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.