Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling

Author:Bruce Sterling [Sterling, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-79679-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

BY EVENING THEY WERE ON A BUS TO JUAREZ. ZETA fell asleep against his shoulder, a torn ticket and a half-chewed flour tortilla still in her hand. Starlitz sat chain-smoking amid his neighbors, the cheekboned widow in the frayed black shawl and the pear-shaped gent in the seersucker suit. The night outside the window was full of Central American stars.

Starlitz enjoyed a Mexico City–style coughing fit, tossed the butt, and lit another. He was dead broke now, his baggy cotton pants holding scarcely a peso, but he was far from lost in the world, because he still had cigarettes. Cigarettes, always the primal currency of the twentieth-century underground, the war stricken, the occupation forces, the resistance, and the jailed. The secret wealth of the gulag, Occupation Paris, stilyagi Moscow, of Hong Kong boat people, and a thousand county clinks and rehab clinics. He’d been smoking all day, because it hid his face, it fit him in, it made him commoner. As long as he never took the trouble to check inventory, he knew that there would still be cigarettes left, in the bottom of the bag.

Starlitz and Zeta spent nine days in Juarez, locating a coyote, and waiting for the mighty coyote to deign to take them across the Big River, to The Pass. Rio Grande, El Paso, the pass into El Norte, that vast, legendary realm of cruelty and gold.

Starlitz saw that El Norte had sent its writhing, unnatural tentacles over the border, and El Norte had come to stay. El Norte had sunk down great big solid roots here in the maquiladora country; there was no more slumbering mestizo vibe about this part of Mexico now, there was nothing here you could successfully repel with any bandolier and any machete. Japan was here building gizmos of plastic with double-A batteries, multinat Europe had blown into town with the silicon and the big wheels. This place was Mexico, all right, still definitely a wholly owned family enterprise, but it was Mexico 1999, La NAFTA, Mexico as the world’s first and only Latin American economic superpower. The snake and eagle were a hiccup and sneeze away from the third millennium.

The down-market streets were full of wandering, booze-dazed Yankees, so they ate quite well and slept better after Starlitz had lifted a wallet.

Zeta looked a little downcast over her greasy stack of white corn tamales. “Dad, it’s not right to pick people’s pockets, is it?”

“Absolutely not!” Starlitz assured her firmly, chasing the beans on his flowered tin plate with a Taiwanese fork. “The margins in the pickpocket racket are razor thin. Lifting wallets the right way takes organization: the bumper, the lifter, the getaway guy.… That’s way too much labor for the rate of return. The only cats who make out picking pockets are specialists, they farm people out to hit airports and trains. It’s a franchise. Forget about it.”

“Is it bad that you stole that drunk guy’s wallet?”

“You bet it’s bad, but it’s worse not to pay your coyote when you cross the big river.

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