Bleeding Edge

by Pynchon, Thomas

  “You’re—”

  “The Archer? No. That one is silent.”

  • • •

  BACK IN MEATSPACE, needing somehow to talk to somebody about the new, and soon she guesses unrecognizable, DeepArcher, Maxine calls Vyrva’s mobile number. “I’m just headed down into the subway, I’ll get back to you when I have reception again.” Maxine is not an old hand at cell-phone shenanigans but knows nervous when she hears it. A half hour later Vyrva, allegedly just back from the East Side, shows up at the office in person dragging a heavy-gauge trash bag stuffed full of Beanie Babies. “Seasonal!” she cries, pulling out one by one little Hallowe’en bats, grinning jack-o’-lanterns in witch hats, ghost bears, bears in capes done up as Dracula, “Ghoulianne the Girl Ghost, see, with the little pumpkin, isn’t she cute!”

  Hmmm yes something slightly manic about Vyrva this morning, the East Side to be sure can have this Munchkinetic effect on people, but—retro-CFE circuits now fully kicked in—it occurs to Maxine that the Beanie Babies could have been a cover all the time, couldn’t they, for activities less in the public interest . . .

  Phatic how’s Justin, how’s Fiona, all fine thanks—a shifty flicker of the eyeballs here?— “The guys . . . I mean, we’re all stressed lately, but . . .” Vyrva putting on a pair of lavender-lens wire-rims, five dollars on the street, any number of reasons why right now, “We came to New York, we all did, so innocent . . . Back in California it was fun, just write the code, go for the cool solution, the elegance, party when you can, but here, more and more it’s like—”

  “Growing up?” maybe a little too reflexive.

  “OK, men are children, we all know that, but this is like watching them give in to some secret vice they don’t know how to stop. They want to hang on to those old innocent kids, you can see it, it’s this terrible disconnect, the childlike hope and the depravity of New York meatspace, it’s becoming unbearable.”

  Dear Abby, I have this friend with a big problem . . .

  “You mean, unbearable for you . . . somehow . . . emotionally.”

  “No,” Vyrva with a rapid flash of eye contact, “for everybody, as in a-little-goes-a-long-way, pain-in-the-ass unbearable.” Chirpy yet snarling delivery, all too familiar in Maxine’s line of work. Maybe also an appeal for understanding, hopefully on the cheap. This is how they get when the audit hooks start pulling up evidence they thought they’d deep-sixed forever, when the tax man sits there across the desk with his office thermostats cranked all the way up, stone-faced, puffing on an IRS-issue stogie, waiting.

  Careful to keep it subtext-free for the moment, “Maybe it’s business that’s getting to them?”

  “No. Can’t be pressure about the source code, not anymore, they’re out from under all that now. You can’t tell anybody, but they’re going open source.”

  Pretending not to have heard the news already, “Giving it away? Have they looked at the tax situation?”

  According to Vyrva, Justin and Lucas were out one evening at the brightly lit bar of some tourist motel way over in the West Fifties. Huge-screen TVs tuned to sports channels, fake trees, some of them twenty feet tall, long-haired blond waitresses, an old-school mahogany bar. A lot of convention traffic. The partners are drinking King Kongs, which are Crown Royal plus banana liqueur, and reviewing the room for familiar faces when they hear a voice to which time has been at best disrespectful going, “A Fernet-Branca, please, better make that a double, with a ginger-ale chaser?” and Lucas does a spit take with his drink. “It’s him! That crazy motherfucker from Voorhees, Krueger! He’s after us, he wants his money back!”

  “You’re being paranoid?” Justin hopes. They hide behind a plastic bromeliad and observe squintingly. The packaging is a little different these days, but it seems to be Ian Longspoon all right, last seen years ago just having spun out in the Sand Hill soapbox derby. Being approached now by a compact individual in Oakley M Frames and a neon avocado lounge suit. Justin and Lucas instantly recognize Gabriel Ice in some notion of deep disguise.

  “What would Ice be meeting our old VC, on the sly, to talk about?” Lucas wonders.

  “What would they have in common?”

  “Us!” Both at once.

  “We need to look at those cocktail napkins, and quick!” They happen to know the motel security guy here and are presently back in his office scrutinizing a bank of CCTV displays. Zooming down on the Ice/Longspoon table, they can make out strange soggy diagrams full of arrows, boxes, exclamation points plus what sort of look like giant letter J’s, not to mention L’s . . .

  “You think?”

  “It could stand for anything, couldn’t it?”

  “Wait, I’m trying to think . . .” Each picking it up in turn, tossing it back and forth to be reamplified, till before long it’s totally paranoid panic and their security friend, grown grumpy, is showing them the back way out.

  “What the boys concluded,” Vyrva summarizes, “is that Ice was trying to get Voorhees, Krueger to invoke protective covenants, take the business away, and then sell off the assets—the DeepArcher source code, basically—to Ice.”

  “Fuck it,” Justin later in the night, with unexpected bitterness, “he wants it, let him have it.”

  “Ain’t like you, bro, what’ll happen next time we need to get lost?”

  “I won’t.” Justin sounding a little melancholy about it.

  “Maybe I will,” Lucas declares.

  “We can invent someplace else.”

  “Justin, what is this town doing to our heads, man, we never used to be like this.”

  “I don’t think it’s any better back in California anymore. Just as corrupt, we’ve been up and down the same streets together, you know where it all leads to, there or here.”

  Vyrva, though technically a shiksa, let them go on, drifting in and out in a motherly way, offering snacks and keeping her annoyance to herself. Now, to Maxine, “Talk about lost. Sometimes . . .”

  Here it comes, the fraudster’s lament. Maxine could run workshops in Conquering Eyeroll. “And . . .”

  “And if they’re lost, then I think,” barely audible, “it could be my fault.”

  In comes Daytona with a sack full of Danishes and a plastic coffee carafe. “Yo Vyrva, surf’s up, baby!”

  Vyrva is enough of a sport to stand and bump butts with Daytona and contribute eight bars of backup on the seldom-heard oldie “Soul Gidget” before Daytona, giving her a look, remarks, “Should be singin ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ you lookin a little anorexic, girl, need some them po’k chops! Collard greens!”

  “Fried peach pies,” Vyrva wan but game.

  “What I’m talk’n about,” waving herself back out the door. “Hold that mayo!”

  “Vyrva—”

  “No. It’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, oh, Maxi . . . I’ve been going through such guilt?”

  “If you’re not Jewish, you have to have a license, cause we hold the patent, see.”

  Shaking her head, “What should I do, I’m like so scared now, I’m in so deep?”

  “How about Lucas, how deep is he?”

  “Lucas? No? Not Lucas?” Pissed off that Maxine isn’t getting it.

  “Uh-oh. We’re talking about somebody else? Who?”

  “Please . . . I really thought I could help. It was supposed to be for Fiona, for Justin, for all of us. He said the guys could write their own ticket.”

  “Somebody,” as dinosaur-size scales at long last fall clattering from Maxine’s eyes, “somebody who wanted to acquire the DeepArcher source code, assumed that dating the wife of one of the partners would give him a foot in the door, am I following this so far?”

  “Maxi, you’ve got to believe—”

  “No, that was the ’69 Mets, it’ll be on your Big Apple citizenship exam, and meantime who now, I wonder, who of all the dozens of suits and suitors, would be enough of a total shit to try something like that, wait, wait, it’s right here at the edge of my brain . . .”

  “I m
ight have told you, but you hate him so much . . .”

  “Everybody hates Gabriel Ice, so I guess that means you haven’t told anybody.”

  “And he’s such a vengeful little prick, if I tried to call things off, he’d tell Justin all about it, destroy my marriage, my family . . . I’d lose Fiona, everything—”

  “There, there, don’t dwell, that’s worst-case. Could play out any number of ways. How long’s it been going on for?”

  “Since Las Vegas last summer. We even got in a quickie on September 11th, which makes it that much worse . . .”

  Maxine unable not to squint a little, “I hope you’re not saying you caused that somehow? That would be really crazy, Vyrva.”

  “Same kind of carelessness. Isn’t it?”

  “Same as what? Is this the listen-up-all-you-slackers speech? American neglect of family values brings al-Qaeda in on the airplanes and takes the Trade Center down?”

  “They saw how we are, what we’ve become. How soft, how neglectful. Self-indulgent. They figured us for an easy target, and they were right.”

  “Somehow I don’t see the cause and effect, but maybe it’s just me.”

  “I’m an adulteress!” Vyrva wails quietly.

  “Ah, come on. Adolescentress, maybe.”

  Yet who can help, in these situations, wanting to hear a detail or two? Ice’s cozy bachelor pad down in Tribeca, for example, a bathroom running to about the square footage of a pro basketball court, featuring a wide collection of tampons of every make, size, and absorbency, bottles of shampoo and conditioner whose labels you can’t read a word of because they’re imported from so far away, hair equipment from bobby pins to an enormous retro salon dryer you not only sit under but apparently actually have to climb inside, plus a condom selection that makes the checkout at Duane Reade look like a machine in a gas-station men’s room.

  “Thing is,” after some nose blowing, “the sex is always so great.”

  “A sensitive, considerate lover.”

  “Fuck no, he’s a son of a bitch. Did you ever try anal?”

  Does Maxine really want to hear about this?

  Does Delman’s sell shoes?

  “It figures,” encouragingly. “His specialty, I bet?”

  34

  Hallowe’en arrives. Below 14th Street this has become over the years a major city festival, with a parade whose TV coverage rivals that of Macy’s on Thanksgiving. Up on the Yupper West Side activities tend more toward the scale of a block party, 69th cordoned off, areaways converted into haunted houses, street entertainment and food pitches, bigger crowds every year, which is usually where Maxine takes the boys trick-or-treating, finishing up along 79th and sometimes 86th, working the lobbies of the different apartment buildings. But this year, it is rumored, post-9/11 jitters may have curtailed or even canceled some of these street activities, despite the mayor’s face all over the local channels, looking strangely like the rubber mask of it currently appearing in seasonal pop-up stores, talking tough as ever, recommending that New Yorkers stand up to terror by celebrating Hallowe’en as usual.

  “Jagdeep’s folks are having this Hallowe’en party,” it occurs to Ziggy, what you’d call disingenuously.

  This is the kid in Ziggy’s class who was writing code when he was four, Maxine recalls, and also happens to live in The Deseret. “How appropriate. The whole place is a haunted house.”

  “Something wrong with The Deseret, Mom?” Otis wide-eyed and so in cahoots.

  “Everything,” Maxine replies.

  “Aside from that, though,” Zig serenely.

  “You guys’d be trick-or-treating strictly inside the building?”

  “No need to go anyplace else, Hallowe’en there is legendary. Every apartment gets done up in a different horror theme.”

  “And . . . this is nothing to do with Jagdeep’s sister. With the several years’ premature, uh . . .”

  “Rack,” Otis suggests, being then obliged to dodge a brotherly krav maga sucker punch. “You won’t see her anyway, Zig, she’ll be partying,” running off, Ziggy in pursuit, “down in the Village, she only dates NYU guys—”

  Horst with a straight face not unmodulated by a shit-eating grin, “Series’ll be on tonight, El Duque’s starting, maybe against Curt Schilling, we could stay in and watch the game . . .”

  “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack?”

  Otis has decided he’ll go as Vegeta, his hair radically gelled up tonight into spikes, his silver-and-blue outfit obtained from some strange Asian site, fulfilled and delivered almost before he clicked “Add to Cart.” Ziggy’s going as the Empire State Building, with a stuffed toy ape attached about neck-high. Vyrva and Justin agree to be chaperones and will meet them at The Deseret.

  Eric and Driscoll are headed down to the Village parade, got up respectively as a NAND gate (“I say yes to everything”) and Aki Ross, from the Final Fantasy movie, “The haircut of everybody’s dreams, sixty thousand strands, each one animated separately, serious bandwidth, though this wig here,” Driscoll headshaking a short demo, “has to go under the heading of Desperate Tie-ins.”

  “No more Rachel, huh?”

  “Moving on.”

  Heidi does a fast drop-by, done up in a tropical-weight beige dress, short tousled darkish wig, glasses with oversize wire rims, and a strange plastic perhaps glow-in-the-dark lei hanging around her neck. “You look dimly familiar,” Maxine greets her, “you would be . . . ?”

  “Margaret Mead,” Heidi replies. “Taking my anthro plunge into the urban primitive tonight, babe, it’s all out there and I’m totally immersing in it. Dig what I found down on Canal Street.”

  “Open up your hand, I can’t see it, what is it?”

  “Digital camcorder, usually you can only find these in Japan. Hours of battery time, and I’m bringing spares, so I can record all night.”

  “Yet you seem anxious.”

  “Who wouldn’t be, it’s every pop impulse in history, concentrated into one night a year, what if I don’t know which way to point the lens, what if I miss something really crucial?”

  “Listen to my voice,” something they used to get into as girls, “you are not becoming hysterical, chill, there’s a good princess.”

  “Oh, Lady Maxipad, thanks ever so much, you’re so practical . . .”

  “Yes and I just went to the cash machine, so I’m also good for bail money, if that should come up.”

  As evening falls, Maxine and Horst take the biggest wastebasket in the house and fill it with fun-size candies of different brands, including Swedish Fish, PayDays, and Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, set it outside in the hall, hang a Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob, and retire to the bedroom, allowing Hallowe’en to develop as it will, which out in the streets of the Upper West Side means into a pseudopod of exotic Greenwich Village, after having had to settle the rest of the year for being a vague sort of uptown Dubuque.

  Indoors, the evening gets you’d say festive, with Maxine riding Horst for the better part of an hour, not that it’s anybody’s business of course, and coming a number of times, at last fiercely in sync with Horst, not long after which, owing to some extrasensory cue from the television, whose mute feature has been engaged, they surface from their post-orgy daze in time to witness Derek Jeter’s clutch tenth-inning homer and another trademark Yankee win. “Yes!” Horst beginning to scream in delighted disbelief. “And it better be Keanu Reeves in the biopic!”

  “Uh, huh. You hate everything about New York,” Maxine reminds him.

  “Oh. Well I’ve driven through Arizona, nothin against Arizona, but I did have a little money on the Yanks, judgment call, really . . .” About to drift off into directionless cozy talk here . . .

  “Really”? Maybe not, Horst. “Listen, being it’s a school night? I think I’m gonna just zip down the street and see how everybody’s doing.”

  “Well my darlin, can’t say it wasn’t a blast, shoat but sweet as they say around the pigpen, maybe I’ll just catch some
highlights, then.”

  From Horst, she is aware, this amounts to a declaration of love. But something is now focusing her out of the house, on to The Deseret, and what’s likely to be a peculiar vertical creepfest over there.

  A full moon still a little lopsided and not yet at its zenith, and her girlhood nemesis, doorman Patrick McTiernan, on duty at the gate, wearing a dark blue uniform with The Deseret name in gold, along with gold chevrons hash-marking each sleeve, gold braid epaulets, a gold fourragère drooping over his right shoulder. His own name above the left-hand breast pocket. In gold. Maybe this is a Hallowe’en getup. Or else years have passed, enough of them for Patrick to pick up the extra hash marks, plus the suave chops of a Distinguished Older Gentleman. He does not, of course, recognize Maxine, either from back in the day or as a faceless pool guest, and observing that she is not a group of drunken teenagers, waves her on in.

  The Singhs are up on the tenth floor, the elevators are all either busy or broken down from overloading, and Maxine, having heard fitness-benefit rumors, is OK with taking the stairs. The somber old landmark is certainly jumping tonight. Stairwells and corridors are thronged with all manner of pint-size Statues of Liberty, Uncle Sams, firefolks, cops and GIs in fatigues, not to mention Shreks, Bob the Builders, SpongeBobs and Patricks and Sandy the Squirrels, Queen Amidalas, Harry Potter characters in Quidditch goggles, Gryffindor robes, and witch hats. Apartment doors are all wide open, and inside you can hear a range of sound tracks, including Steely Dan’s “Ain’t Never Gonna Do It Without the Fez On.” The tenantry have as usual gone all out, spending thousands on haunted-house effects, black light and fog generators, arena sound, animatronic zombies as well as live actors working for insultingly less than scale, treat assortments from Dean & DeLuca and Zabar’s, and gift bags stuffed with high-end digital tchotchkes, Hermès scarves, and free airplane tickets to places like Tahiti and Gstaad.

  Up at the Singh residence, Prabhnoor and Amrita are dressed as Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Rubber masks and everything. Prabhnoor is handing out cigars. Amrita, in a blue dress of course, is holding a dead karaoke mike and sweetly singing “I Did It My Way.” They seem like perfectly pleasant people. Everybody is drunk, mostly on vodka, judging from the empties piled up around and behind the bar, though catering staff dressed as Battle Droids are also going around with trays of champagne, plus filet mignon canapés and lobster sandwiches. Vyrva, done up as a Pikachu Beanie Baby, it figures, approaches Maxine gushing, “What a wonderful costume! You look just like a big, grown-up lady!”