Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  “Okay, let’s ask our friend here about that,” said Starlitz, turning to the leaning drunk. “Hey, buddy. I’ll give you a shot of the cactus juice here, but first you gotta answer me something, okay? When does the twenty-first century start?”

  The derelict brushed at a desert-dusty dreadlock. “New Year’s Day, man. Y2K. Everybody knows that. Planes fall out of the sky, blackouts all over the place …”

  “Suppose you start back at the year zero, and start counting off hundreds of years. Aren’t you gonna come up one year short?”

  “Why the hell would I wanna do that?” He turned to the others. “Hey, borrachos!” he shouted. “Tenemos tequila!”

  Surrounded by swift and boisterous demand, Starlitz distributed the contents of the bottle. It didn’t take long to kill off the Gran Centenario. Straight, no chaser.

  Layered onto a bellyful of kosher wine, the tequila hit the crowd like ruinous high-octane jet fuel. One of the day laborers drunkenly yanked the generator back into life. The Christmas lights flickered on. Two guys flung rags and bits of ancient board into the trash barrel, which blazed up enthusiastically, flooding the garage with a bloody glare.

  Starlitz spoke up earnestly. “Dad—tell me about Mom, okay? What is she like now, in that old folks’ home?”

  Joe knocked back his tequila and shuddered. He nodded reluctantly, chin wobbling back and forth. It could have been a trick of the flaming light, but Joe looked a full hundred years old now. He shook his head mournfully. “Senicide medicines.”

  Starlitz tapped his forehead. “She’s already gone, up here, for all intents and purposes, right? Y2K can’t touch her now: she already left.”

  Joe’s brown eyes glittered. Joe’s eyes looked quite ageless suddenly, like two puddles of heat-fused glass. Not glassy cold, though. Lit from within by masculine will, almost a soldierly heroism, a man who had come fully to terms with every blow that life would ever be able to deal him.

  Joe drew a solemn breath and lifted his shabby arm, the flag bearer at the barbed-wire brink of his trench. “Are we not drawn onward, we few—drawn onward to a new era?”

  Starlitz turned his face away. He swallowed his tequila, and now the booze was on top of him, with that fatal charm of alcohol, that deadly skill the drug had of turning real emotion into sentiment. When you were drunk, you knew very well how you felt; the truth welled up from its deepest pits of repression, but the booze bleached the sharpness and the color away, it became the cheap, grainy cartoon version of your anguish. “My God,” Starlitz said, “my God, I’m truly stuck now. A few more ticks of the old atomic clock, and I’m finally all alone in the world. I’m alone in the universe, Dad. No mother, no father. I’m an orphan.”

  Zeta’s eyes welled up. “But I’m still here, Dad! Look at me! I’m not an orphan!”

  Starlitz put an arm around her shoulder. The two of them fell silent, looking at Joe. Starlitz had never realized it, that a child could be such a source of strength. She was pulling him into the future, like hands reaching over the gunwale of a lifeboat.

  The drunks were singing again. They’d found a Mexican “Feliz Navidad” record in the stack of battered vinyl, a pop track with a little more picante to it. Someone had marijuana. The juice and weed had liberated their sense of seasonal generosity. The ones who could still stand were attempting to dance. Joe looked at their staggering tea-head antics, amused, his wily face the picture of forties hepcat cool. “So!” he said. “Catnip in tacos?”

  As the smoldering barrel continued to blaze, the garage filled with toxic smoke. Starlitz felt his eyes stinging painfully. Why hide anything? It was a wake, the century was a dead dog.

  There was a violent banging at the broken door. “¡Policía! Police!”

  “¡La Migra!” someone yelled. Instant panic broke out among the revelers.

  Joe laughed in defiance as he faded from sight. He simply evaporated before the pair of them, like a veil of handmade lace in an atomic sheet of purifying flame. Starlitz barely caught his last cry: “So crank on in, OK narcos!”

  “Dad, it’s cops!” Zeta shrieked in terror.

  “Just sit down, Zeta,” Starlitz said, wiping his eyes. “Put your hands where the officers can see ’em, okay? This is just something we gotta get through.”

  STARLITZ WAS ARRESTED FOR VAGRANCY. THERE WERE potential charges aplenty waiting for him: breaking and entering, trespassing, corrupting a minor, driving without a license in a boosted truck with no inspection sticker, creating fire hazards, attempted arson, and so forth. And so forth. But these charges were all contingent on his revealing who he was. Starlitz had no ID, and he wasn’t answering any questions.

  He got one obligatory phone call. He tried an emergency number, got an answering machine in Washington, D.C. No dice. Starlitz went back into the jug.

  Three days passed. Starlitz wouldn’t talk. The sheriff’s department soon grew bored with him, but this was a question of will. In any prison situation the bulls always had it figured that time was theirs to give or take. Starlitz stayed out of fights, watched prison television, kept his teeth, hair, nails, and his uniform clean, and finally wheedled his way into a second phone call.

  This time the line picked up.

  “Jane O’Houlihan?” he said.

  “You got her. It’s your dime.”

  “Actually, this is the county’s dime, Jane. I’m in a county slammer in Socorro, New Mexico.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my Caller ID says. So who is this?”

  “I can’t tell you, because even county cops tap phone calls these days. But think back to the early nineties, okay? You’re an assistant attorney general in Utah. There’s a Section Ten Thirty bust of a bunch of radical anti-abortionists. Inside the Utah state capitol. Remember that?”

  “Oh, fuck,” O’Houlihan said thoughtfully. “It’s Leggy.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Jane. Voice from the past, and all that. Guy who knew you when. Listen, I need a favor.”

  “Did you leave a message on my answering machine last Monday?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Damn, I had that figured for phone phreaks. They’re all Bulgarian now, did you know that? Shitloads of crazy Bulgarians.” O’Houlihan sniffed. “What the hell good is telecom security when the fucking national phone company is owned by Bulgarian maphiya? And the little sons of bitches have got my office number too.”

  “At least they’re not Serbian.”

  “You’re joking, right? The worst ones are Serbian.”

  “Well, at least they’re not Russian.”

  O’Houlihan’s voice fell even lower. “In Russia the cops are the maphiya.…”

  “Jane, I know you’re busy, so let me cut to the chase here, okay? Things got out of hand, down here on the border. I got busted for vagrancy. I need the DoJ to yank me some big federal strings from Washington, so I can walk out of this mess.”

  “You’re kidding, right? You expect me to get you out of some county jug? Sonny boy, you have no idea what kind of operational constraints we feds labor under. I gotta fill out six OMB forms and an Al Gore Website to procure a friggin’ hairpin.”

  “Janie, you’re hurting my feelings, okay? Who was it that boosted you into the Spinster Prosecutors’ Club, at the right hand of Janet Reno? If it wasn’t for my unique talent-spotting abilities, you’d still be busting check forgers in deepest, darkest Mormonville.”

  “Don’t you dare tug my chain, boyo. I can reach out with my big Yellow Pages finger here”—there was a series of rapid disconnection-clicks on the line—“and you’re just another sad cry for help in alt dot prison dot support. You get me?”

  “Janie, don’t hang up.”

  “That’s more like it,” O’Houlihan said.

  “Look, it’s just a vagrancy rap. I was broke, and I have no ID on me, and I was sleeping in an empty garage. Those aren’t even supposed to be crimes, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You weren’t holding dope, right?”

  “No, no drugs
.”

  “You didn’t have a hot-wired laptop, or a shitload of guns, or anything?”

  “No way.”

  “Then what was it? You’re not telling me what it fuckin’ was.”

  “Well, there’s an underage kid involved.…”

  “Aw, Jesus.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “Your daughter?” O’Houlihan gasped in astonishment. “Your daughter, Starlitz? Your daughter by what?” She paused. “Not those little toll-fraud dyke bitches from Oregon.”

  “Uh, yeah, one of them.”

  “Why do men do this to themselves?” said O’Houli-han wonderingly. “When there are wonderful women in the world, like Grace Hopper, and Madeleine Albright, and Janet Reno. Honest women. Clean. Dedicated. Faithful public servants.”

  “It’s not just asking for me, okay? It’s for the kid. They’ll book her in some kind of juvenile facility, and she’s led a really sheltered life. She’s only eleven years old.”

  “So what is this alleged child’s name? You got her SS number handy?”

  “Her name is Zenobia Boadicea Hypatia McMillen.”

  “Look, that’s enough names for five or six little hippie kids.”

  “I didn’t name her, okay? And I don’t have five or six kids, I only have one. I’m at rock bottom, Jane. She’s all I’ve got left in the world.”

  “Okay,” said O’Houlihan slowly. “Maybe you got me all touched here. Maybe I can do something about dismissing a New Mexico vagrancy rap. It’s not some Chinese Los Alamos atom-spy thing, anyhow. Right?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Her voice grew taut. “So: give over. And I’ll think about it.”

  “What do you need to know?” Starlitz said cautiously.

  “Whatta ya got?”

  “We shouldn’t talk about this on a tapped line.”

  “I’m a heavy fed now, okay? Rule number one, I don’t want anything that any fucking redneck county sheriff can do or care a fucking thing about.”

  “Okay,” said Starlitz. “If that’s how you want to play it. I wanna help you out here, I’m serious. I appreciate the role of law enforcement. I got my ear to the ground. I got some pretty weird contacts. I think I could turn you on to some pretty heavy-duty, fed-style casework here.”

  “I’m listening,” O’Houlihan said.

  “Like, for instance … hey! Come to think of it, I know two girls who had oral sex with the President!”

  “The Big Guy beat the rap in Congress. Barely. Reno’s not gonna go through that scene again. She’d rather cut her own ears off.”

  “Okay, how about: a big commune full of backwoods, Bible-thumping, apocalypse cultists. They’re totally insane. And they are armed to the teeth.”

  “That’s an ATF job. I never work with the ninja tobacco-inspectors.”

  “Uh, okay … how about a military washout kid who’s got a borderline, white-supremacist, paranoia thing? He’s buying fertilizer and he hired a rental truck!”

  “Tell it to Ted Kaczynski! I don’t do loners. There’s way too many of ’em. I need a case with some meat on it, like a good RICO thing.”

  “I’m with you here.… Okay, maybe I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel, but how about a private mafia of trench-coat-wearing high-school teenagers who want to shoot all the jocks in their gym class?”

  “That is kid stuff! Do I look twelve years old to you? Come on, get serious!”

  “Okay,” Starlitz said wearily. “Listen. This is my best pitch. Turkish heroin is being smuggled into Turkish Cyprus inside giant inflatable bags of tap water.”

  Starlitz heard the rapid scratching of a mechanical pencil.

  “ ‘Cyprus,’ you said? ‘Turkish’ Cyprus?”

  “Yeah.”

  Starlitz heard the dry tapping of a keyboard and the rapid swish of an ergonomic mouse. “Eastern Mediterranean island? Economic embargo regime? Under international trade sanctions?”

  “Yup. That would be the place.”

  “This is heroin, though, right? And a brand-new smuggling method, right? Never discovered, never been busted by anybody before?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Starlitz said, brightening. “So listen: if I’m gonna out these submarine smack guys, I need the witness-protection nine yards. Me and my kid, too, okay?”

  ONCE HE’D BEEN SIGNED OUT OF THE SLAMMER, STARLITZ took a bus north to Albuquerque to spring his daughter out of the state juvenile facility. This was by no means an easy matter, since the facility had been designed specifically to repel any and all suspicious male loners who might claim that they were somebody’s father.

  While he planned Zeta’s prison break, Starlitz kept his daughter’s spirits up by smuggling in her favorite foods: tuna sandwiches on crustless bread, all-white-marshmallow bags, provolone-and-macaroni casseroles. Given that it was her first time in custody, Zeta had been bearing up well. Granted, there had been some unfortunate incidents. An episode of walking on the ceiling, the spontaneous poltergeist-style explosion of a television, a social worker’s handbag bursting into flame. Starlitz was not too concerned. These things could be swiftly explained away with the normal paradigms of child misbehavior circa 1999, i.e., designer drug use and bad digital media. Starlitz knew that the kid had gumption. He was convinced that she would be okay.

  When they finally met in the cheerless conference room, with its unburnable, unbreakable, tot-colored plastic furniture, Starlitz saw a lost, doubting look in Zeta’s eyes. He’d never seen such a gaze of silent reproach in a human face. It lanced through him like an emotional harpoon; he found it worse than being shot. He had failed to take proper care. She knew it. He knew it. He could offer no conceivable excuse.

  Starlitz social-engineered the staff by phoning and faxing in a stream of deceptive messages, adopting the guises and letterheads of a child-custody lawyer and a school psychiatrist. He extracted Zeta out the facility doors on a “day trip.” The two of them swiftly vanished from New Mexico’s official ken.

  Starlitz had had more than enough of the local hospitality. They crossed the border into Colorado.

  They finally departed the Greyhound together at Boulder. The city of Boulder seemed as good a place to stop and recoup as any, and maybe a better place than most.

  Over the next week Starlitz finally buckled down to the real-life role of single fatherhood. He rented them a trailer at the Mapleton Mobile Home Park. The trailer was owned by a carpenter with a collapsing marriage, so the front and rear yards were full of unplaned boards and broken tools and mounds of rotting sawdust. A giant set of transmission towers strode through the neighborhood, through the pines, the willows, the brown Dumpsters, the kids’ bicycles, the clotheslines, and the barbecue pits.

  Starlitz got a straight job as a retail clerk at a convenience store, just up the street past the pediatric center and the eye clinic. He opened a bank account and acquired some training-wheel credit cards. He enrolled Zeta in sixth-grade classes at a Boulder public school. He hired a child-custody lawyer and filled out the reams of necessary paperwork.

  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.