Zeitgeist (19 page)

Starlitz nodded. “Where do you find cool shit like this, ace? You’re way ahead of the curve here.”

“Oh, word gets around among us cross-border pilots. The concept was invented by a German pneumatics company. They make blimps, air balloons, whole inflatable buildings with inflatable roofs and inflatable girders.… You see, it’s simple. It all goes up, it all comes down. Full of hot air. No one ever sees how it works, no one ever knows where it goes. So it’s just like a Russian bank, Lekhi.”

Starlitz nodded respectfully. “I am so with that!”

A pair of Cypriot boys had arrived from the neighborhood, pedaling bikes. They looked about six and nine, and wore striped-sleeve football shirts and big goggling grins.

“Tell them it’s a magic gypsy tent,” Starlitz recommended to the station attendant. “Tell ’em we want ’em to step inside.”

Given this tale of terror, the kids vanished immediately, peeling out so fast that their tires shrieked.

“Ladies first,” said Khoklov. He offered his arm to help Zeta climb aboard, through a long, zippered slit.

Starlitz followed.

“I
hate
it in here,” Zeta hissed fretfully. She was crammed into a thrumming fabric space the size and shape of a sleeping bag. “There’s no peanuts or anything! There’s no movie, even! Why do we have to do this?”

“He’s Russian, okay?” said Starlitz. “Uncle Pulat’s going through a kind of transitional period. We gotta be polite about it.”

The twin engines started, with a cough and a startling whine.

Khoklov wriggled aboard. He thrust his pale head into a transparent bubble and gripped a lozenge-shaped Nintendo joystick.

The aircraft wheeled reluctantly in place. Then a laboring plastic piston came down and painfully levered the plane into the air. The propellors caught. They began to climb, and headed out to sea.

DAYS LATER, THIRTY THOUSAND FEET OVER THE Atlantic, Starlitz knocked back a last sip of airline whiskey and leaned his sorry head against a skimpy pillow.

He had once heard from an elderly German that mankind’s ultimate luxury was an unbroken night’s sleep in a soft bed. Before that leaden, brutally sincere revelation, Starlitz had never been a devotee of slumbering. Nowadays Starlitz took sleep very seriously. Starlitz felt sure that if he ever lived as long as the old German had, his nights, too, would be flaking, restless, and broken by sinister flashbacks: not the thunder of Stalin organs on the frozen Eastern Front, necessarily, but other, more personal equivalents.

Zeta lay curled in a tight, twitching ball under her thin airline blanket. When you were eleven years old, even sleep was frenetic.

A stewardess passed down the aisle, with the trancelike step of a professional who lived between time zones.

Starlitz passed her three empty plastic liquor bottles and five disemboweled foil bags of peanuts. She collected the trash impassively, never meeting his eyes, and left him without a glance. He watched her vaguely as he secured his airline tray. Something about her hip roll and soft-footed shuffle struck Starlitz deep in his core. What was it?

Then he had it: good old what’s-her-name.

That Chicago girl. She came in every night, to tidy up
the lair of a Chicago machine politician. She was an office cleaner. Starlitz had been up late one sleepless night with the other hustlers, counting the kickbacks and smoking cigars, when little what’s-her-name had first meekly entered his life, propelling her bucket and mop.

Little what’s-her-face, though only five feet tall, was about a yard across. Anything but frail, she was as sturdy as a tractor. She could have hauled a goat carcass on her shoulders across a Mexican desert while wearing nothing but rubber huaraches, and with never a wince or complaint.… Not promising material to most young guys on the make, granted. No one else in the office had even been able to see her. They had never said a word to her. No other man in the room would ever bother. She was totally beyond their ken.

But he could see her. When she realized that his eyes had focused on her body, she looked up from her mop handle and shot him an opaque, deer-in-the-headlights look. Not so much a feminine come-on, really, as a deliberate, daring step into his story line.

Now it was all coming back to Starlitz, on an interior tide of pained nostalgia and dessicating airline booze. He plucked at his sorry pillow, struggling fruitlessly for comfort. He had the bedroom they’d been in, her smell, her tatty underwear, her face, everything but her name.

As a first hook he’d told her he would help her with her English. She possessed enough bits and pieces of English to pay rent and to buy Mama’s bread and sundries. But she had no real command of North American lingo, and she was never going to get any. There just wasn’t any room for the world’s biggest and pushiest language inside of her rock-solid head. Everything inside her skull was totally occupied with the tremendous, preternatural effort it took to adjust, oil, lubricate, and maintain her remote interior universe.

Their affair, if he could call it that, had lasted eleven months. Mulling over it in his stingy tourist-class seat, Starlitz realized that this was the longest single period
that he had ever put up with anyone. After the fruitless English lessons he liked to dress her up to pass, and take her out on the town for disco nites, fine Irish whiskey, and cripplingly expensive steak dinners. It was especially good that she could not read the menus or speak English to the waiters, and yet she wore the classy, intimidating garments of an upper-class WASP matron who could buy any waiter ten times over. He would take her to Chinatown and shovel her full of rice wine and the finest pepper-blazing Szechuan. It was a visceral thrill to see her white teeth crunch through those baby-corn ears.

Twenty years on, and the vitalizing incongruity of it still made Starlitz grin. He’d cared so much about it, their little scene had meant so much to him. It had all been so much … 
fun
. Now that he could see it in the muddled clarity of middle age, all in amber, tintype retrospect, he realized that little what’s-her-name had first claim as the love of his life.

She had the most intense and utter self-possession Starlitz had ever encountered. They could barely speak to each other, but such was life. She might be ugly as a fence post. To get to second base with her was like ground war. He’d never seen her entirely naked. He didn’t much want to. It was never remotely like a boy-meets-girl thing. They were two alien worlds in near collision; it was all about earthquakes, gravity, and terrifying primal forces.

Most of the time she silently fought for her virtue, and about one time in three she would switch sides and silently fight against it. It wasn’t that the sex was any good, because even for a young guy, as he’d been then, sex with her was way too much like work. No, the reason that Consuelo—and yeah,
that
was it, her name was Consuelo, or something very much like it—had worked out for him was her titanic, liberating reservoir of uniquely personal dissident reality. She could never be described as hot in the sack, but it was life after the sack that amazed him. He would storm out in the middle of the night, freezing and half crippled with unmet male needs, and Chicago
would almost vaporize. That enormous, gimcrack, heartland metropolis turned into van Goghian ethereal fire. He felt as if he could walk straight through the city’s skyrocketing steel walls. He’d been able to live for months off the great bloody sparks she threw off, from the enormous, invisible friction between herself and Yankee reality. Being with her was like visiting the moon.

She never questioned anything he did. Nothing shocked her—or rather, everything he did shocked her equally, which was to say, not at all.

As the months wore on and his frustration grew, he got crueler and crazier. He would try elaborate gambits to disrupt her fortresslike status quo. He sensed that if he could just impale a secret hole below her waterline, elements of his universe might somehow leak through. So he experimented. He equipped her with closetsful of stolen clothes from the mansions of Oak Park. A mafia-hijacked color TV. Then a big set of zircons. A tiara. Once he stole her a mink.

She sold the clothes at rag sales. She gave the TV to her mother. She put the jewelry in a locked box, and lost it. Even in the dead of Chicago winter she wouldn’t wear the mink, although he once spotted her gently stroking it with a look of sorrowful bemusement. As for the rest of it, the vibrator, the thirty-four DD push-up bra, the edible underwear, that was all part of one vast, homogeneous, demonic landscape; the obscene roiling chaos beneath the tightrope wire of decency. She was utterly commonplace, and utterly remote. Knowing her was like shaking a Coke bottle, popping the top, and having the lava of Kilauea pour out.

She wasn’t nice to him. She didn’t get it about boosting his ego, cadging favors, or pretending any girlish happiness. She even took out her own garbage. His role in her life was entirely symbolic. For Consuelo he was any man and every man. He represented her existential confrontation with the masculine principle. No other man was knocking to get in, and after he left her, she would just
settle down with the memories. Higher forces had yanked him out of the properties backstage, and dusted him off and sent him along, because Consuelo’s private mythos somehow needed an incubus.

Then, one day, he met her mother. That was all about long white hair, rattling yellowed blinds, and Olmec Santeria. He found himself clawing his way off the sacrificial pyramid in about thirty seconds flat. After that there was no way forward. So, he offered her a stolen diamond ring cut like a hockey rink, begged her to marry him (in neutral ground, a synagogue), and to fly with him to Libya. Consuelo considered this proposal soberly, reached a just and final conclusion, and said absolutely not, never ever. So he threw the diamond into Lake Michigan, wept for a few minutes, and flew to Libya the next Monday, by himself. And that was a swift and final end to all that.

Libya had been just great, everything he expected and more. Except—and he knew this now—he was never going to care about a woman that much again. He could still go through with sex, but the motive force was slacking off. He would never bang his head that hard again; at the best he would shave, dress up, hold out a wad of money, and wait. If they came, they came; and if they didn’t come, they didn’t come. Big deal. Anything remotely like romance was farther and farther behind him now. Sex would never have a meaning that he couldn’t control, there was no danger of its having any genuine consequence for him. In the secret depths of his blood and bone there was no future.

“Hey, Dad.”

“What?”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Yeah?”

Zeta put her tousled head above the edge of the blanket. “Hey, Dad, my thumbs are all sore from playing Nintendo. Are we there yet?”

“We’re in the middle of the sky above an ocean, but we’ll get where we have to be.”

•   •   •

THE CUSTOMS IN MEXICO CITY WAS EASYGOING ABOUT passports that looked American. Starlitz emptied his wallet at the currency exchange, taking on a ballast of pesos. He bought himself a duty-free carton of Lucky Strikes and a glass-ribbed three-quarter-liter bottle of Gran Centenario tequila. He bought Zeta a pack of Chiclets.

“I don’t like these colored Chiclets,” Zeta complained, her eyes red rimmed with jet lag. “I only like the white ones.”

“Then only chew the white ones. We’ve got some shopping to do.”

Starlitz threw their meager luggage, and both their passports, into a rented airport locker. He slammed the metal door with finality, went into the airport men’s room, and flushed the key. He was looking for his father now. That was the central task at hand. It absolutely had to be done, and it was never an easy job. It was entirely impossible, unless you had entered the vast and shadowy realm of the Undocumented.

Starlitz bought a cheap canvas shoulder-bag with a crude four-color logo of the goat-sucking Chupacabra. He bought a woven Baja jacket with wooden toggle buttons, and with some effort he acquired a hat that was not a “Mexican” hat, but an actual Mexican hat.

“You need a total makeover,” Starlitz told his daughter. “Because I’m taking you to meet your grandpa.”

“Doesn’t Grandpa like G-7 clothes?”

“Grandpa’s never heard of G-7.” Starlitz shook his head. “You see, when you meet my dad—your grandfather—you can’t just ‘go see him.’You have to really
let go
, and then, just maybe, you can get a glimpse of him. Because if we’re lucky, and the time and the place are just right, your grandfather sort of … shows up.”

Zeta nodded thoughtfully.

Starlitz tried his best to sound earnest. “You see, Zenobia, now that we’re together, you’ve got to get to
know my side of the family. And my side of your family really isn’t much like Mom One and Mom Two.”

“ ’Cause they’re New Age lesbians?”

“Oh, no, no. That would be way too simple.”

“I’m not much like my side of the family either,” Zeta said bravely. “It’s okay, Dad.”

Starlitz patted her band-T’d shoulder. This heart-to-heart was going rather better than he had expected. “Yeah, Zeta, and it’ll help us a lot if you give up your super cool nineties clothes for a while. You need to be wearing different clothes now. Clothes that could have been worn at any and all periods between the years 1901 and 1999. Okay? There’s a pretty serious locus of affect around 1945.”