The Corrections

So, what do you think * I* have to say to “these people”? What do you think my little Sunday chats with Mom are like these days?

You owe me $20,500. How’s THAT for a debt?

Buy the fucking ticket. I’ll reimburse you.

I love you and I miss you. Don’t ask me why.

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com

TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com

SUBJECT: Remorse

_______________________________________

I’m sorry I flamed you. The last line is the only one I meant. I don’t have the right temperament for e-mail. Please write back. Please come for Christmas.

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com

TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com

SUBJECT: Worry

_______________________________________

Please, please, please don’t talk about people getting shot and then do the silence thing to me.

FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com

TO: exprof@gaddisfly.com

SUBJECT: Only six more shopping days before Christmas!

_______________________________________

Chip? Are you there? Please write or call.

Global Warming Enhances Value

of Lithuania Incorporated

VILNIUS, OCTOBER 30. With world ocean levels rising by more than an inch per year and millions of cubic meters of ocean beach eroded daily, the European Council on Natural Resources this week warned that Europe could face “catastrophic” shortages of sand and gravel by the end of the decade.

“Throughout history, mankind has regarded sand and gravel as inexhaustible resources,” said ECNR chairman Jacques Dormand. “Sadly, our overreliance on greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels will leave many central European countries, including Germany, at the mercy of sand-and-gravel cartel states, particularly sand-rich Lithuania, if they wish to continue with basic road-building and construction.”

Gitanas R. Misevičius, founder and CEO of Lithuania’s Free Market Party Company, compared the impending European sand-and-gravel crisis to the oil crisis of 1973. “Back then,” Misevičius said, “tiny oil-rich countries like Bahrain and Brunei were the mice that roared. Tomorrow, Lithuania.”

Chairman Dormand described the pro-Western, pro-business Free Market Party Company as “currently the only political movement in Lithuania willing to deal fairly and responsibly with Western capital markets.

“Our misfortune,” Dormand said, “is that most of Europe’s reserve sand-and-gravel capacity is in the hands of Baltic nationalists beside whom Muammar Gadhafi looks like Charles de Gaulle. I scarcely exaggerate in saying that the future economic stability of the EC is in the hands of a few brave Eastern capitalists like Mr. Misevičius. . .”

The beauty of the Internet was that Chip could post whole-cloth fabrications without troubling to check even his spelling. Reliability on the Web was ninety-eight percent a function of how slick and cool your site looked. Although Chip personally wasn’t fluent in Web, he was an American under forty, and Americans under forty were exquisite judges of what was slick and cool and what was not. He and Gitanas went to a pub called Prie Universiteto and hired five young Lithuanians in Phish and R.E.M. T-shirts for thirty dollars a day plus millions of worthless stock options, and for a month Chip rode these slang-slinging Webheads mercilessly. He made them study American sites like nbci.com and Oracle. He told them to do it like this, to make it look like this.

Lithuania.com was officially launched on November 5. A high-res banner—DEMOCRACY PAYS HANDSOME DIVIDENDS—unfurled to the accompaniment of sixteen joyful bars of the “Dance of the Coachmen and Grooms” in Petrushka. Side by side, in a rich blue graphical space below the banner, were a black-and-white Before picture (“Socialist Vilnius”) of shell-scarred façades and shattered lindens on the Gedimino Prospektas and a luscious color After photograph (“Free-Market Vilnius”) of a honey-lit harborside development of boutiques and bistros. (The development was actually in Denmark.) For a week Chip and Gitanas had stayed up late drinking beer and composing the other pages, which promised investors the various eponyms and inseminatory privileges from Gitanas’s original bitter posting and also, according to the level of financial commitment,

    * ­ time-shares in ministerial beachside villas at Palanga!

    * ­ pro rata mineral rights and logging rights to all national parklands!

    * ­ appointment of selected local magistrates and judges!

    * ­ blanket 24-hour-a-day parking privileges in perpetuity in the Old City of Vilnius!

    * ­fifty-percent discount on selected rentals of Lithuanian national troops and armaments on a sign-up basis, except during wartime!

    * ­ no-hassle adoptions of Lithuanian girl babies!

    * ­ discretionary immunity from left-turn-on-red prohibitions!

    * ­ inclusion of the investor’s likeness on commemorative stamps, collector’s-item coins, microbrewery beer labels, bas-relief chocolate-covered Lithuanian cookies, Heroic Leader trading cards, printed wrapping tissue for holiday clementines, etc.!

    * ­ honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Vilnius University, founded in 1578!