The Corrections: A Novel (60 page)

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
this
, 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.