Absurdistan

my breasts, I tried to see the disgust on his face, but his eyes were closed. He lifted up my breast and sponged underneath it. You have to keep all the crevices clean, he used to teach me. He scrubbed. Harder and harder. He went for my stomach, grabbing a fold, roughly sponging it until it felt raw and used, then moving on to the next. “Do you still love me, Papa?” I asked.

“I’ll always love you,” he said, moving along, moving downward.

“I want to believe in something, too, Papa,” I said. “Just like you believed in Israel. I want to help the Sevo people. I’m not stupid. I know they’re no good. But they’re better than their neighbors. I want to avenge Sakha’s death. Will you love me more if I do something important with my life?”

“You want to help someone, help your own kind,” Papa said, scraping the dust and sand off my thighs.

“Mr. Nanabragov tells me I should talk to Israel. How do I do that, Papa? What’s the trick?”

But Papa just kept rubbing along, his body rocking back and forth, his jaws clenched, his lemur head bobbing along. “Think one person can change the world, Misha?” he said at last.

“Yes,” I said. “I really do. Do you?”

Papa took off his shoe. He took out a pocketknife and, in a few frenzied motions, separated its sole, creating the preliminary outline of one of the childhood shoe-boats he used to build for me. He put the sole into the bathtub. It made a few seaworthy gestures, rolled along the waves caused by my deep breathing, then lifted its prow to the ceiling and promptly sank.

I looked around the empty bathroom. It was all quiet now except for the high-tech beeping of some Hyatt appliance. My papa was dead. Alyosha-Bob was gone.

I had work to do.

31 The KBR Luau

August came to the republic. An unpleasant warm wind materialized from the south—from Iran, I suppose— boxing Svani City into a rectangle of hot air. The weather was so unforgiving, Timofey had to accompany me around town putting ice cubes between my tits in a desperate effort to refrigerate me. Being a Belgian, I began to appreciate what my fellow countrymen had to endure down in King Leopold’s un-air-conditioned Congo.

The main event of the social season was the Kellogg, Brown & Root luau in celebration of the Chevron/BP Figa-6 oil fields. Everyone was talking about it—the white men by the Hyatt pool, the teenage soldiers manning the roadblocks, the young maids Timofey had arranged to scrub my feet in the afternoon. KBR was especially famous for its very generous “goody bags,” and people were wondering what they would get at the rooftop luau (let me spoil the fun a little: it was a tin of beluga caviar accompanied by a mother-of-pearl serving spoon engraved with the Halliburton logo; a selection of scents from the 718 perfume store, including their new Ghettoman aftershave; and gold earrings shaped like tiny offshore oil platforms, which made a nice gift for Timofey’s new girlfriend, one of the older Hyatt maids). The KBR luau was, without a doubt, the hottest ticket in town, and I saw my invite as a sign that I had arrived. If I was going to help Nana’s father and the SCROD in their quest for Order and Democracy, it was important to keep my compass needle pointing true north, and in Absurdistan that always meant Golly Burton.

I heard the KBR people had a really easygoing Texas attitude (their company is headquartered in Houston), so I put on some checkered shorts and a banged-up pair of sandals that kept slipping off my sweaty feet no matter how much I tightened the straps. Nana, however, looked super-sexy in her flaming cowboy boots and a formfitting Houston Astros T-shirt that finally made me appreciate the sport of baseball.

On the special Halliburton day, Nana and I made quick love in front of the CNN-tuned television, gave each other a tender, aromatic sponge bath, then took the elevator one floor up from my suite to the roof terrace.

We were greeted by a tall American soldier in Oakley sunglasses and a Kevlar helmet, armed with an enormous assault rifle, an unusual sight, given the cease-fire. A civilian female greeter put fragrant leis of orchid and rose around our necks and slapped a khaki KBR baseball cap on my head and a straw Halliburton beachcomber on Nana’s, warning us of the effects of the blazing sun. “Are the goody bags inside?” Nana asked, craning her neck anxiously.

I could smell a thousand American hamburgers aflame, some exuding pure red meat and charcoal, others coated with a voluptuous layer of processed cheese. The roof was jammed with Halliburtonites and well-connected natives. The Absurdi men had dressed up in their traditional woolen pants and brown wingtips, their wives fronting thick gold necklaces and amber bracelets you could fit around a birch tree. The KBR folks were divided into two camps: British (mostly Scottish) employees in crisp white shirts and pressed trousers, and their more freewheeling Texas and Louisiana counterparts in Hawaiian shirts and knee-high black socks. Local cooks had formed a serving line to dish out steaming bowls of shrimp gumbo and crawfish etouffee, while more discriminating eaters were laying siege to the Svani City Sashimi Company. The rooftop’s open-air view was magnificent and all-inclusive, a front-row seat to the amphitheater that was the Absurdi capital, although a long banner covered the best parts of the skyline with the words KELLOGG, BROWN & ROOT + CHEVRON/BP = LIGHT, ENERGY, PROGRESS.

And below that, in smaller letters: GO, FIGA-6!!! IT’S YOUR BIRTH-DAY!!!

I tossed a well-done hamburger into my mouth, inhaled some relish, got a Hyatt girl in a hula skirt to spray a sweet burst of perfume on my hands, and asked her to point me to the toilet. Along the way, I walked past a dozen two-meter-high tiki totem poles carved with various Pacific grotesqueries and wired to produce a kind of drumbeat Hawaiian-warrior sound (Halla walla halla walla halla walla), and a live palm tree studded with parrot cages. The parrots had been trained to say, “Kwaaak! Kellogg, Brown! Kwaaak! Halliburton!” along with phrases I had difficulty understanding, such as “LOGCAP! Kwaaak! LOGCAP! Kwaaak! It’s a cost-plus contract! It’s a cost-plus contract!”

The fact that the parrots knew more about Golly Burton’s business than I did was distressing. I resolved to make myself more knowledgeable.

KBR had put up a fancy outhouse featuring a marble pissing trough for the men. As in grade school, cliques had formed among the pissers. In one corner, Sevo and Svani were grunting along, trying to get their prostates to cooperate; in another corner, Scottish engineers were painting their initials on the creamy marble. But I didn’t need a bright Halliburton parrot to know that the real power rested among the Texans and their ilk, so I waited for a slot to open and positioned myself in between two hulking Americans, their mustaches the off-white color of sandwich bread.

I shyly took out my khui and started making a puddle with it, whistling the famous American song “Dixie,” hoping that would make me look legitimate. The men were all talking at once, their English both idiomatic and idiotic. I had to concentrate.

“Ends up we’re throwin’ Bechtel a bone,” one of the men drawled past my head.

“I got a call from over there, askin’ when the fun’s gonna start. When those Ukrainian boys gonna start shootin’ up the inferstructure. I say, ‘Don’ worry ’bout the mule, son, just load the wagon.’”

“That’s Bechtel for ya. Big hat, no cattle.”

“You boys jes’ wait till the cavalry shows up,” someone shouted over to my pissmates. “We’re gonna come out of this finer than frog hair. Remember the L-word?”

“You talkin’ about them lesbian hookers again, Cliffey? Keep this man away from the Radisson.”

“I’m talkin’ L-O-G-C-A-P. What that spell?”

The men started to laugh, the fellow next to me tinkling on my sandal. “Cost plus!” someone shouted.

“Cost plus!” the others picked up.

“Blank check!”

“Indefinite delivery!”

“Indefinite quantity!”

“Indefinite quality!”