Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“I’ll have another look around, meet you back outside in a minute.”

“Just keep an eye out for rent-a-cops, they’re not always in uniform.”

It isn’t vintage year or appellation that’s caught her eye, but a shadowy, almost invisible door over in one corner, with a keypad next to it.

Soon as Randy’s out the door, she pulls out her Filofax, which these days has evolved into an expensive folder full of loose pieces of paper, and in the dim light goes looking for a list of hashslingrz passwords Eric has found down in his Deep Web inquiries and Reg has passed along. She recalls some of them being flagged as key codes. Sure enough, only a couple-three fingerdances later, an electric motor whines and a bolt slams open.

Maxine doesn’t think of herself as especially timid, she’s walked into fund-raisers wearing the wrong accessories, driven overseas in rental cars with alien gearshifts, prevailed in beefs with bill collectors, arms dealers, and barking-mad Republicans without much hesitation bodily or spiritual. But now as she steps through the door, the interesting question arises, Maxine, are you out of your fucking mind? For centuries they’ve been trying to indoctrinate girls with stories about Bluebeard’s Castle, and here she is once more, ignoring all that sound advice. Somewhere ahead lies a confidential space, unaccounted for, resisting analysis, a fatality for wandering into which is what got her kicked out of the profession to begin with and will maybe someday get her dead. Up in the world, it is the bright middle of a summer day with birds under the eaves and yellowjackets in the gardens and the smell of pine trees. Down here it’s cold, an industrial cold she feels all the way to her toenails. Isn’t only that Ice doesn’t want her here. She knows, without knowing the reasons, that this is about the last door she should ever have stepped through.

She finds a long corridor, swept, austere, track lighting at wide intervals, shadows where they shouldn’t be, leading—unless she’s turned around somehow—toward the abandoned air base with the big radar antenna. Whatever’s at the other end down here, across the fence, Gabriel Ice’s access to it is important enough to be protected by a key code, making this likely more than some rich guy’s innocent hobby.

She moves cautiously in, a trespasser’s timer blinking silently in her head. Some of the doors along the corridor are shut and locked, some are open, the rooms behind them empty in a chill and unnaturally tended way, as if bad history could be stabilized somehow and preserved for decades. Unless of course this is simply protected office space in here, some physical version of the dark archive at hashslingrz that Eric has been looking into. It smells like bleach, as if recently disinfected. Concrete floors, channels leading to drains set at low points. Steel beams overhead, with fittings whose purpose she can’t or doesn’t want to figure out. No furniture except for gray Formica office tables and folding chairs. Some 220-volt wall outlets, but no sign of heavy appliances.

Has all the hair spray been somehow turning her head into an antenna? She’s begun to hear whispering that soon resolves into radio traffic of some kind—looks around for speakers, can’t locate any, yet the air is increasingly full of numerals and NATO phonetic letters including Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot, affectless voices distorted by radio interference, crosstalk, bursts of solar noise… occasionally a phrase in English she’s never fast enough to catch.

She has come to a stairwell descending even deeper into the terminal moraine. Further than she can see. Her coordinates all at once shift ninety degrees, so that she can’t tell now if she’s staring vertically down uncountable levels or straight ahead down another long hallway. It lasts only a heartbeat, but how long dos it have to? She imagines somebody’s idea of Cold War salvation down there, carefully situated at this American dead end, some faith in brute depth, some prayerful confidence that a blessed few would survive, beat the end of the world and the welcoming-in of the Void…

Oh shit, what’s this— at the next landing down, something’s poised, vibrating, looking up at her… in this light it isn’t easy to say, she hopes she’s only hallucinating, something alive yet too small to be a security person… not a guard animal… no… a child? Something in a child-size fatigue uniform, approaching her now with wary and lethal grace, rising as if on wings, its eyes too visible in the gloom, too pale, almost white…

The timer in her head goes off, jangling, urgent. Somehow, reaching for the Beretta right now will not be a wise idea. “All right Air Jordans—do your stuff!” She turns and sprints back up the corridor, back through the door she shouldn’t have opened, back into the wine cellar to find Randy, who’s been looking for her.

“You OK?”

Depending on how you define OK. “This Vosne-Romanée here, I was wondering…”

“Year don’t matter much, grab it, let’s go.” For a wine thief, Randy is suddenly not acting too suave here. They scramble into the rig and head out the way they came. Randy is silent till they reach the lighthouse, as if he saw something back at Ice’s too.

“Listen, do you ever get up to Yonkers at all? My wife’s family’s up there, and sometimes I’ll do some shootin at this li’l ladies’ target range called Sensibility—”

“‘Men always welcome’, sure, I know it, fact I’m a member.”

“Well, maybe I’ll catch you there sometime?”

“Lookin forward, Randy.”

“Don’t forget your burgundy there.”

“Um… you were talking earlier about karma, maybe you should just go on ahead, take it.”

SHE DOESN’T EXACTLY PEEL OUT, but neither does she dawdle, casting anxious glances in the mirror at least till about Stony Brook. Roll on, four-wheeler, roll on. Talk about fools’ errands. Vip Epperdew’s last known address a charcoal ruin, Gabriel Ice’s compound ostentatious and unsurprising, except for a mystery corridor and something in it she doesn’t want to know if she even saw. So… maybe she can deduct some of this, midsize daily rate, credit-card discount, one tank of gas, buck and a quarter a gallon, see if they’ll go for $1.50….

Just before the country station goes out of range, on comes the Droolin Floyd Womack classic,

That night she dreams the usual Manhattan-though-not-exactly she has visited often in dreams, where, if you go far enough out any avenue, the familiar grid begins to break down, get wobbly and interwoven with suburban arterials, until she arrives at a theme shopping mall which she understands has been deliberately designed to look like the aftermath of a terrible Third World battle, charred and dilapidated, abandoned hovels and burned-out concrete foundations set in a natural amphitheater so that two or more levels of shops run up a fairly steep slope, everything sorrowful rust and sepia, and yet here at these carefully distressed outdoor cafés sit yuppie shoppers out having a cheerful cup of tea, ordering yuppie sandwiches stuffed full of arugula and goat cheese, behaving no differently than if they were at Woodbury Common or Paramus. She is supposed to be meeting Heidi here but abruptly finds herself at nightfall on a path through some woods. Light flickers ahead. She smells smoke with a strong toxic element, plastic, drug-lab fixins, who knows? comes around a bend in the path and there is the house from the Vip Epperdew videotape, on fire—black smoke in knots and whorls, battered among acid-orange flames, pouring upward to merge with a starless overcast. No neighbors have assembled to watch. No sirens growing louder in the distance. Nobody coming to put the fire out or to rescue whoever might still be inside, not Vip but, somehow, this time, Lester Traipse. Maxine stands paralyzed in the jagged light, running through her options and responsibilities. The burning is violent, all-consuming, the heat too fierce to approach. Even at this distance, she feels her oxygen supply being taken. Why Lester? She wakes with this feeling of urgency, knowing she has to do something, but can’t see what.