Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

Well. Should’ve been it for Agent Windust. So it doesn’t help that that very night, or actually next morning just before dawn, she has a vivid, all-but-lucid dream about him, in which they are not exactly fucking, but fucking around, definitely. The details ooze away as dawn light and the sounds of garbage trucks and jackhammers grow in the room, till she’s left with a single image unwilling to fade, this federal penis, fierce red, predatory, and Maxine alone its prey. She has sought to escape but not sincerely enough for the penis, which is wearing some strange headgear, possibly a Harvard football helmet. It can read her thoughts. “Look at me, Maxine. Don’t look away. Look at me.” A talking penis. That same jive-ass radio-announcer voice.

She checks the clock. Too late to go back to sleep, though who would want to, necessarily? What she needs is to go in to the office and work on something nice and normal for a while. Just as she’s about to head out with the boys to school, the doorbell rings its usual Big Ben theme which somebody a hundred years ago figured would be appropriate to the grandiosity of the building. Maxine squints through the peephole and here’s Marvin the kozmonaut, dreads pushed up under his bike helmet, orange jacket and blue cargo pants, and over his shoulder an orange messenger bag with the running-man logo of the recently failed kozmo.com.

“Marvin. You’re up early. What’s with the outfit, you guys folded weeks ago.”

“Don’t mean I have to stop ridin. My legs are still pumpin, no mechanical issues with the bike, I can ride forever, I’m the Flyin Dutchmahn.”

“Strange, I’m not expecting anything, you must have me mixed up with some other lowlife again.” Except Marvin has an uncanny history of always showing up with items Maxine knows she didn’t order but which prove each time to be exactly what she needs.

This is the first time she’s ever seen him in the daylight hours. His shift used to begin at nightfall, and from then till dawn he’d be out on his orange fixed-gear track bike delivering donuts, ice cream, and videotapes, guaranteed to arrive within the hour, to the all-night community of dopers, hackers, instant-gratification cases who thought the dotcom balloon would ascend forever.

“It was all these ritzy neighborhoods up here,” is Marvin’s theory, “I knew the minute we started deliverin north of 14th Street it was the beginnin of the end.”

According to folklore, Mayor Giuliani, who hates all bike delivery people, is said to have declared a vendetta against Marvin personally, which along with his Trinidadian origins and single-digit employee number at kozmo have brought him iconic status in the track-rider community.

“Missed you, Marvin.”

“Lotta work. These days I’m all over the place, like Duane Reade. Don’t give me that banknote you’re wavin all around, it’s way too much and way too sentimental, oh and here, this is for you as well.”

Producing some kind of high-tech gizmo in beige plastic about four inches long by an inch wide, which seems to have a USB connector on one end.

“Marvin, what is it?”

“Ah, Mizziz L, always makin with those jokes. I just deliver em my dear.”

Time to seek the advice of an expert. “Ziggy, what is this thing?”

“Looks like one of those little eight-megabyte flash drives. Like a memory card, only different? IBM makes one, but this is some Asian knockoff.”

“So there could be files or something stored on this?”

“Anything, most likely text.”

“What do I do, just plug it in my computer?”

“Yaahh! No! Mom! you don’t know what’s on it. I know some kids at Bronx Science—let them check it out in the computer lab up there.”

“Sound like your grandma, Zig.”

Next day, “That thumb drive? it’s OK, safe to copy, just a lot of text, looks semiofficial.”

“And now your friends have seen it before I have.”

“They… uh, they don’t read that much, Mom. Nothing personal. A generational thing.” Turns out to be a piece of Nicholas Windust’s own dossier, downloaded from some Deep Web directory for spooks called Facemask, and displaying the kind of merciless humor also to be found in high-school yearbooks.

Windust does not after all seem to be FBI. Something worse, if possible. If there is a brother- or God forbid sisterhood of neoliberal terrorists, Windust has been in there from the jump, a field operative whose first recorded job, as an entry-level gofer, was in Santiago, Chile, on 11 September 1973, spotting for the planes that bombed the presidential palace and killed Salvador Allende.

Beginning with low-level bagman activities, graduating to undercover surveillance and corporate espionage, Windust’s list of credits at some point turned sinister, perhaps as early as his move across the Andes to Argentina. Job responsibilities began to include “interrogation enhancement” and “noncompliant-subject relocation.” Even with her light grasp of Argentine history during those years, Maxine can translate this well enough. Around 1990, as part of a cadre of old Argentina hands, U.S. veterans of the Dirty War who then stayed on to advise the IMF stooges that rose to power in its aftermath, Windust was one of the founders of a D.C. think tank known as Toward America’s New Global Opportunities (TANGO). He has a thirty-year history of visiting-lecturer gigs, including at the infamous School of the Americas. Is surrounded by the usual posse of younger protégés, though he seems to be against cults of personality on principle.

“Too Maoist for him, maybe,” is one of the less bitchy comments, and indeed colleagues seem to have struggled at length with doubts about Windust. Considering the money to be made off of troubled economies worldwide, his unexpected reluctance to grab a piece of the proceeds for himself soon aroused suspicions. Duked in, he’d’ve been a safely co-enabling partner in crime. To be motivated only by raw ideology—besides greed, what else could it be?—made him weird, almost dangerous.

So, over time, Windust got pushed into a peculiar compromise. Whenever a government at the behest of the IMF sold off an asset, he agreed either to go in for a percentage or, later on, with more leverage, to buy it outright—but he never, the hippie nutcase, cashed anything in. A power plant goes private for pennies on the dollar, Windust becomes a silent partner. Wells that supply regional water systems, easements across tribal lands for power lines, clinics dedicated to tropical ailments unheard of in the developed world—Windust takes a modest position. If one day, untypically idle, he should pull out his portfolio to see what he’s got he’d find himself with controlling interests in an oil field, a refinery, an educational system, an airline, a power grid, each in a different newly privatized part of the world. “None of them especially grand in scale,” concludes one confidential report, “but considering the assembled set all together, by Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice, subject at times has effectively found himself in control of an entire economy.”

By the same kind of thinking, it occurs to Maxine, Windust has acquired a portfolio of pain and damage applied to various human body parts that might have added up to hundreds—who knows, maybe thousands—of deaths on his karmic ticket. Should she tell somebody? Ernie? Elaine, who’s been trying to fix her up? They would so plotz.

This is fucking appalling. How does it happen, how does somebody get from entry-level foot soldier to the battered specimen who accosted her the other night? This is a text file, no pictures, but Maxine can somehow see Windust back then, a clean-looking kid, short hair, chinos and button-down shirts, only has to shave once a week, one of a globetrotting gang of young smart-asses, piling into cities and towns all over the Third World, filling ancient colonial spaces with office copiers and coffee machines, pulling all-nighters, running off neatly bound plans for the total obliteration of target countries and their replacement by free-market fantasies. “Need one of these on everybody’s desk by nine A.M., ¡ándale, ándale! ” Comical Speedy Gonzales dialogue would’ve been standard among these generally eastern-seaboard snotnoses.