Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  “That’s right.”

  “The French One died. Snorting smack. In some crap hotel in the middle of Asia.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “I thought you’d win that bet, Reggae. Not that I cared. It was a crazy bet. Why would you want to make a bet like that? You win the bet, you get a little money. You lose that bet: you have to be magic, baby. Magic.”

  Starlitz spoke in English. “I wouldn’t call three hundred million yen tax-free ‘a little money.’ I would have had some major use for that kind of bread. On the far side of Y2K a fat stack of yen would have been handy.”

  “It isn’t much money,” shrugged Makoto. “First hundred million yen is hardest. But now, you lost. Right?” He looked at Starlitz candidly, vague interest dawning.

  Starlitz shrugged mournfully. “Yeah. So I’ll be magic, man. I’ll be magic for you real soon now.”

  “Where did it go wrong?” said Makoto.

  “Well, man, I’ve been thinking about that. Seriously. It would be easy to say that I blew off the gig for personal reasons. Because of my little girl, and the giri and the ninjo obligations, and all that. Yeah, I dropped the G-7 gig, I gave it up. But if it wasn’t my daughter showing up, it just would have been somethin’ else. It was just dumb of me to think that we could create a multinational pop act that would make us a shitload of money, but that had absolutely no talent, soul, inspiration, or musical sincerity whatsoever.”

  “It make good sense. Basic modern trend of the industry.”

  Starlitz spread his hands. “Sure, sure. I mean, of course you and I could create a successful global pop act. We had the capital, we had the know-how, we had the contacts. But I couldn’t get away with that. The world only looks that fucking cynical. I was violating a major narrative. I should have known some girl would end up getting dramatically killed over G-7, even though the act was totally bogus and meant absolutely nothing.” Starlitz sighed. “And it was the French One too. That clinches it for sure, man. See, the French One was the very best one, she understood the whole G-7 pitch, she knew we were creating a scene that was a total precession of the simulacrum with no real signifiers. Besides, she was the only one who could sing.”

  “G-7 making very good money now,” Makoto offered. “G-7 making lots more money.”

  “Well, that’s not surprising.”

  “Hai,” said Makoto intently, “this Turkish gentleman friend of yours, Mehmet Ozbey-san … He seems to be very businesslike, quite an accomplished manager. The money’s coming in like clockwork, every week. In Turkish government bonds, no less. Inside a diplomatic parcel!” Makoto examined a burning run on his joint and dampened it with a licked fingertip. “Our old G-7 accountant—what was his name?”

  “ ‘Nick.’ ”

  “ ‘Nick.’ ” Makoto puffed smoke and switched back to English. “The British police, they arrest your Nick. In Istanbul. Interpol grab him. I’m afraid your friend Nick, not very honest accountant.”

  “Damn. I’m sorry about that. For Nick, I mean.” Starlitz shook his head. “I might have known Nick would crash. Or more likely, get pushed. Nick was important to me, but for Ozbey, Nick was in the way.” Starlitz scratched at his jawline, irritated. “That was a delicate arrangement. There weren’t a lot of guys with Nick’s unique talents who wanted in on such a crap deal.”

  Makoto stubbed out his joint. “Indonesia in currency crash,” he said firmly. “Malaysia very sick financially. Japan in steady recession, eight, nine year. Hong Kong scene have hand over mouth from new China bosses. But Central Asia, much oil money, no pop-music penetration. I write G-7 one special song. Just for fun.”

  “Oh, no!” Starlitz blurted, stunned. “Tell me you didn’t write them a good song!”

  Sheepishly, Makoto switched to Japanese. “Listen to me, Reggae,” he said reasonably, “I know I promised you that I would never give the act any decent tunes. That was part of the bet. But once that girl was dead, our previous arrangement was off. So, I admit it; I wrote a new song for G-7. Kind of a cool, Central Asian, Tuvan-throat-singing treatment. And it’s a hit, brother. Biggest pop hit ever to premiere in Tashkent.”

  Starlitz struggled back to English. “Why are you pushing this thing? You’re all playing with fire. You know that, don’t you?”

  “G-7 my best commercial act now. Besides”—Makoto scowled—“hot DJ kid in London write them good song anyway.”

  “You’re kidding. Which DJ kid would that be?”

  “The new DJ kids all the same! Electronica kid in London have stupid computer in bed-sit, can’t even read music, play guitar!”

  “Which DJ kid was it? I need a name.”

  “ ‘DJ Dead White Eurocentric.’ ”

  Starlitz winced. “Oh, man, that’s scary! You’re scaring me here. What the hell is he doing writing tunes for G-7? He’s got Madonna hammering his door with her baby over her arm.”

  Makoto rubbed the broad bridge of his nose. “G-7 are hot. He smells them burning. Just like me.” Makoto looked glumly into the prescient gleam of his tabletop. “G-7 is very hot. Because the bombs are falling. It is culture war.”

  MAKOTO AND STARLITZ SPENT A SLOW AFTERNOON wandering the palace grounds. Makoto showed Starlitz the dog kennel, the hang gliders, the surfboards, the Aqua-Lungs, and the trimaran. Ritually showing off his Kauai digs was something Makoto did quite a lot of, these days.

  Makoto was exhibiting this courtesy just to show that he bore Starlitz no hard feelings. Yes, the two of them had failed to see out the century in full commercial control of the world’s least important pop group, but what the hell, it was just the music business. The pop biz had its ups and downs. It wasn’t something two sane men should take personally.

  “Look at my new roses,” Makoto offered in Japanese.

  “Hai?” The plants looked unexceptional; the leaves were small, the vines were crooked, they had no blooms.

  “They are ‘BGM.’ ”

  “ ‘Back-Ground Music’?”

  “ ‘Benchmarked Genetic Modification.’ They can’t reproduce outside the lab. Every pot comes with a copyright.” Makoto dug in the rich dark earth with the toe of his zori. “They have firefly genes inside them, so they glow in the dark. Just out of the lab, in time for the new century. Barbara hates them. The staff hates them. They’re just not natural. They’re mutant monsters from Babylon. I tried, but I can’t get them to bloom.”

  “Why you buy these things? Never buy the alpha rollout.”

  “It was one of those one-click Website things.” Makoto ducked his head. “I was surfing stoned.… I shouldn’t do that anymore. I should just shut up and pay other people to deal with my weird decisions.… You wouldn’t want the job, would you?”

  Starlitz shrugged, surprised. “Maybe. Not many jobs in Kauai.”

  “Kauai is the ‘Garden Island.’ It’s mid-Pacific service and tourist economics. Lot of bar jobs here, like your old days in Roppongi.” Makoto threw his arm over Starlitz’s shoulder. “Reggae, let me confide something here. There is no harm in gardening. It’s good. It’s honorable. The sensei Borutaro, he said that to mind your own garden is a very good idea.”

  “ ‘Borutaro’? Some Zen guy?”

  “ ‘Voltaire.’ ”

  “Oh, yeah. Him.” Starlitz examined the rosebushes. “I’m thinking about this proposal. Seriously.”

  Makoto chuckled. “I see the future, my brother. I have no fear of Y2K. The years roll by, I just get fatter, and older, and richer. Maybe I get a little better at playing my guitar. But I have less and less to say. Eventually I approach perfect mastery—but I have no reason to play anymore. And then, they can cremate me.”

  “It’s better to fade away than to burn out.”

  “Yes, surely, but it’s not much better—and that’s why I’m going to get away with it.”

  IN THE LUMINOUS TROPICAL EVENING, BARBARA RETURNED from teaching her hula hulau class. Barbara had once been a mere hula student. She had taken a properly humble part in Hawa
iian hoi’ke recitals. She had put in respectful dues at a local hula dojo. Then Barbara had made one obligatory public performance at the Koke’e Banana Poka Festival.

  Barbara was not an authentic hula dancer. Authentic hula was a preindustrial cultural act by regional ethnics who lacked metals and practiced human sacrifice.

  But Barbara’s hula blew everyone else off the stage. Barbara danced the hula that Hawaii would have created if Hawaii had been a mid-Pacific Polynesian superpower with aircraft-carrier canoes. Barbara danced a hula that knew that it was 1999. It was a bright, fully rendered, safe-sex, steroid and gym-shoes hula.

  Now Barbara was Kauai’s postmodern hula guru. Barbara had her own hula school now, and she had a student claque of two dozen worshipful, liberal, middle-aged Anglo women who believed in her utterly and would do absolutely anything she said.

  Starlitz watched from a safe distance as Barbara glided barefoot from her Mercedes. Barbara wore a wrapped cotton skirt of explosive floral print, a tight strapless bandeau, a white floral handwoven headdress. Barbara drifted nonchalantly across forty feet of red, mossy mud, and arrived with feet so clean that they might have just been steamed and toweled.

  “Leggy,” Barbara said, blinking her vast, tapering, headlamp eyes. “Aloha, dude.”

  “How’s it goin’.”

  Barbara printed her lips on Starlitz’s upper right cheekbone. Starlitz was astonished. Normally, being air-kissed by Barbara was like being tapped by a No mask. But this had been an unfeigned moment of genuine mammalian body contact.

  “Where you been so long?” crooned Barbara, in her best chummy, intimate, bantering stage-voice. “I was afraid you didn’t love us anymore.”

  “Lotta business,” Starlitz muttered.

  “Leggy, stay with us awhile. Welcome to Paradise.” Barbara split the air with expressive fingertips. “ ‘Anuanua o te heiti nehenehe to tino e.’ ”

  “Uh, yeah, no, maybe.” Starlitz was trying not to stare. No man who hadn’t known her for years would have been able to tell this, but Barbara was growing old. Very, very gracefully—but old. There were little nips and tucks out of Barbara’s creamy toned expanse. An epidermal crinkle here and there. The awesome coconut-oil sheen to her glossy locks looked a hell of a lot like coconut oil, but not a whole hell of a lot like hair.

  Sun. Salt water. Surfboards. There might even be three or four spare pounds of extra roast pork on Barbara’s frame.

  Barbara drifted inside her home. Starlitz followed, kicking off his sandals at the door.

  “How’s life been treating you, babe?”

  “People are nice to me here.”

  “Yeah?”

  “In Kauai I’m a home girl. I’m ohana. The people at the florist shop. At the noodle shop. They like me.” Several languid heartbeats passed. “You know?”

  “Yeah, Barbara, I get it, I’m with the program. You mean the pop celebrity thing isn’t a burden to you here. Because these simple, multiracial island people can see through the image, to your own true, delightful inner spirit.”

  Barbara nodded delicately. “I could talk just like that, if I wanted to.”

  Starlitz shrugged. “Barbara, I have to ask you for a favor.”

  Barbara smiled broadly, reached out, gave his shoulder a playful hula-style kung-fu jab. “Oh, you!”

  “There was this bet Makoto and I had, and I lost it. You know about that?”

  Barbara nodded solemnly. “Magic.”

  “Yeah. I wonder if you’d mind coming with us out to the Waialua River. I need a magic volunteer. You’d be so perfect.”

  • • •

  JET LAG FELLED HIM EARLY. NEXT MORNING STARLITZ and Zeta rose with the cries of the birds, borrowed a car from the compound’s garage, and drove to Lihue for a series of purchases. Tiki torches. Smoke bombs. Flash paper. Mirrors.

  Zeta’s skin was bright purple. It was one of those new and very paranoid sunscreens, a postindustrial reaction to the planet’s tattered ozone layer. The game plan was to visibly wax down one’s entire child, so as to avoid possible eruptions of bleeding epidermal cancers in the depths of the twenty-first century. The purple tone faded after a while, but it ensured that you hadn’t missed a spot. For her own part Zeta just enjoyed being a purple girl, so she slopped the stuff on three times an hour.

  Zeta’s trip to the Lihue tourist traps had been quite a success. She wore a foam sun visor, a cropped tank shirt with a batik gecko, and drawstring cotton beach pants with decorative cartoon schools of the colorful Hawaiian state fish, the mellifluous humuhumunukunukuapua’a.

  “Boy, Dad. No more stinkin’ school. We’re in Hawaii. You are just the coolest, Dad.”

  “I hear the junior high schools around here really suck.”

  “Dad, they’ve got soaping shoes,” Zeta insisted, lifting her newly shod feet. “At my lame school in Colorado the kids barely even heard of soaping shoes!”

  Starlitz took a dappled mountain turn, squinting at the potholed road. “Give me the pitch there.”

  “ ‘The Fader’ is the most sophisticated soaping shoe in the line!” declared Zeta, whacking her metal feet on the car’s sandy floorboards with an ominous ringing sound. “Made of ‘Meat Is Murder’ vegan pleather, this sporting shoe combines old-fashioned pinpoint mesh with radiator mesh for enhanced breathability. For better highway vision the Fader is highlighted using 3M reflective piping!”

  “So what’s the ‘soap’ schtick, exactly?”

  “Well, you know how skater guys, like, grind down handrails on their skateboard axles?”

  “Oh, yeah,” nodded Starlitz, “lip tricks, burly air, three-sixties, seven-twenties, decal sponsorship, I’m hip.”

  “Well, the soapers just put stainless steel plates in your shoe. So you can jump on anything, and just kinda skid.”

  “No skateboard left? Built it right into the shoe?”

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  No board left, just the tricks. “Not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing.” Starlitz patted his daughter’s slimy purple shoulder. “Kid, this extracurricular thing is definitely working out for you.”

  STARLITZ AND ZETA SCOUTED OUT THE WAIALUA riverbank, found a conveniently secluded locale in the dripping bush, and carefully planted the necessary magic props. They then returned to the mansion, where Starlitz briefed his patron on the upcoming ritual.

  “I’m not saying just any woman would be good material for this,” Starlitz said. “Barbara, though, is ideal. But just in case anything turns a little … you know … freaky … keep in mind that she volunteered for this.”

  “To break the law of gravity?”

  “Look,” Starlitz said, pained, “don’t put it that way. I mean, yes, technically speaking, Barbara is going to ‘break the law of gravity.’ But this is not a fucking NASA project here, okay? She’s doing this for you. This is a totally spiritual thing. She’s going to be set free, okay? She’s going to become … unearthly. Untouched. Transcendent.”

  “You’re serious about this?”

  Starlitz frowned. “We shook hands on this, man. It was a bet. A woman died over this. You’ve known me a long time. You know I can do things like this. You’ve seen me do a lot of stuff that is … inexplicable.”

  “Float in midair? Not like that.”

  “Look, these are very strange times, man. You asked for magic, and I came here specifically to do it, and now you are going to get it. You, me, and the house crew are going to an ancient Polynesian taboo site. You can stop grinning just anytime, because this outing is not the fucking Tokyo Disneyland, pal. This is straight-out voodoo necromancy. If you’ve got the nerve to witness this, this is gonna transform your life.”

  Makoto blinked. “Will Barbara be all right?”

  Starlitz slapped Makoto’s shoulder. “Y’know … I admit, I had real reservations about invoking this kind of primeval energy.… But you asking me that, that makes it much easier for me. Because I trust you, man. Your girlfriend should be all right—
as long as she is not disturbed during the ceremony in even the slightest way. The feng shui energy in a Polynesian ritual site … That’s a place and a process of enormous, ancient, supernatural earth power, you understand me? It is kame, it is mana. If there’s anyone you don’t trust completely and totally, do not bring them to this ceremony.”

  Makoto scratched his head. Makoto had bought it. Makoto was with the program all the way. “What should I bring?”

  “Well,” said Starlitz, “bring a whole shitload of pakalolo.”

  PREPARING THE RITUAL REQUIRED THREE DAYS. TO demonstrate the gravity of the event the participants were required to fast, meditate, and ritually purge themselves. This requirement immediately weeded out half of Makoto’s staffers, people who had concluded from the get-go that it had to be another lame scam.

  The remainder were made of more adventurous stuff, and after a three-day regimen of white rice, fish broth, and Kauai marijuana, they were primed for anything.

  Starlitz led them on a dramatic seven-mile evening hike through the Waialua state park.

  “Everyone gather round,” Starlitz finally announced. He was reading from a sheet of prepared phonetic Japanese. “As you can see, I was here earlier, blessing the site and setting up these tiki torches. But—and this is absolutely critical—we must all unite to remove all traces of the twentieth century from this sacred ground! This place must become eternal and timeless, the way it was and will be, before and after science. That means all physical traces: not one cigarette butt, not a pull-tab from a can, no spiritual pollutants, nothing from any factory, no product of any machine. If you see the footprint of a modern shoe, erase it. We need purity. The natural, the unsullied. So get on your hands and knees. Gaze carefully at every centimeter. This is a kind of prayer.”

  Starlitz retired to the fragrant shadows at the overgrown fringe of the clearing, where he eased his aching feet and had a cigarette.

  Zeta watched the Japanese staff crawling enthusiastically through the damp undergrowth, sniffing and meticulously pinching up everything that resembled litter. “Dad, they look really, really stupid.”