Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  “But then… if it was that same weird talent that kept you safe…”

  “How could it be? How could predicting market behavior be the same as predicting a terrible disaster?”

  “If the two were different forms of the same thing.”

  “Way too anticapitalist for me, babe.”

  Later he reflects, “You always had me figured for some kind of idiot savant, you were the one with the street smarts, the wised-up practical one, and I was just some stiff with a gift, who didn’t deserve to be so lucky.” First time he’s said this to her in person, though it’s a pitch he’s made more than once to an imaginary ex-wife, alone at night in hotel rooms in the U.S. and abroad, where sometimes the television speaks in languages he doesn’t know any more of than he needs to get around, the room service always brings him somebody else’s food, which he has learned to go along with in a spirit of adventurous curiosity, reminding himself that he would otherwise never have experienced, say, blackened alligator casserole with fried pickles or sheep’s-eyeball pizza. Daytime business for him is duck soup (which they also brought him once, for breakfast, in Ürümqi) with no connection he can clearly see to the other, the backstreets of the day, the 3:00 AM retranslations appropriate to fear of unwelcome dreams, the unreadable vistas of city shadow out the windows. Poisonous blue masses he doesn’t want to see but keeps drawing back the drapes a little to blink through at for as long as he has to. As if something is happening out there he mustn’t miss.

  • • •

  NEXT DAY AS MAXINE and the boys are heading out to Kugelblitz, “Mind if I come along?” sez Horst.

  Sure. Maxine notices other sets of parents, some who haven’t spoken for years, showing up together to escort their children, regardless of age or latchkey status, safely to and from. Headmaster Winterslow is there on the stoop, greeting everybody one by one. Grave and courtly and for once refraining from educated speech. He is touching people, squeezing shoulders, hugging, holding hands. In the lobby is a table with sign-up sheets for volunteer work down at the site of the atrocity. Everybody is still walking around stunned, having spent the previous day sitting or standing in front of television screens, at home, in bars, at work, staring like zombies, unable in any case to process what they were seeing. A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumbstruck, undefended, scared shitless.

  • • •

  ON HER WEBLOG, March Kelleher has wasted no time shifting into what she calls her old-lefty tirade mode. “Just to say evil Islamics did it, that’s so lame, and we know it. We see those official close-ups on the screen. The shifty liar’s look, the twelve-stepper’s gleam in the eye. One look at these faces and we know they’re guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. But who’s in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched the Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. Which of course is not at all to suggest that Bush and his people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. It would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the possibility that that terrible day could have deliberately been engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian ‘war’ and the emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Nah, nah, perish that thought.

  “But there’s still always the other thing. Our yearning. Our deep need for it to be true. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them—we who called down the sacred lightning of ‘democracy,’ and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. And whatever happened then is on our ticket.”

  A week or so later, Maxine and March do breakfast at the Piraeus Diner. There is now a huge American flag in the window and a UNITED WE STAND poster. Mike is being extra solicitous to the cops who come in looking for free meals.

  “Check this out.” March hands over a dollar bill, around the margins of whose obverse somebody has written in ballpoint, “World Trade Center was destroyed by CIA—Bush Senior’s CIA is making Bush Jr. Prez for life & a hero.” “I got this in change at the corner grocery this morning. That’s well within a week of the attack. Call it what you like, but a historical document whatever.” Maxine recalls that Heidi has a collection of decorated dollar bills, which she regards as the public toilet wall of the U.S. monetary system, carrying jokes, insults, slogans, phone numbers, George Washington in blackface, strange hats, Afros and dreadlocks and Marge Simpson hair, lit joints in his mouth, and speech-balloon remarks ranging from witty to stupid.

  “No matter how the official narrative of this turns out,” it seemed to Heidi, “these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.”

  “This message on this bill doesn’t surprise me so much as how promptly it showed up,” March sez now. “How fast the analysis has been.”

  Like it or not, Maxine has become March’s official doubter, and happy to help, usually, though these days like everybody else she’s feeling discombobulated. “March, since it happened, I don’t know what to believe.”

  But March, relentlessly on the case, brings up Reg’s DVD. “Suppose there was a Stinger crew deployed and waiting for orders to shoot down the first 767, the one that went on to hit the North Tower. Maybe there was another team stationed over in Jersey to pick up the second one, which would’ve been circling around and coming up from the southwest.”

  “Why?”

  “Anti-compassion insurance. Somebody doesn’t trust the hijackers to go through with it. These are Western minds, uncomfortable with any idea of suicide in the service of a faith. So they threaten to shoot the hijackers down in case they chicken out at the last minute.”

  “And if the hijackers do change their minds, what if the Stinger team do the same and don’t shoot the plane down?”

  “Then that would explain the backup sniper on the other roof, who the Stinger people know is there, keeping them in his sights till their part of the mission is over. Which is as soon as the guy with the phone gets word the plane’s committed—then everybody cleans up and clears out. It’s full daylight by then, but not that much risk of being seen ’cause all the attention is focused downtown.”

  “Help, too byzantine, make it stop!”

  “Trying, but is Bush answering my calls?”

  • • •

  HORST MEANTIME IS PUZZLED ABOUT something else. “Remember the week before this happened, all those put options on United and American Airlines? Which turned out to be exactly the two airlines that got hijacked? Well, it seems on that Thursday and Friday there were also lopsided put-to-call ratios for Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, couple others like them, all tenants of the Trade Center. As a fraud investigator, what does that suggest to you?”

  “Foreknowledge of a decline in their stock prices. Who was doing all this trading?”

  “Nobody so far has stepped forward.”

  “Mystery players who knew it was going to happen. Overseas maybe? Like the Emirates?”

  “I try to keep hold of my common sense, but…”

  Maxine goes over to her parents’ for lunch, and Avi and Brooke are there as expected. The sisters embrace, though you could not say warmly. There’s no way not to talk about the Trade Center.

  “Nobody that morning had anything to say,” Maxine, noticing at some point that there’s a NY Jets logo on Avi’s yarmulke, “Ain’t it awful’ is about as profound as it got. Just the one camera angle, the static telephoto shot of those towers smoldering, the same news that’s no news, the same morning-show airhead idiocy—”

  “They were in shock,” Brooke mutters, “like everybody that day, what, you weren’t?”

  “But
why keep showing us that one thing, what were we supposed to be waiting for, what was going to happen? Too high up to run hoses, OK, so the fire will either burn itself out or spread to other floors or—or what else? What were we being set up for, if not what happened? One comes down, then the other, and who was surprised? Wasn’t it inevitable by then?”

  “You think the networks knew ahead of time?” Brooke, offended, glowering. “Whose side are you on, are you an American or what are you?” Brooke now in full indignation, “this horrible, horrible tragedy, a whole generation traumatized, war with the Arab world any minute, and even this isn’t safe from your stupid little hipster irony? What’s next, Auschwitz jokes?”

  “Same thing happened when JFK was shot,” Ernie belatedly trying to defuse things with geezer nostalgia. “Nobody wanted to believe that official story either. So suddenly here were all these strange coincidences.”

  “You think it was an inside job, Pa?”

  “The chief argument against conspiracy theories is always that it would take too many people in on it, and somebody’s sure to squeal. But look at the U.S. security apparatus, these guys are WASPs, Mormons, Skull and Bones, secretive by nature. Trained, sometimes since birth, never to run off at the mouth. If discipline exists anywhere, it’s among them. So of course it’s possible.”

  “How about you, Avi?” Maxine turning to her brother-in-law. “What’s the latest on 4360.0 kilohertz?” Nice as pie. But he gives a violent jump. “Oops, or do I mean megahertz?”

  “What The Fuck?”

  “Language,” Elaine automatically before realizing it’s Brooke, who seems to be looking around for a weapon.

  “Arab propaganda!” Avi cries. “Anti-Semitic filth. Who told you about this frequency?”

  “Saw it on the Internet,” Maxine shrugs, “ham operators have known about it forever, they’re called E10 stations, operated by Mossad out of Israel, Greece, South America, the voices are women who figure in the erotic daydreams of radio hobbyists everywhere, reciting alphanumerics, encrypted, of course. Widely believed to be messages to agents, salaried and otherwise, out in the Diaspora. Word is that in the run-up to the atrocity, traffic was pretty heavy.”

  “Every Jew hater in this town,” Avi making with the aggrieved tone, “is blaming 9/11 on Mossad. Even a story going around about Jews who worked down at the Trade Center all calling in sick that day, warned away by Mossad through their”—air quotes—secret network.’”

  “The Jews dancing on the roof of that van over in Jersey,” Brooke fuming, “watching it all collapse, don’t forget that one.”

  Later as Maxine prepares to leave, Ernie catches up with her in the foyer. “Ever call that FBI guy?”

  “I did, and you know what? He thinks Avram really is Mossad, all right? On station, tapping his foot to a klezmer beat only he can hear, waiting to be activated.”

  “Evil Jewish conspiracy.”

  “Except you’ll notice Avi never talks about what he was doing over in Israel, neither of them do, any more than what he’s doing here now for hashslingrz. The one thing I can guarantee you is, is it’ll be well compensated, wait and see, he’ll give you guys a Mercedes for your anniversary.”

  “A Nazi car? Good, so I’ll sell it…”

  30

  If you read nothing but the Newspaper of Record, you might believe that New York City, like the nation, united in sorrow and shock, has risen to the challenge of global jihadism, joining a righteous crusade Bush’s people are now calling the War on Terror. If you go to other sources—the Internet, for example—you might get a different picture. Out in the vast undefined anarchism of cyberspace, among the billions of self-resonant fantasies, dark possibilities are beginning to emerge.

  The plume of smoke and finely divided structural and human debris has been blowing southwest, toward Bayonne and Staten Island, but you can smell it all the way uptown. A bitter chemical smell of death and burning that no one in memory has ever in this city smelled before and which lingers for weeks. Though everybody south of 14th Street has been directly touched one way or another, for much of the city the experience has come to them mediated, mostly by television—the farther uptown, the more secondhand the moment, stories from family members commuting to work, friends, friends of friends, phone conversations, hearsay, folklore, as forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize control of the narrative as quickly as possible come into play and dependable history shrinks to a dismal perimeter centered on “Ground Zero,” a Cold War term taken from the scenarios of nuclear war so popular in the early sixties. This was nowhere near a Soviet nuclear strike on downtown Manhattan, yet those who repeat “Ground Zero” over and over do so without shame or concern for etymology. The purpose is to get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless.

  For a couple of days, the West Side Highway falls silent. People between Riverside and West End miss the ambient racket and don’t get to sleep so easily. On Broadway meanwhile it’s different. Flatbeds carrying hydraulic cranes and track loaders and other heavy equipment go thundering downtown in convoys day and night. Fighter planes roar overhead, helicopters hang battering the air for hours close above the rooftops, sirens are constant 24/7. Every firehouse in the city lost somebody on 11 September, and every day people in the neighborhoods leave flowers and home-cooked meals out in front of each one. Corporate ex-tenants of the Trade Center hold elaborate memorial services for those who didn’t make it out in time, featuring bagpipers and Marine honor guards. Child choirs from churches and schools around town are booked weeks in advance for solemn performances at “Ground Zero,” with “America the Beautiful” and “Amazing Grace” being musical boilerplate at these events. The atrocity site, which one would have expected to become sacred or at least inspire a little respect, swiftly becomes occasion instead for open-ended sagas of wheeling and dealing, bickering and badmouthing over its future as real estate, all dutifully celebrated as “news” in the Newspaper of Record. Some notice a strange underground rumbling from the direction of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, which is eventually identified as Robert Moses spinning in his grave.

  After maybe a day and a half of stunned suspension, the usual ethnic toxicities, fierce as ever, have resumed. Hey, it’s New York. American flags appear everywhere. In apartment-building lobbies and up in apartment windows, on rooftops, in storefronts and corner groceries, in eateries, on delivery trucks and hot-dog stands, on motorcycles and bikes, on cabs driven by members of the Muslim faith, who between shifts are taking courses in Spanish as a Second Language with a view to posing as a slightly less disrespected minority, though whenever Latino people try putting out some variation like the Puerto Rican flag, they are reflexively cursed and denounced as enemies of America.

  That terrible morning, so it was later alleged, for a radius of many blocks surrounding the towers, every pushcart disappeared, as if the population of pushcart owners, at that time believed to be most of them Muslim, had been warned to keep away. Through some network. Some evil secret rugrider network possibly in place for years. The pushcarts stayed away, and so the morning began that much less comfortably, obliging folks to go in to work without their customary coffees, danishes, donuts, bottles of water, so many bleak appoggiaturas for what was about to happen.

  Beliefs like this take hold of the civic imagination. Corner newsagents are raided and Islamic-looking suspects hauled away by the busload. Sizable Mobile Police Command Centers appear at various flashpoints, especially over on the East Side, wherever, for example, a high-income synagogue and some Arab embassy happen to occupy the same block, and eventually these installations grow not so mobile, becoming with time a permanent part of the cityscape, all but welded to the pavement. Likewise, ships with no visible flags, pretending to be cargo vessels, though with more antennas on them than booms, appear out in the Hudson, drop the hook, and become, effectively, private islands belonging to unnamed security agencies and surrounded by stay-away zones. Roadblocks keep appea
ring and disappearing along the avenues leading to and away from the major bridges and tunnels. Young Guardsfolk in clean new camo fatigues and carrying weapons and ammunition clips are patrolling Penn Station and Grand Central and the Port of Authority. Public holidays and anniversaries become occasions for anxiety.

  Igor on the answering machine at home. Maxine picks up. “Maxi! Reg’s DVD—you got copy there?”

  “Someplace.” She puts him on speaker, finds the disc, pops it into the machine.

  She hears a bottle clink against a glass. Kind of early in the day. “Za shastye.” Followed by a rhythmic wood thumping, as of a head against a table. “Pizdets! New Jersey vodka, 160 proof, keep away from open flame!”

  “Um, Igor, you wanted to—”

  “Oh. Real cute Stinger footage, thank you, takes me back. You know there was more.”

  “Besides the scene on the roof?”

  “Hidden track.”

  No, she didn’t know that. March didn’t either.

  It’s raw footage from Reg’s Unnamed Hashslingrz Project, nerds staring at screens, as expected, plus an officescape of cubicles, lab and recreational spaces, including a full-size indoor half court inside whose chain-link fencing white and Asian yups, all flagrant elbows and missed jump shots, run around authentically distressed city asphalt screaming inner-city insults.

  What she’s still been only half expecting is the shot where Reg walks in the wrong door and we see young men of Arab background, intensely breadboarding together something electronic.

  “You know what that is, Igor?”

  “Vircator,” he informs her. “Virtual-cathode oscillator.”