Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  “This one here’s nice.”

  “Five, ten minutes,” sez Ketone, heading for the printing and laminating setup in the back room.

  “Some exploit,” she guesses, “I don’t want to know about?”

  Eric gets a little shifty. “In case I have to be out of town in a hurry.” Pause, as if for thought. “Is, things are getting weird?”

  “Tell me.” She fills him in on the rolling container top and Uncle Dizzy’s disappearing act. “Just seem to be having some of this, don’t know, virtuality creep lately.”

  Eric has noticed it too. “Maybe it’s those Montauk Project folks again. Like, traveling back and forth in time, busy interfering with cause and effect, so whenever we see things begin to break up, pixelate and flicker, bad history nobody saw coming, even weather getting funny, it’s because the special time-ops folks have been out meddling.”

  “Sounds good to me. No harder to buy than what’s on the news channels. But we’d never have any way to tell. Anybody comes too close to the truth, they disappear.”

  “Maybe what we’ve been living through is just a privileged little window, and now it’s going back to what it always was.”

  “You see, ah, trouble down the tracks?”

  “Only this strange feeling about the Internet, that it’s over, not the tech bubble, or 11 September, just something fatal in its own history. There all along.”

  “You sound like my father, Eric.”

  “Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage—

  “Gee Eric, li’l judgmental. How about some what the Buddha calls compassion here?”

  “Meantime hashslingrz and them are all screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handing more and more of it over to the bad guys… They get us, all right, we’re all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us… We’re being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed, and it won’t end till the Internet—the real one, the dream, the promise—is destroyed.”

  “So where’s the Undo command?”

  Some all but invisible tremor. Maybe he’s laughing to himself. “Could be there’s enough good hackers around interested in fighting back. Outlaws who’ll work for free, show no mercy for anybody who tries to use the Net for evil purposes.”

  “Civil war.”

  “OK. Except the slaves don’t even know that’s what they are.”

  It isn’t till later, in the unpromising wastelands of January, that Maxine understands this was Eric’s idea of saying so long. Something like it may’ve always been in the cards, though she expected more of a slow virtual slideaway, beneath the overlit pondscum of shopping sites and gossip blogging, down through an uncertain light, slipping behind veil after veil of encryption, deeper into the Deep Web. No, instead just one day, pow—no more L train, no more Joie de Beavre, just abruptly dark and silent, another classic skip, leaving only an uneasy faith that he maybe still exists somewhere on the honorable side of the ledger.

  Driscoll as it turns out is still in Williamsburg, still answering e-mails.

  “Is my heart broken, thanks for asking, I never knew what was going on anyway. Eric all along had this, can I say alternative destiny? Maybe not, but you must have noticed. Right now I have to deal with more immediate shit like too many roommates around here, hot-water issues, shampoo and conditioner theft, I need to focus on getting far enough ahead to afford a place of my own, if it means changing phase, daylight hours in a cube in a shop someplace across the bridge, so be it. Please don’t move to the burbs or nothing just yet, OK? I may want to drop by if I get a minute.”

  Fine, Driscoll, 3-D and out here in “objective reality” would sure be nice if you could manage it, which side of the river being not so important as which side of the screen. Maxine is no happier than she was with the epistemological bug going around, avoiding only Horst, who, typically immune, before long finds himself coming in handy as the calibration standard of last resort. “So, Dad, is this real? Not real?”

  “Not real,” Horst sparing Otis a brief glance away from, say, Ben Stiller in The Fred MacMurray Story.

  “It’s just the strangest feeling,” Maxine confides impulsively to Heidi.

  “Sure,” Heidi shrugs, “that’d be GAPUQ, the old Granada–Asbury Park Uncertainty Question. Been around forever.”

  “Inside the closed, inbred world of academia, you mean, or…”

  “Actually you might enjoy their Web site,” just as pissily, “for victims whose struggle to tell the difference is especially vivid, like your own, for example, Maxi—”

  “Thank you, Heidi,” with a certain upward cadence, “and Frank, I believe, was singing about love.”

  They’re at JFK, in the Lufthansa business-class departure lounge, sipping on some kind of organic mimosa, while everybody else in the room is busy getting hammered as quickly as possible. “Well it’s all love isn’t it,” Heidi scanning the room for Conkling, who has gone off on a nasal tour of the premises.

  “This real/virtual situation, it doesn’t come up with you, Heidi.”

  “Guess I’m just a Yahoo! type of gal. Click in, click back out, nothing too far afield, nothing too…” the characteristic Heidi pause, “deep.”

  It’s between semesters at City, and Heidi, on her break, is about to fly off with Conkling to Munich, Germany. When Maxine first heard about this, a Wagnerian brass section began to blare rudely down the corridors of short-term memory. “This is about—”

  “He”— no longer, Maxine noted, “Conkling” — “has recently purchased a pre-owned bottle of 4711 cologne, liberated by GIs at the end of the war from Hitler’s private bathroom at Berchtesgaden… and…” That old Heidical yes-and-what’s-it-to-you look.

  “And the only forensic lab in the world equipped for a Hitler’s-cooties workup on it happens to be located in Munich. Well, who wouldn’t want to be certain, it’s like pregnancy, isn’t it.”

  “You’ve never understood him,” nimbly stepping out of the way of the half-eaten sandwich that Maxine reflexively picked up then and launched at her. It’s true that she still doesn’t get Conkling, who is now returning to the Lufthansa lounge all but skipping. “I’m ready! How about you, Poisongirl, are you ready for this adventure?”

  “Rarin to go,” Heidi kind of semiabsently, it seems to Maxine.

  “This could be it, you know, the lost connection, the first step back along that dark sillage, across all that time and chaos, to the living Führer—”

  “You never called him that before,” it occurs to Heidi.

  Conkling’s reply, likely to be idiotic, is interrupted by a young lady on the PA announcing the flight to Munich.

  There is an extra checkpoint these days, an artifact of 11 September, at which the authorities discover in one of Conkling’s inner pockets the possibly historic flask of 4711. Excited colloquial German on the PA. Armed security of two nations converging on the suspects. Oops, Maxine remembers, something about no bringing liquids on board the airplane… standing behind a bulletproof plastic barrier she tries to convey this with charade gestures to Heidi, who is glaring back with a don’t-stand-there-call-a-lawyer tilt to her eyebrows.

  Later, hours later, in the taxi back to Manhattan, “It’s probably for the best, Heidi.”

  “Yes, there may still be lingering in Munich the odd pocket of bad karma,” Heidi nodding you could say almost with relief.

  “All is not lost,” pipes Conkling, “I can send it by bonded courier, and we’ve only lost a day, my tuberose blossom.”

  “We’ll restrategize,” Heidi promises.

  • • •

  “MARVIN, YOU’RE OUT OF UNIFORM. Where’s all the kozmo gear?”

  “Sold it all on eBay, dahlin, movin with the times.”

  “For $1.98, come on.�
�

  “For more than you would ever dream. Nothing dies anymore, the collectors’ market, it’s the afterlife, and yups are its angels.”

  “OK. And this thing you just brought me here…”

  What else, another disc, though it isn’t till after supper, with Horst conclusively tubeside in front of Alec Baldwin in The Ray Milland Story, that Maxine, less than eager, gets to have a look. Another traveling shot, this time out the sleet-battered windshield of some kind of big rig. From what’s visible through the weather, it’s mountain terrain, gray sky, streaks and patches of snow, no horizontal references till an overpass comes swooping in, and then she can see how unnecessarily dutched the frame actually is, so who else can it be behind the camera but Reg Despard.

  And it’s not only Reg—as if on cue, the shot swivels to the left, and here at the wheel, mesh cap, outlaw cheroot, week’s growth of beard and all, is their onetime partner in mischief Eric Outfield again, risen from the deep or wherever.

  “Breaker breaker good buddy, so forth,” beams Eric, “and a belated happy New Year’s to ya, Maxi, you and yours.”

  “Ditto,” adds invisible Reg.

  “Karma, see, me and Reg just keep running into each other.”

  “This time ol’ Black Hat here was lurking around the Redmond campus, somehow physically hacked his way in through the gate—”

  “Common interest in security patches.”

  Heh, heh. “Different motives, of course. Meantime this other gig comes up.”

  “Our exit here.”

  Off the interstate, after a couple of turns, they pull in to a truck stop. The camera goes around to the back of the trailer, Eric in close-up gets a serious face. “This is all deeply secret right now. This disc you’re watching has to be destroyed soon as you’re done with it, grind it, shred it, pop it in the microwave, someday it’ll all be in a feature-length documentary, but not today.”

  “Couple guys in a truck?” Maxine interrogates the screen.

  Eric unlatching the door and rolling it up, “You never saw this, OK?” She can make out, stuffed inside, racks of electronic gear receding to infinity, LEDs glowing in the dimness. She hears the hum of cooling fans. “Custom shock-mounted, everything mil-spec, these here are all what they call blade servers, warehouses full going as you might expect for rock-bottom prices these days and who,” Eric in a cheerful cloud of cigar smoke, “I bet you’re wondering, would be springing for a rolling server farm, in fact a fleet of us, out on the move and untrackable 24/7? what kind of data would these units be carrying on their hard drives, so forth.”

  “Don’t ask,” Reg cackles, “It’s all experimental right now. Could be a big waste of our time and some unknown party’s money.”

  Calm breathing over Maxine’s shoulder. For some reason she doesn’t jump or scream, or not much, only pauses the disc. “Looks like up around the Bozeman Pass,” Horst guesses.

  “How’s your movie, honey?”

  “Just on a commercial break, they’re as far as the making of The Lost Weekend (1945), nice cameo by Wallace Shawn as Billy Wilder, but listen, don’t go by this footage here, OK? it’s really nice country out there, you might enjoy it… Maybe some summer we could…”

  “They want me to destroy this disc, Horst, so if you wouldn’t mind…”

  “Never saw it, deaf and dumb, hey, that’s ’at there Eric guy, ain’t it.”

  Might be some envy in his voice, but this time no husbandish whine. She sneaks a look at his face and catches him gazing into the stormswept mountains like a man in exile, his wish so blatant, to be schlepping once again through blizzards and relentless wind, out solo on the far northern highways. How is she ever supposed to get used to such wintry nostalgia?

  “Think your picture’s back on, 18-wheeler. You’re looking for a role model, you could do worse than Ray Milland, maybe you should be taking notes?”

  “Yep, always been a The Thing with Two Heads (1972) man myself.”

  Maxine resumes the disc. The truck is in motion again. The gray unprophetic miles unrolling. After a while Eric sez, “This ain’t the civil war, by the way, case you were wondering. What we talked about last time. Not even Fort Sumter. Just a li’l spin up the interstate’s all. Bleeding-edge development phase yet. We could be heading anywhere, Alberta, Northwest Territories, Alaska, we’ll see where it takes us. Sorry about no more e-mail, but we’re all down where you might not want to be bringing your family computer anymore. Inappropriate content plus crashing the machine in ways you’ll be unhappy with. From here on, contact will have to be kind of intermittent. Maybe someday—” The picture goes dark. She fast-forwards looking around for more, but that seems to be it.

  39

  Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine’s riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being dealt and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman… After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own—they are the day’s messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under nonunion conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.

  One day, on the express headed downtown from 72nd, a local happens to leave the station at the same time, and as the tracks at the end of the platform draw closer together, there’s a slow zoom in onto one particular window of the other train, one face in this window, too clearly meant to invite Maxine’s attention. She’s tall, darkly exotic, good posture, carrying a shoulder bag she now briefly unlatches her gaze from Maxine’s for long enough to reach inside of and pull out an envelope, which she holds up to the window, then jerks her head toward the next express stop, which will be 42nd. Maxine’s train meantime accelerating and carrying her slowly past.

  If this is a tarot card with a name, it’s The Unwelcome Messenger.

  Maxine gets off at Times Square and waits under a flight of exit stairs. The local rolls and hisses in, the woman approaches. Silently Maxine is beckoned down into the long pedestrian tunnel that runs over to the Port of Authority, on whose tiled walls are posted the latest word on movies about to come out, albums, toys for yups, fashion, everything you need to be a wised-up urban know-it-all is posted on the walls of this tunnel. It occurs to Maxine that if hell was a bus station in New York, this is what ALL HOPE ABANDON would look like.

  The envelope doesn’t have to get closer to her snoot than a foot and a half before there it is, the unmistakable odor of regret, bad judgment, unproductive mourning—9:30 Cologne For Men. Maxine is taken by a chill. Nick Windust has staggered forth again from the grave, hungry, unappeasable, and she doubts, whatever’s in the envelope, that she needs to see it.

  There’s writing on the outside,

  Here’s the money I owe you. Sorry it isn’t the earrings.

  Adios.

  Half glaring at the envelope, expecting only the ghost outline of the wad that used to be there, Maxine is surprised to find instead the full amount, in twenties. Plus some modest vig, which is not like him. Was not. This being New York, how many explanations can there be for why it hasn’t been made off with? Likely it’s to do with the messenger…

  Oh. Seeing the other woman’s eyes begin to narrow, enough to notice, Maxine makes a judgment call. “Xiomara?”

  The woman’s smile, in this bright noisy flow of city indifference, comes like a beer on the house in a bar where n
obody knows you.

  “You don’ t need to tell me how you were able to contact me.”

  “Oh. They know how to find people.”

  Xiomara has been up at Columbia all morning, chairing some kind of seminar on Central American issues. Accounts for her being on the local maybe, but little else. There are always secular backup stories, some comm link in Xiomara’s shoulder bag, not yet on the market outside the surveillance community… but at the same time there’s no shame in going for a magical explanation, so Maxine lets it ride. “And right now, you’re headed for…”

  “Well, actually the Brooklyn Bridge. Do you know how we’d get there from here?”

  “Take the shuttle over to the Lex, ride down on the Number 6, and what’s with the ‘we,’” Maxine wishes to know also.

  “Whenever I come to New York, I like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. If you have time, I thought you could, too.”

  Jewish-mother defaults switch in. “You eat breakfast?”

  “Hungarian Pastry Shop.”

  “So we get over in Brooklyn, we’ll eat again.”

  Maxine can’t say what she might’ve been expecting—braids, silver jewelry, long skirts, bare feet—well, surprise, here instead is this polished international beauty in a power suit, not some clueless eighties hand-me-down either, but narrower in the shoulders the way they’re supposed to be, longer jacket, serious shoes. Perfect makeup job. Maxine must look like she’s been out washing the car.