Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“No more Rachel, huh?”

“Moving on.”

Heidi does a fast drop-by, done up in a tropical-weight beige dress, short tousled darkish wig, glasses with oversize wire rims, and a strange plastic perhaps glow-in-the-dark lei hanging around her neck. “You look dimly familiar,” Maxine greets her, “you would be…?”

“Margaret Mead,” Heidi replies. “Taking my anthro plunge into the urban primitive tonight, babe, it’s all out there and I’m totally immersing in it. Dig what I found down on Canal Street.”

“Open up your hand, I can’t see it, what is it?”

“Digital camcorder, usually you can only find these in Japan. Hours of battery time, and I’m bringing spares, so I can record all night.”

“Yet you seem anxious.”

“Who wouldn’t be, it’s every pop impulse in history, concentrated into one night a year, what if I don’t know which way to point the lens, what if I miss something really crucial?”

“Listen to my voice,” something they used to get into as girls, “you are not becoming hysterical, chill, there’s a good princess.”

“Oh, Lady Maxipad, thanks ever so much, you’re so practical…”

“Yes and I just went to the cash machine, so I’m also good for bail money, if that should come up.”

As evening falls, Maxine and Horst take the biggest wastebasket in the house and fill it with fun-size candies of different brands, including Swedish Fish, PayDays, and Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, set it outside in the hall, hang a Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob, and retire to the bedroom, allowing Hallowe’en to develop as it will, which out in the streets of the Upper West Side means into a pseudopod of exotic Greenwich Village, after having had to settle the rest of the year for being a vague sort of uptown Dubuque.

Indoors, the evening gets you’d say festive, with Maxine riding Horst for the better part of an hour, not that it’s anybody’s business of course, and coming a number of times, at last fiercely in sync with Horst, not long after which, owing to some extrasensory cue from the television, whose mute feature has been engaged, they surface from their post-orgy daze in time to witness Derek Jeter’s clutch tenth-inning homer and another trademark Yankee win. “Yes!” Horst beginning to scream in delighted disbelief. “And it better be Keanu Reeves in the biopic!”

“Uh, huh. You hate everything about New York,” Maxine reminds him.

“Oh. Well I’ve driven through Arizona, nothin against Arizona, but I did have a little money on the Yanks, judgment call, really…” About to drift off into directionless cozy talk here…

“Really”? Maybe not, Horst. “Listen, being it’s a school night? I think I’m gonna just zip down the street and see how everybody’s doing.”

“Well my darlin, can’t say it wasn’t a blast, shoat but sweet as they say around the pigpen, maybe I’ll just catch some highlights, then.”

From Horst, she is aware, this amounts to a declaration of love. But something is now focusing her out of the house, on to The Deseret, and what’s likely to be a peculiar vertical creepfest over there.

A full moon still a little lopsided and not yet at its zenith, and her girlhood nemesis, doorman Patrick McTiernan, on duty at the gate, wearing a dark blue uniform with The Deseret name in gold, along with gold chevrons hash-marking each sleeve, gold braid epaulets, a gold fourragère drooping over his right shoulder. His own name above the left-hand breast pocket. In gold. Maybe this is a Hallowe’en getup. Or else years have passed, enough of them for Patrick to pick up the extra hash marks, plus the suave chops of a Distinguished Older Gentleman. He does not, of course, recognize Maxine, either from back in the day or as a faceless pool guest, and observing that she is not a group of drunken teenagers, waves her on in.

The Singhs are up on the tenth floor, the elevators are all either busy or broken down from overloading, and Maxine, having heard fitness-benefit rumors, is OK with taking the stairs. The somber old landmark is certainly jumping tonight. Stairwells and corridors are thronged with all manner of pint-size Statues of Liberty, Uncle Sams, firefolks, cops and GIs in fatigues, not to mention Shreks, Bob the Builders, SpongeBobs and Patricks and Sandy the Squirrels, Queen Amidalas, Harry Potter characters in Quidditch goggles, Gryffindor robes, and witch hats. Apartment doors are all wide open, and inside you can hear a range of sound tracks, including Steely Dan’s “Ain’t Never Gonna Do It Without the Fez On.” The tenantry have as usual gone all out, spending thousands on haunted-house effects, black light and fog generators, arena sound, animatronic zombies as well as live actors working for insultingly less than scale, treat assortments from Dean & DeLuca and Zabar’s, and gift bags stuffed with high-end digital tchotchkes, Hermès scarves, and free airplane tickets to places like Tahiti and Gstaad.

Up at the Singh residence, Prabhnoor and Amrita are dressed as Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Rubber masks and everything. Prabhnoor is handing out cigars. Amrita, in a blue dress of course, is holding a dead karaoke mike and sweetly singing “I Did It My Way.” They seem like perfectly pleasant people. Everybody is drunk, mostly on vodka, judging from the empties piled up around and behind the bar, though catering staff dressed as Battle Droids are also going around with trays of champagne, plus filet mignon canapés and lobster sandwiches. Vyrva, done up as a Pikachu Beanie Baby, it figures, approaches Maxine gushing, “What a wonderful costume! You look just like a big, grown-up lady!”

“How’re the kids making out so far?”

“Pretty good, we may have to rent a U-Haul. Justin’s going around with them, working door-to-door. Some Hallowe’en, huh?”

“Yeah. Can’t understand why I’m feeling all this class hostility.”

“This? next to the Alley a couple years ago? the average start-up party? this is a footnote, my dear. Commentary.”

“You’ve been in New York too long, Vyrva, you’re starting to talk like my father.”

“Justin’s got his mobile, you want me to call and—”

“It’s The Deseret, off-planet, likely to be roaming charges here nobody can afford, I’ll just cruise around, thanks.”

Out into this overdue-for-exorcism building she has never found even marginally likable. Lining the streetlike corridors, where a hundred years ago pony-drawn delivery wagons, cranked up here on massive hydraulic lifts, brought directly to the doorsills of tenants cans of milk, bushels of flowers, cases of champagne, tonight Maxine finds elaborate mock-ups of Camp Crystal Lake, mummies’ tombs, Frankenstein’s Art Deco lab all in black and white. Tenant hospitality is you’d have to say proactive. Before long, without so much as raising an eyebrow, she finds herself schlepping sacks full of Hallowe’en plunder too heavy for a child even to lift.

As the evening advances, so does the median age of the crowd of walk-ins, with much more emphasis on eye makeup, glitter, fishnet hose, axes in skulls, fake blood. It is inevitable that somebody should be masquerading as Osama bin Laden, and here in fact are two of them, whom Maxine recognizes sooner than she wants to as Misha and Grisha.

“We were going to go as World Trade Center,” Misha explains, “but decided OBL would be even more offensive.”

“So how come you’re not down in the Village someplace, where the TV coverage is?”

They exchange a Can-we-trust-her look.

“It’s for a reason,” she guesses, “private not public.”

“It’s fuckin Hallowe’en, right?” sez Grisha.

“Paying respects,” explains Misha.

To whom? Here at The Deseret, of course, to whom else but Lester Traipse, the real Hallowe’en ghost tonight, Lester the jive-ass ballistic blade victim with the unfinished business, doomed to wander those century-old corridors until accounts are balanced, or for eternity, whichever comes first. Lester was a creature of Silicon Alley, Alley to the core, and down the Alley the stories are never that short let alone sweet, down there it’s not only a mediagenic neighborhood of dreams recently faded but also the latest in a tradition of New York Alleys It Is In Fact Best To Avoid, shadows full of mentally unstable voices, echoes off the masonry, cries of city desolation, metallic noises less innocent than ancient trash cans in the wind.