“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.”
Viktor lowered his voice. “A lot of money in that band. Tours. New clothes.”
“That’s great.”
“A new album. Turkish lyrics.”
“No kidding.”
“The French One died.”
“Oh, hell. The French One? Dead? The French One was the only one who could sing!”
“Her own fault. She was stupid. She snorted the wrong kind of white powder in a party in Yerevan. Ozbey hired a new French One. A Moroccan girl from the Arab quarter of Paris. ‘Cheba Angélique,’ a rai singer in exile. She is hot! The crowds love her! She makes the old French One look like a week-old blancmange.”
“I can’t believe the French One’s dead.”
“She is dead, though. Very. I saw her when they shipped the body through. And the new American One! Oh, my God.”
“You didn’t have sex with her, did you?”
“No, but Ozbey did. And Ozbey’s Uncle the Minister. And Ozbey’s uncle’s boss. The husband of the former prime minister bought her a gold Mercedes. And so did a Saudi prince. And the playboy son of the president of Azerbaijan gave the American One a hundred thousand dollars in a casino in Yerevan. She took her clothes off in the steppes of—”
“I get the picture there, man.”
“She’s huge. She’s huge like Ozbey, only … like a woman, a pop star.”
“You’re dead sure the French One is really dead?”
“She’s dead as Napoleon, Lekhi. She’s deader than Minitel.”
“That’s a very big problem. I’ll be in touch.” Starlitz hung up.
AS THE PLANE ROSE FROM THE NEW AND BARELY FUNCTIONAL Denver airport, Zeta stuck her nose to the scratched and clouded glass. “Boy, you’re the greatest, Dad. No finals! And Hawaii! Wow, I’ve never even been to Hawaii. Can we surf? Boy, life is just so great!”
BY THE DAWN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY EVERY SCRAP of the island of Kauai had been tidily sewn up by six oligarchical clans. These were Anglo-Hawaiian plantation folks, people with the tooth-gritting single-mindedness of Scarlett O’Hara, but in sarongs instead of hoop skirts. Only a hellish catastrophe could force them to sell off the homeland.
Luckily, a horrific El Niño typhoon had ravaged Kauai in 1992. A macadamia-nut plantation, reduced by floods and high winds to a mess of leafless jackstraws, had slipped the grasp of its ruined owners. Makoto won the bidding, but it was Barbara who closed the deal. Barbara had wafted her ethereal way to the local equivalent of Tara, assembled the heartbroken Hawaiian farmers, and performed a faultless slack-key rendition of the sentimental local classic, “Pupu Hinuhinu.” Grandma, still clutching her termite-eaten land grant from the royal court of Liliuokalani, had burst into tears of relief. The clan had escaped unbearable ritual humiliation. Because Makoto and Barbara were artists. They could sing.
As it happened, although Barbara was a major-league Japanese pop star, Barbara was not technically Japanese. Barbara was a Sino-Irish-Polish-Filipino girl, the daughter of two U.S. State Department translators. She’d been born in Kuala Lumpur, and raised in Warsaw, Brussels, Singapore, and Zurich. Barbara was a rarity, a true native of Imperial America’s offshore diaspora. Until gently washing up on the white beaches of Hawaii, Barbara had never lived in even a single one of the United States.
Starlitz had no problem understanding Makoto. Starlitz got along fine with Makoto. Makoto was probably the most technically accomplished pop musician in the world, but as long as you didn’t ask Makoto to explain his music, the guy’s means, motives, and tactics were perfectly comprehensible. Makoto was a Japanese hippie studio producer. Being Japanese made him a tad inscrutable, being a hippie was plenty weird, and his career in the music biz was somewhat unusual. But these three aspects of Makoto’s personality were almost always overshadowed by the fact that Makoto was a multimillionaire.
By stark contrast Starlitz found Barbara to be truly unearthly. Starlitz was a little vague about the intensely private boy-meets-girl history there, but apparently Makoto had discovered Barbara idly dawdling in some New Wave dive in Shibuya, wearing a tight sweater and sipping a malted soymilk, existing about eight million light-years away from anybody’s idea of a national heritage. Like a lot of pretty girls who had once been too tall and thin, Barbara was a big modelesque mess. She had been lounging in her private thicket of thorns, the slumbering pop princess of the Pacific Rim.
Then Makoto arrived on her scene, sniffed the somnolent air, and said unto her, “Baby, Be Magic.” Barbara awoke, blinked, had her hair, lips, and nails done over, and exploded on the stage. To become magic was the first sincere demand that anyone had ever made of Barbara. Barbara was perfectly willing to be magic. There was nothing else to be done about her.
Starlitz wasn’t the kind of guy to get all sentimental about a chick who could sing. But he’d never met any human being so fully vested in her rapturous girly divahood as Barbara. Barbara was a hundred and five percent diva: east, west, north, and south, even straight up and down. There just wasn’t a lot of conventional human being inside the global diva construct there. Likely there hadn’t been a whole lot to Barbara to begin with. Maybe the height, the bone structure, and the vocal cords.
Barbara had no detectable ego. Public adulation meant nothing to her. She was Makoto�
��s shining star, the beloved muse of a musical genius; she was like a guitar that could eat, sleep, and kiss him. Makoto himself was never the star. Makoto could play onstage, he could make a band drive, he could solo even, but Makoto was a bespectacled Japanese hipster with long hair washed in borax and a head like a soccer ball. With Makoto in reach, however, Barbara could perform absolutely anything. There seemed to be no end to the woman’s musical flexibility. She could remain in soft focus under an eight-hundred-watt klieg light. Barbara could empty her nonexistent heart to every lonely human being in a packed stadium through an amp stack at eighty decibels, and leave them convinced that perfect romance existed and would always elude them. And, perhaps most to the point, Barbara could flawlessly enunciate Japanese synth-pop, Indonesian kroncong and dangdut, Hong Kong canto-pop, Jamaican reggae, and six regional varieties of Eurodisco.
Makoto and Barbara—they’d had a number of band identities, since they kept spinning sidemen in and out of the stables at Toshiba-EMI and Sony-Epic—had never broken a hit in the United States. They had been huge in the seventies in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand, Norway, and Finland. In the eighties they’d been mega in Portugal, Goa, Macao, Malta, Ibiza, Korea, Sweden, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. They’d scored one-off top-ten hits in France, Spain, Holland, Italy, and Greece. Makoto and Barbara were infallibly big in Japan—even Makoto’s spin-off bands were big in Japan. But they had never dented the American market. Never ever. Even though they both spoke mostly English, lived in America, and had every Elvis Presley record ever made.
Starlitz and Zeta arrived at Makoto’s dream home just after noon mid-Pacific time. The mogul’s mansion couldn’t properly be described as “sprawling”—it was properly huge, all right, but it resembled an exquisite, fragile Japanese box kite that had tumbled from a great height onto the vivid green hillside of Kauai’s North Shore. The angular flutter of precisely sited walls was surrounded by fragrant trellises, lanai porches, swirling wooden walkways, and melancholy, bougainvillea-shrouded satellite dishes.
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