Bleeding Edge

by Pynchon, Thomas

  For a couple of weeks now, Maxine has been showing up for sessions to find her youthful guru increasingly bent out of shape by the news from Afghanistan. Despite impassioned appeals from around the world, two colossal statues of the Buddha, the tallest standing statues of him in the world, carved in the fifth century from a sandstone cliffside near Bamiyan, have been for a month now dynamited and repeatedly shelled by the Taliban government, till finally being reduced to rubble.

  “Fuckin rugriders,” as Shawn expresses it, “‘offensive to Islam’ so blow it up, that’s their solution to everything.”

  “Isn’t there something,” Maxine gently recalls, “about if the Buddha’s in your way on the path to enlightenment it’s OK to kill him?”

  “Sure, if you’re a Buddhist. These are Wahhabists. They’re pretending it’s spiritual, but it’s political, like they can’t deal with having any competition around.”

  “Shawn, I’m sorry. But aren’t you supposed to be above this?”

  “Whoa, overattached me. Think about it—all it takes is, like, a idle thumb on a space bar to turn ‘Islam’ into ‘I slam.’”

  “Thought-provoking, Shawn.”

  A glance at the TAG Heuer on his wrist, “Hope you don’t mind if we run a little short today, Brady Bunch marathon, you understand . . . ?” Shawn’s devotion to reruns of the well-known seventies sitcom have drawn comment all up and down his client list. He can footnote certain episodes as other teachers might the sutras, with the three-part family trip to Hawaii seeming to be a particular favorite—the bad-luck tiki, Greg’s near-fatal wipeout, Vincent Price’s cameo as an unstable archaeologist . . .

  “I’ve always been more of a Jan-gets-a-wig person myself,” Maxine was once careless enough to admit.

  “Interesting, Maxine. You want to, like, talk about it?” Beaming at her with that vacant, perhaps only Californian, the-Universe-is-a-joke-but-you-don’t-get-it smile which so often drives her to un-Buddhist daydreams seething with rage. Maxine doesn’t want to say “airhead” exactly, though she guesses if somebody put a tire gauge in his ear it might read a couple psi below spec.

  Later at Kugelblitz, Ziggy gone off to krav maga with Nigel and his sitter, Maxine picks up Otis and Fiona, who are soon in front of the living-room Tube about to watch The Aggro Hour, featuring both of Otis’s currently favorite superheroes—Disrespect, notable for his size and attitude, which could be called proactive, and The Contaminator, in civilian life a kid who’s obsessively neat about always making his bed and picking up his room but who, when out on duty as TC, becomes a lonely fighter for justice who goes around strewing garbage through disagreeable government agencies, greedy corporations, even entire countries nobody likes much, rerouting waste lines, burying his antagonists beneath mountains of toxic grossness. Trying for poetic justice. Or, as it seems to Maxine, making a big mess.

  Fiona is in that valley between powerhouse kid and unpredictable adolescent, having found, long may it wave, an equilibrium that nearly has Maxine wiping her nose here, as she considers on what short notice such calm can be disrupted.

  “You’re sure,” Otis in full being-a-gent mode, “this won’t be too violent for you.”

  Fiona, whose parents actually should consider heartbreaker insurance, bats eyelashes possibly enhanced by a raid on her mom’s makeup supplies. “You can tell me not to look.”

  Maxine, recognizing that girlhood technique of pretending anybody can tell you anything, slides a bowl of health-food Cheetos in front of them, along with two cans of sugar-free soda, and waving Enjoy, quits the room.

  “’Suckers beginnin to get me upset,” murmurs Disrespect, as armed personnel carriers and helicopters converge on his person.

  • • •

  ZIGGY COMES IN from krav maga in his usual haze of early-adolescent sex angst. He has a big crush on his instructor, Emma Levin, who’s rumored to be ex-Mossad. On the first day of class, his friend Nigel, overinformed and unreflective as always, blurted, “So Ms. Levin, you were what, one of those kidon lady assassins?”

  “I could say yes, but then I’d have to kill you,” her voice low, mocking, erogenous. A number of mouths had dropped open. “Nah, guys, sorry to disappoint, just an analyst, worked in an office, when Shabtai Shavit left in ’96, so did I.”

  “She’s a looker, huh?” Maxine couldn’t help inquiring.

  “Mom, she’s . . .”

  After thirty long seconds, “Words fail you.”

  There’s also Naftali, the ex-Mossad b.f., who will kill anybody even looks at her sideways, unless maybe it’s a kid who can’t help having some preadolescent longing.

  Vyrva calls to say she won’t be there till after supper. Fortunately, you cannot call Fiona a picky child, in fact there’s nothing she won’t eat.

  Maxine finishes up the dishes and puts her head in the boys’ room, where she finds them with Fiona intensely attending to a screen on which is unfolding a first-person shooter, with a generous range of weaponry in a cityscape that looks a lot like New York.

  “You guys? What have I been saying about violence?”

  “We disabled the splatter options, Mom. It’s all good, watch.” Tapping some keys.

  A store something like Fairway, with fresh produce displayed out in front. “OK, now keep an eye on this lady here.” Coming down the sidewalk, middle class, respectably turned out, “Enough money to buy groceries, right?”

  “Wrong. Check it out.” The woman pauses in front of the grapes, so far in this dewy morning light unmolested, and without the least sign of guilt begins poking around, picking grapes off stems and eating them. She moves on to the plums and nectarines, fondles a number of these, eats some, stashes a couple more in her purse for later, continues early lunch at the berry section, opening up the packaging and stealing strawberries, blueberries and raspberries, scarfing it all down totally without shame. Reaching for a banana.

  “What do you say, Mom, good for a hundred points easy, right?”

  “She is quite the fresser. But I don’t think—”

  Too late—from the shooter’s edge of the screen now emerges the front end of a Heckler & Koch UMP45, which swivels to point at the human pest, and, accompanied by bass-boosted machine-pistol sound effects, blows her away. Clean. She just disappears, not even a stain on the sidewalk. “See? No blood, virtually nonviolent.”

  “But stealing fruit, this isn’t a capital offense. And what if a homeless person—”

  “No homeless people on the target list,” Fiona assures her. “No kids, babies, dogs, old people—never. We’re out after yup, basically.”

  “What Giuliani would call quality-of-life issues,” adds Ziggy.

  “I had no idea grouchy old people designed video games.”

  “My dad’s partner Lucas designed it,” sez Fiona. “He calls it his valentine to the Big Apple.”

  “We’re beta-testing it for him,” Ziggy explains.

  “Bearing eight o’clock,” Otis sez, “dig it.”

  Adult male in a suit, carrying a briefcase, standing in the middle of the sidewalk traffic screaming at his kid, who looks to be about four or five. The volume level grows abusive, “And if you don’t—” the grown-up raising his hand ominously, “there’ll be a consequence.”

  “Uh-uh, not today.” Out comes the full auto option again, and presently the screamer is no more, the kid is looking around bewildered, tears still on his little face. The point total in the corner of the screen increments by 500.

  “So now he’s all alone in the street, big favor you did him.”

  “All we have to do—” Fiona clicking on the kid and dragging him to a window labeled Safe Pickup Zone. “Trustworthy family members,” she explains, “come and pick them up and buy them pizza and bring them home, and their lives from then on are worry-free.”

  “Come on,” sez Otis, “let’s just cruise around.” Off they go on a tour of the inexhaustible galleries of New York annoyance, zapping loudmouths on cellular phones, morally self-eleva
ted bicycle riders, moms wheeling twins old enough to walk lounging in twin strollers, “One behind the other, we let them off with a warning, but not this one, look, side by side so nobody can get past? forget it.” Pow! Pow! The twins go flying, all smiles, above New York and into the Kiddy Bin. Passersby are largely oblivious to the sudden disappearances except for Christers, who think it’s the Rapture. “Guys,” Maxine astonished, “I had no idea— Wait, what’s this?” She has spotted a line jumper at a bus stop. Nobody paying attention. H&Kwoman to the rescue! “All right, how do I do this?” Otis is happy to instruct, and before you can say “Be more considerate,” the pushy bitch has been despatched and her children dragged to safety.

  “Way to go Mom, that’s a thousand points.”

  “Actually, sort of fun.” Scanning the screen for her next target. “Wait, I didn’t say that.” Trying later to put a positive spin on it, Maxine figures maybe it’s a virtual and kid-scale way of getting into the antifraud business . . .

  “Hi, Vyrva, come on in.”

  “Didn’t think I’d be this late.” Vyrva goes and puts her head in Otis and Ziggy’s room. “Hi, sweetie?” The girl looks up and murmurs hi, Mom, and gets back to yuppicide.

  “Oh, look, they’re blowing away New Yorkers, how cute? I mean, nothing personal?”

  “You’re good with this—Fiona, virtual murder sort of thing?”

  “Oh, it’s bloodless, like Lucas didn’t even write in a splatter option? They think they’re disabling it, but it’s not even there?”

  “So,” shrugging away any scold signifiers in face and voice, “a mom-approved first-person shooter.”

  “That’s exactly the slogan we’re gonna use in the ads.”

  “You’re advertising where, on the Internet?”

  “The Deep Web. Down there advertising is like still in its infancy? And the price is what Bob Barker might call ‘right’?” Air quotes, Vyrva’s hair, back in braids, bouncing to and fro.

  Maxine reaches a bag of some Fairway coffee blend out of the freezer and pours beans in the grinder. “Watch your ears a minute.” She grinds the coffee, pours it into a filter in the electric drip unit, hits the power switch.

  “So Justin and Lucas are branching into games now.”

  “It isn’t really business the way I learned it in college,” Vyrva confides, “at this point life should be serious? The guys are still having too much fun for their age.”

  “Oh—male anxiety, yes that’s much better.”

  “The game is just a promotional freebie,” Vyrva frowning cute-apologetic. “Our product is still totally DeepArcher?”

  “Which is . . .”

  “Like ‘departure,’ only you pronounce it DeepArcher?”

  “Zen thing,” Maxine guesses.

  “Weed thing. Just lately everybody’s been after the source code—the feds, game companies, fuckin Microsoft? all have offers on the table? It’s the security design—like nothing any of these people’ve ever seen, and it’s makin them all crazy.”

  “So, today you were out scouting your next round? Who’s the lucky VC this time?”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “What I do. Professionally D and D.”

  “Maybe,” Vyrva considers, “we should pinkie-swear?”

  Maxine patiently holding out her pinkie, hooking it with Vyrva’s and obtaining eye contact, “Then again—”

  “Hey, if you can’t trust another Kugelblitz mom?”

  So, with the usual caveats, Maxine keeps her other hand in her pocket with fingers crossed as she solemnly pinkie-swears. “I think we got a preempt today? Even back at the height of the tech bubble, this would be awesome money? And it’s not a VC, it’s another tech company? Big deal this year down in the Alley, hashslingrz?”

  Whoopwhoopwhoop. “Yeah . . . think I’ve . . . heard that name. That’s where you were today?”

  “All day down there. I’m still, like, vibrateen? He’s a bundle of energy, that guy.”

  “Gabriel Ice. He’s made you a big offer to buy, what, this source code?”

  Ear to shoulder, one of those long West Coast shrugs, “He sure came up with a impressive piece of change from someplace? Enough to rethink the IPO? We already put the red herring on indefinite hold?”

  “Wait a minute, what’s with acquisition fever down the Alley, didn’t all that go belly-up last year with the crash?”

  “Not for the managed-security people, they’re making out fiercely at the moment. When everybody’s nervous, all corporate suits can think about is protecting what they’ve got.”

  “So you guys’ve been out schmoozing with Gabriel Ice. Can I have your autograph?”

  “We went to an afternoon soiree over at his mansion on the East Side? Him and his wife, Tallis, she’s the comptroller at hashslingrz, sits on the board too, I think?”

  “And this is an outright buy?”

  “All they want is, there’s a part about getting somewhere without leaving a trail. The content, they could care less. It isn’t about the destination or even the trip, really, not for these jokers.”

  Maxine is much too familiar by now, even God forbid intimate, with this cover-your-tracks attitude. Next it morphs from innocent greed into some recognizable form of fraud. She wonders if anybody’s ever run a Beneish model on hashslingrz, just to see how ritually slaughtered the public numbers are. Note to self—find the time. “This DeepArcher, Vyrva, it’s what—a place?”

  “It’s a journey. Next time you’re over, the boys’ll give you a demo.”

  “Good, haven’t seen that Lucas for a while.”

  “He hasn’t been around a lot. There’s been, like, issues? He and Justin find any excuse to get into a fight. whether to even sell the source code in the first place. Same old classic dotcom dilemma, be rich forever or make a tarball out of it and post it around for free, and keep their cred and maybe self-esteem as geeks but stay more or less middle income.”

  “Sell it or give it away,” some scrutiny, “tough call, Vyrva. Which one wants to do what?”

  “Both want to do both,” she sighs.

  “Figures. How about you?”

  “Oh? Torn? You’ll think it’s just hippyeen around, but I’m not that cool with a whole shitload of money crashing into our life right now? That can be so destructive, we know of one or two people back in Palo Alto, it gets ugly and sad so fast, and I’d rather see the guys keepin on with their work, maybe start up something new.” A tilted grin. “Hard for a New York person to understand, sorry.”

  “Seen it forever, Vyrva. Direction of flow, in or out, don’t matter, above a critical amount, it’s all bad.”

  “Not that I’m living through my husband, OK? I just hate it when the guys argue. They’re in love, for goodness sakes. They put on all this who-are-you-again-dude, but in fact it’s like a couple of skateboarders together? Should I be jealous?”

  “What for?”

  “You know this kind of old-school movie where there’s these two kids are best friends and one grows up to be a priest and the other turns out to be a mobster, well, that’s Lucas and Justin. Only don’t ask which is which.”

  “But say Justin is the priest . . .”

  “Well, the one who . . . doesn’t get into a shoot-out at the end.”

  “Then Lucas . . .”

  Vyrva looks off into the distance, trying for Surf Bunny Gazes at the Sea but revealing instead a look Maxine has seen maybe more of than she wants to. Don’t—don’t put in, she advises herself, despite the all-but-irresistible question arising, Has Vyrva been shtupping, excuse me, “seeing” her husband’s partner on the sly?

  “Vyrva, you’re not . . .”

  “Not what?”

  “Never mind.” Both women then beam elaborately and shrug, one fast, the other slow.

  Another unexplored corner here, of which there are already enough. Maxine has only recently for example found out about Vyrva and Beanie Babies. Seems Vyrva’s been out running some arbitrage hustle with
the trendy stuffed-toy/beanbag hybrids. Soon after their first play date, “Fiona has every Beanie Baby,” Otis nodding for emphasis, “in the world.” He thought a minute. “Well, every kind of Beanie Baby. Every one in the world, that’d be . . . like warehouses and stuff.”

  As happened off and on with the boys, Maxine was reminded of Horst, this time of his blockhead literalism, and she had to restrain herself from grabbing Otis, slobbering kisses and squashing him like a tube of toothpaste, and so forth.

  “Fiona has . . . the Princess Diana Beanie Baby?” she asked instead.

  “‘The’? Good luck, Mom. She’s got all the variations, even the BBC Interview Anniversary Edition. Under the bed, all in the closets, they’re pushing her out of her room.”

  “You’re saying Fiona’s . . . a Beanie Baby person.”

  “Not her so much,” Otis sez, “it’s her mom who’s totally the obsessive in the house.”

  Maxine has noticed that at least once a week, as soon as she has Fiona safely delivered at Kugelblitz, Vyrva is off on the 86th Street crosstown bus headed for yet another Beanie Baby transaction. She has compiled a list of retailers on the East Side who get the critters shipped all but directly in from China by way of certain shadowy warehouses adjoining JFK. ’Suckers don’t just fall off the truck, they parachute out of the airplane. Vyrva buys them up dirt cheap on the East Side, then rushes back to various West Side toy and variety stores whose delivery schedules she has carefully recorded, sells them for a price somewhat lower than what the stores will pay when their own truck shows up, and everybody pockets the difference. Meantime Fiona, though not much of a collector, gets to keep on accumulating Beanie Babies.