Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

One day, on the express headed downtown from 72nd, a local happens to leave the station at the same time, and as the tracks at the end of the platform draw closer together, there’s a slow zoom in onto one particular window of the other train, one face in this window, too clearly meant to invite Maxine’s attention. She’s tall, darkly exotic, good posture, carrying a shoulder bag she now briefly unlatches her gaze from Maxine’s for long enough to reach inside of and pull out an envelope, which she holds up to the window, then jerks her head toward the next express stop, which will be 42nd. Maxine’s train meantime accelerating and carrying her slowly past.

If this is a tarot card with a name, it’s The Unwelcome Messenger.

Maxine gets off at Times Square and waits under a flight of exit stairs. The local rolls and hisses in, the woman approaches. Silently Maxine is beckoned down into the long pedestrian tunnel that runs over to the Port of Authority, on whose tiled walls are posted the latest word on movies about to come out, albums, toys for yups, fashion, everything you need to be a wised-up urban know-it-all is posted on the walls of this tunnel. It occurs to Maxine that if hell was a bus station in New York, this is what ALL HOPE ABANDON would look like.

The envelope doesn’t have to get closer to her snoot than a foot and a half before there it is, the unmistakable odor of regret, bad judgment, unproductive mourning—9:30 Cologne For Men. Maxine is taken by a chill. Nick Windust has staggered forth again from the grave, hungry, unappeasable, and she doubts, whatever’s in the envelope, that she needs to see it.

There’s writing on the outside,

Here’s the money I owe you. Sorry it isn’t the earrings.

Adios.

Half glaring at the envelope, expecting only the ghost outline of the wad that used to be there, Maxine is surprised to find instead the full amount, in twenties. Plus some modest vig, which is not like him. Was not. This being New York, how many explanations can there be for why it hasn’t been made off with? Likely it’s to do with the messenger…

Oh. Seeing the other woman’s eyes begin to narrow, enough to notice, Maxine makes a judgment call. “Xiomara?”

The woman’s smile, in this bright noisy flow of city indifference, comes like a beer on the house in a bar where nobody knows you.

“You don’ t need to tell me how you were able to contact me.”

“Oh. They know how to find people.”

Xiomara has been up at Columbia all morning, chairing some kind of seminar on Central American issues. Accounts for her being on the local maybe, but little else. There are always secular backup stories, some comm link in Xiomara’s shoulder bag, not yet on the market outside the surveillance community… but at the same time there’s no shame in going for a magical explanation, so Maxine lets it ride. “And right now, you’re headed for…”

“Well, actually the Brooklyn Bridge. Do you know how we’d get there from here?”

“Take the shuttle over to the Lex, ride down on the Number 6, and what’s with the ‘we,’” Maxine wishes to know also.

“Whenever I come to New York, I like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. If you have time, I thought you could, too.”

Jewish-mother defaults switch in. “You eat breakfast?”

“Hungarian Pastry Shop.”

“So we get over in Brooklyn, we’ll eat again.”

Maxine can’t say what she might’ve been expecting—braids, silver jewelry, long skirts, bare feet—well, surprise, here instead is this polished international beauty in a power suit, not some clueless eighties hand-me-down either, but narrower in the shoulders the way they’re supposed to be, longer jacket, serious shoes. Perfect makeup job. Maxine must look like she’s been out washing the car.

They start off cautiously enough, politely, before either of them knows it, it’s turning into morning talk-show TV. Had Lunch with Ex-Husband’s Ex-Girlfriend.

“So the money, you got it from Dotty, the widow in D.C., correct?”

“One of a thousand chores she suddenly finds on her list.”

And it’s also possible, given the depths of Beltway connivance running parallel to and just behind the visible universe, that Xiomara is up here today at not so much Dotty’s behest as that of elements interested in how doggedly Maxine’s apt to go after the truth behind Windust’s passing.

“You and Dotty are in touch.”

“We met a couple of years ago. I was in Washington with a delegation.”

“Your— Her husband was there?”

“Not likely. She swore me to secrecy, we met for lunch at the Old Ebbitt, noisy, Clinton people all milling around, both of us picking at salads, trying to ignore Larry Summers at a distant booth, no problem for her, but I felt like I was auditioning for something.”

“And the topic under discussion, of course…”

“Two different husbands, really. Back when I knew him, he was a person she wouldn’t have recognized, an entry-level kid who didn’t know how much trouble his soul was in.”

“And by the time she got to him…”

“Maybe he didn’t need quite so much help.”

Classic New York conversation, you’re having lunch, you talk about having lunch someplace else. “So you ladies had a nice chat.”

“Not sure. Toward the end Dotty said something strange. You’ve heard about the ancient Mayans and this game they played, an early form of basketball?”

“Something about,” Maxine dimly, “…vertical hoop, high percentage of fouls, some of them flagrant, usually fatal?”

“We were outside trying to hail a cab, and out of nowhere Dotty said something like, ‘The enemy most to be feared is as silent as a Mayan basketball game on television.’ When I politely pointed out that back in Mayan times there wasn’t any TV, she smiled, like a teacher you’ve just fed the right cue to. ‘Then you can imagine how silent that is,’ and she slid into a cab I hadn’t seen coming, and disappeared.”

“You think it was her way of talking about…” oh, go ahead, “his soul?”

She gazes into Maxine’s eyes and nods. “Day before yesterday, when she asked me to bring you the money, she talked about the last time she saw him, the surveillance, the helicopters, the dead phones and frozen credit cards, and said she’d really come to think of them again as comrades-in-arms. Maybe she was only being a good spook widow. But I kissed her anyway.”

Maxine’s turn to nod.

“Where I grew up in Huehuetenango, where Windust and I met, it was less than a day’s journey to a system of caves everyone there believed was the approach to Xibalba. The early Christian missionaries thought tales of hell would frighten us, but we already had Xibalba, literally, ‘the place of fear.’ There was a particularly terrible ball court there. The ball had these… blades on it, so games were in deadly earnest. Xibalba was—is—a vast city-state below the earth, ruled by twelve Death Lords. Each Lord with his own army of unquiet dead, who wander the surface world bringing terrible afflictions to the living. Ríos Montt and his plague of ethnic killing… not too different.

“Windust began hearing Xibalba stories as soon as his unit arrived in country. At first he thought it was another case of having fun with the gringo, but after a while… I think he began to believe, more than I ever did, at least to believe in a parallel world, somewhere far beneath his feet where another Windust was doing the things he was pretending not to up here.”

“You knew…”

“Suspected. Tried not to see too much. I was too young. I knew about the electric cattle prod, ‘self-defense’ is how he explained it. The name the people gave him was Xooq’, which means scorpion in Q’eqchi’. I loved him. I must have thought I could save him. And in the end it was Windust who saved me.” Maxine feels a strange buzzing at the edges of her brain, like a foot trying to come back awake. Still inside the perimeter of newlywed bliss, he sneaks out of bed, does what he’s in Guatemala to do, slips back, in the worst hours of the morning, nestling his cock against the crack of her ass, how could she not have known? What innocence could she still believe in?