Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  Still, farm fields Kum & farm fields Go, but it’s Chicago that really pulls you back. Horst took his sons to the traders’ cafeteria at the CBOT, and to the Brokers Inn, where they ate the legendary giant fish sandwich, and to old-school steak houses in the Loop where the beef is hung aging in the front window and the staff address the boys as “Gentlemen.” Where the steak knife next to your plate is not some flimsy little serrated blade with a plastic handle but whetstoned steel riveted into custom-hewn oak. Solid.

  The Loeffler grandfolks, all through their visit, were over the moon, the specifically Iowa moon, which from the front porch was bigger than any moon the boys had ever seen, rising over little trees whose silhouettes were shaped like lollipops, making everybody forget about what they might’ve been missing on the tube, which was on inside but more as an accent light than anything.

  They ate at malls all across Iowa, at Villa Pizza and Bishop’s Buffet, and Horst introduced them to Maid-Rites as well as to local variations on the Louisville Hot Brown. Further into the summer and days to the west, they watched the wind in different wheat fields and waited through the countywide silences when it grows dark in the middle of the afternoon and lightning appears at the horizon. They went looking for arcade games, in derelict shopping plazas, in riverside pool halls, in college-town hangouts, in ice-cream parlors tucked into midblock micromalls. Horst couldn’t help noticing how the places had, most of them, grown more ragged since his time, floors less swept, air-conditioning not as intense, smoke thicker than in the midwestern summers of long ago. They played ancient machines from faraway California said to be custom-programmed by Nolan Bushnell himself. They played Arkanoid in Ames and Zaxxon in Sioux City. They played Road Blasters and Galaga and Galaga 88, Tempest and Rampage and Robotron 2084, which Horst believes to be the greatest arcade game of all time. Mostly, wherever they could find it, they seemed to be playing Time Crisis 2.

  Or Ziggy and Otis were. The big selling point of the game was that both boys could play at the same machine and keep an eye on each other, while Horst went off on various commodities-related chores.

  “I’m just gonna zip in this bar here for a minute, guys. Some business.”

  Ziggy and Otis continuing to blast away, Ziggy usually with the blue handgun and Otis the red one, jumping on and off the foot pedals depending on whether they need to seek cover or come out shooting. At some point, going after more tokens, they notice a couple of local kids who’ve been lounging nearby watching them play, but strangely, for these arcades, reluctant to kibitz. While not actually drooling or packing any real-life weapons that Ziggy or Otis can see, they still radiate this aura of blank menace with which the Midwest so often fails to endear itself. “Something?” inquires Ziggy as neutrally as possible.

  “You fellas ‘nerds’?”

  “Nerds, how’s that?” sez Otis, who is wearing a midnight blue porkpie hat and Scooby-Doo shades with green lenses. “This is the package, live wid it.”

  “We’re nerds,” the shorter of the two announces.

  Ziggy and Otis look carefully and see a pair of suburban normals. “If you guys are nerds,” Ziggy cautiously, “what do the non-nerds around here look like?”

  “Not sure,” sez the bigger one, Gridley. “They’re kind of hard to see most of the time, even in the daylight.”

  “Especially in the daylight,” adds Curtis, the other one.

  “Nobody scores this high on Time Crisis. Usually.”

  “Ever, Gridley. Except that kid from Ottumwa.”

  “Sure, but he’s a space alien. One of those distant galaxies. You guys space aliens?”

  “It’s mostly just piling up bonus points.” Ziggy demonstrates. “These guys in the orange suits? New on the job, worst shots in the game, worth 5000 a pop, but 5000 here,” Pow! “5000 there,” Pow! “pretty soon it begins to add up.”

  “We never find that many.”

  “Oh,” Ziggy suavely as if everybody knew, “next time you see the Boss heading away from you—”

  “There!” Otis points.

  “Right, well, you shoot his hat off—see? real quick, four times, lead him and aim a little above his head—so now you don’t have to go straight for that tank there, first you can go in this alleyway full of all these lame bonus guys. Get em in the head, you pick up extra points.”

  “You guys from New York?”

  “You noticed,” sez Ziggy. “It’s why we’re into shooters.”

  “How about powerboats?”

  “Sounds kind of wholesome, somehow.”

  “You ever try Hydro Thunder?”

  “Seen it,” Otis admits.

  “Come on,” Gridley sez. “We can show you how to get into the bonus boats right away. There’s a police boat with a cannon on it, Armed Response, that ought to be your kind of thing.”

  “And you get to sit on a subwoofer.”

  “My brother’s a little strange.”

  “Hey, forget you, Gridley.”

  “You guys are brothers? Us too.”

  So Horst, returning from the bar after covering a margin call, arranging a July-November soybean spread, social-engineering an update on Kansas City hard red winter wheat, and putting away an indeterminate number of Berghoff longnecks, finds his sons screaming with, you would have to say, unaccustomed abandon, blasting souped-up powerboats through a postapocalyptic New York half underwater here, suffocating in mist, underlit, familiar landmarks picturesquely distressed. The Statue of Liberty wearing a crown of seaweed. The World Trade Center leaning at a dangerous angle. The lights of Times Square gone dark in great irregular patches, perhaps from recent urban warfare in the neighborhood. Intact buildings are draped in black scaffold netting all the way to the waterline. Ziggy is in the Armed Response, and Otis has the helm of the Tinytanic, a miniature version of the famous doomed ocean liner. Gridley and Curtis have vanished, as if they were shills not quite of this earth, whose function in the realworld was to steer Ziggy and Otis into the ruinous waterscapes of what might lie in wait for their home city, as if powerboat skills will be necessary for Big Apple disasters to come, including but not limited to global warming.

  “So Mom, we were thinking, maybe we could move to someplace less at risk? Murray Hill? Riverdale?”

  “Well… we’re up six floors…”

  “So at least a lifeboat, keep it near the window?”

  “With what floor space, give us a break you goofballs will you.”

  After the boys are in bed, Maxine trying to settle in in front of another homicidal-baby-sitter TV movie, Horst approaches diffidently. “Would it be OK if I stuck around for a while?”

  Resisting anything like a double take, “You mean tonight.”

  “Maybe a little longer?”

  What’s this? “Long as you like, Horst, we’re still splitting the maintenance here.” Gracious as it is possible at the moment to be, when she’d rather be watching a former sitcom actress pretending to be a youngish Mom in Peril.

  “If it’s problematic, I can stay someplace else.”

  “The boys will be thrilled, I think.”

  She watches his mouth begin to open and then close again. He nods and withdraws to the kitchen, from which soon can be heard sounds of refrigerator entry and plundering.

  The drama on the tube is approaching a crisis, the babysitter’s evil scheme has begun to fall apart, she has just grabbed the Baby and is trying to make a run for it, in inappropriate heels, into some kind of alligator-intensive terrain, a squad of police who look like catalog models with no firm idea of which end of the gun do you point at the suspect are speeding to the rescue—all night shots, natch—when Horst emerges from the kitchen with a chocolate mustache, holding an ice-cream package.

  “There’s Russian writing all over it. This Igor guy, correct?”

  “Yeah, he gets it shipped in, always more than he can use, I get to help with some of the overrun.”

  “And in exchange for his generosity—”

  “Horst, it
’s business, he’s,” smoothly, “eighty years old and looks like Brezhnev, you already ate half a kilo, you want me to call this in, find a stomach pump for you?”

  Horst semimiraculously getting a grip, “Not at all, fact, this stuff is terrific. Next time you talk to that ol’ Igor, can you find out if they have chocolate macadamia over there? passion fruit swirl maybe?”

  • • •

  MAXINE SPENDS NEXT MORNING at Morris Brothers looking at back-to-school gear for the boys, popping into the apartment around lunchtime. She’s just about to open a half-pint of yogurt when Rigoberto buzzes up on the intercom. Even over the low-fidelity speaker, you can hear some swooning in his voice. “Mrs. Loeffler? You have a visitor?” A pause as if working on how to say it. “I’m, like pretty sure it’s Jennifer Aniston, is down here to see you?”

  “Rigoberto, please, you’re a sophisticated New Yorker.” She goes to the peephole and sure enough presently out the elevator and down the hall comes this wide-angle version of Rachel “I Love Ross, I Love Ross Not” Green herself. Maxine opens the door before negative thoughts like psychopath in latex celebrity mask can arise.

  “Ms. Aniston, first of all let me just say, I am such a huge fan of the show—”

  Driscoll shakes her hair. “You think?”

  “You look just like her. Don’t tell me Murray and Morris actually—”

  “Yep, and thanks totally for that tip, it’s changed my life. The guys said to tell you they miss you and they hope you’re not still upset about that li’l dryer malfunction?”

  “Nah, federal emergency, half of Con Ed out in the street with jackhammers, what’s to be upset? Come on in the kitchen, I just ran out of Zima, but there’s beer. Maybe.”

  Rolling Rock, two bottles Horst has somehow overlooked, way in the back of the fridge. They go in and sit at the dining-room table.

  “Here,” Driscoll sliding over a gray-and-burgundy envelope about the size and shape of an old floppy disc, “this is for you.”

  Inside is a card on expensive stock with calligraphic hand-lettering.

  Ms. Maxine Tarnow-Loeffler

  The pleasure of your company is requested at

  The First Annual

  Grande Rentrée Ball, or

  Geeks’ Cotillion

  Saturday night, the eighth of September, 2001

  Tworkeffx.com

  Open Bar

  Clothes Optional

 

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh I’m on some committee.”

  “Looks like a big deal, who can afford a party on this scale anymore?”

  Well, seems Gabriel Ice, who else, having as it turns out recently acquired Tworkeffx, which builds and maintains virtual private networks, has discovered among the company assets a special Party Fund which has been sitting for years in escrow waiting for something like this particular End of the World As We Know It.

  Maxine’s annoyed. “All that time and nobody thought to raid the account? How idealistic is that? The crooks I deal with every day, not one—lame, idiotic, whatever—would have passed this up. Until fucking Ice, of course. So now he’s the genial host and not spending a nickel out of his own pocket.”

  “Still, we could all use a wingding about now, even if it’s only the Alley’s biggest pink-slip party. It’ll be about the open bar if nothing else.”

  • • •

  AS LABOR DAY APPROACHES, everybody in the world begins calling in, people Maxine hasn’t heard from for years, a classmate from Hunter who reminds her at length how at just the right moment in an evening of irresponsible stupor she saved this person’s life by hailing a taxi, folks from out of town making their annual autumn pilgrimages into NYC, eager as any city-dwelling leafers headed the other way to gaze at spectacles of decadence, sophisticated travelers who have been away all summer at fabulous tourist destinations, back now to bore everybody they can round up with camcorder tapes and tales of fantastic bargains, travel upgrades, living with the natives, Antarctic safaris, Indonesian gamelan festivals, luxury tours of the bowling alleys of Liechtenstein.

  Horst, though not exactly hanging around the house all day, is finding time for the boys, more time, it seems from Maxine’s increasingly out-of-focus memories of the Horst Years, than he has ever spent before, taking them up to see a Yankee game, discovering the last skee-ball parlor in Manhattan, even volunteering to bring them around the corner for a seasonal drill he has always avoided, back-to-school haircuts.

  The barbershop, El Atildado, is below street level. There’s a noisy subarctic air conditioner, back copies of OYE and Novedades, and 90 percent of the conversation, like the commentary to the Mets game on the TV, in Caribbean Spanish. Horst has just gotten absorbed in the game, which is with the Phillies, when in off the street, down the steps, and through the door comes a party in a Johnny Pacheco T-shirt, schlepping a full-size outdoor barbecue complete with propane tank, which he is looking to sell at an attractive price. This happens a lot at El Atildado. Miguel, the owner, always sympathetic, patiently tries to explain why nobody in here is likely to be too interested, pointing out the logistics of walking home with it on the street, not to mention the police, who have El Atildado on their list and keep sending the same beefy Anglos in plainclothes getups that wouldn’t fool your baby sister screeching up to the curb to jump out and into action. Indeed, according now to a doorman from down the street on a break, who sticks his head in with the latest cop-watch update, this very scenario is nearly upon them. There is some tense low-volume conversation. Laboriously the barbecue guy maneuvers his sale item back out the door and up the steps, and no more than a minute later here comes the Twentieth Precinct in the form of a cop in a Hawaiian shirt which does not not entirely cover his Glock, hollering, “Ahright, where is he, we just saw him on Columbus, I find out he was in here I’m gonna have your ass, you understand me what I’m sayin here, all you motherfuckers, gonna be in some deep shit, mierda honda, tu me comprendes,” and so forth.

  “Hey, look,” sez Otis, as his brother makes dummy-up signals, “it’s Carmine—hey! hey, Carmine!”

  “Yo, guys,” Detective Nozzoli’s eyes flicking to the TV screen. “How they doin?”

  “Five–nothin,” Ziggy sez. “Payton just homered.”

  “Wish I could watch. Gotta go chase a perp instead. Say hi to your mom.”

  “‘Say hi to your mom’?” Horst inquires after the inning has ended and commercials come on.

  “Him and Heidi are dating,” Ziggy calmingly. “She used to bring him around sometimes.”

  “And your mom…”

  So it comes out also that Maxine has been coordinating with the cops, some kind of cops, the boys aren’t sure which. “She’s into criminal cases now?”

  “Think it’s about a client.”

  Horst’s screenward gaze grows melancholy. “Nice clients…”

  Later Maxine finds Horst in the dining room trying to assemble a particleboard computer desk for Ziggy, blood already streaming from several fingers, reading glasses about to slide off the sweat on his nose, mysterious metal and plastic fasteners littering the floor, instruction sheets torn and flapping everywhere. Screaming. The default phrase being “Fucking IKEA.”

  Like millions of other men around the world, Horst hates the Swedish DIY giant. He and Maxine once blew a weekend looking for the branch in Elizabeth, New Jersey, located next to the airport so the world’s fourth-richest billionaire can save on lading costs while the rest of us spend the day getting lost on the New Jersey Turnpike. Also off it. At last they arrived at a county-size parking lot, and shimmering in the distance a temple to, or museum of, a theory of domesticity too alien for Horst fully to be engaged by. Cargo planes kept landing gently nearby. An entire section of the store was dedicated to replacing wrong or missing parts and fasteners, since with IKEA this is not so exotic an issue. Inside the store proper, you walk forever from one bourgeois context, or “room of the house,” to another, along a fractal p
ath that does its best to fill up the floor space available. Exits are clearly marked but impossible to get to. Horst is bewildered, in a potentially violent sort of way. “Look at this. A barstool, named Sven? Some old Swedish custom, the winter kicks in, weather gets harsh, after a while you find yourself relating to the furniture in ways you didn’t expect?”

  It was years into the marriage before Horst admitted to not being a domestic person—by then, to nobody’s big surprise. “My ideal living space is a not too ratty motel room in the deep Midwest, somewhere up in the badlands, about the time of the first snows.” Horst’s head in fact is a single nationwide snowdrift of motel rooms in far windswept spaces that Maxine will never know how to find her way to, let alone inhabit. Each crystalline episode fallen into his night, once, unrepeatable. The aggregate a wintry blankness she can’t read.

  “Come on. Take a break.” She puts the tube on, and they sit and watch the Weather Channel for a while, with the sound off. One anchor meteorologist says something and the other looks over and reacts and then looks back into the camera and nods. Then they switch, and the other talks, and the first one nods.