Bleeding Edge

29

The spread on the Jets-Indianapolis game Sunday is 2 points. Horst, regionally loyal as always, bets Ziggy and Otis a pizza that the Colts will win, which in fact they do in a 21-point walkover. Peyton Manning can do no wrong, Vinny Testaverde is a little less consistent, managing in the last five minutes for example to fumble on the Colts’ 2-yard line to a defensive end who then proceeds to run the ball 98 yards to a touchdown, as Testaverde alone chases him up the field while the rest of the Jets look on, and Ziggy and Otis lapse into intemperate language their father doesn’t see how he can call them out for.

It’s a warm evening, and they all decide instead of ordering the pizza in to walk over to Columbus, to Tom’s Pizza, a local soon to fade into Upper West Side folk memory. First time in years, it occurs to Maxine later, that they’ve done anything all together as a family. They sit at a table outside. Nostalgia lurks, ready to ooze from ambush. Maxine thinks back to when the boys were little, the local practice in neighborhood pizza parlors then being to cut slices into small bite-size squares as an accommodation for little kids. When the kid can handle a whole slice, it’s a kind of coming-of-age. Later on, with braces, there’s a return to smaller squares. Maxine glances over at Horst for any outward signs of an active memory, but no dice, old Stolid Geometry is occupied with stuffing pizza into his face at a steady rhythm and trying to make the boys lose count of how many slices they’ve had. Which itself, Maxine supposes, you could call family tradition, not specially admirable, but hell, she’ll take it.

Later, back home, Horst settled in in front of his computer screen, “Guys, come here, look at this. Darnedest thing.”

The screen is full of numbers. “This is the Chicago Exchange, toward the end of last week, see? there was a sudden abnormal surge of put options on United Airlines. Thousands of puts, not a heck of a lot of calls. Now, today, the same thing happens for American Airlines.”

“A put,” Ziggy sez, “that’s like selling short?”

“Yeah, when you’re expecting the stock price to go down. And trading volume meanwhile is way, way up—six times normal.”

“Just those two airlines?”

“Yep. Weird, huh?”

“Insider trading,” it seems to Ziggy.

MONDAY NIGHT VYRVA CALLS MAXINE with panic in her voice. “The guys are freaking out. Something about this random-number source they’ve been hacking into suddenly going nonrandom.”

“And you’re telling me this because…”

“OK if Fiona and I come over there for a little?”

“Sure.” Horst is out at a sports bar someplace way downtown watching Monday Night Football. Giants and Broncos, at Denver. Planning to sleep over at the apartment of his colleague in arrested adolescence Jake Pimento, who lives in Battery Park City, and then go in to work at the Trade Center from there.

Vyrva shows up all loose ends. “They’re screaming at each other. Never a good sign.”

“How was camp, Fiona?”

“Awesome.”

“Didn’t suck.”

“Exactly.”

Otis, Ziggy, and Fiona settle in in front of Homer Simpson, playing an accountant of all things, in a film noir, or possibly jaune, called “D.O.H.”

Vyrva showing signs of early parent bewilderment. “She’s suddenly doing Quake movies. Some of them are online, she has a following already. We’ve been cosigning distribution deals. More clauses than a North Pole family reunion. No idea what we’re agreeing to, of course.”

Maxine makes popcorn. “Stay over, why don’t you. Horst won’t be back tonight, plenty of room.”

Just one more of these into-the-night schmoozathons, nothing special, kids off to bed without too much drama, television programming that’s better with the sound off, no deep confessions, business chatter. Vyrva checks in with Justin around midnight. “They’re bonding again, now. Worse than the other. I think I will stay over.”

TUESDAY MORNING THEY ALL CONVOY over to Kugelblitz together, hang around the stoop till the bell rings, Vyrva peels away to grab a bus across town, Maxine heads for work, puts her head in a local smoke shop to grab a newspaper, and finds everybody freaking out and depressed at the same time. Something bad is going on downtown. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,” according to the Indian guy behind the counter.

“What, like a private plane?”

“A commercial jet.”

Uh-oh. Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to worse. All day long. At around noon the school calls and says they’re shutting down for the day, could she please come and collect her kids.

Everybody’s on edge. Nods, headshakes, not a lot of social conversation.

“Mom, was Dad down there at his office today?”

“He was staying over at Jake’s last night, but I think he’s mostly been working from his computer. So chances are he didn’t even go in.”

“But you haven’t heard from him?”

“Everybody’s been trying to get through to everybody, lines are swamped, he’ll call, I’m not worrying, don’t you guys, OK?”

They’re not buying it. Of course they’re not. But they both nod anyway and just get on with it. A class act, these two. She holds their hands, one on either side, all the way home, and though this sort of thing belongs to their childhood and generally annoys them, today they let her.

The phone starts ringing after a while. Each time Maxine jumps to pick it up, hoping it’s Horst, it turns out instead to be Heidi, or Ernie and Elaine, or Horst’s parents calling from Iowa where everything is an hour closer to the innocence of sleep. But from the slab of beef who still, she hopes, shares her life, no word. The boys stay in their room watching the single constant telephoto shot of the smoking towers, already too distant. She keeps sticking her head in. Bringing snack food, mom-approved and otherwise, that they don’t touch.

“Are we at war, Mom?”

“No. Who says we are?”

“This Wolf Blitzer guy?”

“Usually countries go to war with countries. I don’t think whoever did this, that they’re a country.”

“It said on the news they’re Saudi Arabians,” Otis tells her. “Maybe we’re at war with Saudi Arabia.”

“Can’t be,” Ziggy points out, “we need all that oil.”

As if by ESP, the phone rings, and it’s March Kelleher.

“It’s the Reichstag fire,” she greets Maxine.

“The what?”

“Those fucking Nazis in Washington needed a pretext for a coup, now they’ve got it. This country is headed up shit’s creek, and it isn’t rugriders we should worry about, it’s Bush and the gang.”

Maxine isn’t so sure. “It seems like none of them know what they’re doing right now, just caught by surprise, more like Pearl Harbor.”

“That’s what they want you to believe. And who says Pearl Harbor wasn’t a setup?”

They’re actually discussing this? “Forget doing it to your own people, why would anybody do this to their own economy?”

“You never heard of ‘You’ve got to spend money to make money’? Tithing back to the dark gods of capitalism.”

Then something occurs to Maxine. “March, that DVD of Reg’s, the Stinger missile…”

“I know. We got snookered.”

THE PHONE RINGS. “Are you all right?”

Asshole. What the fuck does he care? Not a voice she’s been that anxious to hear from. In the background a bureaucratic pandemonium, ringing phones, lower pay grades being verbally abused, shredders working full-time.

“Who’s this again?”

“You want to talk, you’ve got my number.” Windust hangs up. “Talk,” does that mean “fuck”? Wouldn’t surprise her, that level of desperation, of course, there have to exist losers who would actually use the tragedy unfolding downtown to get laid on the cheap, and no reason Windust as she’s come to know him couldn’t be one.

Still no word from Horst. She tries not to worry, to believe her own pitch to the boys, but she’s worried. Late that night, after they’re in bed, she sits awake in front of the tube, nodding off, being wakened by microdreams of somebody coming in the door, nodding off again.

Sometime during the night, Maxine dreams she’s a mouse who’s been running at large inside the walls of a vast apartment building she understands is the U.S., venturing out into kitchens and pantries to scavenge for food, scuffling but free, and in these small hours she has been attracted by what she recognizes as a sort of humane mousetrap yet cannot resist the bait, not traditional peanut butter or cheese but something more from the gourmet section, pâté or truffles maybe, and the moment she steps into the enticing little structure, her simple body weight is enough to unlatch a spring-loaded door that closes, not that loudly, behind her, and is impossible to open again. She finds herself inside a multilevel event space of some kind, at a gathering, maybe a party, full of unfamiliar faces, fellow mice, but no longer exactly, or only, mice. She understands that this place is a holding pen between freedom in the wild and some other unimagined environment into which, one by one, each of them will be released, and that this can only be analogous to death and afterdeath.

And wants desperately to wake up. And once she’s awake to be someplace else, even a meretricious geeks’ paradise like DeepArcher.

She gets out of bed, sweating, looks in to find the boys snoring away, drifts into the kitchen, stands staring at the fridge like it’s a television set that will tell her something she needs to know. She hears sound from the spare room. Trying not to hope, not to hyperventilate, she tiptoes in and there yes it’s Horst, snoring in front of his BioPiX channel, alone of all channels tonight not providing twenty-four hour coverage of the disaster, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to be alive, and home.

“DENVER WON IT 31–20. I fell asleep on Jake’s couch. Sometime in the night, I woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep right away.” So strange down there, Battery Park at night. Made Horst think of the night before Christmas when he was a kid. Santa Claus up there invisible, on route, someplace up in that sky. So quiet. Except for Jake snoring in the bedroom. And that neighborhood, even when you can’t see the Trade Center towers, you feel them, felt them, like somebody in an elevator shouldering up against you. And out in the sunlight the soaring hazy aluminum presence…

Next morning all hell’s broken loose outside, by the time Jake remembers where the coffee is and Horst puts the news on the tube, there’s sirens, helicopters, all through the neighborhood, pretty soon they notice people out the window, heading for the water, figure it might be a good idea to join them. Tugboats, ferries, private boats, pulling in, taking people out from the yacht basin, all on their own, amazing coordination of effort, “I don’t think anybody was in charge, they just came in and did it. I ended up over in Jersey. Some motel.”

“Your kind of place.”

“The television didn’t work too good. Nothing on but news updates.”

“So if you guys hadn’t decided to sleep in…”

“Back in the pits, I used to know this Christer coffee trader who told me it was like grace, something you don’t ask for. Just comes. Of course it can also be withdrawn at any time. Like when I always knew which way to bet on Eurodollars. The times we shorted Amazon, got out of Lucent when it went to $70 a share, remember? It wasn’t me that ever ‘knew’ anything. But something did. Sudden couple extra lines of brain code, who knows. I just followed along.”

“But then… if it was that same weird talent that kept you safe…”

“How could it be? How could predicting market behavior be the same as predicting a terrible disaster?”

“If the two were different forms of the same thing.”

“Way too anticapitalist for me, babe.”

Later he reflects, “You always had me figured for some kind of idiot savant, you were the one with the street smarts, the wised-up practical one, and I was just some stiff with a gift, who didn’t deserve to be so lucky.” First time he’s said this to her in person, though it’s a pitch he’s made more than once to an imaginary ex-wife, alone at night in hotel rooms in the U.S. and abroad, where sometimes the television speaks in languages he doesn’t know any more of than he needs to get around, the room service always brings him somebody else’s food, which he has learned to go along with in a spirit of adventurous curiosity, reminding himself that he would otherwise never have experienced, say, blackened alligator casserole with fried pickles or sheep’s-eyeball pizza. Daytime business for him is duck soup (which they also brought him once, for breakfast, in Ürümqi) with no connection he can clearly see to the other, the backstreets of the day, the 3:00 AM retranslations appropriate to fear of unwelcome dreams, the unreadable vistas of city shadow out the windows. Poisonous blue masses he doesn’t want to see but keeps drawing back the drapes a little to blink through at for as long as he has to. As if something is happening out there he mustn’t miss.

NEXT DAY AS MAXINE and the boys are heading out to Kugelblitz, “Mind if I come along?” sez Horst.

Sure. Maxine notices other sets of parents, some who haven’t spoken for years, showing up together to escort their children, regardless of age or latchkey status, safely to and from. Headmaster Winterslow is there on the stoop, greeting everybody one by one. Grave and courtly and for once refraining from educated speech. He is touching people, squeezing shoulders, hugging, holding hands. In the lobby is a table with sign-up sheets for volunteer work down at the site of the atrocity. Everybody is still walking around stunned, having spent the previous day sitting or standing in front of television screens, at home, in bars, at work, staring like zombies, unable in any case to process what they were seeing. A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumbstruck, undefended, scared shitless.

ON HER WEBLOG, March Kelleher has wasted no time shifting into what she calls her old-lefty tirade mode. “Just to say evil Islamics did it, that’s so lame, and we know it. We see those official close-ups on the screen. The shifty liar’s look, the twelve-stepper’s gleam in the eye. One look at these faces and we know they’re guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine. But who’s in any hurry to imagine? To make the awful connection? Any more than Germans were back in 1933, when Nazis torched the Reichstag within a month of Hitler becoming chancellor. Which of course is not at all to suggest that Bush and his people have actually gone out and staged the events of 11 September. It would take a mind hopelessly diseased with paranoia, indeed a screamingly anti-American nutcase, even to allow to cross her mind the possibility that that terrible day could have deliberately been engineered as a pretext to impose some endless Orwellian ‘war’ and the emergency decrees we will soon be living under. Nah, nah, perish that thought.

“But there’s still always the other thing. Our yearning. Our deep need for it to be true. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them—we who called down the sacred lightning of ‘democracy,’ and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. And whatever happened then is on our ticket.”

A week or so later, Maxine and March do breakfast at the Piraeus Diner. There is now a huge American flag in the window and a UNITED WE STAND poster. Mike is being extra solicitous to the cops who come in looking for free meals.

“Check this out.” March hands over a dollar bill, around the margins of whose obverse somebody has written in ballpoint, “World Trade Center was destroyed by CIA—Bush Senior’s CIA is making Bush Jr. Prez for life & a hero.” “I got this in change at the corner grocery this morning. That’s well within a week of the attack. Call it what you like, but a historical document whatever.” Maxine recalls that Heidi has a collection of decorated dollar bills, which she regards as the public toilet wall of the U.S. monetary system, carrying jokes, insults, slogans, phone numbers, George Washington in blackface, strange hats, Afros and dreadlocks and Marge Simpson hair, lit joints in his mouth, and speech-balloon remarks ranging from witty to stupid.

“No matter how the official narrative of this turns out,” it seemed to Heidi, “these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.”

“This message on this bill doesn’t surprise me so much as how promptly it showed up,” March sez now. “How fast the analysis has been.”

Like it or not, Maxine has become March’s official doubter, and happy to help, usually, though these days like everybody else she’s feeling discombobulated. “March, since it happened, I don’t know what to believe.”

But March, relentlessly on the case, brings up Reg’s DVD. “Suppose there was a Stinger crew deployed and waiting for orders to shoot down the first 767, the one that went on to hit the North Tower. Maybe there was another team stationed over in Jersey to pick up the second one, which would’ve been circling around and coming up from the southwest.”

“Why?”

“Anti-compassion insurance. Somebody doesn’t trust the hijackers to go through with it. These are Western minds, uncomfortable with any idea of suicide in the service of a faith. So they threaten to shoot the hijackers down in case they chicken out at the last minute.”

“And if the hijackers do change their minds, what if the Stinger team do the same and don’t shoot the plane down?”

“Then that would explain the backup sniper on the other roof, who the Stinger people know is there, keeping them in his sights till their part of the mission is over. Which is as soon as the guy with the phone gets word the plane’s committed—then everybody cleans up and clears out. It’s full daylight by then, but not that much risk of being seen ’cause all the attention is focused downtown.”

“Help, too byzantine, make it stop!”

“Trying, but is Bush answering my calls?”

HORST MEANTIME IS PUZZLED ABOUT something else. “Remember the week before this happened, all those put options on United and American Airlines? Which turned out to be exactly the two airlines that got hijacked? Well, it seems on that Thursday and Friday there were also lopsided put-to-call ratios for Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, couple others like them, all tenants of the Trade Center. As a fraud investigator, what does that suggest to you?”

“Foreknowledge of a decline in their stock prices. Who was doing all this trading?”

“Nobody so far has stepped forward.”

“Mystery players who knew it was going to happen. Overseas maybe? Like the Emirates?”

“I try to keep hold of my common sense, but…”

Maxine goes over to her parents’ for lunch, and Avi and Brooke are there as expected. The sisters embrace, though you could not say warmly. There’s no way not to talk about the Trade Center.

“Nobody that morning had anything to say,” Maxine, noticing at some point that there’s a NY Jets logo on Avi’s yarmulke, “Ain’t it awful’ is about as profound as it got. Just the one camera angle, the static telephoto shot of those towers smoldering, the same news that’s no news, the same morning-show airhead idiocy—”

“They were in shock,” Brooke mutters, “like everybody that day, what, you weren’t?”

“But why keep showing us that one thing, what were we supposed to be waiting for, what was going to happen? Too high up to run hoses, OK, so the fire will either burn itself out or spread to other floors or—or what else? What were we being set up for, if not what happened? One comes down, then the other, and who was surprised? Wasn’t it inevitable by then?”

“You think the networks knew ahead of time?” Brooke, offended, glowering. “Whose side are you on, are you an American or what are you?” Brooke now in full indignation, “this horrible, horrible tragedy, a whole generation traumatized, war with the Arab world any minute, and even this isn’t safe from your stupid little hipster irony? What’s next, Auschwitz jokes?”

“Same thing happened when JFK was shot,” Ernie belatedly trying to defuse things with geezer nostalgia. “Nobody wanted to believe that official story either. So suddenly here were all these strange coincidences.”

“You think it was an inside job, Pa?”

“The chief argument against conspiracy theories is always that it would take too many people in on it, and somebody’s sure to squeal. But look at the U.S. security apparatus, these guys are WASPs, Mormons, Skull and Bones, secretive by nature. Trained, sometimes since birth, never to run off at the mouth. If discipline exists anywhere, it’s among them. So of course it’s possible.”

“How about you, Avi?” Maxine turning to her brother-in-law. “What’s the latest on 4360.0 kilohertz?” Nice as pie. But he gives a violent jump. “Oops, or do I mean megahertz?”

“What The Fuck?”

“Language,” Elaine automatically before realizing it’s Brooke, who seems to be looking around for a weapon.

“Arab propaganda!” Avi cries. “Anti-Semitic filth. Who told you about this frequency?”

“Saw it on the Internet,” Maxine shrugs, “ham operators have known about it forever, they’re called E10 stations, operated by Mossad out of Israel, Greece, South America, the voices are women who figure in the erotic daydreams of radio hobbyists everywhere, reciting alphanumerics, encrypted, of course. Widely believed to be messages to agents, salaried and otherwise, out in the Diaspora. Word is that in the run-up to the atrocity, traffic was pretty heavy.”

“Every Jew hater in this town,” Avi making with the aggrieved tone, “is blaming 9/11 on Mossad. Even a story going around about Jews who worked down at the Trade Center all calling in sick that day, warned away by Mossad through their”—air quotes—secret network.’”

“The Jews dancing on the roof of that van over in Jersey,” Brooke fuming, “watching it all collapse, don’t forget that one.”

Later as Maxine prepares to leave, Ernie catches up with her in the foyer. “Ever call that FBI guy?”

“I did, and you know what? He thinks Avram really is Mossad, all right? On station, tapping his foot to a klezmer beat only he can hear, waiting to be activated.”

“Evil Jewish conspiracy.”

“Except you’ll notice Avi never talks about what he was doing over in Israel, neither of them do, any more than what he’s doing here now for hashslingrz. The one thing I can guarantee you is, is it’ll be well compensated, wait and see, he’ll give you guys a Mercedes for your anniversary.”

“A Nazi car? Good, so I’ll sell it…”