Absurdistan (45 page)

Birds of Prey

“No oil,” I said. To make sure I had understood correctly, I repeated the words in Russian.
“Nyefti nyetu.”
I felt as if something dear had been taken away from me, as if a flotilla of my papa’s rubber-sole boats were sailing away from me and over the horizon. I had gotten so used to the oil; one could almost say I had gotten close to it. Everywhere and everything was
nyeft’
. The modern world was composed entirely of petrol.

I walked away from Jimbo-Dror and toward his window to look at the stubby, sea-lapped orange legs of the nearby oil platforms and the skeletal derricks idling above them.

“Empty,” he said.

“But what about Figa-6?”

“Let me give you the big picture,” the Mossadnik said. “There are supposed to be fifty billion barrels of oil reserves in the Absurdi sector of the Caspian. In truth, there isn’t
one percent
of that left. Figa-6 will run out by the end of the year. It doesn’t make sense to start pumping it. The Absurdis have been lying to the investors from the start. Most of their hydrocarbon reserves were tapped out during Soviet times.”

“But how can that be?” I said. “What about the KBR luau? What about the pipeline to Europe? Wasn’t that the reason for this whole Sevo-Svanï war? Wasn’t that why they shot down Georgi Kanuk’s plane?”

“Georgi Kanuk’s plane was never shot down,” Dror said. “The old man’s living in a villa near Zurich, quite nicely, from what I’ve heard. Kellogg, Brown and Root bribed him with two-point-four million dollars and gave Nanabragov the same. And that was just a down payment. There was supposed to be plenty more once the LOGCAP contract got started.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When they realized the oil was almost finished, Kanuk and Nanabragov needed something else. The sturgeon’s nearly extinct, and the only thing this country grows is grapes.
Awful
grapes. Now, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP, they understood they’d been taken for a ride, and they started cutting back on what was left of production, but they did it slowly, so as not to scare off their shareholders. Just look at all those fancy skyscrapers they built.” The Israeli gestured toward the extinguished skyline. “But then the Absurdis and their friends at Golly Burton had a better idea. Let’s get a massive U.S. Army presence in here. We’ll do support services, build marble outhouses, overcharge the hell out of the Department of Defense, ‘cost plus’ all the way, and all we have to do is get our oil services staff out and replace them with our military support people.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Just shut up and listen. So now all KBR, Kanuk, and Nanabragov need is a reason for the American army to pull in. This place is strategically located. Iran is next door. What about an air force base? Well, you’ve got a problem. The Russians still see Absurdistan as their backyard. They might get mad. And anyway, how much can you skim off a little base like that? You need something big. You need a huge U.S. Army presence doing peacekeeping and humanitarian work. Now, KBR was set to score a ten-year LOGCAP contract starting in 2002, but what good is all that if there’s no heart-wrenching genocide around the corner? ‘Think Bosnia’ became everyone’s motto. ‘How can we make this place more like Bosnia?’ I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Halliburton. If Joseph Heller were still alive, they’d probably ask him to be on their board.”

I took a deep breath. There was a bottle of Hennessy on the counter, and I helped myself without asking. Jimbo-Dror motioned for a glass as well. “And so,” he continued after a taste of the cognac, “the so-called civil war began. Only two things went wrong. The war got completely out of hand. These glue-sniffing True Footrest Posses really started blowing the crap out of the place, which may be good for a civilian engineering outfit like Bechtel, but it scares away all the Western workers, and more importantly, it scares away the Department of Defense. And then something much worse happened. Nobody cared.”

“You mean the Western media.”

“I mean the American people. See, we knew this was going to happen. We did a focus group—”

“The Mossad does focus groups?”

“We’re open to all kinds of methodologies. And we’re very interested in how genocides are perceived by the American electorate. So we did a focus group in suburban Maryland. Right away I knew KBR was in trouble. We do a sample space of three troubled countries: Congo, Indonesia, and Absurdsvanï. Okay, first part. We give these American
schmendricks
a map of the world and say, ‘Point to the general area where you think Congo is located.’ Nineteen percent point to the continent of Africa. Another twenty-three percent point to either India or South America. We count those as correct answers, because Africa, India, and South America all start out wide and then taper off at the bottom. So, for our purposes, forty-two percent of respondents sort of know where Congo is.

“Then we do Indonesia. Eight percent get the actual country. Another eight percent hit the Philippines. Fourteen percent go for New Zealand. A surprising nine percent aim for the Canadian Maritimes. We count all those as correct answers, because the respondents essentially know that Indonesia is an archipelago or at least that there are islands involved.

“Finally we do Absurdistan.
Nobody
gets it right. We start offering clues. ‘It’s near Iran,’ we say.
Huh?
‘It’s on the Caspian.’
Whuh?
‘Alexandre Dumas wrote about it after he visited Russia.’
Yuh?
Complete disaster. We show pictures of Absurdis, Congolese, and Indonesians at play, picking fruits, frying goats, and so on. More problems. The Congolese are clearly black, so that strikes a chord with all the respondents. Like them or not, you got plenty of blacks in America. The Indonesians have funny eyes, so they’re Asian. Probably work hard and raise dutiful children. Good for them. Then you get the Absurdis. They’re sort of dark, but not really black. They look a little Indonesian, but they’ve got round eyes. Are they Arabs? Italians? Persians? We finally settle on ‘taller Mexicans,’ which is another way of saying we’re fucked.

“Then we really let the cat out of the bag. We tell them, ‘Look, there’s a genocide happening, and the U.S. can invade one of the following ten countries.’ We give them a list of countries, real and imaginary. We’ve got Djibouti, Yolanda, Costa Rica, Eastern Tuchusland, Absurdsvanï, and so forth. Guess what came in dead last, even behind the reviled Homoslavia? That’s right. See, the way ‘Absurdsvanï’ is pronounced and spelled, it’s utterly impossible for an American to feel anything for it. You have to be able to use a country as a child’s first name to get anywhere.
Rwanda
Jones.
Somalia
Cohen.
Timor
Jackson.
Bosnia
Lewis-Wright. And then you got this
Republika Absurdsvanï.
Hopeless.

“So I call my friend Dick Cheney—he was still CEO of Halliburton back then—and I say, ‘
Hamoodi,
this isn’t going to work. This country’s a complete zero. You can maybe do Iraq in a few years, depending on who wins the U.S. election, or blow up Panama one more time, but stay the hell out of the Caspian.’ But Cheney, you know, he doesn’t listen to no one. It’s ‘LOGCAP this’ and ‘LOGCAP that.’ Well, look out the window! There’s LOGCAP for you!”

I took another sip of cognac. I looked out the window at the sterile Figa-6 oil fields and the false industrial sunset breaking out across the water. I scratched myself in a place where I had no itch, somewhere between my lower stomach and infinity. And then I understood.
I’d been had.
Utterly. Completely. They’d used me. Taken advantage of me. Sized me up. Known right away that they had their man. If “man” is the right word.

“Do you think…” I started to say. “Do you think Nana Nanabragovna knew about this all along?” But before the Israeli could answer, I was already out the door, heaving myself down the pockmarked esplanade toward the Lady with Lapdog.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have talked to this Jimbo-Dror,” Mr. Nanabragov said, jerking severely, one hand angrily pulling on the gray tuft of hair between his still-muscular tits. A dead sheep was being hoisted from a newly docked speedboat and into the waiting arms of the Lady with Lapdog staff. It was nearly dinnertime at the Lapdog, and the menu promised mutton. “This Jew seems to be a propagandist for the other side.”

“Which other side?” I said.

“Who knows?” Nanabragov shrugged. “
Some
other side. Everyone has always been against us. The Russians. The Armenians. The Iranians. The Turks. Look who we’re surrounded by. We have no friends here. We thought maybe Israel would like us and then the American public would be our friends. That’s why we reached out to you.”

“You lied to me, you twitchy bastard,” I whispered. “The oil…the fucking LOGCAP!”

Nanabragov made a lightning twitch to starboard, as if rehearsing for some new Latin dance. “Did I do something wrong, Misha?” he asked. “Did I do anything to hurt my people?”

“The people…” I said. I looked to the refugees clustered beneath blue UNHCR tarps by the waterfront. I was worried they would catch wind of the mutton and sturgeon grilling several meters out to sea and then storm the Lapdog. Had they any strength or anger left? “You’ve destroyed them,” I said. “The country is ruined.”

“Well, what can be done?” Nanabragov shrugged.

“I believed in you,” I said. “I thought we would make something better. All the people really need is a little hope and encouragement. They’re hardworking and clever.”

“This country is nothing without oil,” Nanabragov said. “Sevo, Svanï—it makes no difference. We’re a feudal nation. We have a feudal mentality. It was all perfectly fine during the Cold War. We were taken care of by Moscow. But now the world changes so quickly that if you’re even one centimeter behind, you’ll be behind forever. When you compare us to all those Chinese and Indians, you know we’ve got no business being in the race. We need to find a new patron.”

“But the young people aren’t like that,” I said. “My friend Alyosha says they can burn hundreds of pirated DVDs in seconds. They can hack into anything.”

“Sure, they can burn and hack,” Nanabragov said. “Give me a torch and I’ll set the whole place on fire. I’m telling you, anyone who’s the least bit smart around here fled to Orange County a long time ago.”

“So you destroy a country because it’s not competitive. What kind of reason is that?”

“It’s the best reason, Misha. Nowadays, if you don’t have natural resources, you need USAID. You need the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. You need Kellogg, Brown and Root. If only we could get on America’s top-ten list and score big like Jordan or Egypt. Or Israel.”

“Why did you kill Sakha the Democrat!” I shouted. “He wasn’t just some third-rate peasant.
He was one of us.
”

“Federal forces killed Sakha. It wasn’t the SCROD.”

“You planned it together with the Svanï. First thing you did was get rid of the democrats.”

“A lot of good they were. Rotten intelligentsia. Couldn’t tie their own shoes. What are you doing, Misha? Oh, for God’s sake. Stop it! Men don’t cry. You look funny. Such a big man in tears…What would Nana say if she saw?”

I shook down to the most ridiculous parts of me, tears flying in every direction but upward, like the oil gushers that had failed to materialize. I could still hear Sakha’s tender bleating, his last words, which had been addressed to me.
Mishen’ka, please. Tell them to stop. They will listen to a man like you. Please. Say something.

Mr. Nanabragov came up to me. He raised his hands as if to embrace me, but they twitched out of position. He stood there jerking silently. “Misha,” he said. “Don’t take my Nana away from me.”

“What?”

His eyes were filling up with water and rainbows. “You don’t understand what it has been like without her,” he said, sniffling. “When she was at NYU and my Bubi was studying Ethnic Musicology at UCLA, there was nothing for me…nothing to live for. People like your father and me, we’re of a different generation. Family is what we know. We can’t live the way people do now, one child in San Diego, one in Torrance, one in the Valley.” He wiped at his eyes.

“Surely you don’t mean to leave her
here,
” I said.

“You can both stay. Get married. After the Russian bombing next week, things will settle down. You’ll see. I’ll give you a piece of the cigarette action, not that you need a piece of anything.”

“But we’ll die here,” I said, wiping my raw nose.

“Not necessarily. Don’t you understand? I’ll do anything to keep her. You’re your father’s son. He killed an American just to make sure you wouldn’t leave him.”

Seagulls were circling low over the dead sheep, and the Lapdog waiters were fingering their pistols. I remembered the seagull attacking the British kid on the videotape of my father getting decapitated. Everywhere I went, birds of prey were looking for an in. I stared at the smoke-gray sky above us, black smoke from the Lapdog grill, the haze wafting from the still-burning city. “Misha,” Mr. Nanabragov said. “Misha. How can you fault me? Your father killed an Oklahoman to make sure you couldn’t go back to New York.”