Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“And why are we keeping out of camera range, again?”

“They don’t want me in the building. By now there’s got to be at least a restraining order.”

“You’re what, you… stalk buildings now?”

“That fake toilet at hashslingrz? Just now out in the street, happened to spot one of the guys from there, had enough blank tape with me, so I started following and taping. Zigzagging all over the neighborhood, after a while he picks up a couple-three others I recognize, and next thing I knew, they’re all going into The Deseret here, getting star treatment at the gate. It occurs to me that since Gabriel Ice is one of the owners of this place—”

“Wait a minute, Ice? Since when?”

“Thought you knew. Any case it’s all academic now, we’ve been overtaken by events. Ice fired me off the movie yesterday. My apartment got broken into again, this time trashed, all my footage taken except what I hid.”

Not a promising development. “You better come with me. There might be a service elevator free by now.”

By way of which they manage to escape out the back and over to Riverside, where they just make it onto a bus heading downtown.

“I don’t suppose you’ve mentioned this to the cops or anything.”

“In case they need a good laugh to lighten up their otherwise grim workday, you mean. Sure, how about on my way out of town?”

“Seattle.”

“It’s time, Maxi. Ice did me a favor. I don’t need a hashslingrz movie on my résumé, bad for my image, and you know what, hashslingrz is history. Whatever happens, it’s fuckin doomed.”

“Wouldn’t say they’re on the brink of Chapter Eleven exactly.”

“If a dotcom had an immortal soul,” Reg strangely distant, as if already calling back out the window of some westbound conveyance, “hashslingrz’s’d be lost.”

They get off at 8th Street, find a pizza joint, sit for a while at a sidewalk table. Reg drifts into a patch of philosophical weather.

“Ain’t like I was ever Alfred Hitchcock or somethin. You can watch my stuff till you’re cross-eyed and there’ll never be any deeper meaning. I see something interesting, I shoot it is all. Future of film if you want to know—someday, more bandwidth, more video files up on the Internet, everybody’ll be shootin everything, way too much to look at, nothin will mean shit. Think of me as the prophet of that.”

“You’re fishing for compliments, Reg, what about that unscheduled redecoration on your apartment? Somebody must have thought highly of something you shot.”

“Ice,” he shrugs. “Tryin to repo what he thinks is his.”

No, Maxine thinks with a sudden flulike ache in her fingers, Ice would be best-case. And if it’s anybody else, Seattle might not be far enough. “Listen, if you need me to hold on to anything for you—”

“Don’t worry, you’re on my list.”

“And you’ll let me know when you leave town?”

“I’ll try.”

“Please. Oh, and Reg.”

“Yeah, I know, I used to watch the old Bionic Woman myself. Sooner or later Oscar Goldman says, ‘Jaime—be careful.’”

“He was a strong Jewish-mother role model for me. Just remember even Jaime Sommers needs to step cautious once in a while.”

“Don’t worry. I used to think that as long as I could see it through the viewfinder, it couldn’t hurt me. So it took a while, but now I know different. You happy?” Disillusioned child written all over him.

“I guess I could take that as the good news.”

Among the mystery vendors discovered by the resourceful Eric Outfield down in the encrypted files of hashslingrz is a fiber brokerage called Darklinear Solutions.

Who in their right mind, you wonder, would go into fiber these days, given the huge decline in new installation since last year? Well, back during the tech bubble, it seems so much cabling was put in that now miles of existing fiber are just sitting there what they call “dark,” and the result is that outfits like Darklinear have come swooping down on the carcass of the business, scouting out overinstalled, unused fiber in otherwise “lit” buildings, mapping it, helping clients put together customized private networks.

What’s puzzling Maxine is why hashslingrz’s payments to Darklinear are being kept hidden when they don’t have to be. Fiber’s a legitimate company expense, bandwidth needs at hashslingrz more than justify it, even the IRS seems to be happy. And yet, just as with hwgaahwgh.com, the dollar amounts are way too big, and somebody’s putting up password protection out of all proportion.

Sometimes, better than letting things fester, it is perverse fun to give in to annoyance. Maxine calls up Tallis Ice and gets lucky. Or doesn’t get the machine, put it that way. “I had a call from your charming husband. Somehow he knew about our visit the other day.”

“Not me—I swear, it’s the building, they keep logs, there’s video surveillance, well, maybe I did mention something about, you came by?”

“I’m sure he’s a wonderful person regardless,” replies Maxine. “While I’ve got you on the phone, can I pick your brain?”

“Sure?” Like, let’s see, where’d I put it…

“You were talking about infrastructure the other day. I’m working for a client over in New Jersey with a capitalizing issue, and they’re curious about a fiber broker in Manhattan called Darklinear Solutions. This is all out of my area—did you ever do business with them, or know anybody who has?”

“No.” But there it is again, some peculiar hiccup in continuity that Maxine has learned means Look Closer. “Sorry?”

“Just trying to get educated on the cheap, thanks, Tallis.”

DARKLINEAR SOLUTIONS IS a hip-looking chrome-and-neon establishment in the Flatiron District. In the E-rated video game of this, it sells echinacea smoothies and seaweed panini, instead of doped silica to feed depraved fatpipe fantasies that still may linger from the era recently ended.

Maxine is just about to alight from her cab when she sees a woman coming out the door in a tight leopard-print jumpsuit and Chanel Havana shades over her eyes instead of up on her head acting as a hairband, who, despite this effort, possibly conscious, at disguise, is obviously, well, well, Mrs. Tallis Kelleher Ice.

Maxine considers waving and hollering hi, but Tallis is acting too nervous here, she makes the average urban paranoid look like James Bond at the baccarat table. What’s this? Fiber is suddenly so hush-hush? No, actually it’s the getup, which screams accommodation to somebody else’s idea of provocative, and Maxine naturally finds herself wondering whose.

“You getting out, lady?”

“Maybe you should put the meter on again, while I just take a minute here.”

Tallis makes her way up the block, glancing around anxiously. At the corner she pretends to stand gazing in the window of a toilet showroom, her feet in third ballet position, some Barnard girl in an art gallery here. A minute later the door of Darklinear Solutions swings open once again and out comes this compact party in a sales-floor blazer and slacks, carrying a shoulder-strap attaché and casing the street apprehensively also. He turns the other direction from Tallis but only goes as far as a Lincoln Navigator parked a few spaces away, gets in, heads back toward Tallis at a slow cruise. When he reaches the corner, the passenger door swings open and Tallis slides in.

“Quick,” sez Maxine, “before the light changes.”

“Your husband?”

“Somebody’s, maybe. Let’s see where they go.”

“You a cop?”

“I’m Lennie on Law & Order , you didn’t recognize me?” They follow the ponderous gas gobbler all the way over to the FDR and proceed uptown, exiting at 96th, continuing north on First Avenue into a fringe neighborhood no longer Upper East Side and not quite East Harlem, where you might once have gone to visit your drug dealer or arrange a compensated evening rendezvous, but which is now showing symptoms of gentrification.