Zeitgeist (20 page)

“Nineteen forty-five, Dad? Wasn’t that World War Three?”

“World War Two.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“The past is a different country, Zeta. We have to be different now too. We don’t take cabs anymore. We’re poor people now, you and me. We’re poor, and we’re invisible. We don’t have any ID, so we can’t let cops catch us. We don’t know any lawyers or doctors, and we don’t have a bank. Don’t talk to strangers, ever. Pretend you don’t speak any English. Never write your name down, never tell anyone who you are.” Starlitz drew a breath. “And most of all, stay away from videocams. If you see a security video, just get the hell away from that whole neighborhood, right away.”

“What’s wrong with videocams?”

“Haven’t you noticed yet?”

She shrugged. “I know that videocams don’t like me. I break ’em all the time. I even break cameras sometimes.”

“That’s because of two important things, babe. Surveillance and documentation. It’s all about mechanical objectivity, proper observation, the scientific method, reproducible results, and all of that scary crap. If we’re going to find your grandpa, we can’t be pinned down like
that, not even one little bit. We’ve got to be looser and farther away from the consensus narrative than you’ve ever gotten before. You understand me? I know this is kind of hard to understand.”

Zeta wrinkled her brow. “It’s like hide-and-go-seek, sorta, right?”

“Yeah. Sorta.”

“We’re hunting for Grandpa? We’re sneaking up on him in disguise?”

“Yeah. That’s the story. Pretty much.”

She looked up brightly. “We’ve got to go underground to nail his sorry ass?”

“Absolutely!”
Starlitz beamed. “Now you’re really with it!”

BY EVENING THEY WERE ON A BUS TO JUAREZ. ZETA fell asleep against his shoulder, a torn ticket and a half-chewed flour tortilla still in her hand. Starlitz sat chain-smoking amid his neighbors, the cheekboned widow in the frayed black shawl and the pear-shaped gent in the seersucker suit. The night outside the window was full of Central American stars.

Starlitz enjoyed a Mexico City–style coughing fit, tossed the butt, and lit another. He was dead broke now, his baggy cotton pants holding scarcely a peso, but he was far from lost in the world, because he still had cigarettes. Cigarettes, always the primal currency of the twentieth-century underground, the war stricken, the occupation forces, the resistance, and the jailed. The secret wealth of the gulag, Occupation Paris, stilyagi Moscow, of Hong Kong boat people, and a thousand county clinks and rehab clinics. He’d been smoking all day, because it hid his face, it fit him in, it made him commoner. As long as he never took the trouble to check inventory, he knew that there would still be cigarettes left, in the bottom of the bag.

Starlitz and Zeta spent nine days in Juarez, locating a coyote, and waiting for the mighty coyote to deign to take them across the Big River, to The Pass. Rio Grande, El
Paso, the pass into El Norte, that vast, legendary realm of cruelty and gold.

Starlitz saw that El Norte had sent its writhing, unnatural tentacles over the border, and El Norte had come to stay. El Norte had sunk down great big solid roots here in the maquiladora country; there was no more slumbering mestizo vibe about this part of Mexico now, there was nothing here you could successfully repel with any bandolier and any machete. Japan was here building gizmos of plastic with double-A batteries, multinat Europe had blown into town with the silicon and the big wheels. This place was Mexico, all right, still definitely a wholly owned family enterprise, but it was Mexico 1999, La NAFTA, Mexico as the world’s first and only Latin American economic superpower. The snake and eagle were a hiccup and sneeze away from the third millennium.

The down-market streets were full of wandering, booze-dazed Yankees, so they ate quite well and slept better after Starlitz had lifted a wallet.

Zeta looked a little downcast over her greasy stack of white corn tamales. “Dad, it’s not right to pick people’s pockets, is it?”

“Absolutely not!” Starlitz assured her firmly, chasing the beans on his flowered tin plate with a Taiwanese fork. “The margins in the pickpocket racket are razor thin. Lifting wallets the right way takes organization: the bumper, the lifter, the getaway guy.… That’s way too much labor for the rate of return. The only cats who make out picking pockets are specialists, they farm people out to hit airports and trains. It’s a franchise. Forget about it.”

“Is it bad that you stole that drunk guy’s wallet?”

“You bet it’s bad, but it’s worse not to pay your coyote when you cross the big river.”

“Okay, Dad.” She put a semicircle of toothmarks into her tamale.

THEIR COYOTE WAS THE KIND OF SORRY, AMATEUR coyote you could find in a border town, on a bad weekend,
with broken Spanish. The coyote was an acne-faced Tejano kid with a silver buckle and a big black cowboy hat, who figured he had
la Frontera
sussed because he carried the proverbial
pistola en la mano
.

After midnight their little cluster of the adventurous unemployed waded the concrete-lined Rio Grande, and were almost immediately flushed out by a pack of Migra with infrared cams. Luckily, thanks to a recent shoot-to-kill scandal, the uniformed agents of the INS were a little more sluggish and tentative than usual. Scrambling up the harsh concrete incline, Starlitz and Zeta hit the thorny dirt and froze in a meager patch of tumbleweed, while a thundering herd of booted feet and whining dogs passed them not ten feet away. Then they climbed and plucked and lightly bled their way through the barbed wire, and slithered and tiptoed between and among the various spotlit free-fire zones, until, finally, they emerged onto a cracked, weed-grown sidewalk of a formally American street.

“Hey, Dad,” Zeta panted, picking vicious burrs out of her hair.

“Yeah?”

“Hey, Dad, you know something?”

“What?”

“Hey, Dad, you know something, I never did anything like
this
before. This is
terrible
. I’m hungry, I’m hungry all the time. I feel cold, and I’m dirty. We have to walk everywhere. We go to the bathroom right on the ground. I don’t have my own house, or any water.”

“Yep. That’s the story line, all right.”

“How come this feels so normal?”

“Because this
is
normal. Most of the people in the world live like this. Most people have
always
lived like this. Most people have always
expected
to live like this. This is the great untold back-story, it’s the genuine silent majority. Most people in the world are totally poor, and totally obscure. Billions of people live like this. It never makes a headline. No camera ever looks at it, they’re never on TV. Nobody who matters ever pretends to care.”

They walked on silently for some time, passing cracked streetlights and shabby convenience stores boasting of lottery payoffs. “Hey, Dad.”

“What.”

“Hey, Dad.”

“What?”

“Do poor people eat lightbulbs?”

“Why would they wanna do that?” Starlitz paused thoughtfully. “Do
you
eat lightbulbs?”

Zeta fell two steps back and muttered inaudibly.

“What was that?”

Paralyzed with shyness, she looked up. “I said, ‘only the frosted white ones.’ ”

“Did anyone ever
see
you eat lightbulbs?” His voice grew sharp. “Did you ever
tell anyone
that you eat lightbulbs? You never ate lightbulbs in front of a camera, did you?”

“No, no, no, no, Dad, I never told anybody.”

“Well, I guess you ought to be cool, then.”

“Really?” she brightened. “Great.”

They walked on silently. “I would watch it with the lightbulb thing,” he said at last. “I mean, they’re made of glass and metal, when you think about it. That’s inorganic.”

Zeta said nothing.

“It’s okay,” he soothed, “I’m your dad, and you can tell me about these things. It’s all right, Zeta. It’s
good
to tell me.”

AN ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL HAD NO TROUBLE HITCHING rides with the kindly and supportive rural populace of New Mexico. They were a little disappointed to discover that she didn’t speak border Spanish, but they wouldn’t make an issue of this when she was accompanied by her large, silent, hat-wearing dad. Their migration was slow and semirandom, full of long, dusty roadside waits and many doublings-back, but the continent’s crust moved below their feet, and their destination was no particular place. Their destination was a state of mind.

Except for the possible interest of bored sheriff’s deputies, there was no real hazard in hitchhiking. The locals were people of the mountain-studded North American Empty Quarter. Under no circumstances would they dream of turning in Starlitz and Zeta to the loathsome minions of distant Washington. A couple of their drivers even pulled off the road, fed them chile, and picked up the tab. One generous matron offered to buy Zeta better shoes.

They slept in culverts and under bridges, slowly climbing up toward the arid, piney reaches of Socorro.

Now they walked up the side of a broken road, built for some long-forgotten military encampment. Zeta was browner and thinner. Despite their hard nights and their meager, irregular rations, she seemed to have grown an inch. She was alive, in motion, and breathing mountain air. Every day, every hour, put a new, visible lacquer of experience on the fine surface of her young soul.

“Dad, are we there yet?”

“Almost. I can feel it. We’re definitely closing in.”

“Does Grandpa live around here?”

“No, he doesn’t live anywhere in particular, but this is the place that turned him into what he is. Or what he was. You know. Whenever.”

Starlitz finally settled on a broken, paint-flaking Quonset hut, in a declining suburb of Socorro. Someone had forgotten to buy the place out and develop it; likely it was fatally out of code, commercially hammerlocked by some distant federal registry of toxic sites.

As Starlitz and Zeta settled into the place, chasing its cobwebs and dropping candy wrappers, the nature of its allure slowly clarified. This eldritch structure had once been part of a great, reality-shattering research effort, the bloody midcentury parturition of Big Science. The place definitely had the smell and taste of Major Technological Advent, a faint metallic isotropic tang of anomalous Geiger activity, from backyard lab procedures dating back to the Belle Epoque of Marie Curie, when stuff that glowed in the dark was considered a nerve tonic.

Some local mestizo junk guy had picked the metal barn up off the atomic security lot, sometime after the mighty Fall of Oppenheimer, and some small, tax-evading businessman had hammered and wire-tied the military lab back together, put up its arching iron bands and its waffled sheet iron. It had acquired a series of cut-through, tie-on, handmade wooden shacks, like a series of paradigmatic airlocks into the world of proletarian poverty.

As the southwestern decades passed, the little complex had picked up consumer detritus like the stony growth of a desert rose; a gas pump, a wooden sign, various pachuco spray-bombings, dead batteries, a new concrete floor, a dog’s lair or maybe an urban coyote’s; dead tractor tires, fake nylon Paiute blankets; foot-crushed, illegible, oil-stained calendar pages of zaftig beach-babes, souvenir fake-flint arrowheads chipped by retrofitted warmachines in occupied Japan, fossilized squirts of axle grease, splintered wooden pallets, frayed pulley-belts with every atom of use rubbed out of them by bitter years of high RPM; bent, dented copper rivets, heel-piercing shards of rainbow-colored, fingernail-paring-shaped lathe scrap, six wooden-handled tin buckets of paint long congealed into rubbery, colorless solids, a rat-haunted stack of ancient cedar firewood, empty, logoed flour sacks half gone to woven powder, empty bottles of Jim Beam and Dos Chamucos tequila, a curled-up, sand-eaten, fatally kinked coil of garden hose.…

They spent a cold night on the concrete floor, lighting a little tramp fire on the cracked cement, dancing together to try to keep warm, but there was no sign of the old man.

“I’m sorry he didn’t show up,” Starlitz said resignedly, in the grim pink light of dawn. “This is going to be harder than it looks. I kind of figured it might be, this being the very, very tag end of the century and all, but I didn’t want us to do all that work, if we didn’t have to. We’ll have to try again, and this time we’re gonna have to really put some effort in it.”

“Doesn’t Grandpa know we’re here?”

“He doesn’t have to know.” Starlitz scratched his greasy hair. “We can try the Christmas thing. It’s an entry-way,” he explained. “Every twentieth-century Christmas is pretty much like all the other ones. Christmas got more consumer oriented every year of the century, as the Judeo-Christian thing lost its shareholder value, but the holidays tend to work for him. The surveillance always eases around Christmas. People are sloppy drunk and fighting with their relatives, so they never look hard at strangers. The newspapers are skinnier, the TVs are full of old comedians. Back when I used to see my dad a lot, he would always show up around Christmas.… Kinda wander into town to see me for the holidays, you know.… In Florida, mostly.”

“Are you from Florida, Dad?”

“Yeah, no, maybe. When I was your age, after my mom finally went into the hospital and couldn’t come out again, there was this old guy from outside Tallahassee who took me up … the Professor, we used to call him.… This woman he was with—my stepmom, I guess—she used to feed us.… I used to help out on his great project.” Starlitz rubbed his sandaled heel on an oil stain. “Kind of a child-labor, backwoods, Florida-hick thing, really.”

“He had a great project? I wish
I
had a great project. What kind of great project?”

“Oh, the usual. Guys like the Professor, they’re beyond the fringe, but there’s generally some kind of huge, cranky scam going down there.… Guys like him generally have a great project, if they’re strong enough.… If it’s way outside your discourse, the ‘great project’ looks totally nuts. But if you’re inside the story line, it definitely comes across as some kind of very serious world-changing scheme.… The Professor didn’t want to be blown out of the consensus narrative, so he was really
clinging on
, you know.… Kinda piling up physical evidence of his own existence.… The Professor was putting together this, uhm, personal reality anchor. With used car parts and giant chunks of coral.… I mean
giant
chunks of Florida coral stone, like five-ton, six-ton chunks.… He used to
wait till after dark, so nobody would see him pick ’em up and carry them in his arms.… It passed as a kind of a folk art, this wacky roadside-attraction thing, at least that’s what it
looked
like, this big stone maze he built, and lots of dangling hubcaps and cypress-root sculptures.… That’s where I lived, when I was a kid.”