Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

“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.”