Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

Maybe the formal amiability is catching. Maxine finds herself talking about work, and Horst, improbably, listening. Not that it’s any of his business, of course, but then again, a recap, what could hurt? “This documentary guy Reg Despard—his twice-as-paranoid IT genius, Eric—they spot something cute in the bookkeeping at hashslingrz.com, OK, Reg comes to me with it, thinks it’s sinister, global in scope, maybe to do with the Mideast, but it could be too much X-Files or whatever.” Pause, skillfully disguised as taking a breath. Waiting for Horst to get all pissy. But he’s only blinking, slowly yet, which may signal some interest. “Now, it seems Reg has disappeared, mysteriously, though maybe only out to Seattle.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

“Oh. Think? I have time to think? The feds are now on my case also, supposedly because of Brooke and her husband and some alleged Mossad connection, which may be total, how do they say out where you come from, horseshit.”

Horst by now is holding his head in both hands, as if about to attempt a foul shot with it. “Jemima, Keziah, and Kerenhappuch! What can I do to help?”

“Actually, you know what?” Where is this coming from, and how serious is she really, “Saturday night there’s this big nerd clambake downtown? and, and I could use an escort, how about that. Huh?”

He kind of squints. “Sure thing.” Half a question. “Wait… will I have to dance?”

“Who can say, Horst, sometimes when the music is right? you know, a person just has to?”

“Um, no I meant…” Horst is almost cute when he fidgets. “You never forgave me for not learning how to dance, right?”

“Horst, I am supposed to be what, here, tiptoeing around your regrets? If you like, I can teach you a couple of real simple steps right now, would that help?”

“Long as I don’t have to swing my hips, a man’s got to draw the line someplace.”

She roots through the CD collection, pops on a disc. “OK. This is merengue, real simple, all you have to do is stand there like a silo, if you feel like moving a foot now and then, why so much the better.”

The kids look in after a while and find them in a formal clinch, slowdancing to every other beat of “Copacabana.”

“Vice-principal’s office, you two.”

“Yeah, on the double.”

It’s a warm evening. Just around the time sunset colors are developing over Jersey and food-delivery bike traffic in the neighborhood approaches its peak and city trees are filled with bird dialogue that reaches a crescendo as the streetlights come on, contrails of evening departures hanging brightly in the sky, Horst and Maxine, having dropped the kids at Ernie and Elaine’s, are on the subway headed down to SoHo.

The recently acquired Tworkeffx, paying top-of-the-market rent, has occupied for a handful of glittering years a species of Italian palazzo, its cast-iron façade faking the look of limestone, ghostly tonight in the streetlight. What must be everybody from down in the Alley, past and present, is converging on it. You can hear the festivities for blocks before you get there. A crowd track of party-prepped voices with soprano highlights, bass lines from the music inside, punctuated by crackling and high-volume distortion from security-cop walkie-talkies.

One cannot help noticing a certain emphasis tonight on instant nostalgia. Nineties irony, a little past its sell-by date, is in full bloom again down here. Maxine and Horst are swept past the bouncers at the door in a vortex of fauxhawks and fades and emo hair, mops and crops and Japanese princess cuts, Von Dutch trucker-cap knockoffs, temporary tattoos, spliffs hanging off lips, Matrix -era Ray-Bans, Hawaiian shirts, the only shirts in sight with collars, except for Horst’s. “Good grief,” he exclaims, “it looks like Keokuk around here.” Those in earshot are too hip to tell him that’s the point.

Even though the dotcom bubble, once an eye-catching ellipsoid, now droops in vivid pink collapse over the trembling chin of the era, perhaps no more than a vestige of shallow breath left inside it, no expense tonight has been spared. The theme of the gathering, officially “1999,” has a darker subtext of Denial. It soon becomes clear that everybody’s pretending for tonight that they’re still in the pre-crash fantasy years, dancing in the shadow of last year’s dreaded Y2K, now safely history, but according to this consensual delusion not quite upon them yet, with all here remaining freeze-framed back at the Cinderella moment of midnight of the millennium when in the next nanosecond the world’s computers will fail to increment the year correctly and bring down the Apocalypse. What passes for nostalgia in a time of widespread Attention Deficit Disorder. People have pulled their pre-millennial T-shirts back out of the archival plastic they’ve been idling in—Y2K IS NEAR, ARMAGEDDON EVE, Y2K COMPLIANT LOVE MACHINE, I SURVIVED… Determined, as Prince can be heard repeatedly urging, to party like it’s 1999.

The Soviet-era sound system, looted from a failed arena somewhere in Eastern Europe, is also blasting Blink-182, Echo and the Bunnymen, Barenaked Ladies, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and other sentimental oldies while vintage stock quotations from the boom-years NASDAQ crawl along a ticker display on a frieze running the full perimeter of the ballroom, beneath giant four-by-six-meter LED screens onto which bloom and fade loops of historical highlights like Bill Clinton’s grand-jury testimony, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” the other Bill, Gates, getting a pie in the face in Belgium, the announcement trailer for Halo, clips from the Dilbert animated TV series and the first season of SpongeBob, Roman Coppola’s Boo.com commercials, Monica Lewinsky hosting SNL , Susan Lucci finally winning a Daytime Emmy for Erica Kane, with Urge Overkill’s song of the same name deejayed in as accompaniment.

The antique bar, elaborately carved in a number of neo-Egyptian motifs, was salvaged by Tworkeffx from the headquarters lodge of a semimystical outfit uptown being converted, like every structure of its scale in NYC, to residential use. If occult mojo still permeates the ancient Caucasian walnut, it is waiting its moment to manifest. What remains tonight is an appeal to fond memories of all the open bars of the nineties, where everybody here can remember drinking for free, night after night, simply by claiming affiliation with the start-up of the moment. The bartenders behind it tonight are mostly out-of-work hackers or street-level drug dealers whose business dried up after April 2000. Those who can’t help making with the free booze advice, for example, turn out to be Razorfish alumni, still the smartest people in the room. There is no bottom-shelf product here, it’s all Tanqueray No. Ten, Patrón Gran Platinum, The Macallan, Elit. Along with PBRs, of course, in a washtub full of crushed ice, for those who cannot easily deal with the prospect of an irony-free evening.

If there’s business being talked tonight, it’s someplace else in town, where time is too valuable to waste on partying. Third-quarter earnings are in the toilet, deal flow is down to a slow drip, corporate IT budgets are as frozen as machine margaritas in a Palo Alto bar, Microsoft XP has just emerged from beta, but already there is nerdal muttering and geekish discontent over security and backward-compatibility issues. Recruiters are out discreetly prowling the crowd, but with none of the usual color-coded bracelets visible tonight, hackers looking to work for short money have to default to intuition about who’s hiring.

Later those who were here will remember mostly how vertical it all was. The stairwells, the elevators, the atria, the shadows that seem to plunge from overhead in repeated assaults on the gatherings and ungatherings beneath… the dancers semi-stunned, out under the strobing, not dancing exactly, more like standing in one place and moving up and down in time to the music.