Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

“This real/virtual situation, it doesn’t come up with you, Heidi.”

“Guess I’m just a Yahoo! type of gal. Click in, click back out, nothing too far afield, nothing too…” the characteristic Heidi pause, “deep.”

It’s between semesters at City, and Heidi, on her break, is about to fly off with Conkling to Munich, Germany. When Maxine first heard about this, a Wagnerian brass section began to blare rudely down the corridors of short-term memory. “This is about—”

“He”— no longer, Maxine noted, “Conkling” — “has recently purchased a pre-owned bottle of 4711 cologne, liberated by GIs at the end of the war from Hitler’s private bathroom at Berchtesgaden… and…” That old Heidical yes-and-what’s-it-to-you look.

“And the only forensic lab in the world equipped for a Hitler’s-cooties workup on it happens to be located in Munich. Well, who wouldn’t want to be certain, it’s like pregnancy, isn’t it.”

“You’ve never understood him,” nimbly stepping out of the way of the half-eaten sandwich that Maxine reflexively picked up then and launched at her. It’s true that she still doesn’t get Conkling, who is now returning to the Lufthansa lounge all but skipping. “I’m ready! How about you, Poisongirl, are you ready for this adventure?”

“Rarin to go,” Heidi kind of semiabsently, it seems to Maxine.

“This could be it, you know, the lost connection, the first step back along that dark sillage , across all that time and chaos, to the living Führer—”

“You never called him that before,” it occurs to Heidi.

Conkling’s reply, likely to be idiotic, is interrupted by a young lady on the PA announcing the flight to Munich.

There is an extra checkpoint these days, an artifact of 11 September, at which the authorities discover in one of Conkling’s inner pockets the possibly historic flask of 4711. Excited colloquial German on the PA. Armed security of two nations converging on the suspects. Oops, Maxine remembers, something about no bringing liquids on board the airplane… standing behind a bulletproof plastic barrier she tries to convey this with charade gestures to Heidi, who is glaring back with a don’t-stand-there-call-a-lawyer tilt to her eyebrows.

Later, hours later, in the taxi back to Manhattan, “It’s probably for the best, Heidi.”

“Yes, there may still be lingering in Munich the odd pocket of bad karma,” Heidi nodding you could say almost with relief.

“All is not lost,” pipes Conkling, “I can send it by bonded courier, and we’ve only lost a day, my tuberose blossom.”

“We’ll restrategize,” Heidi promises.

“MARVIN, YOU’RE OUT OF UNIFORM. Where’s all the kozmo gear?”

“Sold it all on eBay, dahlin, movin with the times.”

“For $1.98, come on.”

“For more than you would ever dream. Nothing dies anymore, the collectors’ market, it’s the afterlife, and yups are its angels.”

“OK. And this thing you just brought me here…”

What else, another disc, though it isn’t till after supper, with Horst conclusively tubeside in front of Alec Baldwin in The Ray Milland Story , that Maxine, less than eager, gets to have a look. Another traveling shot, this time out the sleet-battered windshield of some kind of big rig. From what’s visible through the weather, it’s mountain terrain, gray sky, streaks and patches of snow, no horizontal references till an overpass comes swooping in, and then she can see how unnecessarily dutched the frame actually is, so who else can it be behind the camera but Reg Despard.

And it’s not only Reg—as if on cue, the shot swivels to the left, and here at the wheel, mesh cap, outlaw cheroot, week’s growth of beard and all, is their onetime partner in mischief Eric Outfield again, risen from the deep or wherever.

“Breaker breaker good buddy, so forth,” beams Eric, “and a belated happy New Year’s to ya, Maxi, you and yours.”

“Ditto,” adds invisible Reg.

“Karma, see, me and Reg just keep running into each other.”

“This time ol’ Black Hat here was lurking around the Redmond campus, somehow physically hacked his way in through the gate—”

“Common interest in security patches.”

Heh, heh. “Different motives, of course. Meantime this other gig comes up.”

“Our exit here.”

Off the interstate, after a couple of turns, they pull in to a truck stop. The camera goes around to the back of the trailer, Eric in close-up gets a serious face. “This is all deeply secret right now. This disc you’re watching has to be destroyed soon as you’re done with it, grind it, shred it, pop it in the microwave, someday it’ll all be in a feature-length documentary, but not today.”

“Couple guys in a truck?” Maxine interrogates the screen.

Eric unlatching the door and rolling it up, “You never saw this, OK?” She can make out, stuffed inside, racks of electronic gear receding to infinity, LEDs glowing in the dimness. She hears the hum of cooling fans. “Custom shock-mounted, everything mil-spec, these here are all what they call blade servers, warehouses full going as you might expect for rock-bottom prices these days and who,” Eric in a cheerful cloud of cigar smoke, “I bet you’re wondering, would be springing for a rolling server farm, in fact a fleet of us, out on the move and untrackable 24/7? what kind of data would these units be carrying on their hard drives, so forth.”

“Don’t ask,” Reg cackles, “It’s all experimental right now. Could be a big waste of our time and some unknown party’s money.”

Calm breathing over Maxine’s shoulder. For some reason she doesn’t jump or scream, or not much, only pauses the disc. “Looks like up around the Bozeman Pass,” Horst guesses.

“How’s your movie, honey?”

“Just on a commercial break, they’re as far as the making of The Lost Weekend (1945), nice cameo by Wallace Shawn as Billy Wilder, but listen, don’t go by this footage here, OK? it’s really nice country out there, you might enjoy it… Maybe some summer we could…”

“They want me to destroy this disc, Horst, so if you wouldn’t mind…”

“Never saw it, deaf and dumb, hey, that’s ’at there Eric guy, ain’t it.”

Might be some envy in his voice, but this time no husbandish whine. She sneaks a look at his face and catches him gazing into the stormswept mountains like a man in exile, his wish so blatant, to be schlepping once again through blizzards and relentless wind, out solo on the far northern highways. How is she ever supposed to get used to such wintry nostalgia?

“Think your picture’s back on, 18-wheeler. You’re looking for a role model, you could do worse than Ray Milland, maybe you should be taking notes?”

“Yep, always been a The Thing with Two Heads (1972) man myself.”

Maxine resumes the disc. The truck is in motion again. The gray unprophetic miles unrolling. After a while Eric sez, “This ain’t the civil war, by the way, case you were wondering. What we talked about last time. Not even Fort Sumter. Just a li’l spin up the interstate’s all. Bleeding-edge development phase yet. We could be heading anywhere, Alberta, Northwest Territories, Alaska, we’ll see where it takes us. Sorry about no more e-mail, but we’re all down where you might not want to be bringing your family computer anymore. Inappropriate content plus crashing the machine in ways you’ll be unhappy with. From here on, contact will have to be kind of intermittent. Maybe someday—” The picture goes dark. She fast-forwards looking around for more, but that seems to be it.

Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine’s riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being dealt and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman… After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own—they are the day’s messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under nonunion conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.