Bleeding Edge (35 page)

“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 THE
NYC 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 . . .”

“Wish I could be more specific.”

According to the flash-drive dossier Marvin brought around last summer, Windust’s portfolio is stuffed with privatized state assets all across the Third World. She imagines a few blessed hectares down in the trackless retrocolonial, someplace “safe,” whatever that means, off the surveillance matrix, spared somehow from U.S.-engineered regime changes, children with AKs, deforestation, storms, famines, and other
late-capitalist planetary insults . . . with somebody he can trust, some ultimate Tonto, keeping an eye on its perimeters for him as the years unroll . . . In the lives variously reported of Windust, are loyalties like that possible?

She should have tumbled before this to the peculiar lightlessness in his eyes today, a deficit beyond secular fatigue. “Retirement” is a euphemism, and somehow she doubts he’s up here on any midlife cardio-fitness program. This is coming more and more to feel like a checklist of winding-up chores he’s running through before moving on.

In which case, Maxine, enough with the date-night ditzing around, she can feel a cold draft through some failing seam in the fabric of the day, and there is no payoff here worth any further investment beyond, “Let’s see, you had how many, three? Gigaccinos, and then the bagels . . .”

“Three bagels, plus the Denver omelet deluxe, you had the plain toasted . . .”

Out on the sidewalk, neither can find a formula that will let them separate with any grace. After another half minute of silence, they end up nodding and turning in different directions.

On the way home she passes the neighborhood firehouse. They’re in working on one of the trucks. Maxine recognizes a guy she sees all the time in the Fairway buying huge amounts of food. They smile and wave. Cute kid. Under different circumstances . . .

Of which as usual there are not enough. She threads among the daily bunches of flowers on the sidewalk, which will be cleared in a while. The list of firefighters here who were lost on 11 September is kept back someplace more intimate, out of the public face, anybody wants to see it they can ask, but sometimes it shows more respect not to put such things out on a billboard.

If it isn’t the pay, isn’t the glory, and sometimes you don’t come back, then what is it? What makes these guys choose to go in, work twenty-four hour shifts and then keep working, keep throwing
themselves into those shaky ruins, torching through steel, bringing people to safety, recovering parts of others, ending up sick, beat up by nightmares, disrespected, dead?

Whatever it is, would Windust even recognize it? How far has he journeyed from working realities? What sanctuary has he sought, and what, if any, given?