driver’s seat, slingingback his elbow. “How do you feel, kid? You feel like you’re gonna die?”
“No, I’m a Necro-Realist,” Viktor said stoutly. “I know what death is. But I don’t die easily. Dying is for other people.”
“Then, no, it isn’t always this horrible.” Starlitz turned back with a grunt. “ ‘Horrible’ would be too simple. The world isn’t simple or pure. It isn’t any one thing. The real world, the true reality … it literally isn’t what it is. ‘
A
is not A,’ right? In the real world
A
can’t even fuckin’ bother to be A. You ever read any Umberto Eco?”
Viktor stirred restlessly. “You mean those big, fat popular novels? No, I can’t abide that sort of thing.”
“How about Deleuze and Guattari? Derrida? Foucault? You ever read any Adorno?”
“Adorno was a fucking Marxist,” Viktor said wearily. “But of course I’ve read Derrida. How could one not read Derrida? Derrida revealed that the Western intellectual tradition is riddled with logical aporias.” Viktor looked up. “Have
you
read Jacques Derrida, Mr. Starlitz?
En français
?”
“Uh … I don’t exactly
read
those guys,” Starlitz confessed. “I had to pick it all up on the street.”
Viktor grunted in disdain.
“I do read Jean Baudrillard sometimes. Baudrillard’s a real comedian.”
“I don’t like Baudrillard,” said Viktor, sitting up straighter. “He never made it clear how a political intervention can avoid being recuperated by the system. ‘Seduction,’ ‘fatal strategies,’ where does that get us?” He sighed. “We might as well go get drunk.”
“Well, see, the basic deal there is,” mused Starlitz, “that when the master narrative collapses and implodes, everything becomes undecidable.”
Viktor leaned forward intently. “Tell me. Where does one find this ‘master narrative’? I want some of it. Do you
buy
it? Is that the secret?”
Starlitz waved one meaty hand. “Millennium’s almost over now, kid. The narrative is increasingly polyvalent anddecentered. It’s become, you know, way
rhizomatic
, and all that.”
“Yes. So they tell me. All right. So what? Where is my part of the action?”
“Well, I dunno if you’ve got any action or not, but you’re not gonna find it here in Cyprus. This is a tiny, unrecognized, outlaw republic. We’re among the excluded, out here. We are very, very peripheral. And besides that—there’s a big cusp coming. A major narrative crisis. It’s gonna wipe a lot of slates clean. Bury the walking zombies.”
“You mean Y2K,” said Viktor, leaning back.
Starlitz nodded silently. The night was going well. The kid would be okay now. The kid had made his bones tonight. Now he was in the know.
STARLITZ PARKED VIKTOR BY THE HOUR IN A FLEABAG Lefkosa
pansiyon
. The place was locally known as a “Natasha house,” thanks to its staff of expatriate Ukrainian working girls. It was five in the morning. The staff were all asleep. They were exhausted from their bone-grinding, hands-on labor, underpricing Turkish whores.
Starlitz dumped the taxi in the tall weeds of an abandoned Turkish trench works, west of the capital. As he walked back toward the divided city, a Homeric dawn gnawed at the Nicosia skyline with her rosy gums.
Starlitz lit one of Viktor’s cigarettes, put his hands in his pockets, and began to drift.
Midmorning found Starlitz sitting on a bus bench, eating from a large bag of chocolate croissants and sipping a Styrofoam Nescafé. Urban crowds went about their business, men in flat hats and patterned sweaters, women heaving baby carriages along the black-and-white-striped curb.
A rust-spotted jitney pulled over. A backpacking American woman climbed out of it. Her skin was the color of a Starbucks frappuccino, and she had black, kinked hair inbig clusters of thread-knotted twists. She wore a nylon tropical shirt, knotted at the midriff, and chocolate-chip desert-camo cutoffs, unconvincingly cinched up with a
“No, I’m a Necro-Realist,” Viktor said stoutly. “I know what death is. But I don’t die easily. Dying is for other people.”
“Then, no, it isn’t always this horrible.” Starlitz turned back with a grunt. “ ‘Horrible’ would be too simple. The world isn’t simple or pure. It isn’t any one thing. The real world, the true reality … it literally isn’t what it is. ‘
A
is not A,’ right? In the real world
A
can’t even fuckin’ bother to be A. You ever read any Umberto Eco?”
Viktor stirred restlessly. “You mean those big, fat popular novels? No, I can’t abide that sort of thing.”
“How about Deleuze and Guattari? Derrida? Foucault? You ever read any Adorno?”
“Adorno was a fucking Marxist,” Viktor said wearily. “But of course I’ve read Derrida. How could one not read Derrida? Derrida revealed that the Western intellectual tradition is riddled with logical aporias.” Viktor looked up. “Have
you
read Jacques Derrida, Mr. Starlitz?
En français
?”
“Uh … I don’t exactly
read
those guys,” Starlitz confessed. “I had to pick it all up on the street.”
Viktor grunted in disdain.
“I do read Jean Baudrillard sometimes. Baudrillard’s a real comedian.”
“I don’t like Baudrillard,” said Viktor, sitting up straighter. “He never made it clear how a political intervention can avoid being recuperated by the system. ‘Seduction,’ ‘fatal strategies,’ where does that get us?” He sighed. “We might as well go get drunk.”
“Well, see, the basic deal there is,” mused Starlitz, “that when the master narrative collapses and implodes, everything becomes undecidable.”
Viktor leaned forward intently. “Tell me. Where does one find this ‘master narrative’? I want some of it. Do you
buy
it? Is that the secret?”
Starlitz waved one meaty hand. “Millennium’s almost over now, kid. The narrative is increasingly polyvalent anddecentered. It’s become, you know, way
rhizomatic
, and all that.”
“Yes. So they tell me. All right. So what? Where is my part of the action?”
“Well, I dunno if you’ve got any action or not, but you’re not gonna find it here in Cyprus. This is a tiny, unrecognized, outlaw republic. We’re among the excluded, out here. We are very, very peripheral. And besides that—there’s a big cusp coming. A major narrative crisis. It’s gonna wipe a lot of slates clean. Bury the walking zombies.”
“You mean Y2K,” said Viktor, leaning back.
Starlitz nodded silently. The night was going well. The kid would be okay now. The kid had made his bones tonight. Now he was in the know.
STARLITZ PARKED VIKTOR BY THE HOUR IN A FLEABAG Lefkosa
pansiyon
. The place was locally known as a “Natasha house,” thanks to its staff of expatriate Ukrainian working girls. It was five in the morning. The staff were all asleep. They were exhausted from their bone-grinding, hands-on labor, underpricing Turkish whores.
Starlitz dumped the taxi in the tall weeds of an abandoned Turkish trench works, west of the capital. As he walked back toward the divided city, a Homeric dawn gnawed at the Nicosia skyline with her rosy gums.
Starlitz lit one of Viktor’s cigarettes, put his hands in his pockets, and began to drift.
Midmorning found Starlitz sitting on a bus bench, eating from a large bag of chocolate croissants and sipping a Styrofoam Nescafé. Urban crowds went about their business, men in flat hats and patterned sweaters, women heaving baby carriages along the black-and-white-striped curb.
A rust-spotted jitney pulled over. A backpacking American woman climbed out of it. Her skin was the color of a Starbucks frappuccino, and she had black, kinked hair inbig clusters of thread-knotted twists. She wore a nylon tropical shirt, knotted at the midriff, and chocolate-chip desert-camo cutoffs, unconvincingly cinched up with a
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