On a very gloomy Sunday morning, Lichenkev and his slate of smugglers and hit men on the Cheap Power for the People Party ticket claimed 38 of the 141 seats in the Seimas. But the Lithuanian President, Audrius Vitkunas, a charismatic and paranoid arch-nationalist who hated Russia and the West with equal passion, refused to certify the election results.
“Hydrophobic Lichenkev and his mouth-frothing hellhounds will not intimidate me!” Vitkunas shouted in a televised address on Sunday evening. “Localized power failures, a near-total breakdown in the communications network of the capital and its environs, and the presence of roving heavily armed ‘constabularies’ of Lichenkev’s hired mouth-frothing lickspittle hellhounds do not inspire confidence that yesterday’s voting reflects the stubborn will and immense good sense of the great and glorious immortal Lithuanian People! I will not, I cannot, I must not, I durst not, I shall not certify these scum-flecked, maggot-riddled, tertiary-syphilitic national parliamentary election results!”
Gitanas and Chip watched the address on the television in the former ballroom at the villa. Two bodyguards quietly played Dungeonmaster in a corner of the room while Gitanas translated for Chip the richer nuggets of Vitkunasian rhetoric. The peaty light of the year’s shortest day had faded in the casement windows.
“I got a real bad feeling about this,” Gitanas said. “I got a feeling Lichenkev wants to gun down Vitkunas and take his chances with whoever replaces him.”
Chip, who was doing his best to forget that Christmas was four days away, had no wish to hang on in Vilnius only to be driven out a week after the holiday. He asked Gitanas if he’d thought about emptying the Credit Suisse account and leaving the country.
“Oh, sure.” Gitanas was wearing his red motocross jacket and hugging himself. “I think about shopping at Blooming-dale’s every day. I think about the big tree at Rockefeller Center.”
“Then what’s keeping you?”
Gitanas scratched his scalp and smelled his fingernails, blending the aroma of scalp with the skin-oil smells from around his nose, taking obvious comfort in sebum. “If I leave,” he said, “and the trouble blows over, then where am I? I’m fucked three ways. I’m not employable in America. As of next month, I’m not married to an American. And my mom’s in Ignalina. What do I got in New York?”
“We could run this thing in New York.”
“They got laws there. They’d shut us down in a week. I’m fucked three ways.”
Toward midnight Chip went upstairs and inserted himself between his thin, cold East Bloc sheets. His room smelled of damp plaster, cigarettes, and strong synthetic shampoo fragrances such as pleased the Baltic nose. His mind was aware of its own racing. He didn’t fall into sleep but skipped off it, again and again, like a stone on water. He kept mistaking the streetlight in his window for the light of day. He went downstairs and realized that it was already late afternoon on Christmas Eve; he had the oversleeper’s panicked sense of having fallen behind, of lacking information. His mother was making Christmas Eve dinner in the kitchen. His father, youthful in a leather jacket, was sitting in the ballroom in the dim late light and watching the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Chip, to be friendly, asked him what the news was.
“Tell Chip,” Alfred told Chip, whom he didn’t recognize, “there’s trouble in the East.”
Real daylight came at eight. A shouting in the street woke him up. His room was cold but not freezing; a smell of warm dust came off the radiator—the city’s Central Boiler Facility still functioning, the social order still intact.
Through the branches of the spruce trees outside his window he saw a crowd of several dozen men and women in bulky overcoats milling outside the fence. A dusting of snow had fallen in the night. Two of Gitanas’s security men, the brothers Jonas and Aidaris—big blond fellows with semi-automatics on straps—were parleying through the bars of the front gate with a pair of middle-aged women whose brassy hair and red faces, like the heat in Chip’s radiator, gave evidence of ordinary life’s persistence.
Downstairs the ballroom echoed with emphatic televised Lithuanian declarations. Gitanas was sitting exactly where Chip had left him the night before, but his clothes were different and he appeared to have slept.
The gray morning light and the snow on the trees and the peripheral sense of disarray and breakup recalled the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break. Chip went to the kitchen and poured Vitasoy Delite Vanilla soy milk on a bowl of Barbara’s All-Natural Shredded Oats Bite Size cereal. He drank some of the viscous German organic black-cherry juice that he’d lately been enjoying. He made two mugs of instant coffee and took them to the ballroom, where Gitanas had turned off the TV and was sniffing his fingernails again.
Chip asked him what the news was.
“All my bodyguards ran away except Jonas and Aidaris,” Gitanas said. “They took the VW and the Lada. I doubt they’re coming back.”
“With protectors like this, who needs attackers?” Chip said.
“They left us the Stomper, which is a crime magnet.”
“When did this happen?”
“Must have been right after President Vitkunas put the Army on alert.”
Chip laughed. “When did that happen?”
“Early this morning. Everything in the city is apparently still functioning—except, of course, Transbaltic Wireless,” Gitanas said.
The mob in the street had swelled. There were perhaps a hundred people now, holding aloft cell phones that collectively produced an eerie, angelic sound. They were playing the sequence of tones that signified service interruption.
“I want you to go back to New York,” Gitanas said. “We’ll see what happens here. Maybe I’ll come, maybe I won’t. I gotta see my mother for Christmas. Meantime, here’s your severance.”
He tossed Chip a thick brown envelope just as multiple thuds were sounding on the villa’s outer walls. Chip dropped the envelope. A rock crashed through a window and bounced to a stop by the television set. The rock was four-sided, a broken corner of granite cobblestone. It was coated with fresh hostility and seemed faintly embarrassed.
Gitanas dialed the “police” on the copper-wire line and spoke wearily. The brothers Jonas and Aidaris, fingers on triggers, came in through the front door, followed by cold air with a sprucey Yule flavor. The brothers were cousins of Gitanas; this was presumably why they hadn’t deserted with the others. Gitanas put down the phone and conferred with them in Lithuanian.
The brown envelope contained a meaty stack of fifty-and hundred-dollar bills.
Chip’s feeling from his dream, his belated realization that the holiday had come, was persisting in the daylight. None of the young Webheads had reported to work today, and now Gitanas had given him a present, and snow was clinging to the boughs of spruces, and carolers in bulky coats were at the gate …
“Pack your bags,” Gitanas said. “Jonas will take you to the airport.”
Chip went upstairs with an empty head and heart. He heard guns banging on the front porch, the ting-a-ling of ejected casings, Jonas and Aidaris firing (he hoped) at the sky. Jingle bells, jingle bells.
He put on his leather pants and leather coat. Repacking his bag connected him to the moment of unpacking it in early October, completed a loop of time and pulled a drawstring that made the twelve intervening weeks disappear. Here he was again, packing.
Gitanas was smelling his fingers, his eyes on the news, when Chip returned to the ballroom. Victor Lichenkev’s mustaches went up and down on the TV screen.
“What’s he saying?”
Gitanas shrugged. “That Vitkunas is mentally unfit, et cetera. That Vitkunas is mounting a putsch to reverse the legitimate will of the Lithuanian people, et cetera.”
“You should come with me,” Chip said.
“I’m gonna go see my mother,” Gitanas said. “I’ll call you next week.”
Chip put his arms around his friend and squeezed him. He could smell the scalp oils that Gitanas in
his agitation had been sniffing. He felt as if he were hugging himself, feeling his own primate shoulder blades, the scratch of his own woolen sweater. He also felt his friend’s gloom—how not-there he was, how distracted or shut down—and it made him, too, feel lost.
Jonas beeped the horn on the gravel drive outside the front door.
“Let’s meet up in New York,” Chip said.
“OK, maybe.” Gitanas pulled away and wandered back to the television.
Only a few stragglers remained to throw rocks at the Stomper as Jonas and Chip roared through the open gate. They drove south out of the city center on a street lined with forbidding gas stations and brown-walled, traffic-scarred buildings that seemed happiest and most themselves on days, like this one, when the weather was raw and the light was poor. Jonas spoke very little English but managed to exude tolerance toward Chip, if not friendliness, while keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror. Traffic was extremely sparse this morning, and sport-utility vehicles, those workhorses of the warlord class, attracted unhealthy attention in times of instability.
The little airport was mobbed with young people speaking the languages of the West. Since the Quad Cities Fund had liquidated Lietuvos Avialinijos, other airlines had taken over some of the routes, but the curtailed flight schedule (fourteen departures a day for a capital of Europe) wasn’t equipped to handle loads like today’s. Hundreds of British, German, and American students and entrepreneurs, many of their faces familiar to Chip from his pub-crawling with Gitanas, had converged on the reservation counters of Finnair and Lufthansa, Aeroflot and LOT Polish Airlines.
Doughty city buses were arriving with fresh loads of foreign nationals. As far as Chip could see, none of the counter lines were moving at all. He tallied the flights on the Outbound board and chose the airline, Finnair, with the most departures.
At the end of the very long Finnair line were two American college girls in bell-bottom jeans and other Sixties Revival wear. The names on their luggage were Tiffany and Cheryl.
“Do you have tickets?” Chip asked.
“For tomorrow,” Tiffany said. “But things looked kinda nasty, so.”
“Is this line moving?”
“I don’t know. We’ve only been here ten minutes.”
“It hasn’t moved in ten minutes?”
“There’s only one person at the counter,” Tiffany said. “But it’s not like there’s some other, better Finnair counter someplace else, so.”
Chip was feeling disoriented and had to steel himself not to hail a cab and return to Gitanas.
Cheryl said to Tiffany: “So my dad’s like, you’ve got to sublet if you’re going to Europe, and I’m like, I promised Anna she could stay there weekends when there’s home games so she can sleep with Jason, right? I can’t take a promise back—right? But my dad’s getting like all bottom-line, and I’m like, hello, it’s my condominium, right? You bought it for me, right? I didn’t know I was going to have some stranger, you know, who, like, fries things on the stove, and sleeps in my bed?”
Tiffany said: “That is so-gross.”
Cheryl said: “And uses my pillows?”
Two more non-Lithuanians, a pair of Belgians, joined the line behind Chip. Simply not to be the last in line brought some relief. Chip, in French, asked the Belgians to watch his bag and hold his place. He went to the men’s room, locked himself in a stall, and counted the money Gitanas had given him.
It was $29,250.
It upset him somehow. It made him afraid.
A voice on a bathroom speaker announced, in Lithuanian and then Russian and then English, that LOT Polish Airlines Flight #331 from Warsaw had been canceled.
Chip put twenty hundreds in his T-shirt pocket, twenty hundreds in his left boot, and returned the rest of the money to the envelope, which he hid inside his T-shirt, against his belly. He wished that Gitanas hadn’t given him the money. Without money, he’d had a good reason to stay in Vilnius. Now that he had no good reason, a simple fact which the previous twelve weeks had kept hidden was stripped naked in the fecal, uric bathroom stall. The simple fact was that he was afraid to go home.
No man likes to see his cowardice as clearly as Chip could see his now. He was angry at the money and angry at Gitanas for giving it to him and angry at Lithuania for falling apart, but the fact remained that he was afraid to go home, and this was nobody’s fault but his.
He reclaimed his place in the Finnair line, which hadn’t moved at all. Airport speakers were announcing the cancellation of Flight #1048 from Helsinki. A collective groan went up, and bodies surged forward, the head of the line blunting itself against the counter like a delta.
Cheryl and Tiffany kicked their bags forward. Chip kicked his bag forward. He felt returned to the world and he didn’t like it. A kind of hospital light, a light of seriousness and inescapability, fell on the girls and the baggage and the Finnair personnel in their uniforms. Chip had nowhere to hide. Everyone around him was reading a novel. He hadn’t read a novel in at least a year. The prospect frightened him nearly as much as the prospect of Christmas in St. Jude. He wanted to go out and hail a cab, but he suspected that Gitanas had already fled the city.
He stood in the hard light until the hour was 2:00 and then 2:30—early morning in St. Jude. While the Belgians watched his bag again, he waited in a different line and made a credit-card phone call.
Enid’s voice was slurred and tiny. “Wello?”
“Hi, Mom, it’s me.”
Her voice trebled instantly in pitch and volume. “Chip? Oh, Chip! Al, it’s Chip! It’s Chip! Chip, where are you?”
“I’m at the airport in Vilnius. I’m on my way home.”
“Oh, wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! Now, tell me, when do you get here?”
“I don’t have a ticket yet,” he said. “Things are sort of falling apart here. But tomorrow afternoon sometime. Wednesday at the latest.”
“Wonderful!”
He hadn’t been prepared for the joy in his mother’s voice. If he’d ever known that he could bring joy to another person, he’d long since forgotten it. He took care to steady his own voice and keep his word count low. He said that he would call again as soon as he was at a better airport.
“This is wonderful news,” Enid said. “I’m so happy!”
“OK, then, I’ll see you soon.”
Already the great Baltic winter night was shouldering in from the north. Veterans from the front of the Finnair line reported that the rest of the day’s flights were sold out and that at least one of these flights was likely to be canceled, but Chip hoped that by flashing a couple of hundreds he could secure those “bumping privileges” that he’d lampooned on lithuania.com. Failing that, he would buy somebody’s ticket for lots of cash.
Cheryl said: “Oh my God, Tiffany, the StairMaster is so-totally butt-building.”
Tiffany said: “Only if you, like, stick it out.”
Cheryl said: “Everybody sticks it out. You can’t help it. Your legs get tired.”
Tiffany said: “Duh! It’s a StairMaster! Your legs are supposed to get tired.”
Cheryl looked out a window and asked, with withering undergraduate disdain: “Excuse me, why is there a tank in the middle of the runway?”
A minute later the lights went out and the phones went dead.
ONE LAST CHRISTMAS
Down in the basement, at the eastern end of the Ping-Pong table, Alfred was unpacking a Maker’s Mark whiskey carton filled with Christmas-tree lights. He already had prescription drugs and an enema kit on the table. He had a sugar cookie freshly baked by Enid in a shape suggestive of a terrier but meant to be a reindeer. He had a Log Cabin syrup carton containing the large colored lights that he’d formerly hung on the outdoor yews. He had a pump-action shotgun in a zippered canvas case, and a box of twenty-gauge shells. He had rare clarity and the will to use it while it lasted.
A shadowy light of late afternoon was captive in the window wells. The furnace was cycling on often, the house lea
king heat. Alfred’s red sweater hung on him in skewed folds and bulges, as if he were a log or a chair. His gray wool slacks were afflicted with stains that he had no choice but to tolerate, because the only other option was to take leave of his senses, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that.
Uppermost in the Maker’s Mark carton was a very long string of white Christmas lights coiled bulkily around a wand of cardboard. The string stank of mildew from the storeroom beneath the porch, and when he put the plug into an outlet he could see right away that all was not well. Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs—a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle. He unwound the spool with veering hands, paying the string out on the Ping-Pong table. At the very end of it was an unsightly stretch of dead bulbs.
He understood what modernity expected of him now. Modernity expected him to drive to a big discount store and replace the damaged string. But the discount stores were mobbed at this time of year; he’d be in line for twenty minutes. He didn’t mind waiting, but Enid wouldn’t let him drive the car now, and Enid did mind waiting. She was upstairs flogging herself through the home stretch of Christmas prep.