Bleeding Edge

36

Some holiday season someday, Maxine would like to find featured on the tube a revisionist Christmas Carol, where Scrooge is the good guy for a change. Victorian capitalism has hustled him over the years for his soul, turning him from an innocent entry-level kid into a mean old man who treats everybody like shit, none worse than his apparently honest bookkeeper Bob Cratchit, who in reality has been systematically skimming off of poor haunted and vulnerable Scrooge, cooking the books, and running off periodically to Paris to squander what he’s stolen on champagne, gambling, and cancan girls, leaving Tiny Tim and the family in London to starve. At the end, instead of Bob being the instrument of Scrooge’s redemption, it turns out to be by way of Scrooge that Bob is ransomed back to the side of humanity again.

Every year when Christmas and Hanukkah roll around, this story begins to slop over into work. Maxine finds herself reversing polarities, overlooking obvious Scrooges and zooming in on secretly sinful Cratchits. The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything’s on its head, it’s a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction, and not especially relaxing.

Having listened through the window to the same heartfelt street-trumpet rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” a thousand times, each identical, note-for-note, finding this at last, what’s the phrase—fucking tiresome, Maxine, Horst, and the boys decide to take a break together and roll a couple of frames down at the Port Authority bus terminal, which houses the last unyuppified bowling alley in the city.

At the terminal, on the way upstairs, amid the swarm of travelers, hustlers, shoulder surfers, and undercover cops, Maxine notices a sprightly figure beneath a gigantic backpack, possibly bound for someplace he thinks has no extradition treaty with the U.S. “Be right with you guys.” She makes her way through the traffic and brings out the sociable smile. “Why, Felix Boïngueaux, ça va, heading back up to Montreal, are we?”

“This time of year, are you crazy? Heading for sunshine, tropical breezes, babes in bikinis.”

“Some friendly Caribbean jurisdiction, no doubt.”

“Only going as far as Florida, thanks, and I know what you’re thinking, but that’s all in the past, eh? I’m a respectable businessman now, paying for employee health insurance and everything.”

“Heard about your bridge round from Rocky, congratulations. Haven’t seen you since the Geeks’ Cotillion, recall you being into some deep discussion then with Gabriel Ice. Were you able to drum up any business?”

“Maybe a little consulting work.” No shame. Felix is now an account payable of the guy who may have whacked his former partner. Maybe has been all along.

“Tell you what, get a Ouija board and ask Lester Traipse what he thinks about that. You told me once, you strongly implied, you knew who did Lester —”

“No names,” looking nervous. “You want it to be uncomplicated, but it’s not.”

“Just one thing—total honesty, OK?” Looking for furtive eyeballs with this one? forget it. “After Lester was hit—did you ever have any reason to think there was somebody after you too?”

Trick question. Saying no, Felix admits he’s being protected, which makes the next question “Who by?” Saying yes leaves open the possibility he’ll produce documentation, however embarrassing, if the price is right. He stands there processing this, stolid as a take-out container of poutine, amid the swarm of holiday travelers, fake Santas, children on leashes, drink-sodden victims of lunchtime office partying, commuters hours late and days early, “Someday we’ll be friends,” Felix shifting his backpack, “I promise.”

“I so look forward. Bon voyage. Have a frozen mai tai in memory of Lester.”

“Who was that, Mom?”

“Him? Uh, one of Santa’s elves, down here on a business trip from Montreal, which is like a regional hub for North Pole activities, same weather conditions and so on?”

“Santa’s elves don’t exist,” proclaims Ziggy, “In fact—”

“Dummy up, kid,” mutters Maxine, about the same time Horst advises, “That’s enough.”

Seems various NYC junior know-it-alls of Otis and Ziggy’s acquaintance have been putting around the story there’s no Santa.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” sez Horst.

The boys squint at their father. “You’re what, forty, fifty years old, and you believe in Santa Claus?”

“I do indeed, and if this miserable city is too wised up to deal with it, then they can shove it up their own,” looking around dramatically, “butthole, which last time I checked was someplace over on the Upper East Side.”

While they check in at Leisure Time Lanes, get bowling shoes, examine the fried-food inventory and so forth, Horst goes on to explain that just like the Santa clones out on the street corners, parents are also Santa’s agents, acting in loco Santaclausis, “Actually, as it gets closer to Christmas Eve, just loco. See, the North Pole is not so much about fabrication anymore, elves have gradually moved out of the workshop and into fulfillment and delivery, where they’re busy outsourcing and routing toy requests. Pretty much everything these days is transacted via Santanet.”

“Via what?” Ziggy and Otis inquire.

“Hey. Nobody has any trouble believing in the Internet, right, which really is magic. So what’s the problem believing in a virtual private network for Santa’s business? It results in real toys, real presents, delivered by Christmas morning, what’s the difference?”

“The sleigh,” Otis promptly. “The reindeer.”

“Only cost-efficient in snow-covered areas. As the planet warms up, and Third World markets become more important, North Pole HQ has to start subcontracting delivery out to local companies.”

“So this Santanet,” Ziggy relentless, “there’s passwords?”

“Kids aren’t allowed,” Horst beyond ready to change the subject, “it’s like they don’t let you guys watch pirate movies either?”

“What?”

“Pirate movies? Why not?”

“’Cause they’re rated Ahrrrh. Look, somebody want to help me program this scoreboard, I get a little confused…”

They’re happy to oblige, but Maxine understands, with one of those joys-of-the-season twinges, as a reprieve it’s all too temporary.

MARCH KELLEHER MEANTIME has become even more problematic to get hold of. None of the doorstaff at the St. Arnold now has ever heard of her, none of her phones is even defaulting to an answering machine anymore, just ringing on and on into enigmatic silence. According to her Weblog, the attention from cops and cop affiliates public and private has reached alarming levels, obliging her to roll up her futon every morning, hop on a bicycle, and relocate someplace new, trying not to sleep in the same place too many nights in a row. She has a network of friends who warbike around town with compact PCs and provide her with a growing list of free Wi-Fi hotspots, which she likewise tries not to use the same one of too often. She carries an iBook clamshell in a shade known as Key Lime and logs in from wherever she can find free Internet access.

“It’s getting weird,” she admits on one of her Weblog entries. “I’m keeping a step or two ahead so far, but you never know what they’ve got, how state-of-the-art it might be, who works for them and who doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I love them nerds, in another life I would’ve been a nerd groupie, but even nerds can be bought and sold, almost as if times of great idealism carry equal chances for great corruptibility.”

“After the 11 September attack,” March editorializes one morning, “amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame ‘the CIA’ or ‘a secret rogue operation.’ But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line—who knows, maybe even the CIA’s scared of them.

“Maybe it’s unbeatable, maybe there are ways to fight back. What it may require is a dedicated cadre of warriors willing to sacrifice time, income, personal safety, a brother/sisterhood consecrated to an uncertain struggle that may extend over generations and, despite all, end in total defeat.”

She’s going crazy, Maxine thinks, this is Jedi talk. Or maybe that graduation speech last summer at Kugelblitz really was prophecy, and now it’s coming true. For all Maxine knows, March is sleeping in the park by now, her possessions in Zabar’s bags, hair growing out wild and gray, no hot baths anymore, depending for showers on the winter rains. How guilty is Maxine supposed to feel about passing her Reg’s video?

VYRVA COMES OVER ONE MORNING after leaving the kids off at school. It isn’t that a coolness has grown between her and Maxine, exactly. Among the underlying rules of the fraud-investigation universe is that on any given Saturday night anybody may be playing canasta with anybody, who in particular seldom being as important as what’s on the score sheet.

Nose in her coffee cup, Vyrva announces, “It finally happened. He dumped me.”

“Why, the li’l rat.”

“Well… I sort of provoked it?”

“And he didn’t…”

“Take revenge because DeepArcher went open source? Hell no, he’s delighted, means he’s got it for free, saves him a purchase price that could have put Fiona, Justin, and me in any twelve-room penthouse in town.”

“Oh?” Real estate, now there’s a return to mental health. “You guys’ve been looking?”

“I have. Still got to talk Justin into it, ’course, he’s homesick for California.”

“You’re not.”

“Remember a movie called Lawrence of Arabia (1962), guy from England goes out in the desert, suddenly realizes he’s home?”

“You remember a movie called The Wizard of Oz (1939), where—”

“All right, all right. But this is the version where Dorothy gets heavily into Emerald City residential property?”

“After an inappropriate relationship with the Wiz.”

“Who’s done with me in any case, tossed me aside, a fallen woman but I live with my guilt, yes I’m free, free I tell you.”

“So why the face?” Maxine allows herself once a year to do her Howard Cosell impression, and today’s the day. “Vyrva, you are wallowing in lachrymosity.”

“Oh, Maxi, I feel so totally, like, used?”

“What, you’re a decent-looking enough broad, at least when you’re not blubbering, what if it wasn’t only business intrigue, what if it really was lust he felt,” is she really saying this? “true and simple lust, all along.”

Which turns the spigot on full blast. “That sweet little guy! I told him to just fuck off, I hurt him, I’m such a bitch…”

“Here, a tip.” Sliding over a roll of paper towels. “From one who has been there. Absorbs better than tissues, you don’t use as many cubic feet, less to clean up later.”

DAYTONA, AS IF HAVING MADE some year-end resolution, suspends her comical-Negro shtick for a minute. “Mrs. Loeffler?”

“Uh-oh.” Checking the area for vengeance seekers, bill collectors, cops.

“No, it’s only about that Ehbler-Cohen ticket? With the weird-ass defined-benefit plan? They were hiding it in the spreadsheets. Look.”

Maxine looks. “How did you—”

“It was luck, really, I happened to take my reading glasses off, and suddenly, blurry but there it was, the pattern. Just way too many them damn empty cells.”

“Walk me through this idiot style, please, I’m hopeless at spreadsheets, people say Excel, I think they’re talking about a T-shirt size.”

“Look, you pull down Tools, click on Auditing, and that lets you see everything that’s going into the formula cells, and… dig it.”

“Oh. Wow.” Following along, “Sweet.” Nodding appreciatively, like it’s a cooking show. “Nice going, I would never have caught that.”

“Well, you were out working on some other thing, so I took the liberty…”

“Where’d you pick this stuff up, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Night school. All this time you thought I was at rehab? Ha, ha. I’ve been taking CPA classes. Going for my license next month.”

“Daytona! This is wonderful, so why keep it such a secret?”

“Didn’t want you be thinkin All About Eve and shit.”

CHRISTMAS COMES AND GOES, and maybe it isn’t Maxine’s holiday but it is Horst’s and the kids’, and this year it seems less of an effort for her to be a sport, though she does predictably find herself the night before Christmas screaming desperate in Macy’s at midnight, her brain the usual Sno-Kone with convolutions, up on the mezzanine rejecting one gift idea after another, suddenly here’s a warm and friendly tap on her shoulder—aaahh! Dr. Itzling! Her dentist! This is what it’s come to!

But somewhere in the tinsel dazzle, there are also fragrances from weeklong oven exercises, Horst and his possibly toxic Old-Time Eggnog recipe, the coming and going of friends and relatives including the distant in-law who always ends up telling mohel jokes, A Beast Wars Family Christmas at Radio City Music Hall, with Optimus Primal, Rhinox, Cheetor, and the gang helping a middle school with its Christmas pageant by doing singing cameos as manger animals, the boys, overindulged, sitting among an early-morning mountain of unreusable wrapping paper and packaging, out of which have emerged game platforms, action figures, DVDs, sporting equipment, clothes they may or may not ever wear.

During this occur odd moments of slack, reserved for visits more spectral, from those who cannot or would not ever be here—among them, at a typically uneasy distance from the jollification, Nick Windust, from whom there’s been not a word, though why should there be. Out somewhere in that nomad’s field of indifference, riding the Chinese bus into a futurity of imprecise schedules and reduced options. How long does that go on?

“Nick.”

He’s silent, wherever he is. By now one more American sheep the shepherds have temporarily lost track of, somewhere in the high country above this ruinous hour, cragfast in the storm.

MONDAY AFTER THE HOLIDAYS, Kugelblitz has resumed, Horst and Jake Pimento are over in New Jersey looking for office space, Maxine should either try to cop another hour of z’s or go in to work, but she knows where she ought to be, and as soon as everybody’s out of the house, she brews twelve cups of coffee, gets in front of her screen, logs in, and heads for DeepArcher.

Open source has certainly brought some changes. Core is teeming these days with smartasses, yups, tourists, and twits writing code for whatever they think they want and installing it, till some other headcase finds it and deinstalls it. Maxine goes in with no clear idea of what she’ll find.

Onto the screen, accordingly, leaps a desert, correction, the desert. Empty as the train stations and spaceport terminals of a more innocent time were overpopulated. No middle-class amenities here, beyond arrows to let you scan around the horizon. This is survivalist country. Movements are blurless, every pixel doing its job, the radiation from above triggering colors too unsafe for hex code, a sound track of ground-level desert wind. This is what she’s supposed to pick her way across, dowsing a desert which is not only a desert, for links invisible and undefined.

Not yet in despair, off she goes, zooming and swiveling, up and down dunes and wadis of deep purity finely touched with mineral tints, beneath rocks and ridgelines, empty stretches in which Omar Sharif continues not to come riding in out of a mirage. It should be just one more teen-sociopath video game, except it’s not a shooter, so far anyway, there’s no story line, no details about the destination, no manual to read, no cheat list. Does anybody get extra lives? Does anybody even get this one?

She pauses in the uneasy melismas of desert wind. Suppose it’s all about losing, not finding. What has she lost? Maxine? Hello? To put it another way, what’s she trying to lose?

Windust, back to Windust. Dowsing through her off-screen day-to-day, did she once in the pre–11 September past somehow click on the exact invisible pixel that brought her to him? Did he do the same and find himself entering her life? How does one of them reverse the process?

Toggling between horizontal and overhead views, she discovers a way to vary the angle in between, so that like an archaeologist at dawn she can now see this desert landscape at a very shallow raking angle, allowing her to pick up relief features that would otherwise be invisible. These prove to be fertile sources of the links she needs to be clicking on. Soon she finds herself getting crossfaded to relay stations, oases, very rarely a traveler coming the other way, back from whatever’s out ahead, with very little to tell beyond cryptic allusions to some icy uncanalized river on whose far bank lies a city built of a rare impregnable metal, gray and gleaming in self-contained mystery, entered only after lengthy exchanges of signs and countersigns…

Structures begin to emerge ahead, carrion birds appear in the sky. Now and then, far off, human figures, robed and hooded, still, wind-ruffled, taller than the perspective would call for, stand and watch Maxine. No attempts at approach or welcome. Ahead, past the baked-mud district that now rises around her, she can feel a presence. The sky changes, beginning to pick up saturation, edging into SVG Alice Blue, the landscape acquiring a queer luminosity, moving toward her, picking up speed, rushing in to envelop her.

Where should her freakout point be set here, exactly? The town, the casbah, whatever it is, sweeps past, leaving her in what is now a Third World darkness, lit only by isolated episodes of fire. After a while, feeling her way in the dark, she strikes oil. An enormous gusher, sudden, bass-intensive, black on black, goes booming upward, prospectors appear from nowhere with generators and searchlights, in whose glare the top of the thing can’t even be seen. Every wildcatter’s dream, and for many the point of the journey. Maxine goes wow, takes a virtual snapshot, but continues on her way. Not long after, the blowout bursts into flame and remains visible behind her for miles.

A night whose length can’t be selected as a preference. A midwatch whose purpose is to turn whoever’ s out in it into a blind dowser of the unknown, all but lost in the empty quarter. Never to focus on anything that can be seen.

At virtual daybreak who should Maxine run into but Vip Epperdew, up on a ridgeline gazing at the desert. She’s not sure he recognizes her. “How are Shae and Bruno?”

“I think they’re in L.A. I’m not, I’m still in Vegas. We seem to be no longer a threesome.”

“What happened?”

“We were at the MGM Grand, I was playing one of the Stooges slots, had just got three Larrys, a Moe, and a pie on the payline, turned around to share my good fortune, Shae and Bruno were nowhere in sight. Collected my jackpot, went looking all over for them, they were gone. I always imagined if they ever did run out, I’d be left in some embarrassing public situation, handcuffed to a lamppost or whatever. But there I was, free as any normal citizen, with the room paid up and enough casino credit to last me a couple of days anyway.”

“Must’ve been unsettling.”

“At that point I was still too preoccupied with the slots, actually. By the time I understood the kids weren’t coming back, I’d won enough to sign a lease on a one-bedroom unit in North Las Vegas. The rest has been coasting on momentum.” Nowadays Vip is a professional slots jockey, somehow so far staying a fraction of a percent ahead, a regular, known all around town, from carpet joints to convenience stores. He’s picked up an attitude to go with his casino butt. He’s found a calling.

“Like my rig?” gesturing downhill at a Citroën Sahara, built back in the sixties, front and rear engines, four-wheel drive for desert terrain, rendered in affectionate detail, looks like a normal 2CV except for the spare tire on the hood. “Only 600 of ’em ever produced, won the real one on a pair of fishhooks nobody believed I had. Cut you for it if you’d like, high card. Case you’re wondering, the beauty of this site,” looking around the empty desertscape, “is it ain’t Vegas. No casinos, honest odds. Random numbers here are strictly legit.”

“So I was told once. Nowadays, not so sure. You might want to be careful, now—Vip? do you remember me?”

“Darlin, I don’t even remember the last deal.”

She finds a link that brings her into an oasis, a wraparound garden straight out of the Islamic paradise, more water than has ever flowed in all the broken country she’s come in out of, palms, swimming pools with in-pool bars, wine and pipe smoke, melons and dates, a music track heavy on the hijaz scale. This time, as a matter of fact, she has a confirmed Omar Sharif sighting, inside a tent, playing bridge and flashing that killer smile. And then, with no intro,

“Hi, Maxine.” Windust’s avatar is a younger version of himself, a not-yet-corrupted entry-level wise-ass, brighter than he deserves.

“Never expected to find you in here, Nick.”

Oh, really? This isn’t what she hoped would happen? That somebody, some all-knowing cyber-yenta her online history has always belonged to, would be logging her every click, every cursor movement? Knowing what she wants before she does?

“Did you get back to D.C. all right?” Which, if it sounds too much like where’s my money, tough shit.

“Not all the way back. There are exclusion zones now. Around my house, my family. I haven’t been getting much sleep. It looks like they’ve cut me loose. Loose at last. All gone dark, everybody in my address book, even those with no names, only numbers.”

“Where are you now, like physically?”

“Some Wi-Fi hotspot. Starbucks, I think.”

He thinks. She has to take an unexpected breath then. This is almost the first thing he’s said that she really believes. He doesn’t fucking know where he is anymore. Some transparent beam of feeling passes through her, which she won’t identify till later. This is how long it’s been since she felt pity.

Abruptly, she isn’t sure who took the first step, they’re back out on the desert again, moving at high speed, not exactly flying because that would mean she’s asleep and dreaming, beneath a crescent moon that sheds more illumination than it should, past wind-shaped rock formations that Windust tends to dodge suddenly and violently into the cover of, pulling her somehow with him.

“Somebody’s shooting at us?”

“Not yet, but we have to assume something’s tracking us, everything we do, holding it short-term. They’ll think they see a pattern of run for cover. Then we’ll surprise them and stay in the open…”

“‘We’? I kind of like hide behind the rocks myself. Are these the same people who were shooting AKs at us that time?”

“Don’t go sentimental on me.”

“Why not? We could’ve been just like this. Lovers on the run.”

“Oh, great call. Your kids, your home, your family, your business and reputation, in exchange for a cheap fatality for all those you can’t save. Works for me.” The avatar gazes at her, steady, unremorseful, all a deliberate front, granted, but whoever “they” are, she needs to believe they are far worse than anything Windust became later on, working for them. They found his careless gift of boy’s cruelty and developed it, deployed and used it, by tiny increments, till one day he was a professional sadist with a GS-1800-series job and no regrets. Nothing could touch him, and he thought that would just go on, deep into his retirement years. Chump. Asshole.

She’s furious, she’s helpless. “What can I—”

“Nothing.”

“I know. But—”

“I didn’t come looking for you. You clicked on me.”

“Did I.”

Long silence, as if he’s having an argument with himself and they finally settle it. “I’ll be at the place. I can’t guarantee an erection.”

“Aw. You OK with opening your heart to somebody?”

“I was thinking more like, bring money?”

“I’ll see how much I can steal from the children.”