The Corrections: A Novel (61 page)

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.

How wholly typical it was of his luck, then, that before he could enjoy even two good months in Vilnius, both his father and Lithuania fell apart.

Denise in her e-mails had been hectoring Chip about Alfred’s health and insisting that Chip come to St. Jude for Christmas, but a trip home in December held little attraction. He suspected that if he abandoned the villa, even for a week, something stupid would prevent him from returning. A spell would be broken, a magic lost. But Denise, who was the steadiest person he knew, finally sent him an e-mail in which she sounded downright desperate. Chip skimmed the message before he realized that he shouldn’t have looked at it at all, because it named the sum he owed her. The misery whose taste he thought he’d forgotten, the troubles that had seemed small from a distance, filled his head again.

He deleted the e-mail and immediately regretted it. He had a dreamlike semi-memory of the phrase
fired for sleeping
with my boss’s wife
. But this was such an unlikely phrase, coming from Denise, and his eye had brushed over it so quickly, that he couldn’t fully credit the memory. If his sister was on her way out as a lesbian (which, come to think of it,
would make sense of several aspects of Denise that had always puzzled him), then she could certainly now use the support of her Foucaultian older brother, but Chip wasn’t ready to go home yet, and so he assumed that his memory had deceived him and that her phrase had referred to something else.

He smoked three cigarettes, dissolving his anxiety in rationalizations and counteraccusations and a fresh resolve to stay in Lithuania until he could pay his sister the $20,500 that he owed her. If Alfred lived with Denise until June, this meant that Chip could stay in Lithuania for another six months and still keep his promise of an all-family reunion in Philadelphia.

Lithuania, unfortunately, was rattling down the road toward anarchy.

Through October and November, despite the global financial crisis, a veneer of normalcy had adhered to Vilnius. Farmers still brought to market poultry and livestock for which they were paid in litai that they then spent on Russian gasoline, on domestic beer and vodka, on stone-washed jeans and Spice Girls sweatshirts, on pirated
X Files
videos imported from economies even sicker than Lithuania’s. The truckers who distributed the gasoline and the workers who distilled the vodka and the kerchiefed old women who sold the Spice Girls sweatshirts out of wooden carts all bought the farmers’ beef and chicken. The land produced, the litai circulated, and in Vilnius, at least, the pubs and clubs stayed open late.

But the economy wasn’t simply local. You could give litai to the Russian petroleum exporter who supplied your country with gasoline, but this exporter was within his rights to ask which Lithuanian goods or services, exactly, he might care to spend his litai on. It was easy to buy litai at the official rate of four per dollar. Hard, however, to buy a dollar for four litai! In a familiar paradox of depression, goods
became scarce
because
there were no buyers. The harder it was to find aluminum foil or ground beef or motor oil, the more tempting it became to hijack truckloads of these commodities or to muscle in on their distribution. Meanwhile public servants (notably the police) continued to draw fixed salaries of irrelevant litai. The underground economy soon learned to price a precinct captain as unerringly as it priced a box of lightbulbs.

Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both countries, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury. (In Vilnius, by November of that dismal autumn, five criminal oligarchs were responsible for employing thousands of carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, cooks, prostitutes, barkeeps, auto mechanics, and bodyguards.) The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharma-ceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.

It warmed his Foucaultian heart, in a way, to live in a land where property ownership and the control of public discourse were so obviously a matter of who had the guns.

The Lithuanian with the most guns was an ethnic Russian named Victor Lichenkev, who had parlayed the cash liquidity of his heroin and Ecstasy near-monopoly into absolute control of the Bank of Lithuania after the bank’s
previous owner, FrendLeeTrust of Atlanta, had catastrophically misjudged consumer appetite for its Dilbert MasterCards. Victor Lichenkev’s cash reserves enabled him to arm a five-hundred-man private “constabulary” which in October boldly surrounded the Chernobyl-type nuclear reactor at Ignalina, 120 kilometers northeast of Vilnius, that supplied three-quarters of the nation’s electricity. The siege gave Lichenkev excellent leverage in negotiating his purchase of the country’s largest utility from the rival oligarch who himself had bought it on the cheap during the great privatization. Overnight, Lichenkev gained control of every litas flowing from every electric meter in the country; but, fearing that his Russian heritage might provoke nationalist animosity, he took care not to abuse his new power. As a gesture of goodwill, he slashed electricity prices by the fifteen percent that the previous oligarch had been overcharging. On the resulting wave of popularity, he chartered a new political party (the Cheap Power for the People Party) and fielded a slate of parliamentary candidates for the mid-December national elections.

And still the land produced and the litai circulated. A slasher flick called
Moody Fruit
opened at the Lietuva and the Vingis. Lithuanian drolleries issued from Jennifer Aniston’s mouth on
Friends
. City workers emptied concrete-clad garbage receptacles on the square outside St. Catherine’s. But every day was darker and shorter than the day before.

As a global player, Lithuania had been fading since the death of Vytautas the Great in 1430. For six hundred years the country was passed around among Poland, Prussia, and Russia like a much-recycled wedding present (the leatherette ice bucket; the salad tongs). The country’s language and a memory of better times survived, but the main fact about Lithuania was that it wasn’t very large. In the twentieth century, the Gestapo and SS could liquidate 200,000 Lithuanian Jews and the Soviets could deport another quarter-million
citizens to Siberia without attracting undue international attention.

Gitanas Misevičius came from a family of priests and soldiers and bureaucrats near the Belorussian border. His paternal grandfather, a local judge, had failed a Q&A session with the new Communist administrators in 1940 and had been sent to the gulag, along with his wife, and never heard from again. Gitanas’s father owned a pub in Vidiskés and gave aid and comfort to the partisan resistance movement (the so-called Forest Brothers) until hostilities ceased in ’53.

A year after Gitanas was born, Vidiskés and eight surrounding municipalities were emptied by the puppet government to clear the way for the first of two nuclear power plants. The fifteen thousand people thus displaced (“for reasons of safety”) were offered housing in a brand-new, fully modern small city, Khrushchevai, that had been erected hastily in the lake country west of Ignalina.

“Kind of bleak-looking, all cinderblock, no trees,” Gitanas told Chip. “My dad’s new pub had a cinderblock bar, cinder-block booths, cinderblock shelves. The socialist planned economy in Belorussia had made too many cinderblocks and was giving them away for nothing. Or so we were told. Anyway, we all move in. We got our cinderblock beds and our cinderblock playground equipment and our cinderblock park benches. The years go by, I’m ten years old, and suddenly everybody’s mom or dad’s got lung cancer. I mean
every
body’s
. Well, and then my dad’s got a lung tumor, and finally the authorities come and take a look at Khrushchevai, and lo and behold, we got a radon problem. Serious radon problem. Really fucking disastrous radon problem, actually. Because it turns out those cinderblocks are mildly radioactive! And radon is pooling in every closed room in Khrushchevai. Especially rooms like a pub, with not a lot of air, where the owner sits all day and smokes cigarettes. Like for instance my dad does. Well, Belorussia, which is our sister socialist
republic (and which, by the way, we Lithuanians used to
own
), Belorussia says it’s really sorry. There must have somehow been some pitchblende in those cinderblocks, says Belorussia. Big mistake. Sorry, sorry, sorry. So we all move out of Khrushchevai, and my dad dies, horribly, at ten minutes after midnight on the day after his wedding anniversary, because he doesn’t want my mom remembering his death on their wedding date, and then thirty years go by, and Gorbachev steps down, and finally we get to take a look in those old archives, and what do you know? There was no weird glut of cinderblock due to poor planning. There was no snafu in the five-year plan. There was a deliberate strategy of recycling very-low-grade nuclear waste in building materials. On the theory that the cement in cinderblock renders the radioisotopes harmless! But the Belorussians had Geiger counters, and that was the end of that happy dream of harmlessness, and so a thousand trainloads of cinderblock got sent to us, who had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong.”

“Ouch,” Chip said.

“It’s beyond ouch,” Gitanas said. “It killed my dad when I was eleven. And my best friend’s dad. And hundreds of other people, over the years. And everything made sense. There was always an enemy with a big red target on his back. There was a big evil daddy U.S.S.R. that we all could hate, until the nineties.”

The platform of the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17, which Gitanas helped found after Independence, consisted of one very broad and heavy plank: the Soviets must pay for raping Lithuania. For a while, in the nineties, it was possible to run the country on pure hatred. But soon other parties emerged with platforms which, while giving revanchism its due, also sought to move beyond it. By the end of the nineties, after the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17 lost its last seat in the Seimas, all that remained of the party was its half-renovated villa.