Zeitgeist (25 page)

Viktor lowered his voice. “A lot of money in that band. Tours. New clothes.”

“That’s great.”

“A new album. Turkish lyrics.”

“No kidding.”

“The French One died.”

“Oh, hell. The French One? Dead? The French One was the only one who could sing!”

“Her own fault. She was stupid. She snorted the wrong kind of white powder in a party in Yerevan. Ozbey hired a new French One. A Moroccan girl from the Arab
quarter of Paris. ‘Cheba Angélique,’ a rai singer in exile. She is hot! The crowds love her! She makes the old French One look like a week-old blancmange.”

“I can’t believe the French One’s dead.”

“She is dead, though. Very. I saw her when they shipped the body through. And the new American One! Oh, my God.”

“You didn’t have sex with her, did you?”

“No, but Ozbey did. And Ozbey’s Uncle the Minister. And Ozbey’s uncle’s
boss
. The husband of the former prime minister bought her a gold Mercedes. And so did a Saudi prince. And the playboy son of the president of Azerbaijan gave the American One a hundred thousand dollars in a casino in Yerevan. She took her clothes off in the steppes of—”

“I get the picture there, man.”

“She’s huge. She’s huge like Ozbey, only … like a woman, a pop star.”

“You’re dead sure the French One is really dead?”

“She’s dead as Napoleon, Lekhi. She’s deader than Minitel.”

“That’s a very big problem. I’ll be in touch.” Starlitz hung up.

AS THE PLANE ROSE FROM THE NEW AND BARELY FUNCTIONAL Denver airport, Zeta stuck her nose to the scratched and clouded glass. “Boy, you’re the greatest, Dad. No finals! And Hawaii! Wow, I’ve never even
been
to Hawaii. Can we surf? Boy, life is just so great!”

BY THE DAWN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY EVERY SCRAP of the island of Kauai had been tidily sewn up by six oligarchical clans. These were Anglo-Hawaiian plantation folks, people with the tooth-gritting single-mindedness of Scarlett O’Hara, but in sarongs instead of hoop skirts. Only a hellish catastrophe could force them to sell off the homeland.

Luckily, a horrific El Niño typhoon had ravaged Kauai in 1992. A macadamia-nut plantation, reduced by floods and high winds to a mess of leafless jackstraws, had slipped the grasp of its ruined owners. Makoto won the bidding, but it was Barbara who closed the deal. Barbara had wafted her ethereal way to the local equivalent of Tara, assembled the heartbroken Hawaiian farmers, and performed a faultless slack-key rendition of the sentimental local classic, “Pupu Hinuhinu.” Grandma, still clutching her termite-eaten land grant from the royal court of Liliuokalani, had burst into tears of relief. The clan had escaped unbearable ritual humiliation. Because Makoto and Barbara were
artists
. They could
sing
.

As it happened, although Barbara was a major-league Japanese pop star, Barbara was not technically Japanese. Barbara was a Sino-Irish-Polish-Filipino girl, the daughter of two U.S. State Department translators. She’d been born in Kuala Lumpur, and raised in Warsaw, Brussels, Singapore, and Zurich. Barbara was a rarity, a true native of Imperial America’s offshore diaspora. Until
gently washing up on the white beaches of Hawaii, Barbara had never lived in even a single one of the United States.

Starlitz had no problem understanding Makoto. Starlitz got along fine with Makoto. Makoto was probably the most technically accomplished pop musician in the world, but as long as you didn’t ask Makoto to explain his music, the guy’s means, motives, and tactics were perfectly comprehensible. Makoto was a Japanese hippie studio producer. Being Japanese made him a tad inscrutable, being a hippie was plenty weird, and his career in the music biz was somewhat unusual. But these three aspects of Makoto’s personality were almost always overshadowed by the fact that Makoto was a multimillionaire.

By stark contrast Starlitz found Barbara to be truly unearthly. Starlitz was a little vague about the intensely private boy-meets-girl history there, but apparently Makoto had discovered Barbara idly dawdling in some New Wave dive in Shibuya, wearing a tight sweater and sipping a malted soymilk, existing about eight million light-years away from anybody’s idea of a national heritage. Like a lot of pretty girls who had once been too tall and thin, Barbara was a big modelesque mess. She had been lounging in her private thicket of thorns, the slumbering pop princess of the Pacific Rim.

Then Makoto arrived on her scene, sniffed the somnolent air, and said unto her, “Baby, Be Magic.” Barbara awoke, blinked, had her hair, lips, and nails done over, and exploded on the stage. To become magic was the first sincere demand that anyone had ever made of Barbara. Barbara was perfectly willing to be magic. There was nothing else to be done about her.

Starlitz wasn’t the kind of guy to get all sentimental about a chick who could sing. But he’d never met any human being so fully vested in her rapturous girly divahood as Barbara. Barbara was a hundred and five percent diva: east, west, north, and south, even straight up and down. There just wasn’t a lot of conventional human being inside the global diva construct there. Likely there hadn’t
been a whole lot to Barbara to begin with. Maybe the height, the bone structure, and the vocal cords.

Barbara had no detectable ego. Public adulation meant nothing to her. She was Makoto’s shining star, the beloved muse of a musical genius; she was like a guitar that could eat, sleep, and kiss him. Makoto himself was never the star. Makoto could play onstage, he could make a band drive, he could solo even, but Makoto was a bespectacled Japanese hipster with long hair washed in borax and a head like a soccer ball. With Makoto in reach, however, Barbara could perform absolutely anything. There seemed to be no end to the woman’s musical flexibility. She could remain in soft focus under an eight-hundred-watt klieg light. Barbara could empty her nonexistent heart to every lonely human being in a packed stadium through an amp stack at eighty decibels, and leave them convinced that perfect romance existed and would always elude them. And, perhaps most to the point, Barbara could flawlessly enunciate Japanese synth-pop, Indonesian kroncong and dangdut, Hong Kong canto-pop, Jamaican reggae, and six regional varieties of Eurodisco.

Makoto and Barbara—they’d had a number of band identities, since they kept spinning sidemen in and out of the stables at Toshiba-EMI and Sony-Epic—had never broken a hit in the United States. They had been huge in the seventies in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand, Norway, and Finland. In the eighties they’d been mega in Portugal, Goa, Macao, Malta, Ibiza, Korea, Sweden, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. They’d scored one-off top-ten hits in France, Spain, Holland, Italy, and Greece. Makoto and Barbara were infallibly big in Japan—even Makoto’s spin-off bands were big in Japan. But they had never dented the American market. Never ever. Even though they both spoke mostly English, lived in America, and had every Elvis Presley record ever made.

Starlitz and Zeta arrived at Makoto’s dream home just after noon mid-Pacific time. The mogul’s mansion
couldn’t properly be described as “sprawling”—it was properly huge, all right, but it resembled an exquisite, fragile Japanese box kite that had tumbled from a great height onto the vivid green hillside of Kauai’s North Shore. The angular flutter of precisely sited walls was surrounded by fragrant trellises, lanai porches, swirling wooden walkways, and melancholy, bougainvillea-shrouded satellite dishes.

Entering the house was like being swallowed whole by an origami crane. The mansion’s highly peculiar walls
—membranes
was a better term—were made of a slick, spongeable, Tyvek-like substance. The angular expanses of roof were full of great yawning patio holes, where the luminous Hawaiian moon could gaze in onto uncanny interior vistas of Perspex and pahoehoe lava. The floors and door frames were made of spotted, honey-colored “plyboo,” a postmodern laminate of split bamboo and plastic adhesive.

The mansion looked like a stiff Pacific breeze could blow it out to sea with the local whales, but it housed twenty people and had cost somewhere north of three million dollars. No local builder in Kauai was remotely skilled enough to create such a fabulous structure. They’d had to fly in hard-bitten multinational subcontractors who’d worked on the L.A. Getty Museum and that unspeakable Frank Gehry creation in Bilbao. The cost would have crippled anybody but an arty zillionaire who had spontaneous attacks of narcolepsy whenever he met an accountant. Constructing his Kauai palace had even crippled Makoto, but Makoto uncrippled rather deftly. Cost overruns never much bothered Makoto. Given enough pakalolo marijuana, the guy was the essence of indulgent good cheer.

“Hey, Dad.”

“What?”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Huh?”

“Hey, Dad, how come this rich guy doesn’t have any rooms inside his house?”

“Honey, this is one of those way-cool, open-plan, flow-through, shoji-screen things they’ve got going on in here,” Starlitz explained. “Besides, it never gets hot or cold in Hawaii. People here can get away with any kind of loony crap they want.”

A local staffer made her yawning appearance. Makoto had recruited his house groupies from the staff of former elevator operators at the Yellow Magic Orchestra shoe-and-software superstore. Makoto’s house girl wore a dampproof, rose-pink polyester uniform. Starlitz was pretty sure it was designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Only Gaultier could make pink polyester look quite that fuzzy.

Traipsing along in heavy-lidded Hawaiian tempo, the staffer escorted them down an obscure series of damp, slanting, plasticized halls. The walls had been carelessly hung with gold albums and gushing celebrity testimonials. “I wish more American kids could see us getting down to your soulful music—your fans forever, Tipper and Al.” “You may say I’m a dreamer, but so are you, baby—Yoko and Sean.” “From Ted and Jane to Makoto and Barbara—thanks for the help on the yacht! Call us anytime you’re in Atlanta!”

Makoto was standing barefoot in one of his kitchens, eating breakfast. To judge by the look and smell, it was the very same stuff Makoto had been eating for years: potted meat and buckwheat noodles.

“Reggae!” he cried. They embraced.

There was more gray in Makoto’s hair. He was thicker around the waist. And were those round specs really bifocals? Yes, they were.

“Eat Spam,” Makoto said kindly, proffering his wok. “Come from can on mainland. Good for you.”

“We ate at the hotel,” Starlitz said.

“ ‘Hotel!’ But, Reggae!” Makoto protested. “You have guest suite here at house. We put you in Mariko Mori room. You know Mariko Mori?”

“Uhm, yeah, no, maybe. Mariko Mori is the daughter of the guy who builds the biggest skyscrapers in the world.
She takes art photos of herself, dressed up in Mylar space-suits, inside the Tokyo subway.”

Makoto nodded eagerly. “What sweet girl, huh? Super talented! So cute!”

“Does Mariko Mori have any idea how far out she’s been getting lately?”

“Oh, sure! Mariko major artist! Big sale in New York Sotheby’s.” Makoto gazed down at Zeta, beaming unaffectedly. “Who this fan girl? She wear great shoes!”

“This is my daughter, Zenobia. Zenobia Boadicea Hypatia McMillen.”

Zeta and Makoto traded long, guarded, transcontinental stares.

“You like ‘Dragonball’?” Makoto offered at last.

“Yeah,” Zeta muttered, “Dragonball is pretty good.”

“You like ‘Sailor Moon’?”

She perked up. “Sure!”

“ ‘Pokémon’? ‘Hello Kitty’?”

“
Everybody
likes those! Who can’t like those? They’d have to be
stupid
!”

“This girl all right!” Makoto pronounced. “You hungry, Zen Obeah? You like udon noodle?”

“Are they
white
udon noodles?”

“Very, very white.”

“Great. Make me some. Make me some
now
. ’Cause I’m starving.”

Makoto filled a badly scorched soup pan from a gurgling jug of appallingly expensive imported spring water. “Young American girl grow up tall and strong eat udon noodle,” opined Makoto, wandering among his tropical hardwood cabinets and yanking knobs at random. Two huge tropical cockroaches, the size of his guitar-strumming thumb, jumped out from the pantry. Makoto ducked their clattering flight with a tolerant Hawaiian wince. Eventually he discovered a piled bonanza of plastic-wrapped Nipponese noodle product.

“I boil them,” he announced, clicking on his electric stove. “No microwave of tasty noodle. We cook it old-fashion, one-love, natural, i-rie way, mon.”

They watched the pot boil in comfortable silence.

Makoto gave Zeta a thoughtful look. “What you like better, Nintendo or Sega?”

“Sega is dead now. Like, totally.”

“Yes. You right. I keep telling them, use some Tokyo DJ, but no, no, Propellerheads, Prodigy, every damn time! British techno guy have corner on game soundtrack market.”

It was unlike Makoto to mention business before several hours of hospitable Nipponese feel-good touchiefeelie, but clearly the videogame issue had been preying on Makoto’s mind. Makoto was over the fact that he would never be big in America, but he was lethally serious about the British pop scene. It was a bone-deep competitive thing for him. Britain was the European Japan.