Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling

  Wiesel sighed in deep gratification.

  “Easy, boy,” Starlitz told him.

  “The lighting stinks in here,” Wiesel complained, edging back out and groping in his bag for a meter.

  “I can get you a private session,” Starlitz told him. “I can book you a whole afternoon.”

  “Yah. Great. Super,” Wiesel said, pale eyes gleaming like lacquered glass. “I’ll need a studio.…”

  Ozbey returned to the suite, flanked by a friendly pair of thugs. He stared at Wiesel for a moment, then shrugged. “Your friend looks much happier now.”

  “He always rallies once he’s on the job. Fashion people are way temperamental.”

  “Tell him to be careful where he points that big camera. There are special friends of my uncle with us tonight.”

  “Hey, I’m not her manager, you are,” Starlitz objected promptly. “You want to set ground rules for the foreign press, go tell him yourself.”

  Wiesel strolled over and busied himself yanking equipment bags from Starlitz’s bulky torso. He shrugged into them hastily. The net of fat nylon bag-straps seemed to squeeze Wiesel right back into shape. Wiesel burrowed into his ditty bag, found a fabric hat, and whipped it over his head at a cocky angle.

  Gonca rose from her seat suddenly, calling out for Ozbey in Turkish. She had gone pale.

  Ozbey laughed in surprise. “Stage nerves! I was starting to think little Gonca didn’t have any nerves.”

  “You her manager?” said Wiesel abruptly. “You gotta be, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” smiled Ozbey hospitably.

  “Let’s have a word about the property, okay?”

  “It’s late, my friend. You’re tired from your long flight. Let’s have a drink together.”

  “Capital idea,” said Wiesel, his face plump and meaty. “Make mine a double.” He slung a last bag across his shoulder and strode off toward the bar without a second look.

  Starlitz turned to Viktor. “Okay, we’re done, we can go now,” he said in Russian. He left the suite.

  “Just a moment,” said Viktor, tagging after him down the tiled and shining hall.

  “You got a problem?” said Starlitz, turning.

  “No,” said Viktor. “Not so much a problem as a philosophical matter.”

  “Find a mosque and ask an imam.”

  Viktor stepped into the elevator with him. The kid’s clothes reeked of brandy and cheap cigarettes. “I want to know,” he insisted, “what happened to me. I was in my own room, after a hard night. Suddenly I found myself downstairs, standing in the bushes, pissing all over my own shoes.”

  “That’s simple, boy. You’re stinking drunk, so you don’t know where you are, or who you are, or where you’re going.”

  Viktor grunted. “Well, I may be drunk, but I know where you are going.”

  Starlitz glanced at him in surprise. “Yeah?”

  “Yes. You are going downstairs now, to deal with that terrible biznis inside the yellow hat case. Whatever that biznis is.”

  “That biznis is only one of my many burdens and responsibilities, kid.”

  The elevator doors opened again, onto the lobby. “Life is like that, isn’t it?” said Viktor wisely, stepping out. “You have one of those bad nights, when something unspeakable happens.… It’s never just one strange thing. The surface of life breaks open … and the depths come pouring through.”

  Starlitz glanced through the glass doors of the deserted hotel lobby. The abandoned taxi was still sitting there; the panicked driver had not seen fit to return. Someone had stolen Viktor’s abandoned brandy bottle from the roof of the car. “You ever discuss these matters with your uncle?”

  “No. He’s a brave man, Pulat Romanevich.… He has killed more people than I can count.… But, no, he doesn’t understand life. Not anymore, not this modern life. No, not at all. He’s a lost soul.”

  “Where is he tonight? I have some uses for him.”

  “He left for the airport this afternoon,” said Viktor. “He said he had a surprise waiting.”

  “What kind of surprise?”

  Viktor shrugged. “A surprise that flies, I suppose!”

  Starlitz banged the bell at the concierge stand. “Listen, kid. How’d you like to make some serious cash tonight?”

  “Not particularly,” Viktor allowed, leaning on the counter.

  “No?”

  “No. I don’t need money. I’m intelligentsiya. I cannot be measured by any common yardstick.”

  Starlitz looked at Viktor with care. The kid was wearing bloated pants, a stained wife-beater with an anime cartoon on it, and a zip-up athletic jacket made of recycled polystyrene bottles. He had fake Turkish Nike joggers and both his wrists bore little bracelets of woven tatty yarn. Both Viktor’s ears were cauliflowered with badly healed piercings.

  “You got any cigarettes?” Starlitz said.

  “Yes, I do,” said Viktor, patting his pockets. “Turkish Camels.”

  “Come on with me, then. It’s gonna be a long night.”

  STARLITZ ACCEPTED THE REEKING YELLOW HAT CASE from the yawning concierge. He left through the glass doors, pulled the taxi keys from his pocket, and put the case in the taxi’s trunk.

  “Get in,” he said.

  Viktor slid into the taxi’s passenger seat.

  “Not back there! Get up in front.”

  “I’m more convincing as a passenger,” Viktor objected. “If they see me in front with you, they’ll know we stole this thing.”

  The kid had a good point. Starlitz slammed the doors, gunned the complaining engine, and pulled out of the lot.

  Starlitz drove past the moth-beaten neon of the Meridien’s hotel sign. He turned onto the coast road, heading east. Like most Turkish Cypriot taxis the car had an evil-eye charm, made of cast blue glass. It dangled on a leather cord from the rearview mirror. Starlitz yanked the blue eye loose and tossed it out the window. After a moment’s thought he followed it with the driver’s dash-mounted cellular phone.

  “Cigarette?” said Viktor cheerily, passing a Camel to the front.

  “Great,” said Starlitz, accepting a light and puffing energetically. If he didn’t actually ask for a cigarette, it was almost as if he weren’t smoking.

  Snapping a key loose from the driver’s chain, Starlitz opened the taxi’s glove compartment. He removed a British-printed road map of northern Cyprus, a cheap German handgun, a Cypriot union card, a dog-eared pack of risqué playing cards, and a much-depleted Baggie of Lebanese hashish.

  Starlitz tossed the Baggie into the backseat.

  “Thanks!” said Viktor, pocketing it.

  It cost Starlitz an effort of will to drive British style, on the left-hand side of the road. As was common on the island, the Cypriot taxi had its steering wheel on the wrong damn side of the car.

  “Where are we going?” said Viktor calmly.

  “ ‘Yasak Bölge Girilmez,’ ” said Starlitz.

  “Ah, yes,” Viktor quoted, “ ‘Forbidden Zone, Interdite Zone, Verboten Zone.’ ” Every local tourist came to know the bright-yellow Yasak Bölge Girilmez signs. Turkish Cyprus brandished hundreds of them in the face of every visitor.

  They passed night-shadowed coastal villages. On the rocky slopes of the Pentadactylos, big, showy hillside villas loomed under their blue security lights. The ancient landscape boasted many half-completed modern projects, abandoned by offshore developers when some inflation crash had hit the Turkish market. Their grimy slabs and concrete pillars littered the countryside, instant prefab ruins.

  They skirted sprawling Turkish Army bases, walled twelve feet high in chain link and razor wire. They rolled past the sealed-up, shadowed hulks of cheap tourist kafeteryas. They drove past square yellow postboxes that were not included in the global postal networks. Past gloomy roadside palm trees, and minareted village mosques. Past sleeping, dusty, drought-stricken orange groves. Past dreaming fields of yellow asphodel. Past writhing, crooked olive trees that could have sheltered Odysseus on a ba
d sailing day.

  Starlitz pulled onto a tiny country lane. After an extensive travail of bumping, scrunching, and weaving, he finally parked the taxi by a mossy, half-collapsed stone wall. He killed the engine, got out, and stretched.

  Viktor emerged with a bold flutter of denim pants legs and lit a fresh cigarette.

  The dirt road had ended suddenly, in an evil cornucopia of rotting cardboard, rags, and bottles. At the crest of a nearby hill was a sleeping briar tangle of rust-eaten barbed wire. The snarled barricade was lavishly shrouded with snagged and windblown plastic trash. It resembled a laundry clothesline from hell.

  The no-man’s-land between the Greek and Turkish Cyprus factions was twenty-five years old. By its deadly nature it was utterly unlivable, so it had promptly become the island’s premier dump. The deep ruts in the back road had been cut by illegal sewage tankers, who made it their habit to water and fertilize the septic, forbidden wilderness. The Green Line had responded with gusto: three briar-strewn lumps nearby were a dead British fridge, a defunct French stove, and an entire overgrown Volkswagen.

  Starlitz opened the taxi’s trunk. He removed the yellow case with queasy care and set it gently on the road. The flower smell seemed fainter now: more rotten, and yet, at the same time, somehow more poignant.

  “You want that case dumped in the no-man’s-land?” said Viktor curiously.

  “Not dumped. I want it buried.” Starlitz produced a pick-ended tire jack.

  Viktor’s glowing cig-end wobbled as he nodded in the dark.

  “Tell me something,” said Starlitz. “You ever crawl through a barbed-wire border in the middle of the night?”

  “Can’t say I have,” said Viktor. “Barbed-wire borders, that was a nineteen sixties biznis. Much before my time.”

  “Oh, yeah, the Green Line here, it’s way sixties,” Starlitz agreed. “There are sixteen thousand land mines scattered around in there. Lemme tell you something about land mines, okay? Land mines are like videocams, they are way objective and technical. You can’t talk your way out of a land mine. They don’t give a shit who you are, or what you are, or where you’re from. They will blow your ass up even if you married the Prince of Wales.”

  “Oh, give me the stupid case.” Viktor yawned. “I can’t let some fat man of your advanced years blunder around in there all night. This is a young man’s job.”

  “Don’t light up in there,” Starlitz counseled, handing over the case and the tire tool. “The Greeks keep moving their sniper posts, and the UN has infrared cameras.”

  With a wry smile Viktor searched various pockets, and obediently handed over one, two, three, four, and five ragged packs of smuggled Turkish cigarettes.

  “One last thing,” Starlitz told him. “Don’t open the case. Just bury it good and deep.”

  Viktor left, his Nike track shoes crunching through the brittle weeds.

  Starlitz sat inside the darkened taxi. He clicked the ignition and turned on the car radio. With a little effort he found a powerful offshore pop station. The Turks were still very big on Turkish-language heavy metal. Heavy metal rock held on like a barnacle in the planet’s various backwaters. Metal had an inherently polyglot character. Any language screamed with the amps at eleven became a universal language.

  Two hours crept by. It grew colder. A light fog crept across the briar-strewn landscape. Then footsteps approached. Starlitz flicked on the headlights, casting a stumbling Viktor into the glare. Stenciled out of darkness, Viktor stood there, dazed and shivering.

  Starlitz went to join him. Viktor’s baggy pants were wire snagged and dew soaked. He still clutched the dirt-smeared tire tool.

  Viktor was coated head to foot with a substance like light greasy smut, a kind of radiant floral garbage.

  Starlitz put one hand on Viktor’s damp shoulder. Beneath his grip Viktor’s flesh made an ashen, crunching sound.

  “You had to open the case,” Starlitz said kindly.

  “Of course,” Viktor muttered. His pale Slavic eyes looked quite blind.

  “Get in the car,” said Starlitz. He led Viktor forward.

  At Viktor’s uncanny presence the taxi groaned in mechanical protest. Its shocks popped audibly. The paint blistered. A stick of chrome trim snapped loose.

  Starlitz got in.

  “Give me a drink,” groaned Viktor.

  “That won’t help you, kid. Not in these conditions.”

  “I’ve seen death before,” said Viktor hollowly. “But never death like that.”

  “There’s death, and there’s death,” Starlitz told him. “When you bury a century, a whole lot has to go down with it. Spirit of the times, brother.”

  “Yes,” Viktor said weakly. “My artist friends in Petersburg always say that. ‘Even spirits die.’ That’s what they say … my friends, the Necro-Realists.”

  “Spirits die first.” Starlitz started the engine, laboriously turned the taxi in the narrow, rutted lane, and flicked on the radio again. Their situation called for something nice and loud. Something mawkish. Something mundane, that would restore them to the default position of human banality, circa 1999. Celine Dion singing the theme from Titanic. Perfect.

  “You wanna to stay off the booze and the dope for a couple days,” Starlitz advised. “Just be normal, okay? Order room service, and watch bad TV in a cheap hotel.”

  “Will that help me?” Viktor croaked.

  “Absolutely. Just ride it out, man. We’ll be leaving this island soon. Once we’re out of here, none of this will matter. Because it’s over now. We buried it. It’s off the agenda. Not on the record. It’s yesterday.”

  Viktor’s teeth were chattering. With a visible effort he got his jitters under control. As they passed the pale lights of Lapta, something like a human color was returning to the resilient flesh of the young Russian. “I can’t let my uncle see me like this,” he said. “There would be questions.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll check you into a hotel in Lefkosa. I gotta do an errand in that town, anyway.”

  Viktor leaned his shaggy head against the window glass and stared into the night. “Is it always like this? So horrible?”

  Starlitz turned around over the driver’s seat, slinging back his elbow. “How do you feel, kid? You feel like you’re gonna die?”

  “No, I’m a Necro-Realist,” Viktor said stoutly. “I know what death is. But I don’t die easily. Dying is for other people.”

  “Then, no, it isn’t always this horrible.” Starlitz turned back with a grunt. “ ‘Horrible’ would be too simple. The world isn’t simple or pure. It isn’t any one thing. The real world, the true reality … it literally isn’t what it is. ‘A is not A,’ right? In the real world A can’t even fuckin’ bother to be A. You ever read any Umberto Eco?”

  Viktor stirred restlessly. “You mean those big, fat popular novels? No, I can’t abide that sort of thing.”

  “How about Deleuze and Guattari? Derrida? Foucault? You ever read any Adorno?”

  “Adorno was a fucking Marxist,” Viktor said wearily. “But of course I’ve read Derrida. How could one not read Derrida? Derrida revealed that the Western intellectual tradition is riddled with logical aporias.” Viktor looked up. “Have you read Jacques Derrida, Mr. Starlitz? En français?”

  “Uh … I don’t exactly read those guys,” Starlitz confessed. “I had to pick it all up on the street.”

  Viktor grunted in disdain.

  “I do read Jean Baudrillard sometimes. Baudrillard’s a real comedian.”

  “I don’t like Baudrillard,” said Viktor, sitting up straighter. “He never made it clear how a political intervention can avoid being recuperated by the system. ‘Seduction,’ ‘fatal strategies,’ where does that get us?” He sighed. “We might as well go get drunk.”

  “Well, see, the basic deal there is,” mused Starlitz, “that when the master narrative collapses and implodes, everything becomes undecidable.”

  Viktor leaned forward intently. “Tell me. Where does one find this ‘
master narrative’? I want some of it. Do you buy it? Is that the secret?”

  Starlitz waved one meaty hand. “Millennium’s almost over now, kid. The narrative is increasingly polyvalent and decentered. It’s become, you know, way rhizomatic, and all that.”

  “Yes. So they tell me. All right. So what? Where is my part of the action?”

  “Well, I dunno if you’ve got any action or not, but you’re not gonna find it here in Cyprus. This is a tiny, unrecognized, outlaw republic. We’re among the excluded, out here. We are very, very peripheral. And besides that—there’s a big cusp coming. A major narrative crisis. It’s gonna wipe a lot of slates clean. Bury the walking zombies.”

  “You mean Y2K,” said Viktor, leaning back.

  Starlitz nodded silently. The night was going well. The kid would be okay now. The kid had made his bones tonight. Now he was in the know.

  STARLITZ PARKED VIKTOR BY THE HOUR IN A FLEABAG Lefkosa pansiyon. The place was locally known as a “Natasha house,” thanks to its staff of expatriate Ukrainian working girls. It was five in the morning. The staff were all asleep. They were exhausted from their bone-grinding, hands-on labor, underpricing Turkish whores.

  Starlitz dumped the taxi in the tall weeds of an abandoned Turkish trench works, west of the capital. As he walked back toward the divided city, a Homeric dawn gnawed at the Nicosia skyline with her rosy gums.

  Starlitz lit one of Viktor’s cigarettes, put his hands in his pockets, and began to drift.

  Midmorning found Starlitz sitting on a bus bench, eating from a large bag of chocolate croissants and sipping a Styrofoam Nescafé. Urban crowds went about their business, men in flat hats and patterned sweaters, women heaving baby carriages along the black-and-white-striped curb.

  A rust-spotted jitney pulled over. A backpacking American woman climbed out of it. Her skin was the color of a Starbucks frappuccino, and she had black, kinked hair in big clusters of thread-knotted twists. She wore a nylon tropical shirt, knotted at the midriff, and chocolate-chip desert-camo cutoffs, unconvincingly cinched up with a gleaming concho belt.