Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  “What’s it for? It’s a weapon? It makes an explosion?”

  “Electromagnetic, invisible. Gives you big pulse of energy when you want to disable other guy’s electronics. Fries computers, fries radio links, fries television, anything in range.”

  “Broiled is healthier. Listen,” she takes a chance, “you ever used one of these, Igor? In the field?”

  “After my time. Bought a few since, maybe. Sold a few.”

  “There’s a market?”

  “Very hot area of military procurement right now. Many forces worldwide are deploying short-range vircators already, research is funded big time.”

  “These guys in the picture here—Reg said he thought they were Arab.”

  “No surprise, most of tech articles on pulse weapons are in Arabic. For really dangerous field-testing, of course, you must look at Russia.”

  “Russian vircators, they’re what, highly thought of?”

  “Why? You want one? Talk to padonki, they work on commission, I take a percent of that.”

  “Only wondering why, if these guys are as well funded as Arabs are thought to be, they have to build their own.”

  “I looked at it frame by frame, and they aren’t building unit from scratch, they are modifying existing hardware, possibly Estonian knockoff they bought someplace?”

  So maybe only busywork without an end product here, nerds in a room, but suppose it’s one more thing to worry about, now. Would somebody really try to set off a citywide electromagnetic pulse in the middle of New York, or D.C., or is this device on the screen meant for transshipment somewhere else in the world? And what kind of a piece of the deal could Ice be duked in for?

  There’s nothing else on the disc. Leaving everybody up against an even larger question about to lift its trunk and start in with the bellowing. “OK. Igor. Tell me. You think there might be some connection with…?”

  “Ah, God, Maxi, I hope not.” Self-administering another shot of Jersey vodka.

  “What, then?”

  “I’ll think about it. You think about it. Maybe we won’t like what we come up with.”

  • • •

  ONE NIGHT, without any buzz on the intercom, there’s a tentative knock at the door. Through the wide-angle peephole, Maxine observes a trembling young person with a fragile head sporting a buzz cut.

  “Hi, Maxi.”

  “Driscoll. Your hair. What happened to Jennifer Aniston?” Expecting yet another 11 September story about frivolities of youth, newfound seriousness. Instead, “The maintenance was more than I could afford. I figure a Rachel wig’s only $29.95, and you can’t tell it from the real thing. Here, I’ll show you.” She shrugs out of her backpack, which Maxine notices now does seem to run to Himalayan-expedition scale, roots through it, finds the wig, puts it on, takes it off. A couple of times.

  “Let me guess why you’re here.” It’s been happening all over the neighborhood. Refugees, prevented from entering their apartments in Lower Manhattan, whether fancy-schmancy or modest, have been showing up at the doors of friends farther uptown, accompanied by wives, kids, sometimes nannies, drivers, and cooks also, having after exhaustive research and cost-benefit analysis concluded that this is the best refuge currently available to them and their entourage. “Next week who knows, right? We’ll take it one week at a time.” “Day at a time’d be better.” Yupper West Side folks in their greatness of heart have been taking these real-estate casualties in, what choice do they have, and sometimes fast friendships grow even deeper and sometimes are destroyed forever…

  “No problem,” is what Maxine tells Driscoll now, “you can have the spare room,” which happens to be available, Horst shortly after 11 September having shifted his sleeping arrangements into Maxine’s room, to the inconvenience of neither and to what, if in fact she ever went into it with anybody, would be the surprise of very few. On the other hand, whose business is it? It’s still too much for her to get her own head around, how much she’s missed him. How about what they call “marital relations,” is there any fucking going on? You bet, and what’s it to you? Music track? Frank Sinatra, if you really need to know. The most poignant B-flat in all lounge music occurs in Cahn & Styne’s song “Time After Time,” beginning the phrase “in the evening when the day is through,” and never more effectively than when Sinatra reaches after it on vinyl that happens to be in the household record library. At moments like this, Horst is helpless, and Maxine long ago has learned to seize the moment. Allowing Horst to think it’s his idea, of course.

  Driscoll is followed within two hours by Eric, staggering underneath an even more sizable backpack, evicted without notice by a landlord for whom the civic tragedy has come as a convenient excuse to get Eric and the other tenants out so he can convert to co-ops and pocket some public money also.

  “Um, yeah, there’s room if you don’t mind sharing. Driscoll, Eric, you met at that party, down at Tworkeffx, remember, work it out, don’t fight…” She goes off muttering to herself.

  “Hi.” Driscoll thinks about tossing her hair, thinks twice.

  “Hi.” They soon discover a number of interests in common, including the music of Sarcófago, all of whose CDs are present among Eric’s effects, as well as Norwegian Black Metal artists such as Burzum and Mayhem, soon established as sound-track accompaniment of choice for spare-room activities which begin that evening within about ten minutes of Eric observing Driscoll in a T-shirt with the Ambien logo on it. “Ambien, awesome! You got any?” Does she. Seems they share a partiality to this recreational sleeping pill, which if you can force yourself to stay awake will produce acidlike hallucinations, not to mention a dramatic increase in libido, so that soon they are fucking like the teenagers they technically were only a short time back, while yet another side effect is memory loss, so that neither remembers what went on exactly till the next time it happens, whereupon it is like first love all over again.

  On meeting Ziggy and Otis, the frolicking twosome exclaim, more or less in unison, “You guys are real?”—among widely reported Ambien hallucinations being numbers of small people busy running around doing a variety of household tasks. The boys, though fascinated, as city kids know how to maintain a perimeter. As for Horst, if he even remembers Eric from the Geeks’ Cotillion, it’s been swept downstream by recent events, and in any case the Eric-Driscoll hookup helps with any standard Horstian reactions of insane jealousy. His reasonably serene domestic setup being invaded by forces loyal to drugs, sex, rock-and-roll doesn’t seem to register as any threat. So, figures Maxine, we’ll all be on top of each other for a while, other people have it worse.

  Love, while in bloom for some, fades for others. Heidi shows up one day beneath deep clouds of an all-too-familiar disgruntlement.

  “Oh no,” cries Maxine.

  Heidi shakes her head, then nods. “Dating cops is like so over. Every chick in this town regardless of IQ is suddenly a helpless little airhead who wants to be taken care of by some big stwong first wesponder. Trendy? Twendy? Meh. Totally without clue’s more like it.”

  Ignoring the urge to inquire if Carmine, unable to resist the attention, has perhaps also been running around, “What happened exactly? Or no, not exactly.”

  “Carmine’s been reading the papers, he’s bought into the whole story. Thinks he’s a hero now.”

  “He’s not a hero?”

  “He’s a precinct detective. A second or third responder. In the office most of the time. Same job he was always on, same petty thieves, drug dealers, domestic abusers. But now Carmine thinks he’s out on the front line of the War Against Terror and I’m not being respectful enough.”

  “When were you ever? He didn’t know that?”

  “He appreciated attitude in a woman. He said. I thought. But since the attack…”

  “Yeah, you can’t help noticing some attitude escalation.” New York cops have always been arrogant, but lately they’ve been parking routinely on the sidewalk, yelling at civilians for no reason, every time a kid tri
es to jump a turnstile, subway service gets suspended and police vehicles of every description, surface and airborne, converge and linger. Fairway has started selling coffee blends named after different police precincts. Bakeries who supply coffee shops have invented a giant “Hero” jelly donut in the shape of the well-known sandwich of the same name, for when patrol cars show up.

  Heidi has been working on an article for the Journal of Memespace Cartography she’s calling “Heteronormative Rising Star, Homophobic Dark Companion,” which argues that irony, assumed to be a key element of urban gay humor and popular through the nineties, has now become another collateral casualty of 11 September because somehow it did not keep the tragedy from happening. “As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious—weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”

  “Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!”

  “You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again. What’s that going on in the other room, by the way?”

  “Couple kids I do some business with off and on. Used to live downtown. Another of these relo stories.”

  “Thought it might be Horst watching porn on the Internet.”

  Once Maxine would have zinged back, “He was only driven to do that while he was seeing you,” but feels reluctant these days to include Horst in the back-and-forth she and Heidi like to get into, because of… what, it can’t be some kind of loyalty to Horst, can it? “He’s over in Queens today, that’s where they evacuated the commodity exchange to.”

  “Thought he’d be long gone by now. Back out there someplace,” waving vaguely trans-Hudson. “Everything all right otherwise?”

  “What?”

  “You know, in terms of, oh, Rocky Slagiatt?”

  “Copacetic, far ’s I know, why?”

  “I guess ol’ Rocky’s a lot chirpier these days, huh?”

  “How would I know?”

  “With the FBI shifting agents off of Mafia duty and over to antiterrorism, I mean.”

  “So 11 September turns out to be a mitzvah for the mob, Heidi.”

  “I didn’t mean that. The day was a terrible tragedy. But it isn’t the whole story. Can’t you feel it, how everybody’s regressing? 11 September infantilized this country. It had a chance to grow up, instead it chose to default back to childhood. I’m in the street yesterday, behind me are a couple of high-school girls having one of these teenage conversations, ‘So I was like, “Oh, my God?” and he’s like, “I didn’t say I wasn’t see-een her?”’ and when I finally turn to look at them, here are these two women my own age. Older! your age, who should know better, really. Like trapped in a fuckin time warp or something.”

  Oddly enough, Maxine’s just had something like it happen around the corner on Amsterdam. Every schoolday morning on the way to Kugelblitz, she’s been noticing the same three kids waiting on the corner for a school bus, Horace Mann or one of them, and maybe the other morning there was some fog, maybe the fog was inside her, some incompletely dissipated dream, but what she saw this time, standing in exactly the same spot, was three middle-aged men, gray-haired, less youthfully turned out, and yet she knew, shivering a little, that these were the same kids, the same faces, only forty, fifty years older. Worse, they were looking at her with a queer knowledgeable intensity, focusing personally on her, sinister in the dimmed morning air. She checked the street. Cars were no more advanced in design, nothing beyond the usual police and military traffic was passing or hovering overhead, the low-rise holdouts hadn’t been replaced with anything taller, so it still had to be “the present,” didn’t it? Something, then, must’ve happened to these kids. But next morning all was back to “normal.” The kids as usual paying no attention to her.

  What, then, the fuck, is going on?

  31

  When she goes to Shawn with this, she finds her guru, in his own way, freaking out also. “You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?”

  “Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what.”

  “The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fuckin market.”

  “A religious beef, you’re saying?”

  “It’s not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world’s population—more cheap labor, more addicted consumers.”

  “You sound like March Kelleher.”

  “Yeah, or,” that trademark sub-smirk, “maybe she sounds like me.”

  “Uh-huh, listen, Shawn…” Maxine tells him about the kids on the corner and her time-warp theory.

  “Is that like the zombies you said you were seeing?”

  “One person, Shawn, somebody I know, maybe dead maybe not, enough with the zombies already.”

  Hmm yes, but now another, you’d have to say insane, suspicion has begun to bloom in all the California sunshine around here, which is, suppose these “kids” are really operatives, time troopers from the Montauk Project, abducted long ago into an unthinkable servitude, grown solemn and gray through years of soldiering, currently assigned to Maxine expressly, for reasons never to be made clear to her. Possibly in strange cahoots also, and why not, with Gabriel Ice’s own private gang of co-opted script kiddies… aahhh! Talk about paranoid jitters!

  “OK”, soothingly, “like, total disclosure? It’s been happenin to me too? I’m seeing people in the street who are supposed to be dead, even sometimes people I know were in the towers when they went down, who can’t be here but they’re here.”

  They gaze at each other for a while, down here on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched, no clear way to get up and on with a day which is suddenly full of holes—family, friends, friends of friends, phone numbers on the Rolodex, just not there anymore… the bleak feeling, some mornings, that the country itself may not be there anymore, but being silently replaced screen by screen with something else, some surprise package, by those who’ve kept their wits about them and their clicking thumbs ready.

  “I’m sorry, Shawn. What do you think it could be?”

  “Besides how much I miss them, beats me. Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?”

  “You’d prefer retail?”

  “Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window… that was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness an
d death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”

  “And what we’ve always been is…?”

  “Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs… planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”

  After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”

  “Course not, it’s a koan.”

  • • •

  THAT EVENING UNACCUSTOMED LAUGHTER from the bedroom. Horst is horizontal front of the tube, helplessly, for Horst, amused. For some reason he’s watching NBC instead of the BioPiX channel. A diffident long-haired person in amber sunglasses is doing stand-up on some late-night show.

  A month after the worst tragedy in everybody’s lifetime and Horst is laughing his ass off. “What is it Horst, delayed reaction you’re alive?”

  “I’m happy to be alive, but this Mitch Hedberg guy is funny, too.”

  Not a hell of a lot of occasions she’s seen Horst really laugh. Last time must’ve been Keenan and Kel’s “I dropped the screw in the tuna” episode four or five years ago. Sometimes he’ll chuckle at something, but rarely. Whenever somebody asks how come everybody’s laughing at something and he isn’t, Horst explains his belief that laughter is sacred, a momentary noodge from some power out in the universe, only cheapened and trivialized by laugh tracks. He has a low tolerance for unmotivated and mirthless laughter in general. “For many people, especially in New York, laughing is a way of being loud without having to say anything.” So what’s he still doing in town, by the way?

  • • •

  GOING IN TO WORK one morning, she runs into Justin. It seems accidental, but there may be no accidents anymore, the Patriot Act may have outlawed them along with everything else. “Mind if we talk?”