, the little complex had picked up consumer detritus like the stony growth of a desert rose; a gas pump, a wooden sign, various pachuco spray-bombings, dead batteries, a new concrete floor, a dog’s lair or maybe an urban coyote’s; dead tractor tires, fake nylon Paiute blankets; foot-crushed, illegible, oil-stained calendar pages of zaftig beach-babes, souvenir fake-flint arrowheads chipped by retrofitted warmachines in occupied Japan, fossilized squirts of axle grease, splintered wooden pallets, frayed pulley-belts with every atom of use rubbed out of them by bitter years of high RPM; bent, dented copper rivets, heel-piercing shards of rainbow-colored, fingernail-paring-shaped lathe scrap, six wooden-handled tin buckets of paint long congealed into rubbery, colorless solids, a rat-haunted stack of ancient cedar firewood, empty, logoed flour sacks half gone to woven powder, empty bottles of Jim Beam and Dos Chamucos tequila, a curled-up, sand-eaten, fatally kinked coil of garden hose.…
They spent a cold night on the concrete floor, lighting a little tramp fire on the cracked cement, dancing together to try to keep warm, but there was no sign of the old man.
“I’m sorry he didn’t show up,” Starlitz said resignedly, in the grim pink light of dawn. “This is going to be harder than it looks. I kind of figured it might be, this being the very, very tag end of the century and all, but I didn’t want us to do all that work, if we didn’t have to. We’ll have to try again, and this time we’re gonna have to really put some effort in it.”
“Doesn’t Grandpa know we’re here?”
“He doesn’t have to know.” Starlitz scratched his greasy hair. “We can try the Christmas thing. It’s an entry-way,” he explained. “Every twentieth-century Christmas is pretty much like all the other ones. Christmas got more consumer oriented every year of the century, as the Judeo-Christian thing lost its shareholder value, but the holidays tend to work for him. The surveillance always eases around Christmas. People are sloppy drunk and fighting with their relatives, so they never look hard at strangers. The newspapers are skinnier, the TVs are full of old comedians. Back when I used to see my dad a lot, he would always show up around Christmas.… Kinda wander into town to see me for the holidays, you know.… In Florida, mostly.”
“Are you from Florida, Dad?”
“Yeah, no, maybe. When I was your age, after my mom finally went into the hospital and couldn’t come out again, there was this old guy from outside Tallahassee who took me up … the Professor, we used to call him.… This woman he was with—my stepmom, I guess—she used to feed us.… I used to help out on his great project.” Starlitz rubbed his sandaled heel on an oil stain. “Kind of a child-labor, backwoods, Florida-hick thing, really.”
“He had a great project? I wish I had a great project. What kind of great project?”
“Oh, the usual. Guys like the Professor, they’re beyond the fringe,
but there’s generally some kind of huge, cranky scam going down there.… Guys like him generally have a great project, if they’re strong enough.… If it’s way outside your discourse, the ‘great project’ looks totally nuts. But if you’re inside the story line, it definitely comes across as some kind of very serious world-changing scheme.… The Professor didn’t want to be blown out of the consensus narrative, so he was really clinging on, you know.… Kinda piling up physical evidence of his own existence.… The Professor was putting together this, uhm, personal reality anchor. With used car parts and giant chunks of coral.… I mean giant chunks of Florida coral stone, like five-ton, six-ton chunks.… He used to wait till after dark, so nobody would see him pick ’em up and carry them in his arms.… It passed as a kind of a folk art, this wacky roadside-attraction thing, at least that’s what it looked like, this big stone maze he built, and lots of dangling hubcaps and cypress-root sculptures.… That’s where I lived, when I was a kid.”
“Well, why don’t we go there? I mean, that sounds like a nicer place than this stinky garage. I mean, Florida, wow—I went to Florida once. It’s warm!”
“A tornado took it. Took him, Stepmom, took the whole compound. Mobile homes, trailer park, brochures, the souvenir stand, everything.” Starlitz scratched his dirty head. “At least, they called that thing a tornado, after it was gone.… See, the poor guy just got to be too obvious. There was gonna be some TV coverage, and stuff.…”
Zeta scowled. “Why?”
“Well, that’s how reality works, that’s why.”
“Why does it work like that, Dad?”
“It’s the laws of nature. It’s the birds and the bees.”
“I know about that, Dad,” said Zeta with a wince. “They made me read Our Bodies, Ourselves when I was seven.”
“If only it were that easy. That’s not ‘reality.’ You see: the deeper reality is made out of language.”
Zeta said nothing.
“People don’t understand this. And even if they say it, they sure as hell don’t know what that means. It means there is no such thing as ‘truth.’ There’s only language. There’s no such thing as a ‘fact.’ There is no truth or falsehood, just dominant processes by which reality is socially constructed. In a world made out of language, nothing else is even possible.”
Zeta searched in the dirt. She picked up a rusty nail. “Is this language?”
“Yep. That’s a ‘rusty nail,’ as the conceptual entity called a ‘rusty nail’ is constructed under our cultural circumstances and in this moment in history.”
“It feels real. It still gets my fingers all dirty.”
“Zeta, listen to me. This part is really important. ‘Even though her father loved her, the little girl died horribly because she stepped on the rusty nail.’ That’s language too.”
Zeta’s face crumpled in terror. She hastily flung the nail away into the darkness.
“There is no objective reality. There might be a world that has true reality. A world with genuine physics. Like Newton said, or like Einstein said. But because we’re in a world that’s made out of language, we’ll never, ever get to that place from here. There’s no way out of a world that’s made of language. We can never reach any bedrock reality. The only direction we can move is into different flavors of the dominant social discourse, or across the grain of the consensus narrative, or—and this is the worst part—into the Wittgenstein empty spaces where things can’t be said, can’t be spoken, can’t even be thought.… Don’t even go there, okay? You can never come out of there. It’s a black hole.”
“How come you know so much of this stuff, Dad?”
“I didn’t use to know any of it. I was just living my life. I just liked to go live at the edge of the system, where things were breaking off and breaking down. It took me a long time to figure out what I was really doing, that I was always in some place where the big story was turning into little weird counterstories. But now I’m wising up to my situation, because I’m old now, and I know enough to get along in the world.”
Starlitz sighed. “I don’t know all that much, really. There are just a few people in this world who understand how reality works. Most of them don’t speak English. They speak French. Because they’re all language theorists. Semioticians, mostly, with some, uh, you know, structuralists and poststructuralists.… Luce Iragaray … Roland Barthes … Julia Kristeva … Louis Althusser … These are the wisest people in the world, the only people with a real clue.” Starlitz laughed morosely. “And does it help them? Hell, no! The poor bastards, they strangle their wives, they get run over by laundry trucks.… And after Y2K their whole line of gab is gonna be permanently out of fashion. It’ll be yesterday.”
“How come they know so much?”
“I don’t know how they know. But you can tell they know what’s really going on, because when you read what they say, it sounds really cool and convincing, until you realize that even though you know it, you can’t use that knowledge to change anything. If you can understand reality, then you can’t do anything. If you’re doing anything, it means that you don’t understand reality. You ever heard of any of those French people? I bet you never heard of any of them, right?”
“I’ve heard of Julia Kristeva,” Zeta volunteered shyly. “She’s a second-generation antipatriarchal ideologue, like Carole Pateman and Michèle Le Doeff.”
Starlitz nodded slowly, gratified by this revelation. “I’m glad you know about them.… I’m glad they taught you some of that already, you so young and all.” He shrugged wearily. “I don’t spend enough time with Mom One and Mom Two.… We disagree on a lot of stuff.… We kinda try to get along, but we’re always ticked off at each other, like with my arms-smuggling thing on the commune, or that dope ring out of French Polynesia.… We fight too much. It’s sad, really, you know? I’m sad about it. I should have been around more, helping out, when you were littler.” He sighed. “It was never your fault, Zeta. It was just one of those post-nuclear-family things.”
“Well, you can’t come back to the commune now, because they had to sell out.”
“Yeah, I know that. I guess it had to happen. There’s a big transformation coming. A change in the story line. There aren’t many ways through it.” He sighed, and stood up. “I sure hope I can find us one.”
STARLITZ RESOLVED ON A FULL-SCALE EFFORT. IT WAS, after all, a.d. 1999, a year promoted for decades as the final excuse for a twentieth-century party. He’d been foolish to hold anything back.
It took a long bus trip back to the border, and a full week’s earnest effort, to locate a criminal chop shop. Starlitz ingratiated himself with the speed-crazed bike-gang owners. He carefully wrote down their requisite want-list for marketable windshields, door handles, and mufflers. Then he went out to hunt revenue-on-the-wheel.
His hot-wiring skills were sadly out of practice. In his long absence from the trade, cars had evolved a fiendish repertoire of yelping alarms, backed up with brute-force steering-column clubs. Still, a determined operator with a good eye, a steady hand, and patience was sure to bag a car eventually. It helped a lot to have an alert underage lookout.
Three boosted cars later Starlitz had acquired the requisite sum of folding money. He and Zeta returned by bus to Socorro. They methodically haunted the Goodwills, the St. Vinnies, and the dollar stores. They purchased great shiny wads of flock and tinsel, long, blackout-dotted strands of twinkly Christmas lights, an ancient turntable with working speakers, and a scratched stack of Christmas carols on vinyl. At a desolate yard sale they bagged an unused electrical generator from a despondent New Mexico Y2K survivalist. This tragic geek had forfeited his career, his marriage, and his life savings while trying to hide from buggy software.
Then came a crucial juncture of the operation: assembling a merrie crowd of Christmas revelers in the middle of autumn. Starlitz, who was driving without a license or, indeed, without ID of any kind, borrowed a junked truck from an ill-guarded wrecking yard and set out to hire help. The end
result of his rattling, backfiring campaign was a spontaneous choir of local down-and-outs: six illegal-alien day laborers, seeking employment from the parking lot of the local Home Depot; four grimy, cowboy-hatted Native Americans, off the reservation and cruelly paralyzed on gin and ripple; and an ill-assorted pair of aimless, bearded, mystical drug casualties, your basic local Taoists from Taos.
Starlitz drove the revelers, in shifts and by roundabout routes, back to the abandoned Quonset garage. For the sake of the warmth he lit a hearty, mildly toxic fire in a corroded barrel. Starlitz oiled, lubricated, pull-yanked, and adjusted the survivalist generator, while Zeta strung lights and tinsel from the rust-streaked metal walls. There were glitter-coated party hats all around, and plastic-wrapped candy canes. Then, over the generator’s industrial racket, they fired up the record player and belted out Crosby’s perennial hit “White Christmas.”
Since half of the party spoke no English, the chorus was weak. Two gallon jugs of Mogen-David enlivened the festivities considerably.
“Dad, it’s super loud! Cops are gonna come!”
“Yeah, no, maybe,” Starlitz shouted. “It wouldn’t be the first time, given my dad. But this approach is working! I can feel it!”
The sugared booze was hitting his guests like a series of convoy depth bombs. Starlitz gazed about the fire-shadowed walls. Somewhere outside the sonic limits of their scratchy, atemporal racket, chill night had settled over the desert: the dessicated town was surrounded by silent ticking fallout and the cedar-pollen psychic dust of lost Anasazi spirit guides.
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