Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  Going along with it, “In Montreal it’s a diagnostic for moral character—if somebody resists poutine, they resist life.”

  “Can I think about,” having a look around at the partying, “that later? Monday? I promise.”

  “Look, look, it’s Gabriel Ice.” Nodding in the direction of the bar, where sure enough their gracious host stands, expressing himself to a small knot of admirers.

  “Ever meet him?”

  She understands that this may’ve been the whole point. “We’ve talked on the phone. I got a sense that his time is precious to him.”

  “Come on, I’ll introduce you, we’ve been doing a little business together.”

  Of course you have, bitch. They sidle across the teeming square footage till they’re in earshot of the trim tycoon, who is not so much chatting as delivering some kind of sales pitch.

  His eyes, framed by Oliver Peoples horn-rims, are less expressive than many Maxine has noted at the fish market, though sometimes a party who may appear immune to desire is in fact oversusceptible, dangerously so, no least idea of how to deal with it once it jumps the fence, as it must, and heads for the ridgeline. Thin and careful lips. In the business you run into far too many of these faces, don’t know what they want, or how much of it, or what to do with it once they have it.

  “More and more servers together in the same place putting out levels of heat that quickly become problematic unless you spend the budget on A/C. Thing to do,” Ice proclaims, “is to go north, set up server farms where heat dissipation won’t be so much of a problem, take your power from renewables like hydro or sunlight, use surplus heat to help sustain whatever communities grow up around the data centers. Domed communities across the Arctic tundra.

  “My geek brothers! the tropics may be OK for cheap labor and sex tours, but the future is out there on the permafrost, a new geopolitical imperative—gain control of the supply of cold as a natural resource of incomputable worth, with global warming, even more crucial—”

  There is something creepily familiar about this go-north argument. By a corollary of Godwin’s law valid only on the Upper West Side, Stalin’s name, like Hitler’s, is 100% certain to enter a discussion of any length, and Maxine now recalls Ernie telling her about the genocidal Georgian and his plans back in the 1930s for colonizing the Arctic with domed cities and armies of young technicians, otherwise known, Ernie was always careful to point out, as forced labor, bringing out for multimedia emphasis his 78rpm album of The Attractive Schoolgirl of Zazhopinsk, an obscure opera from the purge era, strangled Russian bass-tenor duets invoking steppes of ice, thermodynamic night. And now here’s Gabriel Ice, in a capitalist party mask, with a neo-Stalinist rerun.

  Aah, God help us, how sleazy is it, and how has it come to this? a rented palace, a denial of the passage of time, a mogul on the black-diamond slopes of the IT sector thinks he’s a rock star. It isn’t so much that Maxine can’t be fooled, it’s more that she hates to be, and when she finds anybody trying too hard to fool her, she reaches for her revolver. Or in this case, turns and heads for the stairs, leaving Felix and Gabriel Ice to shmooze as they will, rogue to rogue.

  Does Nora Charles ever have to put up with this sort of thing? Even Nancy Drew? The parties they go to, it’s all catered hors d’oeuvres and beautiful strangers. But let Maxine try to step out and enjoy herself a little, forget it, it always ends up like this. Weekday-type obligations, guilt, ghosts.

  For some reason, however, she manages to stay all night and close the joint down. Horst, perhaps from secondhand smoke, regressing to his old party-animal ways, is affably all over the place. Maxine finds herself tangled in and presently refereeing nerd disputes she can’t understand a word of. She nods out in the toilet once or twice, and if she dreams at all, it’s hard to separate from the great invisible wheeling around her, decelerating, board-fading to all-but-silent black and white, till it’s time at last to CD tilde home. For recessional music there’s “Closing Time” by Semisonic, a four-chord farewell to the old century. Former and future nerdistocracy slowly, and to look at them you’d think reluctantly, filtering back out into the street, into the long September which has been with them in a virtual way since spring before last, continuing only to deepen. Putting their street faces back on for it. Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the little legendary streets, the highs beginning to dissipate, out into the casting-off of veils before the luminosities of dawn, a sea of T-shirts nobody’s reading, a clamor of messages nobody’s getting, as if it’s the true text history of nights in the Alley, outcries to be attended to and not be lost, the 3:00 AM kozmo deliveries to code sessions and all-night shredding parties, the bedfellows who came and went, the bands in the clubs, the songs whose hooks still wait to ambush an idle hour, the day jobs with meetings about meetings and bosses without clue, the unreal strings of zeros, the business models changing one minute to the next, the start-up parties every night of the week and more on Thursdays than you could keep track of, which of these faces so claimed by the time, the epoch whose end they’ve been celebrating all night—which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide everywhere through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces private and public, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of—to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, about to be revealed, a search result with no instructions on how to look for it?

  In the taxi on the way home, there’s loud traffic in Arabic on the radio, which Maxine figures at first for a call-in show till the cabbie picks up a handset and joins in. She glances at the ID up on the Plexiglas. The face in the photo is too indistinct to make out, but the name is Islamic, Mohammed somebody.

  It’s like hearing a party from another room, though Maxine notices there’s no music, no laughing. High emotion all right, but closer to tears or anger. Men talking over each other, shouting, interrupting. A couple of the voices might be women’s, though later it will seem they could have belonged to high-pitched men. The only word Maxine recognizes, and she hears it more than once, is Inshallah. “Arabic for ‘whatever,’” Horst nods.

  They’re waiting at a light. “If it is God’s will,” the driver corrects him, half turning in his seat so that Maxine happens to be looking him in the face. What she sees there will keep her from getting to sleep right away. Or that’s how she’ll remember it.

  29

  The spread on the Jets-Indianapolis game Sunday is 2 points. Horst, regionally loyal as always, bets Ziggy and Otis a pizza that the Colts will win, which in fact they do in a 21-point walkover. Peyton Manning can do no wrong, Vinny Testaverde is a little less consistent, managing in the last five minutes for example to fumble on the Colts’ 2-yard line to a defensive end who then proceeds to run the ball 98 yards to a touchdown, as Testaverde alone chases him up the field while the rest of the Jets look on, and Ziggy and Otis lapse into intemperate language their father doesn’t see how he can call them out for.

  It’s a warm evening, and they all decide instead of ordering the pizza in to walk over to Columbus, to Tom’s Pizza, a local soon to fade into Upper West Side folk memory. First time in years, it occurs to Maxine later, that they’ve done anything all together as a family. They sit at a table outside. Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush. Maxine thinks back to when the boys were little, the local practice in neighborhood pizza parlors then being to cut slices into small bite-size squares as an accommodation for little kids. When the kid can handle a whole slice, it’s a kind of coming-of-age. Later on, with braces, there’s a return to smaller squares. Maxine glances over at Horst for any outward signs of an active memory, but no dice, old Stolid Geometry is occupied with stuffing pizza into his face at a steady rhythm and trying to make the boys los
e count of how many slices they’ve had. Which itself, Maxine supposes, you could call family tradition, not specially admirable, but hell, she’ll take it.

  Later, back home, Horst settled in in front of his computer screen, “Guys, come here, look at this. Darnedest thing.”

  The screen is full of numbers. “This is the Chicago Exchange, toward the end of last week, see? there was a sudden abnormal surge of put options on United Airlines. Thousands of puts, not a heck of a lot of calls. Now, today, the same thing happens for American Airlines.”

  “A put,” Ziggy sez, “that’s like selling short?”

  “Yeah, when you’re expecting the stock price to go down. And trading volume meanwhile is way, way up—six times normal.”

  “Just those two airlines?”

  “Yep. Weird, huh?”

  “Insider trading,” it seems to Ziggy.

  • • •

  MONDAY NIGHT VYRVA CALLS MAXINE with panic in her voice. “The guys are freaking out. Something about this random-number source they’ve been hacking into suddenly going nonrandom.”

  “And you’re telling me this because…”

  “OK if Fiona and I come over there for a little?”

  “Sure.” Horst is out at a sports bar someplace way downtown watching Monday Night Football. Giants and Broncos, at Denver. Planning to sleep over at the apartment of his colleague in arrested adolescence Jake Pimento, who lives in Battery Park City, and then go in to work at the Trade Center from there.

  Vyrva shows up all loose ends. “They’re screaming at each other. Never a good sign.”

  “How was camp, Fiona?”

  “Awesome.”

  “Didn’t suck.”

  “Exactly.”

  Otis, Ziggy, and Fiona settle in in front of Homer Simpson, playing an accountant of all things, in a film noir, or possibly jaune, called “D.O.H.”

  Vyrva showing signs of early parent bewilderment. “She’s suddenly doing Quake movies. Some of them are online, she has a following already. We’ve been cosigning distribution deals. More clauses than a North Pole family reunion. No idea what we’re agreeing to, of course.”

  Maxine makes popcorn. “Stay over, why don’t you. Horst won’t be back tonight, plenty of room.”

  Just one more of these into-the-night schmoozathons, nothing special, kids off to bed without too much drama, television programming that’s better with the sound off, no deep confessions, business chatter. Vyrva checks in with Justin around midnight. “They’re bonding again, now. Worse than the other. I think I will stay over.”

  • • •

  TUESDAY MORNING THEY ALL CONVOY over to Kugelblitz together, hang around the stoop till the bell rings, Vyrva peels away to grab a bus across town, Maxine heads for work, puts her head in a local smoke shop to grab a newspaper, and finds everybody freaking out and depressed at the same time. Something bad is going on downtown. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,” according to the Indian guy behind the counter.

  “What, like a private plane?”

  “A commercial jet.”

  Uh-oh. Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to worse. All day long. At around noon the school calls and says they’re shutting down for the day, could she please come and collect her kids.

  Everybody’s on edge. Nods, headshakes, not a lot of social conversation.

  “Mom, was Dad down there at his office today?”

  “He was staying over at Jake’s last night, but I think he’s mostly been working from his computer. So chances are he didn’t even go in.”

  “But you haven’t heard from him?”

  “Everybody’s been trying to get through to everybody, lines are swamped, he’ll call, I’m not worrying, don’t you guys, OK?”

  They’re not buying it. Of course they’re not. But they both nod anyway and just get on with it. A class act, these two. She holds their hands, one on either side, all the way home, and though this sort of thing belongs to their childhood and generally annoys them, today they let her.

  The phone starts ringing after a while. Each time Maxine jumps to pick it up, hoping it’s Horst, it turns out instead to be Heidi, or Ernie and Elaine, or Horst’s parents calling from Iowa where everything is an hour closer to the innocence of sleep. But from the slab of beef who still, she hopes, shares her life, no word. The boys stay in their room watching the single constant telephoto shot of the smoking towers, already too distant. She keeps sticking her head in. Bringing snack food, mom-approved and otherwise, that they don’t touch.

  “Are we at war, Mom?”

  “No. Who says we are?”

  “This Wolf Blitzer guy?”

  “Usually countries go to war with countries. I don’t think whoever did this, that they’re a country.”

  “It said on the news they’re Saudi Arabians,” Otis tells her. “Maybe we’re at war with Saudi Arabia.”

  “Can’t be,” Ziggy points out, “we need all that oil.”

  As if by ESP, the phone rings, and it’s March Kelleher.

  “It’s the Reichstag fire,” she greets Maxine.

  “The what?”

  “Those fucking Nazis in Washington needed a pretext for a coup, now they’ve got it. This country is headed up shit’s creek, and it isn’t rugriders we should worry about, it’s Bush and the gang.”

  Maxine isn’t so sure. “It seems like none of them know what they’re doing right now, just caught by surprise, more like Pearl Harbor.”

  “That’s what they want you to believe. And who says Pearl Harbor wasn’t a setup?”

  They’re actually discussing this? “Forget doing it to your own people, why would anybody do this to their own economy?”

  “You never heard of ‘You’ve got to spend money to make money’? Tithing back to the dark gods of capitalism.”

  Then something occurs to Maxine. “March, that DVD of Reg’s, the Stinger missile…”

  “I know. We got snookered.”

  • • •

  THE PHONE RINGS. “Are you all right?”

  Asshole. What the fuck does he care? Not a voice she’s been that anxious to hear from. In the background a bureaucratic pandemonium, ringing phones, lower pay grades being verbally abused, shredders working full-time.

  “Who’s this again?”

  “You want to talk, you’ve got my number.” Windust hangs up. “Talk,” does that mean “fuck”? Wouldn’t surprise her, that level of desperation, of course, there have to exist losers who would actually use the tragedy unfolding downtown to get laid on the cheap, and no reason Windust as she’s come to know him couldn’t be one.

  Still no word from Horst. She tries not to worry, to believe her own pitch to the boys, but she’s worried. Late that night, after they’re in bed, she sits awake in front of the tube, nodding off, being wakened by microdreams of somebody coming in the door, nodding off again.

  Sometime during the night, Maxine dreams she’s a mouse who’s been running at large inside the walls of a vast apartment building she understands is the U.S., venturing out into kitchens and pantries to scavenge for food, scuffling but free, and in these small hours she has been attracted by what she recognizes as a sort of humane mousetrap yet cannot resist the bait, not traditional peanut butter or cheese but something more from the gourmet section, pâté or truffles maybe, and the moment she steps into the enticing little structure, her simple body weight is enough to unlatch a spring-loaded door that closes, not that loudly, behind her, and is impossible to open again. She finds herself inside a multilevel event space of some kind, at a gathering, maybe a party, full of unfamiliar faces, fellow mice, but no longer exactly, or only, mice. She understands that this place is a holding pen between freedom in the wild and some other unimagined environment into which, one by one, each of them will be released, and that this can only be analogous to death and afterdeath.

  And wants desperately to wake up. And once she’s awake to be someplace else, even a meretricious g
eeks’ paradise like DeepArcher.

  She gets out of bed, sweating, looks in to find the boys snoring away, drifts into the kitchen, stands staring at the fridge like it’s a television set that will tell her something she needs to know. She hears sound from the spare room. Trying not to hope, not to hyperventilate, she tiptoes in and there yes it’s Horst, snoring in front of his BioPiX channel, alone of all channels tonight not providing twenty-four hour coverage of the disaster, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to be alive, and home.

  • • •

  “DENVER WON IT 31–20. I fell asleep on Jake’s couch. Sometime in the night, I woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep right away.” So strange down there, Battery Park at night. Made Horst think of the night before Christmas when he was a kid. Santa Claus up there invisible, on route, someplace up in that sky. So quiet. Except for Jake snoring in the bedroom. And that neighborhood, even when you can’t see the Trade Center towers, you feel them, felt them, like somebody in an elevator shouldering up against you. And out in the sunlight the soaring hazy aluminum presence…

  Next morning all hell’s broken loose outside, by the time Jake remembers where the coffee is and Horst puts the news on the tube, there’s sirens, helicopters, all through the neighborhood, pretty soon they notice people out the window, heading for the water, figure it might be a good idea to join them. Tugboats, ferries, private boats, pulling in, taking people out from the yacht basin, all on their own, amazing coordination of effort, “I don’t think anybody was in charge, they just came in and did it. I ended up over in Jersey. Some motel.”

  “Your kind of place.”

  “The television didn’t work too good. Nothing on but news updates.”

  “So if you guys hadn’t decided to sleep in…”

  “Back in the pits, I used to know this Christer coffee trader who told me it was like grace, something you don’t ask for. Just comes. Of course it can also be withdrawn at any time. Like when I always knew which way to bet on Eurodollars. The times we shorted Amazon, got out of Lucent when it went to $70 a share, remember? It wasn’t me that ever ‘knew’ anything. But something did. Sudden couple extra lines of brain code, who knows. I just followed along.”