Текст книги "Bleeding Edge"

Автор книги: Thomas Pynchon

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 31 страниц)

“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 might 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!”

“How’re the kids making out so far?”

“Pretty good, we may have to rent a U-Haul. Justin’s going around with them, working door-to-door. Some Hallowe’en, huh?”

“Yeah. Can’t understand why I’m feeling all this class hostility.”

“This? next to the Alley a couple years ago? the average start-up party? this is a footnote, my dear. Commentary.”

“You’ve been in New York too long, Vyrva, you’re starting to talk like my father.”

“Justin’s got his mobile, you want me to call and—”

“It’s The Deseret, off-planet, likely to be roaming charges here nobody can afford, I’ll just cruise around, thanks.”

Out into this overdue-for-exorcism building she has never found even marginally likable. Lining the streetlike corridors, where a hundred years ago pony-drawn delivery wagons, cranked up here on massive hydraulic lifts, brought directly to the doorsills of tenants cans of milk, bushels of flowers, cases of champagne, tonight Maxine finds elaborate mock-ups of Camp Crystal Lake, mummies’ tombs, Frankenstein’s Art Deco lab all in black and white. Tenant hospitality is you’d have to say proactive. Before long, without so much as raising an eyebrow, she finds herself schlepping sacks full of Hallowe’en plunder too heavy for a child even to lift.

As the evening advances, so does the median age of the crowd of walk-ins, with much more emphasis on eye makeup, glitter, fishnet hose, axes in skulls, fake blood. It is inevitable that somebody should be masquerading as Osama bin Laden, and here in fact are two of them, whom Maxine recognizes sooner than she wants to as Misha and Grisha.

“We were going to go as World Trade Center,” Misha explains, “but decided OBL would be even more offensive.”

“So how come you’re not down in the Village someplace, where the TV coverage is?”

They exchange a Can-we-trust-her look.

“It’s for a reason,” she guesses, “private not public.”

“It’s fuckin Hallowe’en, right?” sez Grisha.

“Paying respects,” explains Misha.

To whom? Here at The Deseret, of course, to whom else but Lester Traipse, the real Hallowe’en ghost tonight, Lester the jive-ass ballistic blade victim with the unfinished business, doomed to wander those century-old corridors until accounts are balanced, or for eternity, whichever comes first. Lester was a creature of Silicon Alley, Alley to the core, and down the Alley the stories are never that short let alone sweet, down there it’s not only a mediagenic neighborhood of dreams recently faded but also the latest in a tradition of New York Alleys It Is In Fact Best To Avoid, shadows full of mentally unstable voices, echoes off the masonry, cries of city desolation, metallic noises less innocent than ancient trash cans in the wind.

“You guys were friends with Lester? Did business?” Or to put it another way, what earthly connection . . . unless that’s the point, and the connection is anything but earthly. It’s fuckin Hallowe’en.

“Lester was fellow podonok,” Misha blushing a little, as if embarrassed at how lame this sounds, “friend of scumbag hackers everywhere.”

“Including,” a thought occurring to her, “the former Soviet Union. Maybe this was even some secret-police business?”

Misha and Grisha begin to giggle, watching each other’s face to see, as it turns out, who is going to slap whom first back into sobriety and respect for the departed. A prison thing.

“You two,” noodging cautiously, “really did attend that Civil Hackers’ School in Moscow, didn’t you?”

“Umnik Academy!” cries Misha, “those guys, no, uh-uh!”

“Not us! We’re only chainiki!”

“From Bobryusk!” Misha nodding vigorously.

“Don’t even know how to sit facing keyboard!”

“Not that I mean to pry, it’s only that Lester may have fallen afoul of Gabriel Ice, who as you must know is practically synonymous with U.S. security arrangements. So Russian intelligence would naturally have an interest in his activities.”

“He owns this building,” Grisha sort of blurts, getting a look from his coadjutor. “If he’s here tonight, maybe we’ll run into him. Him or one of his people. Maybe they won’t like seeing Osama twins. Who knows? Little Mortal Kombat maybe.”

Note to self. Noodge Igor, who must know what the fuck this is all about. Scribbled illegibly on a virtual Post-it, stuck on a little-frequented brain lobe it presently falls off of, but there for marginal nagging value at least.

A flamboyance of French maids, street hookers, and baby dominatrices, none of then in junior high yet, comes jittering up the stairs. “Look! What’d I tell you?”

“OhmyGod?”

“Eeew, creepy?”

Misha and Grisha beam, puts their hands on their hearts, and bow slightly. “Tha tso kalan yee?”

“Tha jumat ta zey?”

Sending the young ladies into rewind, all in a frenzy, back down the stairs, Misha and Grisha calling genially after them, “Wa alaikum u ssalam!”

“That’s Hebrew?” sez Maxine.

“Pashto. Wishing them peace, also how old are you, do you go to mosque regularly.”

“Here come my kids.”

Ziggy’s Empire State Building outfit has acquired spray-painted graffiti, and somebody has slipped a miniature souvenir Red Sox cap onto King Kong’s head. Otis’s hair is still defiantly vertical, and like the gent he is, he’s schlepping Fiona’s bag along with his own.

“Fiona, nice getup, help me out, you’re supposed to be—”

“Misty?”

“The girl in Pokémon. And this is—”

Fiona’s friend Imba, who’s got up as Misty’s chronically bummed-out companion Psyduck.

“We flipped for it,” Fiona sez.

“Misty’s a gym leader,” Imba explains, “but she has impatience issues. Psyduck has powers, but such unhappiness.” Synchronized, she and Fiona grab the sides of their heads like S. Z. Sakall and utter the characteristic “Psy, psy, psy.” It occurs to Maxine that Psyduck, though Japanese, could be Jewish.

“Good evening, Tech Support, how may I abuse you?” Justin has come tonight as Dilbert’s power-freak dog, Dogbert, wearing indigo shades instead of clear lenses. Maxine introduces everybody.

“You are the Justin McElmo?” First time Maxine has heard either of these goons say “the.”

“Don’t know, there’s probably more of em out there.”

“Of DeepArcher,” Grisha amplifies.

“Just a couple of Game Boy fans,” Maxine mutters.

“You guys have been down there? Since how long?” Justin not alarmed so much as curious.

“Since 11 September maybe? Before then, was much harder to hack in. Then suddenly, day of attack, gets easier. Later, gets impossible again.”

“But you’re still getting in.”

“Can’t stay away!”

“Pizdatchye,” kvells Grisha, “always some new story, new graphics, different each time.”

“Everything evolving,” Misha sez. “Tell us, Justin. Did you design it that way?”

“To evolve?” Justin looking surprised. “No, it was only supposed to be the one thing, like, timeless? A refuge. History-free is what Lucas and I were hoping for. Now you guys are seeing, what?”

“Usual govno,” sez Grisha. “Politics, markets, expeditions, asskicking.”

“Not gamer scenarios, you understand. Down there we cannot be gamers, we must be travelers.”

A good enough basis to exchange business cards.

Just before moving on to further shenanigans, the torpedoes draw Maxine aside. “DeepArcher—you know it too. You’ve been there.”

“Um,” nothing to lose, “see, it’s only, like, code?”

“No! Maxine, no!” with what could be either naïve faith or raving insanity, “it’s real place!”

“It is asylum, no matter, you can be poorest, no home, lowest of jailbirds, obizhenka, condemned to die—”

“Dead—”

“DeepArcher will always take you in, keep you safe.”

“Lester,” Grisha whispers, eyes angling upstairs toward the pool, “Lester’s soul. You understand? Stingers on roof. That.” A head gesture out into the All Saints night, toward far downtown where the Trade Center used to stand, past the invisible swarming hundreds of thousands of masked celebrants in streets lighted and semi-lit, out to the reeking hole with the Cold War name at the lower edge of the island.

Maxine nods, pretending to see what she can’t see. “Thank you. Go easy, guys.” She collects Ziggy and Otis, who are already scarfing down Teuscher truffles like they’re Hershey Kisses, and they make their way out the forbidding portals of The Deseret and homeward.

“Top of the evening to yese,” calls Patrick McTiernan.

Yeah and where was all that leprechaun jive when she could’ve used it.

Horst is still awake, now watching Anthony Hopkins in The Mikhail Baryshnikov Story, intensely absorbed, a spoonful of Urban Jumble ice cream poised a foot away from his mouth and dribbling onto his shoe.

“Dad, Dad! Snap out of it!”

“Will you look at this,” blinks Horst. “Ol’ Hannibal dancin up a storm here.”

•   •   •

AFTER HER HALLOWE’EN ANTHRO EXPEDITION, Heidi has come back a changed person. “Children of all ages enacting the comprehensive pop-cultural moment. Everything collapsed into the single present tense, all in parallel. Mimesis and enactment.” She may’ve been having a little incoherence after a while. Nowhere did she see a perfect copy of anything. Not even people who said, “Oh, I’m just going as myself” were authentic replicas of themselves.

“It’s depressing. I thought Comic-Con was peculiar, but this was Truth. Everything out there just a mouseclick away. Imitation is no longer possible. Hallowe’en is over. I never thought people could get too wised up. What’ll happen to us all?”

“And because you tend to be a blamer . . .”

“Oh I blame the fuckin Internet. No question.”

•   •   •

THE PHONE CALL TO IGOR isn’t one she’ s looking forward to. Whatever the karmic balance is outstanding between him and Gabriel Ice, she was deliberately avoiding it till Misha and Grisha, noodges from beyond the daytime envelope she would much rather keep inside, made this impossible anymore. Plus which, the happy torpedoes have now it seems been stalking hashslingrz for hidden reasons, and it probably behooves her to find out what, though she isn’t expecting much in the way of details.

Igor is chirpy. Too chirpy. Acting like he’s been waiting for this call forever.

“Look, Igor, it’s not as if anybody is paying me to find out who did Lester—”

“You know who did it. So do I. Cops will not act. It becomes matter of . . .” Is he trying to get her to say it?

“Justice.”

“Restoration.”

“He’s dead. What’s to restore?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I would indeed. Especially if it’s KGB business and you and your posse are embedded assets.”

A silence she has to categorize as amused. “They don’t say KGB anymore, they say FSB, they say SVU. Since Putin, KGB means old guys in government.”

“Whatever. Ice was deep into funding anti-jihadists. Russia has its own Islamic issues. Is it so crazy to imagine the two countries cooperating? Getting upset when Lester started collecting unauthorized bonuses?”

“Maxine. No. It wasn’t only because of money.”

“Excuse me? What then?”

He waits a fraction of a beat too long. “Lester saw too much.”

She tries to remember that last time she and Lester talked, in Eternal September. There must have been a tell she missed, a lapse, something. “If he understood what he was seeing, wouldn’t he have told somebody?”

“He tried to. He called me on my mobile. Night before they got him. I couldn’t pick up. Left long message on voice mail.”

“He had your mobile number.”

“Everybody does. Cost of doing business.”

“What was the message?”

“Pretty crazy shit. Black Escalades trying to run him off LIE. Phone calls to wife, threats to kids. Me, my people, he thought we might have connections. Help broker some understanding.”

“As in . . . ?”

“He forgets about what he saw, they don’t kill him. Good luck.”

“And what he saw . . . ?”

“He was crazy by then. They already had his sanity. They didn’t have to kill him. One more thing which must be restored. You want secular cause and effect, but here, I’m sorry, is where it all goes off books. Lester said, ‘Only choice I have left is DeepArcher.’ I heard about DeepArcher site from padonki, so I have rough idea what it means, but not what he’s talking about.”

Sanctuary. While she was being dogfucked by one of his murderers.

•   •   •

THE DAY OF THENYC MARATHON, seven weeks into post-atrocity, the fearful day still reverberating, what you could call a patriotic atmosphere, thousands of runners come out in memory of 11 September and its victims in defiance of any chance it’ll happen again, security super tight, Verrazano Bridge deeply guarded, all harbor traffic suspended, nothing visible in the skies overhead but helicopters keeping industrious watch . . .

Around midday, headed for the weekly flea market at a nearby middle school, Maxine begins to notice, first one by one, then in a stream, yuppies in Mylar capes—the superhero business suddenly gone low-rent here—beginning to filter over from the park. By the corner of 77th and Columbus, it’s grown into a mob scene. Whooping and hollering and hugging and flags waving everyplace.

Sitting exhausted on the sidewalk against a wall with a row of other runners recovering from the event their shiny official wraps announce they have just run, here seems to be Windust.

First time face-to-face since that romantic evening down on the far West Side. “Don’t tell anybody you saw me,” still a little short of breath, “it’s a vice, especially this soon after eleven September, too much mortality around already, why go out of the way to embrace even more? And yet,” waving around wearily, “here we all are.” Unless he bought his souvenir cape from somebody down the street and Maxine’s in for another setup here.

“Too deep for me.”

A flirtatious smirk. “Yes, I remember.”

“Then again, sometimes a centimeter is way too much. It’s all right, you’re having some chemicals from the running. Can you get up yet? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” Of course, Maxine, why not, maybe a cheese danish also? Is she crazy, this is the last thing she should be doing. But the Jewish Mother, sitting silent in the dark, has suddenly chosen this moment to jump up, switch on the tasteful lamp from Scully & Scully, and blindside Maxine into yet another shameful display of eppes-essen solicitude. For a second she hopes Windust is too exhausted. But fitness prevails, and he’s on his feet, and before she can think up an excuse they are sitting in a retro lunchwagon on Columbus, dating from the eighties when the neighborhood was hot, now more of interest to tourists who are into subcultural history. The place today is jittering with recaffeinating marathoners. Nobody is talking too loud, however, so the chances for conversation are at least fifty-fifty, for a change.

What kind of ex, she wonders, would Windust ever have qualified as? ex-heavy date, ex-mistake, ex-quickie, maybe just x for unknown? By now she ought to be well into pretending none of it ever happened, instead here’s this lurid Day-Glo folder icon blinking at her, Unbalanced Accounts.

Crowds outside push past the window screaming congratulations, laughing too loud, stuffing their faces, flourishing their capes. On triumph’s home screen, Windust is a solitary pixel of discontent. “Guess they showed those rugriders, huh. Look at them. An army of the clueless, who think they own 11 September.”

“Hey, why shouldn’t they, they bought it from you, we all did, you took our own precious sorrow, processed it, sold it back to us like any other product. Ask you something? When it happened? The Day Everything Changed, where were you?”

“In my little cubicle. Reading Tacitus.” The warrior-scholar routine. “Who makes a case that Nero didn’t set fire to Rome so he could blame it on the Christians.”

“Sounds familiar, somehow.”

“You people want to believe this was all a false-flag caper, some invisible superteam, forging the intel, faking the Arabic chatter, controlling air traffic, military communications, civilian news media—everything coordinating without a hitch or a malfunction, the whole tragedy set up to look like a terror attack. Please. My wised-up civilian heartbreaker. Guess what. Nobody in the business is that good.”

“You’re saying I don’t need to get too excited about this anymore? Well. Ain’t that a relief. Meantime you people have what you want, your War on Terror, war without end, and job security up the ol’ wazoo.”

“For somebody maybe. Not me.”

“Goonsquad skills no longer in demand? Aw.”

He looks downward, at his abs, his dick, his shoes, some vintage Mizuno Waves in an eye-assaulting color scheme the years have not been kind to. “Retirement looming, basically.”

“There’s exit options for you guys? Quit kidding.”

“Well . . . considering what the exits are, we do try to make private arrangements instead.”

“Saving up your spare change, Florida Keys, little skiff with an ice chest full of Dos Equis sort of thing . . .”