Talked to Mom this morning, got the whole story, made my apologies, so don’t worry about that.
I’m sorry about your job. To be honest, I’m stunned. I can’t believe anyone would fire you.
Where are you working now?
FROM:
[email protected] TO:
[email protected] SUBJECT: Holiday responsibilities
Mom says you won’t commit to coming home for Christmas, and she expects me to believe it. But I’m thinking no way could you talk to a woman who’s just had the highlight of her year truncated by an accident, and who otherwise has a shitty life with a semi-disabled man, and who hasn’t gotten to be at home for Christmas since like Dan Quayle’s vice presidency, and who *survives* by looking forward to things, and who loves Christmas the way other people love sex, and who’s seen you for all of forty-five minutes in the last three years: I’m thinking no way could you have told this woman, nope, sorry, staying in Vilnius.
(Vilnius!)
Mom must have misunderstood you. Please clarify.
Since you ask, I’m not working anywhere. Subbing a little at Mare Scuro but otherwise sleeping until two in the afternoon. If this continues, I may have to do some therapeutic thing of the sort that will horrify you. Got to regain my appetite for shopping and other non-free consumer pleasures.
The last thing I heard about Gitanas Misevicious was that he’d given Julia two black eyes. But whatever.
FROM:
[email protected] TO:
[email protected] SUBJECT: Re: “Holiday responsibilities”
I intend to get to St. Jude as soon as I make some money. Maybe even by Dad’s birthday. But Christmas is hell, you know that. There’s no worse time. You can tell Mom I’ll come early in the new year.
Mom says that Caroline and the boys will be in St. Jude for Christmas. Can this be true?
Don’t not take a psychotropic on my account.
FROM:
[email protected] TO:
[email protected] SUBJECT: “The only thing I hurt was my dignity”
Nice try, but no, sorry, I insist that you come for Christmas.
I’ve been talking to Axon, and the plan is to give Dad six months of Corecktall beginning right after New Year’s, and to let him and Mom stay with me while that’s going on. (Helpfully, my life is in ruins, so it’s easy to make myself available.) The only way this scenario won’t happen is if Axon’s medical staff decides that Dad has non-drug-related dementia. He admittedly seemed pretty shaky when he was in New York, but he’s been sounding good on the phone. “All I hurt when I fell was my dignity,” etc. They took the cast off his arm a week early.
Anyway, he’s probably going to be with me in Philly for his birthday, and for the rest of the winter and spring too, and so Christmas is the time for you to come to St. Jude, and so please don’t argue with me anymore, just do it.
I eagerly (but with confidence) await confirmation that you will be there.
P.S. Caroline, Aaron, and Caleb are not coming. Gary’s coming with Jonah and flying back to Philly at noon on the 25th.
P.P.S. Don’t worry, I say NO to drugs.
FROM:
[email protected] TO:
[email protected] SUBJECT: Re: “The only thing I hurt was my dignity”
I saw a man shot six times in the stomach last night. A paid hit in a club called Musmiryte. It had nothing to do with us, but I wasn’t happy to see it.
It’s not clear to me why I’m required to come to St. Jude on some specific date. If Mom and Dad were my children, whom I’d created out of nothing without asking their permission, I could understand being responsible for them. Parents have an overwhelming Darwinian hardwired genetic stake in their children’s welfare. But children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents.
Basically, I have very little to say to these people. And I don’t think they want to hear what I do have to say.
Why don’t I plan to see them when they’re in Philadelphia? That sounds more fun anyway. That way all nine of us can get together, instead of just six of us.
FROM:
[email protected] TO:
[email protected] SUBJECT: A serious flaming from your pissed-off sister
My god you sound self-pitying.
I’m saying come for MY sake. For MY sake. And also for YOUR OWN sake, because I’m sure it’s very cool and interesting and adult-feeling to watch somebody get shot in the stomach, but you only have two parents, and if you miss your time with them now you won’t get another chance.
I’ll admit it: I’m a mess.
I will tell you—because I want to tell someone—even though you never told me why YOU got fired—that I was fired for sleeping with my boss’s wife.
So, what do you think *I* have to say to “these people”? What do you think my little Sunday chats with Mom are like these days?
You owe me $20,500. How’s THAT for a debt?
Buy the fucking ticket. I’ll reimburse you.
I love you and I miss you. Don’t ask me why.
FROM:
[email protected] TO:
[email protected] SUBJECT: Remorse
I’m sorry I flamed you. The last line is the only one I meant. I don’t have the right temperament for e-mail. Please write back. Please come for Christmas.
FROM:
[email protected] TO:
[email protected] SUBJECT: Worry
Please, please, please don’t talk about people getting shot and then do the silence thing to me.
FROM:
[email protected] TO:
[email protected] SUBJECT: Only six more shopping days before Christmas!
Chip? Are you there? Please write or call.
Global Warming Enhances Value
of Lithuania Incorporated
VILNIUS, OCTOBER 30. With world ocean levels rising by more than an inch per year and millions of cubic meters of ocean beach eroded daily, the European Council on Natural Resources this week warned that Europe could face “catastrophic” shortages of sand and gravel by the end of the decade.
“Throughout history, mankind has regarded sand and gravel as inexhaustible resources,” said ECNR chairman Jacques Dormand. “Sadly, our overreliance on greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels will leave many central European countries, including Germany, at the mercy of sand-and-gravel cartel states, particularly sand-rich Lithuania, if they wish to continue with basic road-building and construction.”
Gitanas R. Misevičius, founder and CEO of Lithuania’s Free Market Party Company, compared the impending European sand-and-gravel crisis to the oil crisis of 1973. “Back then,” Misevičius said, “tiny oil-rich countries like Bahrain and Brunei were the mice that roared. Tomorrow, Lithuania.”
Chairman Dormand described the pro-Western, probusiness Free Market Party Company as “currently the only political movement in Lithuania willing to deal fairly and responsibly with Western capital markets.
“Our misfortune,” Dormand said, “is that most of Europe’s reserve sand-and-gravel capacity is in the hands of Baltic nationalists beside whom Muammar Gadhafi looks like Charles de Gaulle. I scarcely exaggerate in saying that the future economic stability of the EC is in the hands of a few brave Eastern capitalists like Mr. Misevičius …”
The beauty of the Internet was that Chip could post whole-cloth fabrications without troubling to check even his spelling. Reliability on the Web was ninety-eight percent a function of how slick and cool your site looked. Although Chip personally wasn’t fluent in Web, he was an American under forty, and Americans under forty were exquisite judges of what was slick and cool and what was not. He and Gitanas went to a pub called Prie Universiteto and hired five young Lithuanians in Phish and R.E.M. T-shirts for thirty dollars a day plus millions of worthless stock options, and for a month Chip rode these slang-slinging Webheads mercilessly. He made them study American sites like nbci.com and Oracle. He told them to do it like t
his, to make it look like this.
Lithuania.com was officially launched on November 5. A high-res banner—democracy pays handsome dividends —unfurled to the accompaniment of sixteen joyful bars of the “Dance of the Coachmen and Grooms” in Petrushka. Side by side, in a rich blue graphical space below the banner, were a black-and-white Before picture (“Socialist Vilnius”) of shell-scarred façades and shattered lindens on the Gedimino Prospektas and a luscious color After photograph (“Free-Market Vilnius”) of a honey-lit harborside development of boutiques and bistros. (The development was actually in Denmark.) For a week Chip and Gitanas had stayed up late drinking beer and composing the other pages, which promised investors the various eponyms and inseminatory privileges from Gitanas’s original bitter posting and also, according to the level of financial commitment,
time-shares in ministerial beachside villas at Palanga!
pro rata mineral rights and logging rights to all national parklands!
appointment of selected local magistrates and judges!
blanket 24-hour-a-day parking privileges in perpetuity in the Old City of Vilnius!
fifty-percent discount on selected rentals of Lithuanian national troops and armaments on a sign-up basis, except during wartime!
no-hassle adoptions of Lithuanian girl babies!
discretionary immunity from left-turn-on-red prohibitions!
inclusion of the investor’s likeness on commemorative stamps, collector’s-item coins, microbrewery beer labels, bas-relief chocolate-covered Lithuanian cookies, Heroic Leader trading cards, printed wrapping tissue for holiday Clementines, etc.!
honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Vilnius University, founded in 1578!
“no-questions-asked” access to wiretaps and other state-security apparatus!
the legally enforceable right, whilst on Lithuanian soil, to such titles and honorifics as “Your Lordship” and “Your Ladyship” and “Your Grace,” with non-use by service personnel punishable by public flogging and up to sixty days in jail!
last-minute “bumping” privileges for train and plane seats, reserved-seating cultural events, and table reservations at participating five-star restaurants and nightclubs!
“top-of-the-list” priority for liver, heart, and cornea transplants at Vilnius’s famed Antakalnis Hospital!
no-limit hunting and fishing licenses, plus off-season privileges in national game reserves!
your name in block letters on the side of large boats!
etc., etc.!
The lesson that Gitanas had learned and that Chip was now learning was that the more patently satirical the promises, the lustier the influx of American capital. Day after day Chip churned out press releases, make-believe financial statements, earnest tracts arguing the Hegelian inevitability of a nakedly commercial politics, gushing eyewitness accounts of Lithuania’s boom-economy-in-the-making, slow-pitch questions in online investment chat rooms, and line-drive-home-run answers. If he got flamed for his lies or his ignorance, he simply moved to another chat room. He wrote text for the stock certificates and for the accompanying brochure (“Congratulations—You Are Now a Free-Market Patriot of Lithuania”) and had them sumptuously printed on cotton-rich stock. He felt as if, finally, here in the realm of pure fabrication, he’d found his métier. Exactly as Melissa Paquette had promised him long ago, it was a gas to start a company, a gas to see the money flowing in.
A reporter for USA Today e-mailed to ask: “Is this for real?”
Chip e-mailed back: “It’s for real. The for-profit nation-state, with a globally dispersed citizenry of shareholders, is the next stage in the evolution of political economy. ‘Enlightened neotechnofeudalism’ is blossoming in Lithuania. Come see for yourself. I can guarantee you a minimum ninety minutes’ face time with G. Misevičius.”
There was no reply from USA Today. Chip worried that he’d overplayed his hand; but weekly gross receipts were topping forty thousand dollars. The money came in the form of bank drafts, credit-card numbers, e-cash encryption keys, wire transfers to Crédit Suisse, and hundred-dollar bills in airmail envelopes. Gitanas plowed much of the money into his ancillary enterprises, but, per agreement, he did double Chip’s salary as profits rose.
Chip was living rent-free in the stucco villa where the commander of the Soviet garrison had once eaten pheasants and drunk Gewürztraminers and chatted with Moscow on secure phone links. The villa had been stoned and looted and tagged with triumphant graffiti in the fall of 1990, and had then stood derelict until the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17 was voted out of power and Gitanas was recalled from the UN. Gitanas had been attracted to the shattered villa by its unbeatable price (it was free), by its outstanding security arrangements (including an armored tower and a U.S.-embassy-quality fence), and by the opportunity to sleep in the bedroom of the very commander who’d had him tortured for six months in the old Soviet barracks next door. Gitanas and other Party members had worked weekends with trowels and scrapers to restore the villa, but the Party had disbanded altogether before the job was finished. Now half the rooms stood vacant, the floors splashed with broken glass. As throughout the Old City, heat and hot water originated at a mammoth Central Boiler Facility and dissipated much vigor in the long trip, via buried pipes and leaky risers, to the showers and radiators of the villa. Gitanas had set up offices for the Free Market Party Company in the former grand ballroom, claimed the master bedroom for himself, installed Chip in the former aide-de-camp’s suite on the third floor, and let the young Webheads crash where they pleased.
Although Chip was still paying the rent on his New York apartment and the monthly minimum on his Visa bills, he felt agreeably affluent in Vilnius. He ordered from the top of menus, shared his booze and cigarettes with those less fortunate, and never looked at the prices in the natural food store near the university where he bought his groceries.
True to Gitanas’s word, there were plenty of underage girls in heavy makeup available at the bars and pizzerias, but by leaving New York and escaping from “The Academy Purple,” Chip seemed to have lost his need to fall in love with adolescent strangers. Twice a week he and Gitanas visited the Club Metropol and, after a massage and before a sauna, had their needs efficiently gratified on the Metropol’s indifferently clean foam cushions. Most of the Metropol’s female clinicians were in their thirties and led daytime lives that revolved around child care, or parent care, or the university’s International Journalism program, or the making of art in political hues that nobody would buy. Chip was surprised by how willing these women were, while they dressed and fixed their hair, to speak to him like a human being. He was struck by how much pleasure they seemed to take in their daytime lives, how blah their night work was by contrast, how altogether meaningless; and since he himself had begun to take active pleasure in his daytime work, he became, with each therapeutic (trans)act(ion) on the massage mat, a little more adept at putting his body in its place, at putting sex in its place, at understanding what love was and wasn’t. With each prepaid ejaculation he rid himself of another ounce of the hereditary shame that had resisted fifteen years of sustained theoretical attack. What remained was a gratitude that he expressed in the form of two hundred percent tips. At two or three in the morning, when the city lay oppressed by a darkness that seemed to have fallen weeks earlier, he and Gitanas returned to the villa through high-sulfur smoke and snow or fog or drizzle.
Gitanas was Chip’s real love in Vilnius. Chip particularly liked how much Gitanas liked him. Everywhere the two men went, people asked if they were brothers, but the truth was that Chip felt less like a sibling of Gitanas than like his girlfriend. He felt much like Julia: perpetually feted, lavishly treated, and almost wholly dependent on Gitanas for favors and guidance and basic necessities. He sang for his supper, like Julia. He was a valued employee, a vulnerable and delightful American, an object of amusement and indulgence and even mystery; and what a great pleasure it was, for a change, to be the pursued one—to have qualities and attributes that somebody
else so wanted.
All in all, he found Vilnius a lovely world of braised beef and cabbage and potato pancakes, of beer and vodka and tobacco, of comradeship, subversive enterprise, and pussy. He liked a climate and a latitude that substantially dispensed with daylight. He could sleep extremely late and still rise with the sun, and very soon after breakfast the time came for an evening pick-me-up of coffee and a cigarette. His was partly a student life (he’d always loved a student life) and partly a life in the fast lane of dot-com start-ups. From a distance of four thousand miles, everything he’d left behind in the U.S. looked manageably small—his parents, his debts, his failures, his loss of Julia. He felt so much better on the work front and sex front and friendship front that for a while he forgot what misery tasted like. He resolved to stay in Vilnius until he’d earned enough money to pay down his debts to Denise and to his credit-card issuers. He believed that as few as six months would suffice for this.