Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  Viktor closed his eyes, shuddered dramatically, and opened them again. They were full of lucid Slavic conviction. “You’ve finally lost your mind.”

  “No; actually, you are insane, Viktor. Not that I hold that against you.”

  “No, Starlitz, you’re insane; you’ve lost all sense of proper proportion. Y2K is coming, and you’re at the end of your rope. You’ve lost all sense of restraint and decency. You’re going to pop and disappear, just like a stock-market bubble.”

  “Viktor, don’t tell me I’m insane, okay? I’ve got a child and a nice reputation in the industry. But you—you wouldn’t know an honest job if it carpet-bombed you. You’re a young guy, and you’re like a hundred-and-ten-percent shakedown problems.”

  “All right,” sniffed Viktor, “that does it! I knew that eventually you’d insult me unforgivably. Well, someday, when you get over your ugly greed for dollars and your mindless technology worship, you’ll be sorry you tried to crush the fine spirit of Viktor Bilibin.”

  “Great,” said Starlitz, “go ahead, walk out on the job at hand. See how far it gets you.”

  Viktor rose, turned on his heel, and scampered into the cricket-shrieking Cypriot darkness. He was so happy to go that he could barely stop himself from capering.

  Starlitz worked alone after that. This didn’t bother him much. When the work at hand was unspeakable, it was pleasant not to have to talk to anyone.

  Around midnight he set fire to the training hall.

  As the flames rose, Zeta stepped out of the gloom and joined him.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “What?”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “What is it?”

  “Hey, Dad, how come you’re so ugly now?”

  “Am I ugly now?”

  “Yeah, Dad. You’re covered with ugly paint. You smell like smoke and blood.” She kicked at the dirt with the toe of her shoe. “You got a big bald patch on the back of your head.”

  Starlitz clamped his hand to the back of his skull. It was true. He had lost his hair. “Zenobia, I don’t know exactly how to tell you this, but there are certain things that grown-ups have to do, and—”

  “Dad, listen. While I was sitting in there with those old people, watching war coverage and soccer on their satellite TV, I had like, this … new feeling. Okay? Like, a feeling in my heart. I think I know what I want to be when I grow up.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “Yeah, Dad! I know all about that now. I want to be a lot like you.”

  “Oh, brother.” Starlitz sighed.

  “But it’s true, Dad! I want to spend a lot of my time in cars and airplanes. Going to obscure, dirty places. Where terrible things are happening. And most people don’t know about them. But they’re important anyway. Even though nobody knows or cares much. That’s gonna be my life. My life’s work.”

  “You don’t say,” Starlitz said. The flames were climbing steadily.

  “I do say, Dad. ’Cause I really get it about you now. Because I’m your daughter, and I finally got to know my dad. My good old dad. Except, even though you’re pretty old, you’re not much good, Dad. You’re bad.”

  Starlitz watched as a wall collapsed in a massive flurry of sparks. “Am I bad, Zeta?”

  “Absolutely, Dad! I mean, you’re not actively evil—you’re just, like, totally provisional and completely without morality. You can personify the trends of your day, but you never get ahead of trends. You never make the world any better. You’re not strong enough for that, you just don’t have it in you. But the thing is—I’m not bad. I’m good. I’m a good person. I can feel it inside. I want to be genuinely farsighted, and giving, and wise. A powerful force for good.”

  “Well, I suppose you’ll be wanting to go back to your moms, then. And drop old Dad by the wayside.”

  “Well, no. Because now that I’ve been away from them awhile, I get them too. I don’t want to be like them. No way. Because they’re full of lame hippie crap. They’re petty crooks, and they’re high on drugs. They’re all over, Dad. They’re yesterday. See, I’m already past Y2K. The twentieth century is already over in my heart.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “The twentieth century was never as important as you thought it was, Dad. It was a dirty century. It was a cheap, sleazy century. The second the twentieth century finally went under the carpet, everybody forgot about it right away. In the twenty-first century we don’t have your crude, lousy problems. We’ve got serious, sophisticated problems.”

  Zeta looked over the crashing roof as it slowly tumbled in foul gouts of flame. “I’m glad I saw this, because this is, like, my initiation. I’m going to be spending a lot of my life in situations just like this. Just like you spend your life. The difference between you and me is, when I show up on the scene, people are glad to see me. Because when Zeta Starlitz shows up, people get a bath. They get latrines. They get some decent food, their skin stops itching. The children stop screaming. The panic and the terror goes away.”

  “Did you just say ‘Zeta Starlitz’?” said Starlitz, lifting his brows. “So it’s gonna be ‘Zeta Starlitz,’ huh?”

  “Yeah, Dad, that’s gonna be my name. That’s the name I want. I mean, you can’t expect people to say ‘Zenobia B. H. McMillen is here with the emergency choppers.’ But ‘Zeta Starlitz,’ that’s a great, CNN-style, mover-and-shaker name. Plus, I start and I end with a Z. Pretty cool, huh?”

  Starlitz rubbed his greasy, dirt-smeared chin. “So, basically, we’re talking some kind of a humanitarian bureaucrat, Médecins Sans Frontières-type thing.”

  “Yeah. That’s it. Very high-level, Dad. I speak like nine or ten languages. I wear tailored safari suits. I’ve got a medical degree, and all kinds of ribbons and medals from Swedish do-gooder committees.”

  “Kind of making your old dad pretty proud there.”

  Zeta sighed. “Actually, Dad, it’s all kinda based on being as far away from you as possible.” She looked up. “I don’t mean physically far. I mean, like, in some very distant part of the narrative.”

  “I see. Well, I’m glad you told me this, Zeta. It makes a lot of sense. It’s very plausible. I guess that’s how it’s got to be.”

  “So, Dad, how do I do that? I mean, there’s a good way to do that, right? I don’t quite get that part yet.”

  Starlitz nodded resignedly. “Swiss finishing school.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Oh, it’s some elite European academy for children of diplomats and rich mafiosi. I put you in an expensive Swiss boarding school. They teach you lame aristo ladylike shit, like proper posture, and violin playing. Then I guess, later, it’s an elite med school and lots of … ugh … humanities courses.”

  “Wow, that sounds perfect, Dad. Let’s do it right now. Let’s take our money straight to a Swiss bank, without any of this dirty Cyprus laundry mess.”

  “No, honey—you go to Switzerland. Not me. After this you don’t see much of me anymore. Maybe you see me at Christmas. Well, not this Christmas. Not the Y2K Christmas. Definitely not the Y2K Christmas. Maybe the next Christmas. If I’m around. Some Christmases in the next century. If I’m available, I’ll try to show up. I’ll bring you some nice consumer thing. Okay?”

  Her cheeks lit by firelight, Zeta began to cry.

  THERE WERE EYES ON HIM FROM THE FAR SIDE OF THE diner. A Turk in his sixties, bespectacled and weary. He looked like a retired lawyer, or a teacher waiting to die. Starlitz ignored him and continued to eat. Pitas. Lamb casserole. Doner kebab. Mincemeat. Sweetbreads in herbs. Bottle after bottle of Efes Pilsner. Now that Starlitz was alone, he couldn’t get enough of it. He had to devour it all. Until there was nothing left.

  The man abandoned his shot glass of raki, rose, and placed his snap-brim hat over his vest-covered chest. “You are Mr. Starlitz. Yes?”

  Starlitz looked up, belched, and brushed back greasy ringlets from his sweater collar. “What’s it to ya?”

  “My name is Jelal Kashmas. I’
m a newspaper columnist. For Milliyet. You’ve heard of my newspaper, of course.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because you bribed our fashion correspondent. To gush about the clothes worn by your dancing girls.”

  “Aw, that was ages ago, Mr. Kashmas. I’m not in the pop business now. I’m running a trucking firm.”

  “I thought you once promised,” Jelal said precisely, “that the G-7 band would cease to exist on New Year’s Day 2000.”

  “You want some of these stuffed eggplants, man? I got plenty.”

  “Instead, the G-7 seem to be preparing for a very ambitious tour in 2000. Morocco. Tunisia. Algeria. Egypt. Pakistan. Malaysia.”

  “The act is under new management.”

  “Why should that matter? If you gave your word.”

  Starlitz hunched his shoulders, blinking. “He turned the whole deal inside out, man. Ozbey turned the story line on its head. The story was that the girls were all going to live. And the band would just vanish like a soap bubble. Instead, the band is going to live. The G-7 act will be huge. While the girls die. One by one.”

  “That’s very … droll.”

  “It’s not a joke, pal.”

  Kashmas pulled out a wooden chair and sat. “Do you ever read my columns? ‘The Day the Bosphorus Dried Up’? ‘How I Lost Myself in the Mirror’? My many romantic stories of gangsters in Beyoglu? A columnist always needs new material.”

  “I don’t read Turkish.”

  “Do you ever read the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk? He has been widely translated. He wrote The White Castle and The Black Book.”

  “I think I’ve seen his billboards.”

  “Pamuk understands the Turks. Our noble, tormented, secular Turkish Republic. With her many remembrances, and her great forgetfulness. He’s a young artist, but he’s the equal of Calvino or García Márquez.”

  “Calvino is dead, and García Márquez is in the fucking hospital.”

  “Then perhaps, in the next century, it’s time for the world to listen to Turkey for a while.”

  “I’m all for that,” Starlitz grunted.

  Kashmas put his tweedy elbow on the table and scratched the side of his head. “What are you doing in this part of my country? Why are you in the stronghold of Severik Bey? Didn’t your State Department warn you about this?”

  “I’m not a tourist. I run a trucking company. I’m moving goods and products. Fuck the State Department.”

  “You have no more fondness for music? For Miss Gonca Utz, maybe. This is her hometown. She was born near the Syrian border. They’re very proud of her here. You must have seen her many posters. Her CDs. Her videos. They’re everywhere.”

  Starlitz said nothing.

  “What about Mr. Mehmet Ozbey? How well do you know him?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Why does he have no childhood?”

  “What?” Starlitz said.

  “There are records of his public appearances. There are records of his many business engagements. People flock to his social events. But Mehmet Ozbey has no childhood. I have looked. He has no school records. No parents. No background. If you investigate beyond a certain year, Mehmet Ozbey ceases to exist.”

  Starlitz put his fork down. “Look, pal. It’s true that I ripped off your Milliyet newspaper—like, ten or twelve times, actually—so I’m gonna tell you this, just fuckin’ once. You don’t want to investigate Mehmet Ozbey. You’ll be a chalk outline on the fucking pavement. Even if you did investigate Ozbey, you sure as hell wouldn’t want to investigate him in Gonca Utz’s hometown. Because Severik Bey owns this place, and he is a mountain bandit. He’s a straight-out robber baron of the old medieval school. He’s a kidnapper, an extortionist, a car thief, and a major-league smack racketeer. Plus he owns his own TV station. Journalists who ask questions here end up handcuffed in stolen cars and dumped in a lake.”

  Kashmas shrugged wearily. “Do you think this is news to a Turkish newsman? This country is my home. I’ve lived here all my life. It’s in my blood and bones.”

  “Hmmmph.”

  “Severik Bey is a famous government loyalist. He’s in Parliament. In the ruling party. He gives speeches on secularism and technical education.”

  “Goodie.”

  “Am I boring you, Mr. Starlitz? It’s tiring for strangers to talk Turkish politics. It’s nothing but dervishes, shootings, and scandals. I want to know your story.”

  “Don’t have one anymore.”

  “I see in your face that you have an interesting story. Some people read coffee grounds, but I read faces.”

  “I’m old and tired, and I smoke too much. End of story.”

  “Is it true that you ride your own trucks throughout Turkey, crying out to people to trade ‘new lamps for old’?”

  “Yeah. Sure. You bet. There’s a big collectors’ market overseas for vintage Turkish copperware.”

  “I’ve talked to the men that drive your trucks,” said Kashmas, his baggy eyes warm and confiding. “They tell strange stories about you. For months you’ve roamed the haunted streets of Istanbul and Ankara. Under mosques with broken minarets. In the old ruins. In homes wrecked by fire and earthquake. In abandoned dervish lodges. Wearing dirty clothes, behind mirrored glasses. Looking for dirty dealings, strange local mysteries, the ghosts of dead swindlers and dope fiends. Always in a hurry. A haunted man. A man with his clock running out. Your face is pale, your eyes are restless. The nights in Istanbul are endless, aren’t they?”

  “Look, Scheherezade, lemme tell you something about Turkish truckers. They’re ignorant as dirt. Sure, you bet I watch the clock. I’m bringing modern efficiency to your country’s crappy shipping services. I’m doing just-intime delivery, and overnight package service, in a country with lousy roads and no traffic signs. It’s a science, okay? It’s all about putting trucks in exactly the right place, in exactly the right moment. With global positioning. And software tracking.”

  “How very mysterious and poetic. Why here, Mr. Starlitz?”

  “I like the food here. Come here all the time. I’m a regular. This is my favorite café.”

  “I mean, why this small Turkish border town? There’s no great business here. The town is cheap, and boring. Policemen retire here. Policemen who retire on half pay. Because they preferred traditional torture methods to the new international ones.”

  “I like antiquing,” Starlitz said. He rose from his table to stare out the curtained window.

  Down the steep, winding road came one of his trucks. Carrying its usual payload. A few obligatory packages that he’d hired on at a loss. And that other payload, nailed into a sealed and silent crate.

  “Don’t think that I want trouble,” said Kashmas. “I don’t want to cause you trouble. Who reads newspapers? It’s not like it was in the sixties. I’m a miserable crank. A pop intellectual. A scribbler with big ideas, who writes in a minor language. There are times when I smell of death, even to myself.”

  A distant high-pitched roar was coming down the mountain.

  “I can tell that about people, sometimes,” said Kashmas. “It’s a kind of gift.”

  Gonca’s red sports car came out of a sharp turn with a tortured scream of rubber. Starlitz stared out the window, his shoulders hunched, forehead touching the glass. Gonca wore a whipping Isadora Duncan chiffon scarf, big starlet’s sunglasses.

  She drew up on the lumbering cargo truck with the speed of a cruise missile. At the last instant she veered past it with a mad screech of the horn, a sudden red flash like the slash of a razor blade.

  “I can’t believe it,” Starlitz breathed. “I never thought she’d make it.”

  A larger car came in hot pursuit. It was the massive armored limo of Severik Bey, with the feudal lord commanding the wheel, grinning like a madman as he floored it.

  Without so much as twitch to the right or left, the beautiful saloon plowed into the rear of the truck, at top speed. There was a comprehensive smash, like a sudden mortar barrage. The bulletpr
oof glass did not shatter; it bent and buckled. The high-tech armor did not dent; it warped and ruptured. The huge truck flew up on its hind axle with a heavy-metal scream of protest, and it sat on the smashed hood of the Mercedes limo, a dying elephant impaled on a sharp-horned rhino.

  Starlitz tossed cash on the table and left the roadside diner without a word. Kashmas followed quickly, drawing a notepad and a camera from his voluminous tweed pockets.

  They reached the wreckage, where hot, ruptured metal popped and groaned. Kashmas muttered aloud in astonished Turkish, stamping his feet and staring through windows. “Help me with him,” he said in English.

  The driver’s airbag had inflated. Severik Bey was bleeding profusely, but he was still alive. Kashmas waved his tweedy arms to stop the traffic as Starlitz laid the Kurdish leader on the crumbling asphalt. Severik Bey wasn’t quite out; his shoulder was broken, his ribs were cracked, but the old bandit was tough as nails, he was clawing at the dirt, spitting blood, and slowly cursing his fate.

  The other two men were far less lucky. The man in the passenger seat had gone straight into the armored windshield; he was a bloody sack of meat in a policeman’s suit.

  And in the back was Ozbey, who never bothered with seat belts. If Ozbey had been at the wheel, the contretemps could never have happened. But Ozbey had been a minor figure here in Kurdistan, killing time to amuse his friends. Lolling in the seat with a martini and a cigarette, he’d been flung against the roof like a rag doll.

  The panicked driver emerged from the shipping truck. He was shaken, bruised, but mobile. He stood in the road amid the gathering traffic, with the paralyzed look that people always had at traffic fatalities.

  Starlitz walked up to him to clap him on the back. “You’re a hero,” he said.

  The stricken driver saw blood in the road. He cried out in Turkish and began to sob.

  “Sorry,” said Starlitz, “I mean they’ll call you a hero. Next year. Once the story’s out in Parliament.”