Each day that Chip spent grooming the corpse of a dramatically dead monologue was a day in which his rent and food and entertainment expenses were paid for, in large part, with his little sister's money. And yet as long as the money lasted, his pain was not acute. One day led to another. He rarely got out of bed before noon. He enjoyed his food and his wine, he dressed well enough to persuade himself that he was not a quivering gelatinous mess, and he managed, on four out of five evenings, to hide the worst of his anxiety and foreboding and enjoy himself with Julia. Because the sum he owed Denise was large in comparison to his proofreading wage but small by Hollywood standards, he worked less and less at Bragg Knuter & Speigh. His only real complaint was with his health. On a summer day when his work session consisted of rereading Act I, being struck afresh by its irredeemable badness, and hurrying outside to get some air, he might walk down Broadway and sit on a bench at Battery Park City and let the breeze off the Hudson flow under his collar, and listen to the ceaseless fut-fut of copter traffic and the distant shouts of millionaire Tribeca toddlers, and be overcome with guilt. To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing: neither taking advantage of his good night's sleep and his successful avoidance of a cold to get some work done, nor yet fully entering into the vacation spirit and flirting with strangers and knocking back margaritas. It would have been better, he thought, to do his getting sick and dying now, while he was failing, and save his health and vitality for some later date when, unimaginable though the prospect was, he would perhaps no longer be failing. Of all the things he was wasting—Denise's money, Julia's goodwill, his own abilities and education, the opportunities afforded by the longest sustained economic boom in American history—his sheer physical well-being, there in the sunlight by the river, hurt the worst.

It was pathetically obvious that he'd believed his books would fetch him hundreds of dollars. He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he'd been to take them home. But Jurgen Habermas didn't have Julia's long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn't have Julia's grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn't have Julia's artful tongue. By the beginning of October, when Chip sent his finished script to Eden Procuro, he'd sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers. To raise money for lunch for his parents and Denise, all he had left was his beloved cultural historians and his complete hardcover Arden Shakespeare; and because a kind of magic resided in the Shakespeare—the uniform volumes in their pale blue jackets were like an archipelago of safe retreats—he piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115.

"The desserts were a foot tall!" Enid said, her instincts having told her that Denise didn't care about pyramids of shrimp. "It was elegant elegant. Have you ever seen anything like that?"

"I'm sure it was very nice," Denise said.

"The Dribletts really do things super-deluxe. I'd never seen a dessert that tall. Have you?"

The subtle signs that Denise was exercising patience— the slightly deeper breaths she took, the soundless way she set her fork down on her plate and took a sip of wine and set the glass back down—were more hurtful to Enid than a violent explosion.

"I've seen tall desserts," Denise said.

"Are they tremendously difficult to make?"

Denise folded her hands in her lap and exhaled slowly. "It sounds like a great party. I'm glad you had fun."

Enid had, true enough, had fun at Dean and Trish's party, and she'd wished that Denise had been there to see for herself how elegant it was. At the same time, she was afraid that Denise would not have found the party elegant at all, that Denise would have picked apart its specialness until there was nothing left but ordinariness. Her daughter's taste was a dark spot in Enid's vision, a hole in her experience through which her own pleasures were forever threatening to leak and dissipate.

[...] Chip had reason to be sensitive. Since D—— College had fired him, the market capitalization of publicly traded U. S. companies had increased by thirty-five percent. In these same twenty-two months, Chip had liquidated a retirement fund, sold a good car, worked half-time at an eightieth-percentile wage, and still ended up on the brink of Chapter 11. These were years in America when it was nearly impossible not to make money, years when receptionists wrote MasterCard checks to their brokers at 13.9% APR and still cleared a profit, years of Buy, years of Call, and Chip had missed the boat. In his bones he knew that if he ever did sell "The Academy Purple," the markets would all have peaked the week before and any money he invested he would lose.

"It's interesting. It is interesting," Gitanas agreed, still hugging himself tensely. "Brodsky said, 'Fresh fish always smells, frozen smells only when it thaws.' So, and after the big thaw, when all the little fish came out of the freezer, we were passionate about this and that. I was part of it. Very much part of it. But the economy was mismanaged. I had my fun in New York, but back home—there was a depression, all right. Then, too late, 1995, we pegged the litas to the dollar and started privatizing, way too fast. It wasn't my decision, but I might have done the same. The World Bank had money that we wanted, and the World Bank said privatize. So OK, we sold the port. We sold the airline, sold the phone system. The highest bidder was usually American, sometimes Western European. This wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. Nobody in Vilnius had cash. And the phone company said, OK, we'll have foreign owners with deep pockets, but the port and the airline will still be a hundred percent Lithuanian. Well, the port and the airline were thinking the same. But still it was OK. Capital was flowing, better cuts of meat at the butcher, fewer brownouts. Even the weather seemed milder. Mostly criminals took the hard currency, but that's post-Soviet reality. After the thaw, you get the rot. Brodsky didn't live to see that. So OK, but then all the world economies started collapsing, Thailand, Brazil, Korea, and this was a problem, because all the capital ran home to the U. S. We found out, for example, that our national airline was sixty-four percent owned by the Quad Cities Fund. Which is? A no-load growth fund managed by a young guy named Dale Meyers. You never heard of Dale Meyers, but every adult citizen of Lithuania knows his name."

"We've petitioned the IMF and World Bank for assistance," Gitanas said. "Since they encouraged us to privatize, maybe they're interested in the fact that our privatized nation-state is now a zone of semi-anarchy, criminal warlords, and subsistence farming? Unfortunately, IMF is handling complaints of bankrupt client states in order of the size of their respective GDPs. Lithuania was twenty-six on the list last Monday. Now we're twenty-eight. Paraguay just beat us. Always Paraguay."

"Our agreement is strictly oral," Gitanas said.

"Of course, there's nothing actually illegal about what you're doing," Eden said.
Gitanas answered her question by staring out the window for a longish while. In his red ribbed jacket he looked like a motocross rider. "Of course not," he said.

"So it isn't wire fraud," Eden said.

"No, no. Wire fraud? No."

"Because, not to be a scaredy-cat here, but wire fraud is what this almost sounds like."

"The collective fungible assets of my country disappeared in yours without a ripple," Gitanas said. "A rich powerful country made the rules we Lithuanians are dying by. Why should we respect these rules?"

"This is an essential Foucaultian question," Chip said.

"It's also a Robin Hood question," Eden said. "Which doesn't exactly reassure me on the legal front."

After his party was voted out of power and the Russian currency crisis had finished off the Lithuanian economy, Gitanas said, he'd passed his days alone in the old offices of the VIPPPAKJRIINPB17, devoting his idle hours to constructing a Web site whose domain name, lithuania.com, he'd purchased from an East Prussian speculator for a truckload of mimeograph machines, daisy- wheel printers, 64-kilobyte Commodore computers, and other Gorbachev-era office equipment—the party's last physical vestiges. To publicize the plight of small debtor nations, Gitanas had created a satiric Web page offering DEMOCRACY FOR PROFIT: BUY A PIECE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY and had seeded links and references in American news groups and chat rooms for investors. Visitors to the site were invited to send cash to the erstwhile VIPPPAKJRIINPB17 —"one of Lithuania's most venerable political parties," the "cornerstone" of the country's governing coalition for "three of the last seven years," the leading vote-getter in the April 1993 general election, and now a "Western-leaning pro- business party" reorganized as the "Free Market Party Company." Gitanas's Web site promised that, as soon as the Free Market Party Company had bought enough votes to win a national election, its foreign investors would not only become "equity shareholders" in Lithuania Incorporated (a "for-profit nation state") but would also be rewarded, in proportion to the size of their investment, with personalized memorials to their "heroic contribution" to the "market liberation" of the country. By sending just $100, for example, an American investor could have a street in Vilnius ("no less than two hundred meters in length") named after him; for $5,000 the Free Market Party Company would hang a portrait of the investor ("minimum size 60 cm x 80 cm; includes ornate gilt frame") in the Gallery of National Heroes at the historic Slapeliai House; for $25,000 the investor would be awarded perpetual title to an eponymous town "of no fewer than 5,000 souls" and be granted a "modern, hygienic form of droit du seigneur' that met "most of the guidelines established by the Third International Conference on Human Rights.

Caroline seemed to have forgotten how much her back hurt, but she remembered as soon as he went inside with the steaming, smoking platter of vulcanized animal protein. She seated herself sideways at the table, nudged her food with a fork, and whimpered softly. Caleb and Aaron regarded her with grave concern.

"Doesn't anyone else want to know how Prince Caspian ends?" Jonah said. "Isn't anyone curious at all?"

Caroline's eyelids were fluttering, her mouth hanging open miserably to let air trickle in and out. Gary struggled to think of something undepressed to say, something reasonably unhostile, but he was rather drunk.

"Jesus, Caroline," he said, "we know your back hurts, we know you're miserable, but if you can't even sit up straight at the table—"

Without a word she slid off her chair, hobbled to the sink with her plate, scraped her dinner into the garbage grinder, and hobbled upstairs. Caleb and Aaron excused themselves and ground up their own dinners and followed her. Altogether maybe thirty dollars' worth of meat went into the sewer, but Gary, trying to keep his Factor 3 levels off the floor, succeeded pretty well in forgetting about the animals that had died for this purpose. He sat in the leaden twilight of his buzz, ate without tasting, and listened to Jonah's impervious bright chatter.

The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers obeying barbiturate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and .22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window, besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt, a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had to, because the deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you.

"Are you happy with your life?" Gary said, waiting for a left-turn arrow. "Can you say you're ever happy?"