Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“Fuck it,” Justin later in the night, with unexpected bitterness, “he wants it, let him have it.”

“Ain’t like you, bro, what’ll happen next time we need to get lost?”

“I won’t.” Justin sounding a little melancholy about it.

“Maybe I will,” Lucas declares.

“We can invent someplace else.”

“Justin, what is this town doing to our heads, man, we never used to be like this.”

“I don’t think it’s any better back in California anymore. Just as corrupt, we’ve been up and down the same streets together, you know where it all leads to, there or here.”

Vyrva, though technically a shiksa, let them go on, drifting in and out in a motherly way, offering snacks and keeping her annoyance to herself. Now, to Maxine, “Talk about lost. Sometimes…”

Here it comes, the fraudster’s lament. Maxine could run workshops in Conquering Eyeroll. “And…”

“And if they’re lost, then I think,” barely audible, “it could be my fault.”

In comes Daytona with a sack full of Danishes and a plastic coffee carafe. “Yo Vyrva, surf’s up, baby!”

Vyrva is enough of a sport to stand and bump butts with Daytona and contribute eight bars of backup on the seldom-heard oldie “Soul Gidget” before Daytona, giving her a look, remarks, “Should be singin ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ you lookin a little anorexic, girl, need some them po’k chops ! Collard greens!”

“Fried peach pies,” Vyrva wan but game.

“What I’m talk’n about,” waving herself back out the door. “ Hold that mayo! ”

“Vyrva—”

“No. It’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, oh, Maxi… I’ve been going through such guilt?”

“If you’re not Jewish, you have to have a license, cause we hold the patent, see.”

Shaking her head, “What should I do, I’m like so scared now, I’m in so deep?”

“How about Lucas, how deep is he?”

“Lucas? No? Not Lucas?” Pissed off that Maxine isn’t getting it.

“Uh-oh. We’re talking about somebody else? Who?”

“Please… I really thought I could help. It was supposed to be for Fiona, for Justin, for all of us. He said the guys could write their own ticket.”

“Somebody,” as dinosaur-size scales at long last fall clattering from Maxine’s eyes, “somebody who wanted to acquire the DeepArcher source code, assumed that dating the wife of one of the partners would give him a foot in the door, am I following this so far?”

“Maxi, you’ve got to believe—”

“No, that was the ’69 Mets, it’ll be on your Big Apple citizenship exam, and meantime who now, I wonder, who of all the dozens of suits and suitors, would be enough of a total shit to try something like that, wait, wait, it’s right here at the edge of my brain…”

“I might have told you, but you hate him so much…”

“Everybody hates Gabriel Ice, so I guess that means you haven’t told anybody.”

“And he’s such a vengeful little prick, if I tried to call things off, he’d tell Justin all about it, destroy my marriage, my family… I’d lose Fiona, everything—”

“There, there, don’t dwell, that’s worst-case. Could play out any number of ways. How long’s it been going on for?”

“Since Las Vegas last summer. We even got in a quickie on September 11th, which makes it that much worse…”

Maxine unable not to squint a little, “I hope you’re not saying you caused that somehow? That would be really crazy, Vyrva.”

“Same kind of carelessness. Isn’t it?”

“Same as what? Is this the listen-up-all-you-slackers speech? American neglect of family values brings al-Qaeda in on the airplanes and takes the Trade Center down?”

“They saw how we are, what we’ve become. How soft, how neglectful. Self-indulgent. They figured us for an easy target, and they were right.”

“Somehow I don’t see the cause and effect, but maybe it’s just me.”

“I’m an adulteress!” Vyrva wails quietly.

“Ah, come on. Adolescentress, maybe.”

Yet who can help, in these situations, wanting to hear a detail or two? Ice’s cozy bachelor pad down in Tribeca, for example, a bathroom running to about the square footage of a pro basketball court, featuring a wide collection of tampons of every make, size, and absorbency, bottles of shampoo and conditioner whose labels you can’t read a word of because they’re imported from so far away, hair equipment from bobby pins to an enormous retro salon dryer you not only sit under but apparently actually have to climb inside, plus a condom selection that makes the checkout at Duane Reade look like a machine in a gas-station men’s room.

“Thing is,” after some nose blowing, “the sex is always so great.”

“A sensitive, considerate lover.”

“Fuck no, he’s a son of a bitch. Did you ever try anal?”

Does Maxine really want to hear about this?

Does Delman’s sell shoes?

“It figures,” encouragingly. “His specialty, I bet?”

Hallowe’en arrives. Below 14th Street this has become over the years a major city festival, with a parade whose TV coverage rivals that of Macy’s on Thanksgiving. Up on the Yupper West Side activities tend more toward the scale of a block party, 69th cordoned off, areaways converted into haunted houses, street entertainment and food pitches, bigger crowds every year, which is usually where Maxine takes the boys trick-or-treating, finishing up along 79th and sometimes 86th, working the lobbies of the different apartment buildings. But this year, it is rumored, post-9/11 jitters may have curtailed or even canceled some of these street activities, despite the mayor’s face all over the local channels, looking strangely like the rubber mask of it currently appearing in seasonal pop-up stores, talking tough as ever, recommending that New Yorkers stand up to terror by celebrating Hallowe’en as usual.

“Jagdeep’s folks are having this Hallowe’en party,” it occurs to Ziggy, what you’d call disingenuously.

This is the kid in Ziggy’s class who was writing code when he was four, Maxine recalls, and also happens to live in The Deseret. “How appropriate. The whole place is a haunted house.”

“Something wrong with The Deseret, Mom?” Otis wide-eyed and so in cahoots.

“Everything,” Maxine replies.

“Aside from that, though,” Zig serenely.

“You guys’d be trick-or-treating strictly inside the building?”

“No need to go anyplace else, Hallowe’en there is legendary. Every apartment gets done up in a different horror theme.”

“And… this is nothing to do with Jagdeep’s sister. With the several years’ premature, uh…”

“Rack,” Otis suggests, being then obliged to dodge a brotherly krav maga sucker punch. “You won’t see her anyway, Zig, she’ll be partying,” running off, Ziggy in pursuit, “down in the Village, she only dates NYU guys—”

Horst with a straight face not unmodulated by a shit-eating grin, “Series’ll be on tonight, El Duque’s starting, maybe against Curt Schilling, we could stay in and watch the game…”

“Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack?”

Otis has decided he’ll go as Vegeta, his hair radically gelled up tonight into spikes, his silver-and-blue outfit obtained from some strange Asian site, fulfilled and delivered almost before he clicked “Add to Cart.” Ziggy’s going as the Empire State Building, with a stuffed toy ape attached about neck-high. Vyrva and Justin agree to be chaperones and will meet them at The Deseret.

Eric and Driscoll are headed down to the Village parade, got up respectively as a NAND gate (“I say yes to everything”) and Aki Ross, from the Final Fantasy movie, “The haircut of everybody’s dreams, sixty thousand strands, each one animated separately, serious bandwidth, though this wig here,” Driscoll headshaking a short demo, “has to go under the heading of Desperate Tie-ins.”