Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

  They start off cautiously enough, politely, before either of them knows it, it’s turning into morning talk-show TV. Had Lunch with Ex-Husband’s Ex-Girlfriend.

  “So the money, you got it from Dotty, the widow in D.C., correct?”

  “One of a thousand chores she suddenly finds on her list.”

  And it’s also possible, given the depths of Beltway connivance running parallel to and just behind the visible universe, that Xiomara is up here today at not so much Dotty’s behest as that of elements interested in how doggedly Maxine’s apt to go after the truth behind Windust’s passing.

  “You and Dotty are in touch.”

  “We met a couple of years ago. I was in Washington with a delegation.”

  “Your— Her husband was there?”

  “Not likely. She swore me to secrecy, we met for lunch at the Old Ebbitt, noisy, Clinton people all milling around, both of us picking at salads, trying to ignore Larry Summers at a distant booth, no problem for her, but I felt like I was auditioning for something.”

  “And the topic under discussion, of course…”

  “Two different husbands, really. Back when I knew him, he was a person she wouldn’t have recognized, an entry-level kid who didn’t know how much trouble his soul was in.”

  “And by the time she got to him…”

  “Maybe he didn’t need quite so much help.”

  Classic New York conversation, you’re having lunch, you talk about having lunch someplace else. “So you ladies had a nice chat.”

  “Not sure. Toward the end Dotty said something strange. You’ve heard about the ancient Mayans and this game they played, an early form of basketball?”

  “Something about,” Maxine dimly, “…vertical hoop, high percentage of fouls, some of them flagrant, usually fatal?”

  “We were outside trying to hail a cab, and out of nowhere Dotty said something like, ‘The enemy most to be feared is as silent as a Mayan basketball game on television.’ When I politely pointed out that back in Mayan times there wasn’t any TV, she smiled, like a teacher you’ve just fed the right cue to. ‘Then you can imagine how silent that is,’ and she slid into a cab I hadn’t seen coming, and disappeared.”

  “You think it was her way of talking about…” oh, go ahead, “his soul?”

  She gazes into Maxine’s eyes and nods. “Day before yesterday, when she asked me to bring you the money, she talked about the last time she saw him, the surveillance, the helicopters, the dead phones and frozen credit cards, and said she’d really come to think of them again as comrades-in-arms. Maybe she was only being a good spook widow. But I kissed her anyway.”

  Maxine’s turn to nod.

  “Where I grew up in Huehuetenango, where Windust and I met, it was less than a day’s journey to a system of caves everyone there believed was the approach to Xibalba. The early Christian missionaries thought tales of hell would frighten us, but we already had Xibalba, literally, ‘the place of fear.’ There was a particularly terrible ball court there. The ball had these… blades on it, so games were in deadly earnest. Xibalba was—is—a vast city-state below the earth, ruled by twelve Death Lords. Each Lord with his own army of unquiet dead, who wander the surface world bringing terrible afflictions to the living. Ríos Montt and his plague of ethnic killing… not too different.

  “Windust began hearing Xibalba stories as soon as his unit arrived in country. At first he thought it was another case of having fun with the gringo, but after a while… I think he began to believe, more than I ever did, at least to believe in a parallel world, somewhere far beneath his feet where another Windust was doing the things he was pretending not to up here.”

  “You knew…”

  “Suspected. Tried not to see too much. I was too young. I knew about the electric cattle prod, ‘self-defense’ is how he explained it. The name the people gave him was Xooq’, which means scorpion in Q’eqchi’. I loved him. I must have thought I could save him. And in the end it was Windust who saved me.” Maxine feels a strange buzzing at the edges of her brain, like a foot trying to come back awake. Still inside the perimeter of newlywed bliss, he sneaks out of bed, does what he’s in Guatemala to do, slips back, in the worst hours of the morning, nestling his cock against the crack of her ass, how could she not have known? What innocence could she still believe in?

  Automatic-rifle fire every night, irregular pulses of flame-colored light above the treelines. Villagers began leaving. One morning Windust found the office he’d been working out of abandoned and cleared of everything sensitive. No sign of any of the neoliberal scum he’d oozed into town with. Perhaps owing to the appearance overnight of ill-disposed country folk carrying machetes. Somebody had written SALSIPUEDES MOTHERFUCKERS in lipstick on a cubicle wall. A 55-gallon oil drum out in back full of ashes and charred paperwork was still seeping smoke. Not a yanqui in sight, let alone the Israeli and Taiwanese mercs they’d been coordinating with, all of them suddenly gathered back into the Invisible. “He gave me about a minute to pack a bag. The blouse I wore at our wedding, some family photographs, a sock with a roll of quetzals in it, a little SIG Sauer .22 handgun he was never comfortable with and insisted I take.”

  On the map the Mexican border wasn’t far, but even though they first headed down to the coast, away from the mountains, the terrain was demanding and there were obstacles—army patrols, blood-drinking Kaibil special ops, guerrilleros who would shoot a gringo on sight. At any moment Windust was apt to mutter, “Spot of bother here,” and they’d have to hide. It took days, but finally he got them safely into Mexico. They picked up the highway at Tapachula and rode buses north. One morning at the bus station in Oaxaca, they were sitting out under a canopy of poles and palm thatchwork, and Windust suddenly was down on one knee offering Xiomara a ring, with the biggest diamond she’d ever seen.

  “What’s this?”

  “I forgot to give you an engagement ring.”

  She tried it on, it didn’t fit. “It’s OK,” he said, “When you get to D.F., I want you to sell it,” and it wasn’t till then, that “you” instead of “we,” that she understood he was leaving. He kissed her good-bye, and turning away from maybe the last merciful act in his résumé, moseyed on out of the bus station. By the time she thought to get up and run after him, he’d vanished down the hard roads and into the heavy weather of a northern destiny she’d thought she could protect him from.

  “Foolish little girl. His agency took care of the annulment, found me a job in an office out on Insurgentes Sur, after a while I was on my own, there was no more interest or profit in tracking me, I found myself working more and more with exile groups and reconciliation committees, Huehuetenango was still down there, the war was never going to go away, it was like the old Mexican joke, de Guatemala a Guatepeor.”

  They’ve walked down to Fulton Landing. Manhattan so close, so clear today, yet back on 11 September the river was an all but metaphysical barrier. Those who witnessed the event from over here watched, from a place of safety they no longer believed in, the horror of the day, watched the legions of traumatized souls coming across the bridge, dust-covered, smelling like demolition and smoke and death, vacant-eyed, in flight, in shock. While the terminal plume ascended.

  “Do you mind if we walk back across the bridge, over to Ground Zero?”

  Sure. Just another visitor to the Apple here, another one of those obligatory stops. Or was this the idea all along, and Maxine’s being played here, like an original-cast vinyl LP? “That ‘we’ again, Xiomara.”

  “You’ve never been there?”

  “Not since it happened. Made a point of avoiding it, in fact. You gonna report me to the patriotism police now?”

  “It’s me. I’ve gotten obsessed.”

  They’re up on the bridge again, as close to free as the city ever allows you to be, between conditions, an edged wind off the harbor announcing something dark now hovering out over Jersey, not the night, not yet, something else, on the way in, being drawn as if by th
e vacuum in real-estate history where the Trade Center used to stand, bringing optical tricks, a sorrowful light.

  They glide like attendants toward the room of a waker from civic nightmare who will not be comforted. Open-top tour buses cruise by carrying visitors in matching plastic ponchos with the tour-company logo. At Church and Fulton, there’s a viewing platform, allowing civilians to look in past the chain-link and barricades to where dump trucks and cranes and loaders are busy reducing a pile of wreckage that still reaches ten or twelve stories high, to gaze into what should be the aura surrounding a holy place but isn’t. Cops with bullhorns are managing the foot traffic. Buildings nearby, damaged but standing, some draped like mourners in black façade netting, one with a huge American flag attached across the top stories, gather in silent witness, glassless window-sockets dark and staring. There are vendors selling T-shirts, paperweights, key chains, mouse pads, coffee mugs.

  Maxine and Xiomara stand for a while looking in. “It was never the Statue of Liberty,” sez Maxine, “never a Beloved American Landmark, but it was pure geometry. Points for that. And then they blew it to pixels.”

  And I know of a place, she’s careful not to add, where you dowse across an empty screen, clicking on tiny invisible links, and there’s something waiting out there, latent, maybe it’s geometric, maybe begging like geometry to be contradicted in some equally terrible way, maybe a sacred city all in pixels waiting to be reassembled, as if disasters could be run in reverse, the towers rise out of black ruin, the bits and pieces and lives, no matter how finely vaporized, become whole again…

  “Hell doesn’t have to be underground,” Xiomara looking up at the vanished memory of what had stood there, “Hell can be in the sky.”

  “And Windust—”

  “Dotty said he came here more than once after 11 September, haunting the site. Unfinished business, he told her. But I don’t think his spirit is here. I think he’s down in Xibalba, reunited with his evil twin.”

  The condemned ghost structures around them seem to draw together, as if conferring. Some patrolman from the karmic police is saying move along folks, it’s over, nothing to see here. Xiomara takes Maxine’s arm, and they glide off into a premonitory spritzing of rain, a metropolis swept by twilight.

  Later, back in the apartment, in a widowlike observance, Maxine finds a moment alone and switches off the lights, takes the envelope of cash, and snorts the last vestiges of his punk-rock cologne, trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless and inaccountable as his spirit…

  Which is down in the Mayan underworld now, wandering a deathscape of hungry, infected, shape-shifting, lethally insane Mayan basketball fans. Like Boston Garden, only different.

  And later, next to snoring Horst, beneath the pale ceiling, city light diffusing through the blinds, just before drifting downward into REM, good night. Good night, Nick.

  40

  There is a particular weirdness to be found on weekends in the evening in NYC health and fitness clubs, especially when economic times are sluggish. Unable anymore to bring herself to swim in The Deseret pool, which she believes to be cursed, Maxine has joined her sister Brooke’s state-of-the-art health club Megareps around the corner but isn’t quite used yet to this nightly spectacle of yups on treadmills, plodding to nowhere while watching CNN or the sports channels, laid-off dotcommers who aren’t at strip clubs or absorbed into massively multiplayer online games, all running, rowing, lifting weights, mingling with body-image obsessives, folks recuperating from dating disasters, others desperate enough tonight actually to be looking for company here instead of in bars. Worse, hanging around the snack section, which is where Maxine, coming in out of the strange kind of late-winter rain that you can hear rattling lightly off your umbrella or raincoat but when you look, nothing is getting wet, finds March Kelleher, busy on her laptop, surrounded by muffin debris and a number of paper coffee cups she’s using, much to the annoyance of the rest of the room, for ashtrays.

  “Didn’t know you were a member here, March.”

  “Walk-in, just using the free Internet, hot spots all over town, haven’t been in this one for a while.”

  “Been following your Weblog.”

  “I had an interesting tip about your friend Windust. Like he’s dead, for example. Should I post it? Should I be offering condolences?”

  “Not to me.”

  March puts the screen to sleep and regards Maxine with a level gaze. “You know I never asked.”

  “Thanks. You wouldn’t have found it entertaining.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Long sad career as a mother-in-law, only thing I ever learned is don’t advise. Anybody needs advice these days, it’s me.”

  “Hey, more than happy to, what’s up?”

  A sour face. “Worried sick about Tallis.”

  “This is news?”

  “It’s all getting worse, I can’t just stand by anymore, I have to be the one to take the step, try to get to see her somehow. Fuck the consequences. Tell me it’s a bad idea.”

  “It’s a bad idea.”

  “If you mean life is too short, OK, but around Gabriel Ice, as you must know, it can get even shorter.”

  “What, he’s threatening her?”

  “They’ve split. He’s kicked her out.”

  Well. “So good riddance.”

  “He won’t leave it at that. Something I can feel. She’s my baby.”

  All right. The Code of the Mom stipulates you don’t argue back at this kind of talk. “So,” nodding, “can I help?”

  “Lend me your handgun.” Beat. “Just kidding.”

  “Yet another license pulled, would be the thing…”

  “Only a metaphor.”

  OK, but if March, already on the fly, living with her own danger levels, sees Tallis in this much trouble… “Can I do some recon first, March?”

  “She’s innocent, Maxine. Ah. She’s so fuckin innocent.”

  Running with Gulf Coast gangsters, party to international money laundering, any number of Title 18 violations, innocent, well… “How’s that?”

  “Everybody thinks they know more than her. The old sad delusion of every insect-free know-it-all in this miserable town. Everybody thinks they live in ‘the real world’ and she doesn’t.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s what it is, to be an ‘innocent person.’” In the tone of voice you use when you think somebody needs to have it explained.

  • • •

  TALLIS, booted out of the East Side stately home she and Ice were sharing, has found a utility closet converted to residential use in one of the newer high rises on the far Upper West Side. Looks like a machine more than a building. Pale, metallic, highly reflective, someplace up in the mid–two figures with respect to floors high, wraparound balconies that look like cooling fins, no name, only a number hidden so discreetly not one in a hundred locals you ask can even tell you it. Keeping Tallis company this evening are enough bottles to stock an average Chinese-restaurant bar, from one of which she is drinking directly something turquoise called Hypnotiq. Neglecting to offer any to Maxine.

  Out here at the far ancient edge of the island, this all used to be trainyard. Deep below, trains still move through tunnels in and out of Penn Station, horns chiming in B-major sixths, deep as dreams, while ghosts of tunnel-wall artists and squatters the civil authorities have no clue what to do about—evict, ignore, re-evict—go drifting past the train-car windows in the semidark, whispering messages of transience, and overhead in this cheaply built apartment complex tenants come and go, relentlessly ephemeral as travelers in a nineteenth-century railroad hotel.

  “First thing I noticed,” not complaining to Maxine so much as to anybody who’ll listen, “is I was getting systematically cut off from the Web sites I usually visit. Couldn’t shop online, or chat in chat rooms, or after a while even do normal company business. Finally, wherever I tried to go, I ran into some kind of wall. Dialogue b
oxes, pop-up messages, mostly threatening, some apologizing. Click by click, forcing me away into exile.”

  “You discussed this with CEO-and-hubby?”

  “Sure, while he was screaming, throwing my stuff out the window, reminding me how badly I’m expected to come out of this. A nice adult discussion.”

  Matrimonials. What is there ever to say? “Just don’t forget about the loss carry-forwards and all that, OK?” Running a quick EHA or Eyeball-Humidity Assessment, Maxine thinks for a minute Tallis is about to go all mushy, but instead she’s relieved to see, as if jump-cut to, the reliably annoying Fingernail, cycling toward and away from her lips,

  “You’ve been discovering secrets about my husband… any you’d like to share?”

  “There’s no proof of anything yet.”

  An unsurprised nod. “But he is, I don’t know, a suspect in something?” Gazing toward a neutral corner, voice softening to edgelessness, “The Geek That Couldn’t Sleep. A make-believe horror movie we used to pretend we were in. Gabe was really such a sweet kid, a long time ago.”

  Off she goes goes on the time machine, while Maxine investigates the liquor inventory. Presently Tallis is recalling one of several memorial services after 11 September she was at representing hashslingrz, standing there among a delegation of dry-eyed wisefolk who looked like they were waiting for it to be over so they could get back to which stock to short next, when she observed one of the bagpipe players, improvising grace notes on “Candle in the Wind,” who seemed to her dimly familiar. It turned out to be Gabriel’s old college roommate Dieter, now in business as a professional bagpiper. There were catered eats afterward, over which she and Dieter got into conversation, trying to avoid kilt jokes, though whatever he’d grown into, it wasn’t Sean Connery.

  Demand for bagpipers was brisk. Dieter, filing as an S-corporation these days, teamed up with a couple of other classmates from CMU, had been swamped since 11 September with more gigs than he knew what to do with, weddings, bar mitzvahs, furniture-store openings…

  “Weddings?” sez Maxine.