Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

Meantime Conkling wants to talk about, who else, Princess Heidrophobia. By the time Maxine is able to get his unwholesomely obsessed ass back out the door, she’s left with a scant half hour to get put together for her, what would you call it, working rendezvous with Windust. Somehow she finds herself home, and immobile in front of the bedroom closet, and wondering why her mind has gone this blank. Polyvinyl chloride, something in bright red perhaps, though not inappropriate, is somehow absent from the inventory. Jeans are out of the question also. At length, deep in, at the event horizon of closet oblivion, she notices a chic cocktail-hour suit in a subdued aubergine shade, discovered long ago at the Galeries Lafayette going-out-of-business sale and kept for reasons that probably don’t include nostalgia. She tries to think of ways in which Windust might read it. If he reads it, if he doesn’t just grab and start ripping… Repeated messages from her Vertex, or does she mean Vortex, of Femininity are piling up unanswered.

The address is in a far-west-side piece of lower Hell’s Kitchen among trainyard and tunnel approaches plowed indifferently through a neighborhood whose disconnected fragments have been left to survive as they might, lofts, recording studios, pool-table showrooms, movie-equipment rental places, chop shops… Wised-up real-estate mavens of Maxine’s acquaintance assure her that this is the next hot neighborhood. Redevelopment is in the air. Someday the Number 7 subway will be extended over here and the Javits Center will have its own stop. Someday there will be parks and soaring condos and luxury tourist hotels. Right now it is still a windswept hard-to-get-to region that visitors from other planets, arriving in centuries to come after New York has been long forgotten, will assume was ceremonial, even religious, used for public spectacles, mass sacrifices, lunch breaks.

Today there is a huge gathering of police up and down 11th Avenue and seething all among the blocks over to Tenth. Maxine is just as happy not to be on foot at the moment. The cabdriver, whose problem this has become, thinks it might be a police exercise, based on a scenario where terrorists take over Javits Center.

“Why,” Maxine wonders, “would anybody want to?”

“Well, spoze it happened during the Auto Show. Then they’d have all those cars and trucks. They could sell off some of that for money to buy bombs and AKs and shit,” the driver clearly with a scenario of his own here, “keep the cool units like the Ferraris and Panozes, use the trucks for military vehicles, oh, and they’d also need to hijack a fleet of car carriers, Peterbilt 378s, somethin like that. And… and the really good vintage stuff, Hispano-Suizas, Aston Martins, they could hold them for ransom.”

“‘Give us ten million or we’ll trash this car’?”

“Bend the aerial at least, nothin that would seriously fuck with the resale value, understand.” All around them the Finest flock, swarm, stand guard, run in formation up and down the street. Above in the bright pre-autumnal sky, UFOs carry out their patient cloaked reconnaissance. Now and then a cop with a bullhorn will approach, glaring, and yell at the cab to move on.

Finally they pull up in front of the address, which seems to be a six-story rental building, unfashionable, forsaken, due someday for demolition and replacement by some high-rise condo scheme. At night maybe one lighted window per floor. It reminds her of her own part of town back in the eighties, when the neighborhood was being co-opped. Tenants who can’t or won’t move out. Developers who’re itching to tear the place down acting very unpleasant.

When she hits the buzzer, it seems like ten minutes of being stared and smirked at by a sudden gathering of half the neighborhood, before a shrill noise that could be anything comes out of the undersize speaker.

“It’s me—Maxine.”

“Nnggahh?”

She shouts her name again and peers through the unwashed glass. The door remains unbuzzed. Finally, just as she’s turning away, here comes Windust to open it.

“Buzzer doesn’t work, never has.”

“Thanks for sharing that.”

“Wanted to see how long you’d wait.”

Desolate corridors, unswept and underlit, that stretch on for longer than the building’s outside dimensions would suggest. Walls glisten unhealthily in creepy yellows and grime-inflected greens, colors of medical waste… Open to all sorts of penetration besides the squatters who now and then step out into a sight line and immediately back, like targets in a first-person shooter. Carpeting has been removed from the hallways. Leaks are not being fixed. Paint hangs. Fluorescent bulbs on borrowed time buzz purplishly overhead.

According to Windust, wild dogs live in the basement and begin to come out at sundown, to roam the halls all night. Brought in originally to intimidate the last tenants into moving out, left on site to fend for themselves as soon as the Alpo bill outgrew the relocation budget.

Inside the apartment, Windust doesn’t waste time. “Get down on the floor.” Seems to be in a sort of erotic snit. She gives him a look.

“Now.”

Shouldn’t she be saying, “You know what, fuck yourself, you’ll have more fun,” and walking out? No, instead, instant docility—she slides to her knees. Quickly, without further discussion, not that some bed would have been a better choice, she has joined months of unvacuumed debris on the rug, face on the floor, ass in the air, skirt pushed up, Windust’s not-exactly-manicured nails ripping methodically at sheer taupe pantyhose it took her easily twenty minutes in Saks not so long ago to decide on, and his cock is inside her with so little inconvenience that she must have been wet without knowing it. His hands, murderer’s hands, are gripping her forcefully by the hips, exactly where it matters, exactly where some demonic set of nerve receptors she has been till now only semi-aware of have waited to be found and used like buttons on a game controller… impossible for her to know if it’s him moving or if she’s doing it herself… not a distinction to be lingered on till much later, of course, if at all, though in some circles it is held to be something of a big deal…

Down on the floor, nose level with an electrical outlet, she imagines for a second she can see some great brightness of power just behind the parallel slits. Something scurries at the edge of her vision, the size of a mouse, and it is Lester Traipse, the shy, wronged soul of Lester, in need of sanctuary, abandoned, not least by Maxine. He stands in front of the outlet, reaches in, parts the sides of one slit like a doorway, glances back apologetically, slides into the annihilating brightness. Gone.

She cries out, though not for Lester exactly.

IN THE MELANCHOLY LIGHT, Maxine scans Windust’s face for evidence of emotion. For a quickie, it was OK even if God forbid there should be anything like eye contact around here. On the other hand, at least he used a condom—wait, wait, junior-prom reflexes aren’t bad enough, she’s doing credits and debits on this now also?

Out the window, instead of a sweeping panorama of lights, each illuminating a different Big Apple drama, there’s a modest low-rise view, water tanks poised like antique skyrockets on rooftops whose last waterproofing got mopped on by immigrant hands generations dead, light from other windows mediated by nailed-up bedcovers, bookshelves full of wrecked paperbacks, the backsides of TV sets, shades pulled all the way down tenancies ago and never raised.

There is a kitchen of sorts in here, whose cupboards, in the tradition of accommodation addresses, are full of items some invisible long train of nameless reps and troubleshooters and traveling folk must have thought they needed to get through their stays, the nights they didn’t have the will or the permission to venture out in the streets… strange forms of pasta, cans with pictures in unfamiliar color processes of hard-to-identify foodstuffs, soups with unpronounceable names, snack products with official-looking waivers where the nutritional information is usually found. In the fridge all she sees is a single beet, sitting, one would have to say insolently, on a plate. There are suggestions of blue-green mold, interesting visually, but…