Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“You bring a customer?”

“Just my neighbor’s nephew, she asked me to keep an eye on him. Sweet kid, basically, too much time on the Internet maybe.”

At which point Eric puts his head through the bead curtains.

“ Oh no not this guy, uh-uh, he’s been 86’d, hey creepazoid, you want me to call Porfirio down here again, show you where the sidewalk is?”

“It’s cool,” Maxine smiling, shrugging, sliding out the doorway. “All good.”

“Assholes,” Eric mutters, “can I help it if I like feet?”

“Where do you live? I’ll take you back.”

“Manhattan, downtown.”

“Come on, I’ll spring for a cab. Just let me run in and change.”

“I’ll wait outside.”

“What’s with Footboy,” Stu Gotz wants to know when she’s street legal again. “Nice company you keep.”

“Oh, it’s business.”

“Which reminds me—at this time we are delighted to offer you a one-month contract, provided only that you attend our Introductory Profiling Seminar, which will acquaint you with the many varieties of technoscum and psychosocial misfit all too sadly apt to be overrepresented among our clientele.”

She takes his card, which may come in handy someday though in ways neither can see right at the moment.

ERIC LIVES IN A FIFTH-FLOOR walk-up studio in Loisaida, a doorless bathroom wedged in one corner and in another a microwave, coffeemaker, and miniature sink. Liquor-store cartons full of personal effects are stacked around haphazardly, and most of the limited floor space is littered with unwashed laundry, Chinese take-out containers and pizza boxes, empty Smirnoff Ice bottles, old copies of Heavy Metal, Maxim, and Anal Teen Nymphos Quarterly, women’s shoe catalogs, SDK discs, game controllers and cartridges for Wolfenstein, DOOM, and others. Paint peels from selected ceiling areas, and window treatments are basically street grime. Eric finds a cigarette butt a little longer than the others in a running shoe he’s been using for an ashtray and lights up, lurches over to the electric coffee mess, pours out some cold day-old sludge into a mug with a rectangular outline on it and the words CSS IS AWESOME running outside the frame. “Oh. Want some?”

They light up a joint, Eric comfortable on the floor. “Now,” in a voice she hopes is firm enough, “about this foot situation.”

“Here, let’s just get your shoes off, don’t worry. You don’t have to deal with the floor, you can rest them on me.”

“My thought also.”

It has been a while, like forever, since her feet have received attention like this. She has a moment of panic, wondering, am I weird, allowing this? Eric, with an extrasensory grin, looks up and nods. “Yeah, you are.”

Her feet seem to have been resting in his lap for a while, and she can’t help noticing he has this, well, hardon. Out of his trousers and between her feet, actually, and sort of moving back and forth… Not that this happens to her a lot, which may account for why she begins tentatively now to explore, whatever the foot equivalent of handle is, maybe “footle” the aroused organ, her toes always having been prehensile enough to pick up socks, keys, and loose change, her soles, could it be the cannabis? unaccountably sensitized, particularly the insides of her heels, which reflexologists have told her connect directly with the uterus… she slides the polished toes of one foot under his balls and with the pads of the others begins caressing his penis, after a while switching feet, just to see what will happen, all out of experimental curiosity of course…

“Eric, what’s this, did you just… come, on my feet?”

“Um, yeah? well not ‘on’ exactly, coz I’m wearing a condom?”

“You’re worried about what, funguses?”

“No offense, I just like condoms, sometimes I’ll wear one just to have it on, you know?”

“OK…” Maxine glances quickly at his dick, and her contacts flip inside out and go sailing across the room. “Eric, excuse me, is that some loathsome skin disease?”

“This? oh it’s a designer condom, from the Trojan Abstract Expressionist Collection I believe, here—” He takes it off and waves it at her.

“No need, no need.”

“Was that OK for you?”

Why, the sweetheart. Well? Was it? She angles her head and smiles, she hopes not too sitcomically.

“You don’t do this a lot.”

“Not that often, as Daddy Warbucks always sez…” Now he has that attentive kid-on-a-date look. So Maxine don’t be a schmuck all your life, “Listen. Eric. Total honesty here, all right?” She tells him about her arrangements with Reg.

“What? You came out to that strip joint deliberately, to look for me? Hey Reg, thanks buddy. What’s he doing, he’s checking up on me?”

“Rest easy, just think of me as the straightworld version of you, see what I’m saying. You’re the one gets to be the outlaw, adventures down in the Deep Web, which of us do you think’s having more fun?”

“Sure.” He flicks a quick look at her—she’s been watching him, otherwise she wouldn’t have seen it. “You think it’s fun, maybe sometime I should bring you down there. Show you around.”

“OK. It’s a date.”

“Really?”

“It could be romantic.”

“Most of the time it ain’t, just pretty straightforward, directories you have to access and search by yourself, because no crawler knows how to, no links into it exist. Now and then it can get weird, stuff somebody like hashslingrz wants to keep hidden. Or sites lost to linkrot, to bankruptcy, to who-gives-a-shit-anymore…”

The Deep Web is supposed to be mostly obsolete sites and broken links, an endless junkyard. Like in The Mummy (1999), adventurers will come here someday to dig up relics of remote and exotic dynasties. “But it only looks that way,” according to Eric—“behind it is a whole invisible maze of constraints, engineered in, lets you go some places, keeps you out of others. This hidden code of behavior you have to learn and obey. A dump, with structure.”

“Eric… say there was something down there I might want to hack into…”

“Ehhh. Here I thought you loved me for my psychosexual profile. Should’ve known. Story of my life.”

“Sh-sh, no, nothing like that—the site I’m thinking about, it may not even be there, one of those old Cold War sites, maybe some fringe fantasy, time travel, UFOs, mind control—”

“Sounds awesome so far.”

“It could be heavily encrypted. If I did want to get in, I’d need some alphageek crypto whiz.”

“Sure, that’d be me, but…”

“Hey, I’ll hire you, I’m legit, Reg will vouch.”

“Sure he will, he’s the one who fixed us up. He should be charging me a finder’s fee.” Holding one of her shoes now in you could say a hopeful way.

“You weren’t planning to…”

“I was, but if you have to get back, I understand, here, let me just slide these back on for you…”

“I mean, these are a little too casual anyway, don’t you think? You seem like more of a Manolo Blahnik person.”

“Actually, there’s this guy Christian Louboutin? Does these five-inch stilettos? Awesome.”

“Think I’ve seen knockoffs around.”

“Hey, knockoffs, no problem.”

“Next time, maybe…”

“Promise?”

“No?”

When she gets home, the phone is ringing. Off the hook. A number of previous messages on the machine, all from Heidi.

Who basically wants to know where Maxine’s been.

“Networking. Something important, Heidi?”

“Oh. Just wondering… who’s the new fella?”

“The…”

“You were seen over at the Chinese-Dominican joint the other day. Quite intense, it is reported, eyes only for each other.”