Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

Igor is chirpy. Too chirpy. Acting like he’s been waiting for this call forever.

“Look, Igor, it’s not as if anybody is paying me to find out who did Lester—”

“You know who did it. So do I. Cops will not act. It becomes matter of…” Is he trying to get her to say it?

“Justice.”

“Restoration.”

“He’s dead. What’s to restore?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I would indeed. Especially if it’s KGB business and you and your posse are embedded assets.”

A silence she has to categorize as amused. “They don’t say KGB anymore, they say FSB, they say SVU. Since Putin, KGB means old guys in government.”

“Whatever. Ice was deep into funding anti-jihadists. Russia has its own Islamic issues. Is it so crazy to imagine the two countries cooperating? Getting upset when Lester started collecting unauthorized bonuses?”

“Maxine. No. It wasn’t only because of money.”

“Excuse me? What then?”

He waits a fraction of a beat too long. “Lester saw too much.”

She tries to remember that last time she and Lester talked, in Eternal September. There must have been a tell she missed, a lapse, something. “If he understood what he was seeing, wouldn’t he have told somebody?”

“He tried to. He called me on my mobile. Night before they got him. I couldn’t pick up. Left long message on voice mail.”

“He had your mobile number.”

“Everybody does. Cost of doing business.”

“What was the message?”

“Pretty crazy shit. Black Escalades trying to run him off LIE. Phone calls to wife, threats to kids. Me, my people, he thought we might have connections. Help broker some understanding.”

“As in…?”

“He forgets about what he saw, they don’t kill him. Good luck.”

“And what he saw…?”

“He was crazy by then. They already had his sanity. They didn’t have to kill him. One more thing which must be restored. You want secular cause and effect, but here, I’m sorry, is where it all goes off books. Lester said, ‘Only choice I have left is DeepArcher.’ I heard about DeepArcher site from padonki, so I have rough idea what it means, but not what he’s talking about.”

Sanctuary. While she was being dogfucked by one of his murderers.

THE DAY OF THE NYC MARATHON, seven weeks into post-atrocity, the fearful day still reverberating, what you could call a patriotic atmosphere, thousands of runners come out in memory of 11 September and its victims in defiance of any chance it’ll happen again, security super tight, Verrazano Bridge deeply guarded, all harbor traffic suspended, nothing visible in the skies overhead but helicopters keeping industrious watch…

Around midday, headed for the weekly flea market at a nearby middle school, Maxine begins to notice, first one by one, then in a stream, yuppies in Mylar capes—the superhero business suddenly gone low-rent here—beginning to filter over from the park. By the corner of 77th and Columbus, it’s grown into a mob scene. Whooping and hollering and hugging and flags waving everyplace.

Sitting exhausted on the sidewalk against a wall with a row of other runners recovering from the event their shiny official wraps announce they have just run, here seems to be Windust.

First time face-to-face since that romantic evening down on the far West Side. “Don’t tell anybody you saw me,” still a little short of breath, “it’s a vice, especially this soon after eleven September, too much mortality around already, why go out of the way to embrace even more? And yet,” waving around wearily, “here we all are.” Unless he bought his souvenir cape from somebody down the street and Maxine’s in for another setup here.

“Too deep for me.”

A flirtatious smirk. “Yes, I remember.”

“Then again, sometimes a centimeter is way too much. It’s all right, you’re having some chemicals from the running. Can you get up yet? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” Of course, Maxine, why not, maybe a cheese danish also? Is she crazy, this is the last thing she should be doing. But the Jewish Mother, sitting silent in the dark, has suddenly chosen this moment to jump up, switch on the tasteful lamp from Scully & Scully, and blindside Maxine into yet another shameful display of eppes-essen solicitude. For a second she hopes Windust is too exhausted. But fitness prevails, and he’s on his feet, and before she can think up an excuse they are sitting in a retro lunchwagon on Columbus, dating from the eighties when the neighborhood was hot, now more of interest to tourists who are into subcultural history. The place today is jittering with recaffeinating marathoners. Nobody is talking too loud, however, so the chances for conversation are at least fifty-fifty, for a change.

What kind of ex, she wonders, would Windust ever have qualified as? ex-heavy date, ex-mistake, ex-quickie, maybe just x for unknown? By now she ought to be well into pretending none of it ever happened, instead here’s this lurid Day-Glo folder icon blinking at her, Unbalanced Accounts.

Crowds outside push past the window screaming congratulations, laughing too loud, stuffing their faces, flourishing their capes. On triumph’s home screen, Windust is a solitary pixel of discontent. “Guess they showed those rugriders, huh. Look at them. An army of the clueless, who think they own 11 September.”

“Hey, why shouldn’t they, they bought it from you, we all did, you took our own precious sorrow, processed it, sold it back to us like any other product. Ask you something? When it happened? The Day Everything Changed, where were you?”

“In my little cubicle. Reading Tacitus.” The warrior-scholar routine. “Who makes a case that Nero didn’t set fire to Rome so he could blame it on the Christians.”

“Sounds familiar, somehow.”

“You people want to believe this was all a false-flag caper, some invisible superteam, forging the intel, faking the Arabic chatter, controlling air traffic, military communications, civilian news media—everything coordinating without a hitch or a malfunction, the whole tragedy set up to look like a terror attack. Please. My wised-up civilian heartbreaker. Guess what. Nobody in the business is that good.”

“You’re saying I don’t need to get too excited about this anymore? Well. Ain’t that a relief. Meantime you people have what you want, your War on Terror, war without end, and job security up the ol’ wazoo.”

“For somebody maybe. Not me.”

“Goonsquad skills no longer in demand? Aw.”

He looks downward, at his abs, his dick, his shoes, some vintage Mizuno Waves in an eye-assaulting color scheme the years have not been kind to. “Retirement looming, basically.”

“There’s exit options for you guys? Quit kidding.”

“Well… considering what the exits are, we do try to make private arrangements instead.”

“Saving up your spare change, Florida Keys, little skiff with an ice chest full of Dos Equis sort of thing…”

“Wish I could be more specific.”

According to the flash-drive dossier Marvin brought around last summer, Windust’s portfolio is stuffed with privatized state assets all across the Third World. She imagines a few blessed hectares down in the trackless retrocolonial, someplace “safe,” whatever that means, off the surveillance matrix, spared somehow from U.S.-engineered regime changes, children with AKs, deforestation, storms, famines, and other late-capitalist planetary insults… with somebody he can trust, some ultimate Tonto, keeping an eye on its perimeters for him as the years unroll… In the lives variously reported of Windust, are loyalties like that possible?

She should have tumbled before this to the peculiar lightlessness in his eyes today, a deficit beyond secular fatigue. “Retirement” is a euphemism, and somehow she doubts he’s up here on any midlife cardio-fitness program. This is coming more and more to feel like a checklist of winding-up chores he’s running through before moving on.