Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

Maybe the formal amiability is catching. Maxine finds herself talking about work, and Horst, improbably, listening. Not that it’s any of his business, of course, but then again, a recap, what could hurt? “This documentary guy Reg Despard—his twice-as-paranoid IT genius, Eric—they spot something cute in the bookkeeping at hashslingrz.com, OK, Reg comes to me with it, thinks it’s sinister, global in scope, maybe to do with the Mideast, but it could be too much X-Files or whatever.” Pause, skillfully disguised as taking a breath. Waiting for Horst to get all pissy. But he’s only blinking, slowly yet, which may signal some interest. “Now, it seems Reg has disappeared, mysteriously, though maybe only out to Seattle.”

  “What do you think’s going on?”

  “Oh. Think? I have time to think? The feds are now on my case also, supposedly because of Brooke and her husband and some alleged Mossad connection, which may be total, how do they say out where you come from, horseshit.”

  Horst by now is holding his head in both hands, as if about to attempt a foul shot with it. “Jemima, Keziah, and Kerenhappuch! What can I do to help?”

  “Actually, you know what?” Where is this coming from, and how serious is she really, “Saturday night there’s this big nerd clambake downtown? and, and I could use an escort, how about that. Huh?”

  He kind of squints. “Sure thing.” Half a question. “Wait… will I have to dance?”

  “Who can say, Horst, sometimes when the music is right? you know, a person just has to?”

  “Um, no I meant…” Horst is almost cute when he fidgets. “You never forgave me for not learning how to dance, right?”

  “Horst, I am supposed to be what, here, tiptoeing around your regrets? If you like, I can teach you a couple of real simple steps right now, would that help?”

  “Long as I don’t have to swing my hips, a man’s got to draw the line someplace.”

  She roots through the CD collection, pops on a disc. “OK. This is merengue, real simple, all you have to do is stand there like a silo, if you feel like moving a foot now and then, why so much the better.”

  The kids look in after a while and find them in a formal clinch, slowdancing to every other beat of “Copacabana.”

  “Vice-principal’s office, you two.”

  “Yeah, on the double.”

  28

  It’s a warm evening. Just around the time sunset colors are developing over Jersey and food-delivery bike traffic in the neighborhood approaches its peak and city trees are filled with bird dialogue that reaches a crescendo as the streetlights come on, contrails of evening departures hanging brightly in the sky, Horst and Maxine, having dropped the kids at Ernie and Elaine’s, are on the subway headed down to SoHo.

  The recently acquired Tworkeffx, paying top-of-the-market rent, has occupied for a handful of glittering years a species of Italian palazzo, its cast-iron façade faking the look of limestone, ghostly tonight in the streetlight. What must be everybody from down in the Alley, past and present, is converging on it. You can hear the festivities for blocks before you get there. A crowd track of party-prepped voices with soprano highlights, bass lines from the music inside, punctuated by crackling and high-volume distortion from security-cop walkie-talkies.

  One cannot help noticing a certain emphasis tonight on instant nostalgia. Nineties irony, a little past its sell-by date, is in full bloom again down here. Maxine and Horst are swept past the bouncers at the door in a vortex of fauxhawks and fades and emo hair, mops and crops and Japanese princess cuts, Von Dutch trucker-cap knockoffs, temporary tattoos, spliffs hanging off lips, Matrix-era Ray-Bans, Hawaiian shirts, the only shirts in sight with collars, except for Horst’s. “Good grief,” he exclaims, “it looks like Keokuk around here.” Those in earshot are too hip to tell him that’s the point.

  Even though the dotcom bubble, once an eye-catching ellipsoid, now droops in vivid pink collapse over the trembling chin of the era, perhaps no more than a vestige of shallow breath left inside it, no expense tonight has been spared. The theme of the gathering, officially “1999,” has a darker subtext of Denial. It soon becomes clear that everybody’s pretending for tonight that they’re still in the pre-crash fantasy years, dancing in the shadow of last year’s dreaded Y2K, now safely history, but according to this consensual delusion not quite upon them yet, with all here remaining freeze-framed back at the Cinderella moment of midnight of the millennium when in the next nanosecond the world’s computers will fail to increment the year correctly and bring down the Apocalypse. What passes for nostalgia in a time of widespread Attention Deficit Disorder. People have pulled their pre-millennial T-shirts back out of the archival plastic they’ve been idling in—Y2K IS NEAR, ARMAGEDDON EVE, Y2K COMPLIANT LOVE MACHINE, I SURVIVED… Determined, as Prince can be heard repeatedly urging, to party like it’s 1999.

  The Soviet-era sound system, looted from a failed arena somewhere in Eastern Europe, is also blasting Blink-182, Echo and the Bunnymen, Barenaked Ladies, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and other sentimental oldies while vintage stock quotations from the boom-years NASDAQ crawl along a ticker display on a frieze running the full perimeter of the ballroom, beneath giant four-by-six-meter LED screens onto which bloom and fade loops of historical highlights like Bill Clinton’s grand-jury testimony, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” the other Bill, Gates, getting a pie in the face in Belgium, the announcement trailer for Halo, clips from the Dilbert animated TV series and the first season of SpongeBob, Roman Coppola’s Boo.com commercials, Monica Lewinsky hosting SNL, Susan Lucci finally winning a Daytime Emmy for Erica Kane, with Urge Overkill’s song of the same name deejayed in as accompaniment.

  The antique bar, elaborately carved in a number of neo-Egyptian motifs, was salvaged by Tworkeffx from the headquarters lodge of a semimystical outfit uptown being converted, like every structure of its scale in NYC, to residential use. If occult mojo still permeates the ancient Caucasian walnut, it is waiting its moment to manifest. What remains tonight is an appeal to fond memories of all the open bars of the nineties, where everybody here can remember drinking for free, night after night, simply by claiming affiliation with the start-up of the moment. The bartenders behind it tonight are mostly out-of-work hackers or street-level drug dealers whose business dried up after April 2000. Those who can’t help making with the free booze advice, for example, turn out to be Razorfish alumni, still the smartest people in the room. There is no bottom-shelf product here, it’s all Tanqueray No. Ten, Patrón Gran Platinum, The Macallan, Elit. Along with PBRs, of course, in a washtub full of crushed ice, for those who cannot easily deal with the prospect of an irony-free evening.

  If there’s business being talked tonight, it’s someplace else in town, where time is too valuable to waste on partying. Third-quarter earnings are in the toilet, deal flow is down to a slow drip, corporate IT budgets are as frozen as machine margaritas in a Palo Alto bar, Microsoft XP has just emerged from beta, but already there is nerdal muttering and geekish discontent over security and backward-compatibility issues. Recruiters are out discreetly prowling the crowd, but with none of the usual color-coded bracelets visible tonight, hackers looking to work for short money have to default to intuition about who’s hiring.

  Later those who were here will remember mostly how vertical it all was. The stairwells, the elevators, the atria, the shadows that seem to plunge from overhead in repeated assaults on the gatherings and ungatherings beneath… the dancers semi-stunned, out under the strobing, not dancing exactly, more like standing in one place and moving up and down in time to the music.

  “Doesn’t look that complicated,” Horst observes, sort of to himself, wandering away into the bright commotion of temporal aliasing.

  “Maxi, hi?” It’s Vyrva, with her hair up, eyes dramatized, wearing basic black and spike heels. Justin puts his head around from somewhere behind her and with a stoner’s smile wiggles his eyebrows. Even in this pullulating decadence, he’s still his reliable West Coast sweetheart self, wearing a T-shirt th
at reads JUSTINNOTHER PERL HACKER. Lucas is along, wearing roomy homeboy jeans and an I-spotted-the-fed Defcon shirt.

  “Wow, back off Kim Basinger. Making me feel even frumpier than usual here, Vyrva.”

  “What, this old schmatte, the dog likes to sleep on it, she let me borrow it for the evening.” No direct eye contact, decidedly off-profile for Vyrva, her gaze wandering instead to the giant screens overhead as if waiting for something there, some possibly fateful film clip. Maxine doesn’t perform brain scans but does have a longtime acquaintance with jumpy.

  “Quite a ballroom ain’t it. Bar mitzvah theme ideas everywhere you turn. The Ice individual has spared no expense, he must be lurking around someplace.”

  “Don’t know, haven’t been looking.”

  “Myself,” sez Lucas, “I think he’s in some creepy retro-pissing contest with Josh Harris. Remember that millennium-eve party at pseudo? Went on for months?”

  “You mean,” sez Justin, “like, people in clear plastic rooms fucking in public view, where? Where?”

  “Yo, Maxi.” Eric, hair dyed a sort of pale electric green, a flirtatious eye, a grin that on analysis might test over in the shit-eating part of the scale. Maxine senses Horst, invisibly nearby, gazing at them, about to lapse into sad-sack mode. Oy vey “Did you see my husband around here anyplace?” Loud enough for Horst if he’s there to hear.

  “Your what?”

  “Oh,” normal tone, “sort of quasi ex-husband, did I not ever mention that?”

  “Big surprise,” mumbling cheerfully, “and whoa, what’s this we’ve got here tonight, Giuseppe Zanotti, right?”

  “Stuart Weitzman, smartass, but wait, somebody you should meet here, partial to Jimmy Choo if I’m not mistaken.” It’s Driscoll, the all-out Anistonian version, causing a screen to begin blinking on Maxine’s Lobodex of Love, or in-brain matchmaking app. “Unless you guys know each other already…”

  At it again, Maxine, why can’t she resist these ancient yenta forces that seek to control her? enough, please, with the meddling, parties take care of yenta business better than yentas do, economies of scale or something, no doubt. Eric squints in a charming way. “Didn’t we… one of those Cybersuds affairs, you tried to throw me in the river or something? No, wait, she was shorter.”

  “Maybe a nonbeer event?” crypto-Rachel-to-Ross-wise, “some Linux installfest?” Phone numbers in marker pen on palms or some such ritual, and Driscoll is off again.

  “Listen, Maxi,” Eric turning serious, “there’s somebody we need to find. Lester Traipse’s partner, the Canadian guy.”

  “Felix? He’s still in town?” Somehow, not such good news. “What’s his problem?”

  “He needs to see you, something about Lester Traipse, but he’s also acting paranoid, keeping on the move, partying heavily.”

  “Security through immaturity.” Lester, what about Lester?

  Not a word from Felix since that night at the karaoke and suddenly now he wants to talk. Where was he when his trusting business partner got murdered? Conveniently back in Montreal? How about out in Montauk with Gabriel Ice, scheming how to set Lester up? What’s so urgent tonight that Felix needs to tell Maxine, she wonders.

  “Come on, we’ll do a pseudo-random sweep of the toilets.”

  She follows him into the strummed and seething maw of this work space now fallen into event space, scanning the crowd, getting a quick glimpse of Horst out on the floor doing the same Z-axis Bounce as everybody else, and at least not not enjoying himself.

  Eric motions her through a door and down a corridor to a toilet that proves to be unisex and privacy-free. Instead of rows of urinals, there are continuous sheets of water descending stainless-steel walls, against which gentlemen, and ladies so inclined, are invited to piss, while for the less adventurous there are stalls of see-through acrylic which in more prosperous days at Tworkeffx also allowed slacker patrols to glance in and see who’s avoiding work, custom-decorated inside by high-ticket downtown graffiti artists, with dicks going into mouths a popular motif, as well as sentiments like DIE MICROSOFT WEENIES and LARA CROFT HAS POLYGON ISSUES.

  No Felix here. They hit the stairs and proceed upward floor by floor, ascending into these bright halls of delusion, prowling offices and cubicles whose furnishings have been picked up from failed dotcoms at bargain prices, too soon in their turn destined for looting by the likes of Gabriel Ice.

  Partying everywhere. Sweeping into it, swept… Faces in motion. The employees’ lap pool with champagne empties bobbing in it. Yuppies who appear only recently to have learned how to smoke screaming at each other. “Had a brilliant Arturo Fuente the other day!” “Awesome!” A parade of restless noses snorting lines off of circular Art Deco mirrors from long-demolished luxury hotels dating back to the last time New York saw a market frenzy as intense as the one just ended.

  In and out of a number of theme restrooms, gigantic all but wraparound Irish-bar urinals, vintage embossed toilets from a hundred years ago, wall-mounted tanks and pull chains, other spaces, dimmer and less elegant, seeking to evoke classic downtown club toilets, without a spritz of Lysol since the mid-nineties and only one toilet bowl, distressed and toxic, which people have to queue up for.

  Felix meanwhile is in none of these. Reaching the top floor at last, Eric and Maxine enter the godfather of postmodern toilets, a piazza-size expanse of Belgian encaustic tiling in ocher, pale blue and faded burgundy, recycled from a mansion on lower Broadway, with three dozen stalls, its own bar, television lounge, sound system, and deejay, who at the moment, while a six-by-six matrix of dancers perform the Electric Slide across the antique tiling, is playing Nazi Vegetable’s once-chartbusting disco anthem

  In the Toilet [Hustle tempo]

  Such a weird ’n’ wack-y feeling, wit’ your

  Brains up on th’ ceiling, in the

  Toi-let!

  [Girl backup]—In the toi-let!

  Coke and Ecstasy and weed,

  Never know when you might need

  Them in the toi-let

  (All in-that, toi-let!)

  Just come in to take a peek, end up

  Stayin’ for a week, down in the

  Toi-let!…

  (Toilet! Toilet!)

  All those mirrors, lotsa chrome, stuff you’d

  Never try at home, here in thuhuh

  Toi-let—

  Whoa, oh, girl a-nd

  [Release]

  Boy, let

  The night have its way,

  Wave bye-bye to the day,

  Don’t use nothin too much,

  Have a look but don’t touch, or you’ll

  Spoil it,

  Just be cool, it’s the toi-hoi-let—

  That expectant, disinfectant-heavy

  Rest-room rendez-vooo…

  Urinal smoothies, just like in the movies,

  ’ll charm ya right outta your, pants—come

  To the

  Toilet! flush all those

  Troubles and dance!

  Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth. Teen contemporaries of Maxine’s got lost in the club toilets of the eighties, went in, never came out, some with luck grew too hip or not hip enough to appreciate the scene at all, others, like Maxine, went on only to flash back to it now and then, epileptigogic lighting, Quaaludes for sale on the floor, outer-borough hair statements… the Aqua Net fogs! The girl-hours lost sitting in front of mirrors! The strange disconnects between dance music and lyrics, “Copacabana,” “What a Fool Believes,” heartbreaking stories, even tragic, set to these strangely bouncy tunes…

  The Electric Slide is a four-wall line dance that Maxine recognizes from the many bar mitzvahs gone blurring by since the old Paradise Garage of her teen years and the only fraction of the week really that mattered, Saturday nights when she would sneak out of the house at one or one-thirty, take the subway down to Houston and the endless, endless block to King, teleport in past the bouncers to rejoin for a while the other core Garageheads, and dance all night in
the conjured world, and wait till breakfast at some diner to try to figure out what kind of a story to tell her parents this time… and next thing you’re in your purse looking for tissues because it’s all gone, of course, another of those expulsions on out into a colder season, where not everybody made it through, there was AIDS and crack and let’s not forget late fuckin capitalism, so only a few really found refuge of any kind…

  “Um, Maxine, are you…?”

  “Yes. No. I’m good… what?”

  Eric gestures with his head, and there among the Art Nouveau intricacies of the floor, in the middle of the formation, Maxine spots the elusive potential homicide accomplice Felix Boïngueaux, wearing a double-knit disco-era suit in some screamingly saturated coral, almost certainly picked up on sale, a store buyer’s impulse soon regretted, over a T-shirt with a Canadian maple-leaf logo and THE EH? TEAM on it. The dance formation reformats into couples, and Felix comes over, sweating and jittery.

  “Yo, Felix, ça va?”

  “Bummer about Lester, eh?” Unblinking chutzpah-heavy eye contact.

  “This is what you wanted to see me about, Felix?”

  “I was out of town when it happened.”

  “Did I say anything? Even if Lester did seem, well, under the impression you had his back.”

  Chances of rattling this customer are about as fat as Ally McBeal. “You’re still following the case, then.”

  “We’re keeping a file open on it.” The investigatorial “we.” Let him think there’s a third party who’s hired her. “Anything you can help us with?”

  “Maybe. Maybe you’d just go runnin to tell the cops or something.”

  “I’m not a cop lover, Felix, that’s Nancy Drew, actually not too flattering a comparison, you need to work on that.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who tried to get the ol’ Vipster popped,” Felix meantime having begun to squint suspiciously at Eric, who withdraws amiably enough into the ebb and flow of dancers, drinkers, and dopers.

  She pretends to sigh. “It’s about the poutine isn’t it, you’ll never forgive me, once again, Felix, I’m sorry I said that—dumb remark, cheap shot.”