Zeitgeist (21 page)

“Well, why don’t we go
there
? I mean, that sounds like a nicer place than this stinky garage. I mean, Florida, wow—I
went
to Florida once. It’s warm!”

“A tornado took it. Took him, Stepmom, took the whole compound. Mobile homes, trailer park, brochures, the souvenir stand, everything.” Starlitz scratched his dirty head. “At least, they
called
that thing a tornado, after it was gone.… See, the poor guy just got to be
too obvious
. There was gonna be some TV coverage, and stuff.…”

Zeta scowled. “Why?”

“Well, that’s how reality works, that’s why.”

“Why does it work like that, Dad?”

“It’s the laws of nature. It’s the birds and the bees.”

“I know about
that
, Dad,” said Zeta with a wince. “They made me read
Our Bodies, Ourselves
when I was seven.”

“If only it were that easy. That’s not ‘reality.’ You see: the deeper reality is made out of language.”

Zeta said nothing.

“People don’t understand this. And even if they say it, they sure as hell don’t know what that
means
. It means there is no such thing as ‘truth.’ There’s
only
language. There’s no such thing as a ‘fact.’ There is no truth or falsehood, just dominant processes by which reality is socially constructed. In a world made out of language, nothing else is even possible.”

Zeta searched in the dirt. She picked up a rusty nail. “Is
this
language?”

“Yep. That’s a ‘rusty nail,’ as the conceptual entity called a ‘rusty nail’ is constructed under our cultural circumstances and in this moment in history.”

“It feels real. It still gets my fingers all dirty.”

“Zeta, listen to me. This part is really important.
‘Even though her father loved her, the little girl died horribly because she stepped on the rusty nail.’ That’s language too.”

Zeta’s face crumpled in terror. She hastily flung the nail away into the darkness.

“There is no objective reality. There
might
be a world that has true reality. A world with genuine physics. Like Newton said, or like Einstein said. But because we’re in a world that’s made out of language, we’ll never, ever get to that place from here. There’s no way
out
of a world that’s made of language. We can never reach any bedrock reality. The only direction we can move is into
different flavors
of the dominant social discourse, or across the grain of the consensus narrative, or—and this is the worst part—into the Wittgenstein empty spaces where things can’t be said, can’t be spoken, can’t even be thought.… Don’t even go there, okay? You can never
come out
of there. It’s a black hole.”

“How come you know so much of this stuff, Dad?”

“I didn’t use to know any of it. I was just living my life. I just liked to go live at the edge of the system, where things were breaking off and breaking down. It took me a long time to figure out what I was really doing, that I was
always
in some place where the big story was turning into little weird counterstories. But now I’m wising up to my situation, because I’m old now, and I know enough to get along in the world.”

Starlitz sighed. “I don’t know all that much, really. There are just a few people in this world who understand how reality works. Most of them don’t speak English. They speak French. Because they’re all language theorists. Semioticians, mostly, with some, uh, you know, structuralists and poststructuralists.… Luce Iragaray … Roland Barthes … Julia Kristeva … Louis Althusser … These are the wisest people in the world, the only people with a real clue.” Starlitz laughed morosely. “And does it help them? Hell, no! The poor bastards, they strangle their wives, they get run over by laundry trucks.… And
after Y2K their whole line of gab is gonna be permanently out of fashion. It’ll be yesterday.”

“How come
they
know so much?”

“I don’t know how they know. But you can tell they know what’s really going on, because when you read what they say, it sounds really cool and convincing, until you realize that even though you know it, you can’t use that knowledge to change anything. If you can understand reality, then you can’t do anything. If you’re doing anything, it means that you don’t understand reality. You ever heard of any of those French people? I bet you never heard of any of them, right?”

“I’ve heard of Julia Kristeva,” Zeta volunteered shyly. “She’s a second-generation antipatriarchal ideologue, like Carole Pateman and Michèle Le Doeff.”

Starlitz nodded slowly, gratified by this revelation. “I’m glad you know about them.… I’m glad they taught you some of that already, you so young and all.” He shrugged wearily. “I don’t spend enough time with Mom One and Mom Two.… We disagree on a lot of stuff.… We kinda try to get along, but we’re always ticked off at each other, like with my arms-smuggling thing on the commune, or that dope ring out of French Polynesia.… We fight too much. It’s sad, really, you know? I’m sad about it. I should have been around more, helping out, when you were littler.” He sighed. “It was never your fault, Zeta. It was just one of those post-nuclear-family things.”

“Well, you can’t come back to the commune now, because they had to sell out.”

“Yeah, I know that. I guess it had to happen. There’s a big transformation coming. A change in the story line. There aren’t many ways through it.” He sighed, and stood up. “I sure hope I can find us one.”

STARLITZ RESOLVED ON A FULL-SCALE EFFORT. IT WAS, after all, a.d. 1999, a year promoted for decades as the final excuse for a twentieth-century party. He’d been foolish to hold anything back.

It took a long bus trip back to the border, and a full week’s earnest effort, to locate a criminal chop shop. Starlitz ingratiated himself with the speed-crazed bike-gang owners. He carefully wrote down their requisite want-list for marketable windshields, door handles, and mufflers. Then he went out to hunt revenue-on-the-wheel.

His hot-wiring skills were sadly out of practice. In his long absence from the trade, cars had evolved a fiendish repertoire of yelping alarms, backed up with brute-force steering-column clubs. Still, a determined operator with a good eye, a steady hand, and patience was sure to bag a car eventually. It helped a lot to have an alert underage lookout.

Three boosted cars later Starlitz had acquired the requisite sum of folding money. He and Zeta returned by bus to Socorro. They methodically haunted the Goodwills, the St. Vinnies, and the dollar stores. They purchased great shiny wads of flock and tinsel, long, blackout-dotted strands of twinkly Christmas lights, an ancient turntable with working speakers, and a scratched stack of Christmas carols on vinyl. At a desolate yard sale they bagged an unused electrical generator from a despondent New Mexico Y2K survivalist. This tragic geek had forfeited his career,
his marriage, and his life savings while trying to hide from buggy software.

Then came a crucial juncture of the operation: assembling a merrie crowd of Christmas revelers in the middle of autumn. Starlitz, who was driving without a license or, indeed, without ID of any kind, borrowed a junked truck from an ill-guarded wrecking yard and set out to hire help. The end result of his rattling, backfiring campaign was a spontaneous choir of local down-and-outs: six illegal-alien day laborers, seeking employment from the parking lot of the local Home Depot; four grimy, cowboy-hatted Native Americans, off the reservation and cruelly paralyzed on gin and ripple; and an ill-assorted pair of aimless, bearded, mystical drug casualties, your basic local Taoists from Taos.

Starlitz drove the revelers, in shifts and by roundabout routes, back to the abandoned Quonset garage. For the sake of the warmth he lit a hearty, mildly toxic fire in a corroded barrel. Starlitz oiled, lubricated, pull-yanked, and adjusted the survivalist generator, while Zeta strung lights and tinsel from the rust-streaked metal walls. There were glitter-coated party hats all around, and plastic-wrapped candy canes. Then, over the generator’s industrial racket, they fired up the record player and belted out Crosby’s perennial hit “White Christmas.”

Since half of the party spoke no English, the chorus was weak. Two gallon jugs of Mogen-David enlivened the festivities considerably.

“Dad, it’s super loud! Cops are gonna come!”

“Yeah, no, maybe,” Starlitz shouted. “It wouldn’t be the first time, given my dad. But this approach is working! I can feel it!”

The sugared booze was hitting his guests like a series of convoy depth bombs. Starlitz gazed about the fire-shadowed walls. Somewhere outside the sonic limits of their scratchy, atemporal racket, chill night had settled over the desert: the dessicated town was surrounded by silent ticking fallout and the cedar-pollen psychic dust of lost Anasazi spirit guides.

“It
is
working,” Starlitz realized. “Zeta, look, it worked!”

Zeta removed her hands from her ears. “What did you say?”

“He came, he’s here! Your grandpa just showed up.”

Zeta looked doubtfully among the half-collapsing revelers.

“Count them!” Starlitz said.

Zeta carefully tallied their guests. “I get thirteen sad old drunk guys,” she said mournfully.

“Hurray! I only hired twelve!”

Zeta examined the closed, rotting doors, which had been cinched with a kinked length of rusty chain. “Dad, nobody came in.…”

“Your grandpa doesn’t have to come through a door. Lemme think.… We’ll give every one of them a cigarette, just like for Christmas, okay? Kind of an ID tag!”

Starlitz worked his way through the revelers, methodically flicking his Cricket in a mass baptism of smoke. He was dragging them from the booze-sticky depths of their private realms, and into the Christmas-twinkling light of a greater awareness. Each time the lighter flared, they leapt out of their alcoholic shrouds. Teeth gone, bearded lips slack. Windburns from a lifetime of sheepherding. Grizzle and grease, the dust, the smell. Scarred eyelids, spiked eyebrows. Caries, vitamin deficiency. Rural decay, urban decay.

Then—right before him—here was the man. The man who looked more like the others than the others could ever quite look. He had a face that was a distillation of all lost, invisible faces. He possessed a deep, pristine air of loss, a sense of disconnection so final and complete that there was an eerie joy to it, like poetry in a dead language.

Starlitz seized the shabby shoulder firmly. “Zeta! Zeta! Come quick!”

She came at the trot.

“Look, Zeta, here he is, this is him!”

The timeless bum puffed his freshly lit cigarette and bent his dirty head. He was firming up considerably now,
emerging from infinite shadow into the vivid quotidian world of mass, space-time, weight, grime, grit, filth. Starlitz was astonished to see how young his father looked.

Starlitz had never witnessed his own father looking so anomalously youthful. With his black, dusty hair, unlined, supple neck, and birdbone wrists, he looked no more than twenty-five.

Starlitz’s father was wearing khaki pants, canvas shoes without socks, a buttoned gray canvas shirt that might have come from jail or a construction site. All of it colorless and threadbare, bleached by a thousand suns. He lifted one grimy, gracile hand and touched Zeta’s bare wrist. Zeta flinched with the jolt, but the contact visibly enlivened him. Human awareness flooded his distant, shoe-button eyes.

“O Javanese Navajo,” he muttered.

“Dad,” said Starlitz anxiously, “you know me, right?”

The young man shrugged, with a feeble, wavering smile.

“Hold on to his arm, Zeta. Hold on to him good, don’t let go of him, not even for a second. I’m gonna turn down the music.” Starlitz saw to the blasting phonograph, and returned.

“Dad,” he said intently, “it’s me, it’s Lech. I’m your son, the son of the Polish girl, the girl at the hospital, remember? This is what I look like when I’m all grown up. And this—this is my daughter, Zenobia. This is your granddaughter, Dad.”

“Can he talk English?” said Zeta with interest, still clutching the apparition’s scrawny arm. “He sure doesn’t
look
English.”

“He can’t talk English, exactly,” Starlitz explained. “He has his own native language. It’s one of those tribal lingos. It has, like, sixteen words for the color orange and eighteen words for deer tracks … but past tense, and present tense, and pluperfect and all that stuff, they never quite worked all that out, somehow. See, he never
needed
any future tense or past tense. That was never part of his narrative.”

“What’s his name?”

“Well, I know he had some kind of American legal name once, ’cause they enlisted him in the U.S. Army in the forties. He was in the Pacific war, with the Navajo code talkers. Later he got this broom-pusher job with some big-time feds in Los Alamos.… He had a military accident there, that blew his identity away, just obliterated it.… My mom, your grandma, she always just called him ‘Joe.’ Like ‘GI Joe,’ or ‘Hey, Joe, you got gum?’ So you can just call him ‘Joe,’ too, okay?”

“Hi, Grandpa Joe,” said Zeta.

Grandpa Joe smiled at her and said something elaborate, kindly, self-deprecatingly humorous, and completely indecipherable.