Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  “It is working,” Starlitz realized. “Zeta, look, it worked!”

  Zeta removed her hands from her ears. “What did you say?”

  “He came, he’s here! Your grandpa just showed up.”

  Zeta looked doubtfully among the half-collapsing revelers.

  “Count them!” Starlitz said.

  Zeta carefully tallied their guests. “I get thirteen sad old drunk guys,” she said mournfully.

  “Hurray! I only hired twelve!”

  Zeta examined the closed, rotting doors, which had been cinched with a kinked length of rusty chain. “Dad, nobody came in.…”

  “Your grandpa doesn’t have to come through a door. Lemme think.… We’ll give every one of them a cigarette, just like for Christmas, okay? Kind of an ID tag!”

  Starlitz worked his way through the revelers, methodically flicking his Cricket in a mass baptism of smoke. He was dragging them from the booze-sticky depths of their private realms, and into the Christmas-twinkling light of a greater awareness. Each time the lighter flared, they leapt out of their alcoholic shrouds. Teeth gone, bearded lips slack. Windburns from a lifetime of sheepherding. Grizzle and grease, the dust, the smell. Scarred eyelids, spiked eyebrows. Caries, vitamin deficiency. Rural decay, urban decay.

  Then—right before him—here was the man. The man who looked more like the others than the others could ever quite look. He had a face that was a distillation of all lost, invisible faces. He possessed a deep, pristine air of loss, a sense of disconnection so final and complete that there was an eerie joy to it, like poetry in a dead language.

  Starlitz seized the shabby shoulder firmly. “Zeta! Zeta! Come quick!”

  She came at the trot.

  “Look, Zeta, here he is, this is him!”

  The timeless bum puffed his freshly lit cigarette and bent his dirty head. He was firming up considerably now, emerging from infinite shadow into the vivid quotidian world of mass, space-time, weight, grime, grit, filth. Starlitz was astonished to see how young his father looked.

  Starlitz had never witnessed his own father looking so anomalously youthful. With his black, dusty hair, unlined, supple neck, and birdbone wrists, he looked no more than twenty-five.

  Starlitz’s father was wearing khaki pants, canvas shoes without socks, a buttoned gray canvas shirt that might have come from jail or a construction site. All of it colorless and threadbare, bleached by a thousand suns. He lifted one grimy, gracile hand and touched Zeta’s bare wrist. Zeta flinched with the jolt, but the contact visibly enlivened him. Human awareness flooded his distant, shoe-button eyes.

  “O Javanese Navajo,” he muttered.

  “Dad,” said Starlitz anxiously, “you know me, right?”

  The young man shrugged, with a feeble, wavering smile.

  “Hold on to his arm, Zeta. Hold on to him good, don’t let go of him, not even for a second. I’m gonna turn down the music.” Starlitz saw to the blasting phonograph, and returned.

  “Dad,” he said intently, “it’s me, it’s Lech. I’m your son, the son of the Polish girl, the girl at the hospital, remember? This is what I look like when I’m all grown up. And this—this is my daughter, Zenobia. This is your granddaughter, Dad.”

  “Can he talk English?” said Zeta with interest, still clutching the apparition’s scrawny arm. “He sure doesn’t look English.”

  “He can’t talk English, exactly,” Starlitz explained. “He has his own native language. It’s one of those tribal lingos. It has, like, sixteen words for the color orange and eighteen words for deer tracks … but past tense, and present tense, and pluperfect and all that stuff, they never quite worked all that out, somehow. See, he never needed any future tense or past tense. That was never part of his narrative.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Well, I know he had some kind of American legal name once, ’cause they enlisted him in the U.S. Army in the forties. He was in the Pacific war, with the Navajo code talkers. Later he got this broom-pusher job with some big-time feds in Los Alamos.… He had a military accident there, that blew his identity away, just obliterated it.… My mom, your grandma, she always just called him ‘Joe.’ Like ‘GI Joe,’ or ‘Hey, Joe, you got gum?’ So you can just call him ‘Joe,’ too, okay?”

  “Hi, Grandpa Joe,” said Zeta.

  Grandpa Joe smiled at her and said something elaborate, kindly, self-deprecatingly humorous, and completely indecipherable.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” said Zeta, staring at him intently. “I know who this is! I know him! He’s that old man! He’s that nice old man, that guy who used to bring me little toys and stuff!”

  “No kidding? You’ve seen him before?”

  “Yeah! But he was so much older than this. He was all gray haired, and kind of bent over, and he used to talk to himself in a made-up language, and walk backwards and forwards all the time. He used to come around at Christmas. He gave me, like, cool old candy with real sugar in it!” Zeta scowled. “Mom One and Mom Two, they always said I was making him up.”

  “Wow, Dad, good one!” Starlitz said gratefully, patting the lost man’s broomstick upper arm. “See, your grandpa Joe just doesn’t have a forward gear or a reverse gear. But he never forgets what he saw in the future, just the same.”

  Joe nodded cordially, with an apologetic grin. Joe was still rather spectral, but he seemed increasingly pleased with himself. Joe resembled a young GI who had witnessed some unspeakable Nazi atrocity, but had swiftly restored his aplomb with a stiff rye highball and a Benny Goodman track.

  “Wow, so that nice old man was my grandpa all along!” said Zeta cheerily. “That guy who brought me that old-fashioned watch that glowed in the dark.”

  Grandpa Joe placed a tender hand on his granddaughter’s shoulder, and looked at Starlitz confidingly.

  Starlitz was touched to the core. To think that his father had taken such trouble, under such difficult personal circumstances. Visiting his only granddaughter, bringing her anachronistic gifts, right there at the very edge of his wandering range, in the century’s very last decade. This was truly above and beyond the call. Starlitz felt an unspoken stress suddenly easing inside himself. He knew now that he had done the right thing in coming here. No matter what past losses or future consequences, it had already all been worth it.

  “Kayak,” said Grandpa Joe, clearing his throat. “Kinnik-kinnik. Knock conk.”

  “He’s trying to talk to us!” Zeta said excitedly.

  Grandpa Joe was gathering strength. Far less phantomlike now, he’d gone all wiry and virile, even jitterbuggy. He turned to Zeta, winked at her cozily, and jerked a derisive thumb at Starlitz. “Dolce Vita man. An amative clod!”

  “Aw, Dad’s okay,” Zeta said defensively. “Dad’s a lot of fun, when you get to know him!”

  Joe sniffed sentimentally. “Ma is as selfless as I am.”

  “He’s talking about your grandmother,” Starlitz explained. “Nurse Starlitz. Agnieszka Starlitz. See, she’d been in the death camps in Poland, but once she made it safe to America, she got to where she could see Joe better than anyone else could. Agnieszka could even touch him.… They were never in the same place long enough to get married, but my mom and dad, they were pretty much two of a kind. So they kinda looked after each other.”

  “Can we meet my grandma too?”

  Starlitz shook his head mournfully. “She’s mighty hard to reach now, sweetheart. She’s got her wheelchair, the remote control, her oatmeal three times a day.… Sometimes she’s the nurse, sometimes she’s the patient, most of the time she was both at once, see, kind of a phase-change thing.… I guess you wouldn’t understand that, it’s kind of a grown-up thing, but, no, you can’t see your grandma. Trust me, you really don’t want to be in the kind of mental head-space where you see a lot of Nurse Starlitz.” Starlitz rubbed his chin. “But if anyone can get to her, it would be him.”

  Grandpa Joe was feeling his oats. He stood up, yawned, and stretched. The electrical generator immediately
coughed and died. The Christmas lights winked out. The record player perished with a voltage-starved groan.

  The few bums still singing Christmas carols quickly gave it up. The dead garage was shrouded in flickering metallic dimness, lit only by the blazing trash in its iron Bhopal barrel, but Starlitz’s father did not mind this. On the contrary, the silent, mythic glow of firelight seemed to strengthen Joe considerably. He was in a jollier, almost bumptious mood.

  He gazed at the nearest reveler with amused contempt. “Man.” He grinned. “Eve let an idiot—a retromastoid idiot, Sam, or teratoid—in at eleven A.M.!”

  “Never mind these other crazy jaspers, Dad. We’re just glad to see you. You’re looking great, considering that it’s 1999 and all.”

  Starlitz rose to comfort the parishioners and deliver more wine all around. When he came back, he found his daughter and his father rapt in conversation.

  “See, Grandpa, it’s all about ‘calling down the moon,’ ” Zeta told him shyly. “My two moms do a lot of moon-worship rites, out in the old-growth forest.”

  “Most naive deviants ‘Om,’ ” Joe offered thoughtfully.

  “You know what, Grandpa? I just got back from a place where they have Moslem people!”

  Joe nodded indulgently. “Nail a Moslem a camel, So-malian! Ottoman in a motto.”

  “Wow, Dad sure gets along with you, Zeta,” said Starlitz, sitting down with his Mexican backpack. “I need to tell you Grandpa’s life story now.” Starlitz ceremonially produced his amber bottle of Gran Centenario tequila and a waxed stack of cheap paper cups. “It’s important that you learn this history, okay? This is your heritage, girl. Grandpa would have kind of a hard time telling the story all by himself.” Starlitz pulled the bottle’s foil tab and cracked the plastic twist-off top. “You don’t mind helping me out a little with the old story line, do you, Dad?”

  “O no,” Joe agreed cordially. He accepted a filled paper cup of tequila. “Rot a gill, alligator!” He drank.

  “Well, first of all, no matter what Joe says, he’s not a ‘Javanese Navajo,’ ” Starlitz said. “He’s ethnic, all right—he’s extremely ethnic—but no matter what ethnic label you pin on him, Joe is always somebody else. And that’s your true ancestry, Zeta. You belong to the tribe of those who never belong to a tribe.”

  Starlitz sipped the tequila. Gran Centenario: a vintage century, one hell of a nostalgia kick. “Your family: we break the mold, okay? We live in the cracks in the broken mold. Your grandpa Joe … well, he was always one of ‘them’ who wasn’t ever actually ‘them.’ He’s the Javanese Navajo, the overlapping element in two different circles that are never supposed to meet.”

  “Yeah! Okay!” said Zeta cheerfully. This was clearly making a lot of sense to her. It was as if she had been waiting all her life to hear this revelation. She shivered with delight.

  “Joe got into the war early on.… Because wars are perfect for people like him. You always end up with, you know, totally freakish situations that nobody can explain. The freakishness doesn’t even become visible till years later, because, at the time, they’ve been in combat for months on end, so they’re way past thinking straight about anything.… That Navajo code-talker thing, the Japanese Purple Code in the Pacific, those prehistoric analog code-breaker computers, those weird Nazi wind-up code machines, the gay British mathematician with the secret life, all of it super, super secret, all super important, nobody hears a goddamn word about it, till thirty, forty, fifty years later.… Well, that situation was perfect for Joe. Even though he is what he is.… No, because of what he is. It made him what he is.”

  “Dad … I like this story a lot, but … Joe’s awful young for a grandpa, Dad. He looks younger than you, even.”

  Starlitz coughed on a throat-ripping barb of tequila. “I’m getting to that part. They mustered young Grandpa out of the Navajo code thing—probably because that code he was speaking wasn’t really Navajo—and they made him a kind of local gopher or janitor around the Manhattan Project. Where they were building the atomic bomb, getting ready to test-fire it.”

  Joe spoke up again at this point, with an authoritative, been-there-done-that nod. “Oh, a parabola-lob Arapaho.”

  “Yeah, Joe was a local Indian janitor—mostly, though, he was stealing their office supplies. Spare tires, gasoline, scrap metal, all very valuable back then, during the rationing. These atom-bomb professors had tremendous resources, billions of 1940s dollars, it was all totally hush-hush, they were in a tremendous hurry, so all kinds of valuable stuff was kinda falling off the back of the atom trucks.… You can take it for granted that there has to be some kind of black-market operator, in any situation like that.… Well, it was Joe, of course.”

  “Megatart’s stratagem,” commented Joe.

  “Then the time came to actually test the atomic bomb … the ‘Gizmo,’ they called it. Out at the Trinity site, here in New Mexico.… For some lame security reason they decided to set this bomb off, in a violent rainstorm, at five o’clock in the morning. So, Zeta, just imagine it: it’s pitch black, there’s a high wind, and the straights can’t see a damn thing because they’re all hiding in their bunkers a thousand yards away.… So that’s the best excuse ever to sneak out to the shot tower, and steal a bunch of cool stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Zeta said thoughtfully.

  “Tons of valuable copper wiring in there, or maybe even the plutonium core. Because, you know, with all the tremendous expense it took ’em to refine that plutonium, that stuff was the most valuable scrap metal on earth. So Joe was either directly under the Bomb, or maybe—and I know this sounds weird, but the records of the test kinda back this up—he may have actually crawled inside the Bomb, just before they bolted the last plates onto it. And then it blew. The biggest, most powerful release of energy that the human race had ever created.” Starlitz sighed. “It blew him right out of history.”

  “How’d it do that?” said Zeta with interest.

  “Well, see, that was a defining moment in the twentieth-century narrative. The twentieth century’s core thematic moment. The Bomb was an off-the-wall, shattering, plot-smashing freak scene, straight out of nowhere, very unexpected, a ten-out-of-ten on the world disruption scale. History has never been the same since the Bomb—because history has to live under this glowing mushroom cloud that says, ‘History is provisional.’ Cause-and-effect just kind of lost its grip on Joe—ever since then your grandpa has been kind of smeared across the whole twentieth century, kinda like an electron fog. He’s sort of everywhere in the twentieth-century narrative at once now—but he can only, well, register, when he’s being observed. When someone’s looking at him. When someone’s looking for him.”

  “Like here and now?”

  “Like exactly right here and right now.”

  “Wow. So, this is like, a super special time, then.”

  “That’s right, Zeta. So take a good look, and try hard to remember, okay? Because this is the last time ever.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s a good thing that you saw him now, and that you saw him before, because in the future you’re not gonna see him.”

  “Why not? What about next year?”

  Joe shook his head sadly. “No darn radon.”

  “Grandpa’s right,” Starlitz said heavily, “after Y2K there’s no way.”

  Zeta was stricken. “But why not?”

  “It’s a Bomb thing,” Starlitz said. “It’s the narrative of the Bomb. There is no ‘Atomic Age’ in the next century. The Atomic Age is over, it’s yesterday. The meaning of the Bomb is different after Y2K. I mean, if you ever see them set a Bomb off … the Bomb was the twentieth-century Holy Grail, but it can only be the Holy Grail for about eight minutes. For eight incredible minutes you get to walk around with your sunglasses on in the shock wave, saying all this heavy, supermythical narrative crap like ‘I am brighter than a thousand suns, I am become Death the destroyer of worlds.’ … But when your eight minutes is up, then all you’ve got is t
rash. Trash by definition, okay?”

  Starlitz gazed into his daughter’s candid eyes: he was doing his best to level with her; it was the time for it. “Let’s go back to the story of the Trinity test shot. Well, first you’ve got this silent flash that lights the mountains. Then, a gigantic shock wave. Then a huge boiling egg, a phoenix that rises up into the sky, and then, the desert wind slowly pulls the mushroom cloud apart.… But then … after the heat dies down … you got four federal guys, in hats and suspenders and uniforms, standing around these melted, screwed-up pieces of reinforcement rod. That’s it. That’s the Atomic story line. Atomic energy is a super cool cosmic breakthrough for maybe eight minutes. After that … it’s radiation waste. Trash, practically forever. Trash now, trash a hundred years from now, trash ten thousand years from now. The next century lives downstream from the Atomic Age. So whenever it looks at a nuke, it never sees the original glamour, it always sees the trash first.”

  “No way! But what about Grandpa? It just isn’t fair!”

  “After Y2K it’s just not his kind of story anymore.”

  Joe looked at Zeta with distant pity. It was visibly paining him to hurt her feelings. But there was just no way around the issue. Joe struggled to explain. “Miss, I’m Cain, a monomaniac. Miss, I’m Cain, a monomaniac. Miss, I’m …”

  “That’s enough, Dad,” Starlitz said. “I’ll explain to her some other time, all about the Bomb and the mark-of-Cain part.”

  “Hey, man,” said one of the revelers, wandering over, “you got tequila here.”

  Zeta clenched her slender fists. “But it can’t just be all over, just like that!”

  “Kid,” said Starlitz, “when it’s over, it’s over.”

  Zeta wasn’t taking it well. Her mind raced in rebellion. She sat up with an excited grin. “But, Dad! Hey, Dad, the year 2000 is still part of the twentieth century! It says so in my math book! So Grandpa should get a whole other year! Right?”