Bleeding Edge

by Pynchon, Thomas

“Cultural exchange, I notice they’ve got you playing Metal Gear Solid these days.”

  “Better than the TV garbage I used to find you and Brooke staring at.”

  “Yeah, you really hated all those cop shows. If you caught us watching one, you’d turn it off and ground us.”

  “It’s like they’ve gotten any better? What happened to private eyes, lovable criminals? lost in all that post-sixties propaganda, Orwell’s boot on the face, endless prosecution and enforcement, cop cop cop. Why shouldn’t we want to keep you girls away from that, protect your sensitive minds? See how much good it did. Your sister the Likudnik, you chasing down poor schmucks who’re only trying to pay the rent.”

  “Maybe TV back then was brainwashing, but it could never happen today. Nobody’s in control of the Internet.”

  “You serious? Believe that while you still can, Sunshine. You know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours? It started back during the Cold War, when the think tanks were full of geniuses plotting nuclear scenarios. Attaché cases and horn-rims, every appearance of scholarly sanity, going in to work every day to imagine all the ways the world was going to end. Your Internet, back then the Defense Department called it DARPAnet, the real original purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and control after a nuclear exchange with the Soviets.”

  “What.”

  “Sure, the idea was to set up enough nodes so no matter what got knocked out, they could always reassemble some kind of network by connecting up what was left.”

  Here in the capital of insomnia, it is hours yet from dawn, and this is what innocent father-daughter conversations can drift into. Beneath these windows they can hear the lawless soundscape of the midnight street, breakage, screaming, vehicle exhaust, New York laughter, too loud, too trivial, brakes applied too late before some gut-wrenching thud. When Maxine was little, she thought of this nightly uproar as trouble too far away to matter, like sirens. Now it’s always too close, part of the deal.

  “Were you ever in on that Cold War stuff, Pop?”

  “For me? Too technical. But people at Bronx Science I ran with . . . Crazy Yale Jacobian, nice kid, we used to go downtown, make a little change playing Ping-Pong. He went off to MIT, got a job with the RAND Corporation, moved to California, We lost touch.”

  “Maybe he didn’t work in the blowing–up-the-world department.”

  “I know, I’m a judgmental person, sue me. You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives.”

  “Pop.”

  “Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”

  Maxine goes sorting among semiexploded kernels for what little popcorn is left. “But history goes on, as you always like to remind us. The Cold War ended, right? the Internet kept evolving, away from military, into civilian—nowadays it’s chat rooms, the World Wide Web, shopping online, the worst you can say is it’s maybe getting a little commercialized. And look how it’s empowering all these billions of people, the promise, the freedom.”

  Ernie begins channel-surfing, as if in annoyance. “Call it freedom, it’s based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy’s wrist radio? it’ll be everywhere, the rubes’ll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. Terrific. What they dream about at the Pentagon, worldwide martial law.”

  “So this is where I get my paranoia from.”

  “Ask your kids. Look at Metal Gear Solid—who do the terrorists kidnap? Who’s Snake trying to rescue? The head of DARPA. Think about that, huh?”

  “Pop.”

  “Don’t believe us, ask your friends in the FBI, you know, those kind policemen with their NCIC database? Fifty, a hundred million files? They’ll confirm, I’m sure.”

  She understands this for the opening it apparently is. “Listen, Pop. I have to tell you . . .” Out it comes. The unrelenting vacuum of Windust’s departure. Edited for grandparental anxieties, natch, like no mention of Ziggy’s krav maga episode.

  Ernie hears her through, “Saw something in the paper. Mysterious death, they described him as a think-tank pundit.”

  “They would. Hit man, they say anything about that? Assassin?”

  “Nope. But I guess FBI, CIA, that wouldn’t rule out assassin.”

  “Pop, the petty-fraud community I get to work with, we have our own losers’ code, like loyalty, respect, don’t snitch till you have to. But that gang, they’re out shopping each other before breakfast, Windust was living on borrowed time.”

  “You think he was done in by his own? I would’ve guessed revenge, all the seriously pissed-off Third Worlders this guy must have collected along the way.”

  “You saw him before I did, you passed me his card, you could’ve said something.”

  “More than what I was saying already? When you were little, I always tried to keep you as much as I could from joining in on all the brainless adoration of cops, but after a point you make your own mistakes.” Then, tentative as she’s ever seen him, “Maxeleh, you didn’t . . . ?”

  Looking more at her knees than at her father, she pretends to explain, “All these penny-ante con artists, I never once cut slack for any of them, but the first major-league war criminal I run into, I’m starstruck, he tortures and murders people, always gets away with it, am I repelled, shocked? no, I’m thinking, he can turn. He can still turn away, nobody’s that bad, he has to have a conscience, there’s time, he can make up for it, except now he can’t—”

  “Sh. Shh. It’s all right, kiddo,” reaching diffidently for her face. No, this doesn’t let her off the hook, she knows she’s being less than honest, hoping Ernie, either to protect himself or in true innocence she can’t bring herself to break, will only take it literally. Which he does. “You were always like this. I kept waiting for you to give it up, let it go, turn as cold as the rest of us, praying all the time you wouldn’t. You’d come back from school, history classes, some new nightmare, the Indians, the Holocaust, crimes I hardened my heart against years ago, taught them but didn’t feel them so much anymore, and you’d be so angry, passionately hurting, your little hands in fists, how could anybody do these things, how could they live with themselves? What was I supposed to say? We handed you the tissues and said, it’s grown-ups, some act that way, you don’t have to be like them, you can be better. Best we could ever come up with, pathetic, but you know what, I never found out what we should have said. Think I’m happy about that?”

  “The boys ask me the same things now, I don’t want to see them turn into their classmates, cynical smart-mouthed little bastards—but what happens if Ziggy and Otis start caring too much, Pop, this world, it could destroy them, so easily.”

  “No alternative, you trust them, trust yourself, and the same for Horst, who seems to be back in the picture now . . .”

  “For a while now, actually. Maybe never out of it.”

  “Well, as far as this other guy, better somebody else should deal with the flowers, the eulogies. Like Joe Hill always sez, don’t mourn, organize. And a word of fashion advice from your stylish old man here, wear some color, stay away from too much black.”

  38

  So down at Shawn’s next morning is of course where she lets h
erself disorganize all to pieces, not with her parents or husband or dear friend Heidi, no—in front of some idiot-surfant whose worst idea of a bad day is one-foot-high waves.

  “So you . . . did have feelings for this guy.”

  “Have feelings,” California gobbledygook, translate please, no, wait, don’t. “Shawn? OK you were right, I was wrong, you know what, fuck you, how much do I still owe you, we should settle up because I’m never coming back here again.”

  “Our first fight.”

  “Our last.” For some reason she doesn’t move.

  “Maxi, it’s time. I reach this point with everybody. What you need to deal with now is The Wisdom.”

  “Great, I’m at the dentist here.”

  Shawn darkens the blinds, puts on a tape of Moroccan trance music, lights a joss stick. “Are you ready?”

  “No. Shawn—”

  “Here it is—The Wisdom. Prepare to copy.” She stays on her meditation mat despite herself. Breathing deeply, Shawn announces, “‘Is what it is is . . . is it is what it is.’” Allowing a silence to fall, lengthy but maybe not as deep as the breaths he’s taking. “Got that?”

  “Shawn . . .”

  “That’s The Wisdom, repeat it back.”

  Sighing pointedly, she complies, adding, “Depending of course what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.”

  • • •

  RIGHT, SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT. What has the alternative ever been? Reclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency’s winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which “fraud” is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody’s towering delusions about being exempt . . .

  Each day she sees Ziggy and Otis get through safely is another thousandth of a point added to her confidence level that maybe nobody’s really after them, maybe nobody holds her responsible for whatever Windust did, maybe Lester Traipse’s probable murderer, Gabriel Ice, is not projecting evil energy into the heart of her family by way of Avi Deschler, who is looking more and more like the kid in the teen horror movie who turns out to be possessed. “Nah,” Brooke blithely, “he’s probably experimenting. Some Goth thing maybe.” Oddly these days Maxine finds herself zeroing in on her sister, understanding that among all the signs and symptoms of city pathology, Brooke historically has been her best indication, her high-sensitivity toxic detector, and she is intrigued now to notice that into Brooke’s demeanor some strange anti-kvetchiness has come lately creeping, some willingness to let go of the old obsessions about people and purchases, some . . . glow? Aahh! No, it couldn’t be. Could it?

  “All right, so let’s have it, when are you due?”

  “Hmm? ‘What do I do’? You mean like all day or . . . Oh. Oh, Maxi the Taxi, you tumbled already? I only told Avi last night.”

  “Sisterhood is extrasensory, watch more horror movies, you’ll get educated. How is Avi with this?”

  “Awesome?”

  Not quite how Avi would put it. He’s now making a weekly practice of slipping in the delivery gate around the corner and past Daytona’s headshaking scrutiny to tell Maxine his sad hashslingrz stories, as if she has an arsenal of superpowers to call on.

  His workplace has become a rat’s nest of empire building, turf defense, careerism, backstabbing, betrayal, and snitchcraft. What Avi once imagined as simple paranoia about the competition is in fact systemic by now, with more enemies inside than out. He finds himself actually using the word “tribal.” Also,

  “Mind if I use your toilet a minute?”

  Which with Avi has become a Frequently Asked Question. Plus the red eyes with the half-closed eyelids, runny nose, dopey and scattered conversation, buzzers do begin to sound. One day Maxine gives him a short lead, then follows him out down the hall and into the toilet, where she finds her brother-in-law with a computer-duster nozzle up his nose, committing propellant abuse.

  “Avi, really.”

  “It’s air in a can, harmless.”

  “Read the label. Some planet where the atmosphere is fluoroethane gas, ‘air,’ maybe. Meanwhile, back on earth, you should remember you’ll be a patafamiliarass before you know it here.”

  “Thanks. I should be totally euphoric, right? Guess what, I’m not, I’m anxious, I know I need to find another job, Ice has me by the balls, how do I pay off a mortgage, support a family, without a paycheck?”

  “All Ice cares about,” there-there as usual, “is the lunchhooks of others in the company tambourine, with nondisclosure a distant second. If you can convince him you’re no threat in either area, he’ll go out and headhunt you the perfect dream job himself.”

  • • •

  BUT SHE CAN’T stay out of DeepArcher. Since it went open source and welcomed in half the planet, none of them who they say they are, acquiring a set of option menus the size of the Internal Revenue Code, anybody is likely to be wandering around the site, herds of tourist-idle, cop-curious, the end of life below the spiders as we’ve known it, ROM hackers, homebrewers, RPG heretics, continually unwriting and overwriting, disallowing, deprecating, newly defining an ever-growing inventory of contributions to graphics, instructions, encryption, escape . . . the word is out, and it seems they’ve been waiting years, such is the what’s called pent-up demand. Maxine is able to settle in among the throngs, invisible and at ease. Not addicted exactly, though one day she happens to be back out in meatspace for a second, looks at the clock on the wall, does the math, figures three and a half hours she can’t account for. Luckily there’s nobody but herself to ask what she’s down there looking for, because the answer’s so pathetically obvious.

  Yes, she’s aware DeepArcher doesn’t do resurrections, thanks for pointing it out. But something odd has been going on with Windust’s dossier, the one she copied onto her computer shortly after Marvin brought the thumb drive it was on. She’s been sneaking moments away to look at it, not, lately, without twinges of colonorectal fear, because each time she consults it now, there’s been new material added. As if—a breeze given her generations-old firewalls—somebody has been hacking in whenever they feel like it.

  “Consider the recently advanced theory,” for example, “that subject, while not a double agent in the classic sense, may have been pursuing a well-defined personal agenda. According to recently downgraded files, this may have begun as early as 1983, when subject allegedly expedited the escape of a Guatemalan national, of interest to the Archivo as an insurgent element and to whom subject was married at the time.” And similar updates, all strangely nonnegative when not outright eulogy material. For whose eyes would stuff like this be intended? For Maxine’s Only? who would benefit from knowing that twenty years ago Windust was still capable of a good deed, in saving his then-wife Xiomara from the fascist murderers he was technically working for?

  The first author to suspect here would be Windust himself, trying to look good, except this is insane because Windust is dead. Either it’s Beltway tricksters out on maneuvers or the Internet has become a medium of communication between the worlds. Maxine begins to catch sight of screen presences she knows she ought to be able to name, dim, ephemeral, each receding away into a single anonymous pixel. Maybe not. Much more likely that Windust remains unlit, terribly elsewhere.

  Even though its creators claim not to Do Metaphysical, that option in DeepArcher remains open, alongside more secular explanations—so when she runs unexpectedly into Lester Traipse, instead of assuming it’s a Lester impersonator with an agenda, or a bot preprogrammed with dialogue for all occasions, she sees no harm in treating him as a departed soul. />
  Just to get it out of the way, “So! Lester. Who did the deed?”

  “Interesting. First thing most people want to know is what’s it like being dead.”

  “OK, what’s it—”

  “Ha, ha, trick question, I’m not dead, I’m a refugee from my life. As for whodunit, I’m supposed to know? I arranged over the phone to drop a shrink-wrapped cube of cash as a first installment for Ice underneath The Deseret pool at midnight, next thing I know, I’m here wandering around with my spectral thumb in my metaphysical ass.”

  “Igor Dashkov said you talked about trying to seek some kind of asylum in DeepArcher. Is this who I’m really talking to now, Igor? Misha, Grisha?”

  “Don’t think so, I say ‘the’ too much.”

  “All right, all right. Assuming there’s still an edge somewhere. And beyond it a void. If you’ve been out there—”

  “Sorry. Just a mail-room scrambler here, remember? You want prophecy, sure, I can do that, but it’ll all be bullshit.”

  “How about at least letting me bring you back up. Whoever you are.”

  “What. Up to the surface?”

  “Closer anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” She doesn’t. “If it’s really you, Lester, I hate to think of you being lost down here.”

  “Lost down here is the whole point. Take a good look at the surface Web sometime, tell me it isn’t a sorry picture. Big favor you’d be doing me, Maxine.”

  • • •

  MIGHT AS WELL BE HOMECOMING weekend down here. Next thing she knows, here’s who but her very own Ziggy and Otis. With a whole expanding universe to choose from, among the global torrents somehow the boys have located graphics files for a version of NYC as it was before 11 September 2001, before Ms. Cheung’s bleak announcement about real and make-believe, reformatted now as the personal city of Zigotisopolis, rendered in a benevolently lighted palette taken from old-school color processes like the ones you find on picture postcards of another day. Somebody somewhere in the world, enjoying that mysterious exemption from time which produces most Internet content, has been patiently coding together these vehicles and streets, this city that can never be. The old Hayden Planetarium, the pre-Trump Commodore Hotel, upper-Broadway cafeterias that have not existed for years, smorgasbords and bars offering free lunches, where regulars hang around the door to the kitchen so they can get first shot at whatever’s being carried in, city-summertime movie theaters with signs in blue display type bordered by frost and icicles promising IT’S COOL INSIDE, Madison Square Garden still at Fiftieth and Eighth Avenue and Jack Dempsey’s still across the street, and in the old Times Square, before the hookers, before the drugs, arcades like Fascination, pinball machines so classic now that only overly compensated yups can afford to buy them, and recording booths where half a dozen of you can jam inside and cover the latest Eddie Fisher single on acetate. The retro machinery in the streets, though undefined as to makes and years, is plentiful and ever on the move. Ernie and Elaine, as probable sources for all this, would be screaming with recognition.