Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“More than what I was saying already? When you were little, I always tried to keep you as much as I could from joining in on all the brainless adoration of cops, but after a point you make your own mistakes.” Then, tentative as she’s ever seen him, “Maxeleh, you didn’t…?”

Looking more at her knees than at her father, she pretends to explain, “All these penny-ante con artists, I never once cut slack for any of them, but the first major-league war criminal I run into, I’m starstruck, he tortures and murders people, always gets away with it, am I repelled, shocked? no, I’m thinking, he can turn. He can still turn away, nobody’s that bad, he has to have a conscience, there’s time, he can make up for it, except now he can’t—”

“Sh. Shh. It’s all right, kiddo,” reaching diffidently for her face. No, this doesn’t let her off the hook, she knows she’s being less than honest, hoping Ernie, either to protect himself or in true innocence she can’t bring herself to break, will only take it literally. Which he does. “You were always like this. I kept waiting for you to give it up, let it go, turn as cold as the rest of us, praying all the time you wouldn’t. You’d come back from school, history classes, some new nightmare, the Indians, the Holocaust, crimes I hardened my heart against years ago, taught them but didn’t feel them so much anymore, and you’d be so angry, passionately hurting, your little hands in fists, how could anybody do these things, how could they live with themselves? What was I supposed to say? We handed you the tissues and said, it’s grown-ups, some act that way, you don’t have to be like them, you can be better. Best we could ever come up with, pathetic, but you know what, I never found out what we should have said. Think I’m happy about that?”

“The boys ask me the same things now, I don’t want to see them turn into their classmates, cynical smart-mouthed little bastards—but what happens if Ziggy and Otis start caring too much, Pop, this world, it could destroy them, so easily.”

“No alternative, you trust them, trust yourself, and the same for Horst, who seems to be back in the picture now…”

“For a while now, actually. Maybe never out of it.”

“Well, as far as this other guy, better somebody else should deal with the flowers, the eulogies. Like Joe Hill always sez, don’t mourn, organize. And a word of fashion advice from your stylish old man here, wear some color, stay away from too much black.”

So down at Shawn’s next morning is of course where she lets herself disorganize all to pieces, not with her parents or husband or dear friend Heidi, no—in front of some idiot-surfant whose worst idea of a bad day is one-foot-high waves.

“So you… did have feelings for this guy.”

“Have feelings,” California gobbledygook, translate please, no, wait, don’t. “Shawn? OK you were right, I was wrong, you know what, fuck you, how much do I still owe you, we should settle up because I’m never coming back here again.”

“Our first fight.”

“Our last.” For some reason she doesn’t move.

“Maxi, it’s time. I reach this point with everybody. What you need to deal with now is The Wisdom.”

“Great, I’m at the dentist here.”

Shawn darkens the blinds, puts on a tape of Moroccan trance music, lights a joss stick. “Are you ready?”

“No. Shawn—”

“Here it is—The Wisdom. Prepare to copy.” She stays on her meditation mat despite herself. Breathing deeply, Shawn announces, “‘Is what it is is… is it is what it is.’” Allowing a silence to fall, lengthy but maybe not as deep as the breaths he’s taking. “Got that?”

“Shawn…”

“That’s The Wisdom, repeat it back.”

Sighing pointedly, she complies, adding, “Depending of course what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.”

RIGHT, SOMETHING A LITTLE DIFFERENT. What has the alternative ever been? Reclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency’s winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which “fraud” is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody’s towering delusions about being exempt…

Each day she sees Ziggy and Otis get through safely is another thousandth of a point added to her confidence level that maybe nobody’s really after them, maybe nobody holds her responsible for whatever Windust did, maybe Lester Traipse’s probable murderer, Gabriel Ice, is not projecting evil energy into the heart of her family by way of Avi Deschler, who is looking more and more like the kid in the teen horror movie who turns out to be possessed. “Nah,” Brooke blithely, “he’s probably experimenting. Some Goth thing maybe.” Oddly these days Maxine finds herself zeroing in on her sister, understanding that among all the signs and symptoms of city pathology, Brooke historically has been her best indication, her high-sensitivity toxic detector, and she is intrigued now to notice that into Brooke’s demeanor some strange anti-kvetchiness has come lately creeping, some willingness to let go of the old obsessions about people and purchases, some… glow? Aahh! No, it couldn’t be. Could it?

“All right, so let’s have it, when are you due?”

“Hmm? ‘What do I do’? You mean like all day or… Oh. Oh, Maxi the Taxi, you tumbled already? I only told Avi last night.”

“Sisterhood is extrasensory, watch more horror movies, you’ll get educated. How is Avi with this?”

“Awesome?”

Not quite how Avi would put it. He’s now making a weekly practice of slipping in the delivery gate around the corner and past Daytona’s headshaking scrutiny to tell Maxine his sad hashslingrz stories, as if she has an arsenal of superpowers to call on.

His workplace has become a rat’s nest of empire building, turf defense, careerism, backstabbing, betrayal, and snitchcraft. What Avi once imagined as simple paranoia about the competition is in fact systemic by now, with more enemies inside than out. He finds himself actually using the word “tribal.” Also,

“Mind if I use your toilet a minute?”

Which with Avi has become a Frequently Asked Question. Plus the red eyes with the half-closed eyelids, runny nose, dopey and scattered conversation, buzzers do begin to sound. One day Maxine gives him a short lead, then follows him out down the hall and into the toilet, where she finds her brother-in-law with a computer-duster nozzle up his nose, committing propellant abuse.

“Avi, really.”

“It’s air in a can, harmless.”

“Read the label. Some planet where the atmosphere is fluoroethane gas, ‘air,’ maybe. Meanwhile, back on earth, you should remember you’ll be a patafamiliarass before you know it here.”

“Thanks. I should be totally euphoric, right? Guess what, I’m not, I’m anxious, I know I need to find another job, Ice has me by the balls, how do I pay off a mortgage, support a family, without a paycheck?”

“All Ice cares about,” there-there as usual, “is the lunchhooks of others in the company tambourine, with nondisclosure a distant second. If you can convince him you’re no threat in either area, he’ll go out and headhunt you the perfect dream job himself.”