Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

The day as usual comes sloshing in on her. Pretty soon she’s up to her ears in tax dodges, greedy little hotshots dreaming about some big score, spreadsheets she can’t make sense of. About lunchtime Heidi sticks her head in.

“Just the pop-culture brain I was looking to pick.” They go grab a quick salad at a deli around the corner. “Heidi, tell me again about the Montauk Project.”

“Been around since the eighties, part of the American vernacular by now. Next year they’ll be opening the old air station to tourists. There’s already companies running tour buses.”

“What?”

“Another form of everything ends up as a Broadway musical.”

“So nobody takes the Montauk Project seriously anymore, you’re saying.”

A dramatic sigh. “Maxi, earnest Maxi, forensic as always. These urban myths can be attractors, they pick up little fragments of strangeness from everywhere, after a while nobody can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it’s too unstructured. But somehow we’ll still cherry-pick for the intriguing pieces, God forbid we should be taken in of course, we’re too hip for that, and yet there’s no final proof that some of it isn’t true. Pros and cons, and it all degenerates into arguments on the Internet, flaming, trolling, threads that only lead deeper into the labyrinth.”

Nor, it occurs to Maxine, does touristy mean detoxified, necessarily. She knows people who go to Poland in the summer on Nazi-death-camp tour packages. Complimentary Polish Mad Dogs on the bus. Out in Montauk there could be funseekers infesting every square inch of surface area, while underneath their idle feet, whatever it is, whatever Ice’s tunnel connects with, goes on.

“If you’re not eating that…”

“Fress, Heidi, fress, please. I wasn’t as hungry as I thought.”

Later in the afternoon, the sky begins to gather a lurid yellow tinge. Something’s on the way in from across the river. Maxine puts on Big Apple news traffic and weather station WYUP, and after the usual string of fast-mouth commercials, each more offensive than the last, on comes the familiar teletype theme and a male voice, “You give us thirty-two minutes—you don’t get it back.”

Seeming a bit too chirpy for the material, a newslady announces, “A body found today in a deluxe Upper West Side apartment building has been identified as Lester Traipse, a well-known Silicon Alley entrepreneur… an apparent suicide, though police say murder isn’t being ruled out.”

“Meanwhile, week-old Baby Ashley, rescued yesterday from a dumpster in Queens, is doing well, according to—”

“No,” the way someone much older and more demented might shout back at the radio, “fuck no, you stupid bitch, not Lester.” She just talked to him. He’s supposed to be alive.

She has seen the main sequence of embezzlers’ remorse, tearful press interviews, sidewise please-hit-me glances, sudden onsets of nerve pain, but Lester is, was, one of those rare specimens, he was trying to pay back what he took, to mensch up, seldom if ever do guys like this cancel their own series…

Leaving what? Maxine feels an unwelcome prickling along her jawline. None of the conclusions she’s jumping to here look good. The Deseret? The Fucking Deseret? Something wrong with taking Lester over to Fresh Kills and leaving him on the landfill?

She finds herself gazing out the window. She squints past roofline contours, vents, skylights, water tanks and cornices under this pre-storm lighting, shining as if already wet against the darkening sky, down the street to where the cursed Deseret rears above Broadway, one or two storm-nervous lights already on, its stonework at this distance seeming too uncleansable, its shadows too many, ever to breach.

Insanely she begins to blame herself. Because she found Ice’s tunnel. Ran away from whatever was approaching. It’s Ice getting even, coming after her now.

IT DOESN’T HELP MUCH WHEN, later in the evening, she’s out in the rain and sees Lester Traipse across the street, going down into the subway at Broadway and 79th, in the company of a blond bombshell of a certain age. Sure that this blonde is somehow Lester’s handler, that they’ve been up on the surface for a while, taking care of business, and now she’s bringing him back underneath, Maxine goes sprinting across the most dangerous intersection in the city, and by the time she gets through the moving obstacle course of murderous drivers sending up careless wings of filthy water and down to the subway platform, Lester and the blonde are nowhere to be seen in any direction. Of course, in NYC it is not uncommon to catch sight of a face that you know, beyond all argument, belongs to somebody no longer among the living, and sometimes when it catches you staring, this other face may begin to recognize yours as well, and 99% of the time you turn out to be strangers.

Next morning, after a shiftily insomniac night punctuated with dream clips, she shows up at her appointment with Shawn in something of a state. “I was like, ‘Lester?’ just about to yell across the street something stupid, you’re supposed to be dead or something.”

“First thing to suspect is,” Shawn advises, “is that your memory’s going?”

“No, uh-uh, this was Lester and nobody else.”

“Well… I guess it happens sometimes. Ordinary unenlightened folks just like you, no special gifts or netheen, will see through all the illusion, just as well as a master with, like, years of training? And what they’re able to see is, is the real person, the ‘face before the face’ we call it in Zen, and maybe then they attach some more familiar face to it?”

“Shawn, that’s very helpful, thank you, but suppose it really was Lester?”

“Uh huh well was he walking in, like, third ballet position, by any chance?”

“Not cute, Shawn, the guy just—”

“What? Died? Didn’t die? Made the news on WYUP? Got on the subway with some unidentified babe? Make up your mind.”

In his ads, stuck to every newspaper machine in the city, Shawn promises, “Guaranteed No Use Of Kyosaku,” these being the wooden “warning sticks” Soto Zen instructors use to focus your attention. So instead of hitting people, Shawn gets abusive with remarks. Maxine emerges from the session feeling like she’s been one-on-one with Shaquille O’Neal.

In the outer office she finds another client waiting, light gray suit, pale raspberry shirt, tie and matching handkerchief in deep orchid. For a minute she thinks it’s Alex Trebek. Shawn sticks his head out, gets all congenial. “Maxine, meet Conkling Speedwell, someday you’ll think it was fate, but it’s really just me being a busybody.”

“Sorry if I cut in on your session,” Maxine shaking hands, taking note of the guy’s you could say agendaless grip, something rarely met with in this town.

“Buy me lunch sometime.”

Enough with Lester for a while. He can wait. He has all the time in the world now. Pretending to consult her watch, “How’s today looking?”

“Better than it was.”

OK. “You know Daphne and Wilma’s, down the street?”

“Sure, nice odor dynamic there. About one?”

Odor what? Turns out Conkling is a freelance professional Nose, having been born with a sense of smell far more calibrated than the rest of us normals enjoy. He’s been known to follow an intriguing sillage for dozens of city blocks before finding the source is a dentist’s wife from Valley Stream. He believes in a dedicated circle of hell for anybody who shows up at dinner or for that matter enters an elevator wearing an inappropriate scent. Dogs he hasn’t met formally come up to him with inquiring looks. “A negotiable talent, sometimes a curse.”