Bleeding Edge

37

Due to some likely 007–related mental block about packing it, she has tried to avoid the Walther PPK with the laser in the grip, depending instead on her secondary, the Beretta, which, if handguns had conscious careers, it might consider a promotion. But now she goes, gets the stepladder, roots around up in the back of the closet, and brings out the PPK. At least it isn’t the ladies’ model where the grip comes in pink pearl. Checks the batteries, cycles the laser on and off. Never know when a gal might need a laser.

Out into one of those oppressive wintry afternoons, the sky over New Jersey a pale battle flag of the ancient nation of winter, divided horizontally, hex thistle above, buttermilk yellow below, over to Broadway to look for a cab, which this time of day is likely heading back off shift to Long Island City and unwilling to pick up fares. So it turns out. By the time she can finally wave one down, city lights are coming on and darkness is falling.

Down at the “safe house,” she hits the buzzer, waits, waits, no reply, the door’s locked, but she can see light around the edges. She peers in to check out the lock situation and notices that only the latch is on, no bolt. After years of experimenting with different store and credit cards, she’s found the ideal combination of strength and flexibility in the plastic game cards the boys keep bringing home from ESPN Zone. Taking one of these now, down briefly on one knee, she has ’loided her way in before she can let herself wonder if it’s such a good idea.

Rodent life, quick shadows flickering across her path. Echoing in the stairwells, screamers on other floors, nonhuman noises she can’t identify. Corner shadows thick as grease, that can’t be seen into no matter how bright your bulb. Hallways lighted fitfully and heat, if any, only through selected radiators, so that there are cold patches, indicating the presence of malevolent spirit forces, according to ex–New Agers of Maxine’s acquaintance. Down some corridor a fire alarm with a dying battery repeats a shrill, desolate chirp. She remembers Windust saying that sundown is when the dogs come out.

The door of the apartment is open. She brings out the PPK, hits the laser, flips up the safety, eases inside. The dogs are there, three, four of them surrounding something lying between here and the kitchen. There’s a smell you don’t have to be a dog to pick up. Maxine slides away from the door in case any of them want to leave in a hurry. Her voice firm enough so far, “All right, Toto—freeze!”

Their heads come up, their muzzles are darker-colored than they need to be. She edges in, along the wall. The object hasn’t moved. It announces itself, the center of attention, even if it’s dead, it’s still trying to manage the story.

One dog goes running out the door, two move up snarling to confront her, another stands by Windust’s corpse and waits for the intruder to be dealt with. Gazing at Maxine with—not a canine look really, Shawn if he were here certainly could confirm—the face before the face. “Don’t I remember you from Westminster last year, Best in Category?”

The nearest dog is a mix of rottweiler plus you name it, and the little red dot has moved to the center of its forehead, encouragingly not jittering around but steady as a rock. The wingdog pauses, as if to see what will happen.

“Come on,” she whispers, “you know what it is, pal, it’s drilling right into your third eye… come on… we don’t need to have this happen…” The snarling stops, the dogs, attentively, step toward the exit, the alpha in the kitchen backs away finally from the corpse and—is it nodding at her? joins them. They wait out in the hallway.

The dogs have done some damage she tries not to look at, and there’s the smell. Reciting to herself a rhyme from long-ago girlhood,

She stumbles to the toilet, hits the exhaust fan, and kneels on the cold tiles beneath the racket of the fan. The contents of the bowl give a slight but unmistakable surge upward, as if trying to communicate. She vomits, seized in a vision of all the exhaust ducts from every dismal office and forgotten transient space of the city, all feeding by way of a gigantic manifold into a single pipe and roaring away in a constant wind of anal gas, bad breath, and decaying tissue, venting as you’d expect someplace over in New Jersey… as meantime, inside the gratings over each one of these million vents, grease goes on collecting forever in the slots and louvers, and the dust rising and falling is held there, accumulating over the years in a blackened, browned, secret fur… merciless powder-blue light, black-and-white floral wallpaper, her own unstable reflection in the mirror… There’s vomit on the sleeve of her coat, she tries to wash it out with cold water, nothing works.

She rejoins the silent stiff in the other room. Over in the corner, the Lady with the Alligator Purse watches, silent, no highlights off her eyes, only the curve of a smile faintly visible in the shadows, the purse slung over one shoulder, its contents forever unrevealed because you always wake up before you see them.

“Time’s a-wastin,” the Lady whispers, not unkindly.

Despite which Maxine takes a minute to observe the former Nick Windust. He was a torturer, a murderer many times over, his cock has been inside her, and at the moment she’s not sure what she feels, all she can focus on are the bespoke chukka boots, in this light a soiled pale brown. What is she doing here? What the blessed fuck, did she run over here thinking she could do to stop this?… These poor, stupid shoes…

She takes a rapid tour of his pockets—no wallet, no money, folding or otherwise, no keys, no Filofax, no cellular phone, no smokes or matches or lighters, no meds or eyewear, just the collection of empty pockets. Talk about going out clean. At least he’s consistent. He was never in this for the money. Neolib mischief must have held some different and now-unknowable appeal for him. All he had at the end, with the other world drawing near, was his rap sheet, and his dispatchers have left him to its mercy. The full length of it, the years, the weight.

So who was she talking to, back there in the DeepArcher oasis? If Windust, judging by the smell, was already long dead by then, it gives her a couple of problematic choices—either he was speaking to her from the other side or it was an impostor and the link could have been embedded by anybody, not necessarily a well-wisher, spooks, Gabriel Ice… Some random twelve-year-old in California. Why believe any of it?

The phone rings. She jumps a little. The dogs come to the doorway, curious. Pick up? she thinks not. After five rings an answering machine on the kitchen counter comes on, with the volume set on high so there’s no avoiding the incoming. It’s no voice she recognizes, a high harsh whisper. “We know you’re there. You don’t have to pick up. This is just a reminder that it’s a school night, and you never know when your kids might need you with them.”

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.

On the way out, she passes a mirror, takes an automatic look, sees a blurred moving figure, maybe herself, likely something else, the Lady again, all in shadow except for a single highlight off her wedding band, whose color, if you could taste light, which for a moment she imagines she can, you’d have to call faintly bitter.

NO COPS OUTSIDE ANYPLACE, no cabs, early-midwinter darkness. Cold, a wind picking up. The glow of inhabited city streets too far away. She has stepped out into a different night, a different town altogether, one of those first-person-shooter towns that you can drive around in seemingly forever, but never away from. The only humanity visible are virtual extras in the distance, none offering any of the help she needs. She gropes through her bag, finds her cellular phone, and of course can’t get a signal this far away from civilization, and even if she could, the batteries are almost dead.

Maybe the phone call was only a warning, maybe that’s all, maybe the boys are safe. Maybe this is a fool’s assumption she can’t make anymore. Vyrva was supposed to be picking up Otis at school, Ziggy should be down at krav maga with Nigel, but so what. Every place in her day she’s taken for granted is no longer safe, because the only question it’s come down to is, where will Ziggy and Otis be protected from harm? Who of all those on her network really is trustworthy anymore?

It might be useful, she reminds herself, not to panic here. She imagines herself solidifying into not exactly a pillar of salt, something between that and a commemorative statue, iron and gaunt, of all the women in New York who used to annoy her standing by the curbsides “hailing a taxi,” though no taxis might be visible for ten miles in any direction—nevertheless holding their hand out toward the empty street and the oncoming traffic that isn’t there, not beseechingly but in a strangely entitled way, a secret gesture that will trigger an all-cabbie alert, “Bitch standing at corner with hand up in air! Go! Go!”

Yet here, turning into some version of herself she doesn’t recognize, without deliberation she watches her own hand drift out into the wind off the river, and tries from the absence of hope, the failure of redemption, to summon a magical escape. Maybe what she saw in those women wasn’t entitlement, maybe all it is really is an act of faith. Which in New York even stepping out onto the street is, technically.

Back in Manhattan meatspace, what she ends up doing is somehow passing through the shadowy copless cross streets to Tenth Avenue and finding headed uptown a curb-to-curb abundance of lighted alphanumerics on cheerful yellow rooftops, traveling the darkening hour as if the pavement like a black river is itself flowing away forever uptown, and all the taxis and trucks and suburbanite cars only being carried along on top of it…

HORST ISN’T HOME YET. Otis and Fiona are in the boys’ room, having creative differences as usual. Ziggy is in front of the tube, as if nothing much has been happening in his day, watching Scooby Goes Latin! (1990). Maxine after a quick visit to the bathroom to reformat, knowing better than to start in with the Q&A, comes in and sits down next to him about the time it breaks for a commercial.

“Hi, Mom.” She wants to enfold him forever. Instead lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellín, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost—what else—of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan.

The cartoon comes back on, the villain is brought to justice. “And I would’ve got away with it, too,” he complains, “if it hadn’t been for those Medellín kids!”

“So,” innocent as she can manage, “how was krav maga today?”

“You know, funny you should ask. I begin to see the point.”

Right after class Nigel was outside someplace looking for his sitter, and Emma Levin was going around setting the security perimeter, when Ziggy heard a beep from his backpack.

“Uh-oh. Nige.” Ziggy fished out his Cybiko, checked the screen, started punching buttons with a little stylus. “He’s in the Duane Reade around the corner. There’s a van out in front of this place with some creepy guys and the motor idling.”

“Hey, cool, a pocket keyboard, you can send, like, e-mails on this?”

“More like instant messaging. You don’t think this van is anything to worry about?”

Suddenly there was a huge flash of light and burst of noise. “Harah!” muttered Emma, “the tripwire.”

They ran out the back exit to find a large paramilitary-looking party in the areaway blinking, staggering, and cursing. Everything smelling like fireworks.

“Something we can do for you?” Emma stepping quickly to the right and motioning Ziggy to the left. The visitor turned toward where she’d spoken from and appeared to be reaching for something. Emma went blurring into action. The ape didn’t fly very far through the air but was disorganized enough by the time he hit that it took her only a few economical gestures, with Ziggy as backup, to dispose of him.

“Not only an amateur but stupid too. He doesn’t know who he’s fooling with?”

“You’re awesome, Ms. Levin.”

“’Course, but I meant you. You’re part of my unit, Zig, nobody messes with any of us, he didn’t even get that far with it?”

She searches the intruder and finds a Glock with an oversize magazine. Ziggy’s eyes grow distant, as if attending to something internal. “Hmm… maybe not a civilian, yet not much of a professional, what else does that leave, I wonder.”

“Private contractor?”

“What I was thinking.”

“So you’re a sleeper cell after all.”

Shrug. “I’m on call 24/7. When I’m needed, I’m there. Looks like I’m needed. Just let me set another flashbang here, then we’ll check down in the basement, find a dolly, roll this idiot out to someplace his friends in the van can collect him.”

They rolled the unconscious gunhand on up the block and dumped him by the curb next to a broken pressboard credenza, swollen and lopsided from rainwater. They discussed whether or not to dial 911, figured what could hurt. “And that was about it. Nigel typically was pissed that he didn’t get in on it.”

“And… this is all something you saw on Power Rangers or one of them,” Maxine hopefully.

“Bad karma to lie about stuff like that… Mom? You all right?”

“Oh Ziggurat… I’m just glad you’re safe. So proud of you, how you handled yourself… Ms. Levin must be, too. OK if I call her later?”

“Tellin ya, she’ll confirm.”

“Just to say thanks, Ziggy.”

Otis and Fiona come blasting out the bedroom door.

“Listenna me, Fi, lose the perpetuity language, you’ll regret it.”

“It’s only boilerplate, Satjeevan says I can walk anytime I want.”

“You believe that? He’s a recruiter.”

“Now you’re acting like a jealous boyfriend.”

“Real mature, Fiona.”

Horst comes blinking into the apartment, has a look at Maxine. “Need a minute with yer ma here, guys,” lifts her by one wrist, gently steers her to the bedroom.

“I’m all right,” Maxine avoiding eye contact.

“You’re shaking, you’re whiter than Greenwich, Connecticut on a Thursday. It’s nothing to worry about, darlin. I talked to Zig’s instructor, just the standard New York creep that krav maga’s designed to deal with.” She knows what this honest never-to-be-wised-up face can change into, knows she better let this ride unless she wants to collapse under whatever it is, call it guilt, settles for nodding, distant, miserable. Let Horst have the standard-creep story. There are a thousand things in this town to be afraid of, maybe even two thousand, and there’s too much else he won’t likely ever know. All the silences, all the years, fraud-examiner infidelities without the fucking, plus unexpectedly some real fucking and now the other party is dead. No question of improvising around what happened today, first thing Horst will go, this dead guy, you were seeing him? and she’ll flare up, you don’t know what you’re talking about, then he’ll blame her for putting the boys in danger, then she’ll go, so where were you when you should’ve been here for them, and so fuckin on and on, yes and it’ll be right back to the olden days. So best to just dummy up here, Maxine, once again, just, dummy, up.

NEXT DAY EMMA LEVIN CALLS with news of an anonymous floral bouquet heavy on the roses delivered to her studio, with a note in Hebrew to the effect that all will be well.

“The BF, maybe?”

“Naftali knows flowers exist, he sees them at the corner market, but he still thinks they’re something to eat.”

“So maybe…?”

“Maybe. Then again, nobody pays us to be Shirley Temple. Let’s wait and see.”

Still, maybe, at least, not such a bad sign? Meantime Avi and Brooke having just moved into a co-op near Riverside for a settling price whose obscenity is consistent with Avi’s salary at hashslingrz, Maxine now has a halfway-plausible excuse to stash the boys for a little while with their grandparents, whose building enjoys security arrangements rivaling any to be found in our nation’s capital. Horst goes for this eagerly, not least because he is rediscovering his quasi-ex-wife as an object of lust. “I can’t explain it…”

“Good, don’t.”

“It’s like committing adultery, only different?”

Mr. Elegant. Maxine guesses it is mysteriously not unconnected with loose-woman vibrations she is giving off like it or not, plus Horst’s insane suspicion of every man, ghost or whatever, who gets within ass-grabbing distance of her, and since it does not take too much shift in her own perversity level to feel flattered here, she lets him think what he’ll think, and the hardon situation does not suffer thereby.

Additionally, one day out of nowhere Horst hands her the keys to the Impala.

“Why would I need these?”

“Just in case.”

“Of…”

“Nothing solid, only a feeling.”

“A what, Horst?” She peers. He looks normal enough. “You’d be good with that? Given your ding-intolerance problem?”

“Oh, cost of body work, you’d have to pick that up o’ course.”

Which doesn’t mean he’s lounging around the house all the time. One night he and his runningmate Jake Pimento, who has moved out of Battery Park and up to Murray Hill, are out on an all-nighter with a posse of venture capitalists from across the sea newly interested in rare earths, which Horst by ESP has determined is the next hot commodity, and Maxine decides to stay over with her parents and the boys.

She crashes early but keeps waking up. Dream fragments, cycles she can’t exit. She looks in a mirror, a face appears behind her, her own face but full of evil intent. All night these vignettes keep sending her each time up into a vibrating hollowness of heart. At some point, enough. She rolls muttering from between the damp sheets. Somebody is blasting up and down upper Broadway in a car whose horn plays the first eight bars of Nino Rota’s Godfather theme. Over and over. This happens once a year, and tonight, apparently, is the night.

Maxine begins to prowl the apartment. The boys stacked in bunk beds, the door left a little open, she likes to think for her, knowing that someday their doors will be shut and she’ll have to knock. Ernie’s office, which he shares with a washer and dryer, an antique Apple CRT monitor on a desk, left on, Elaine’s dining-room museum of long-operating lightbulbs from this apartment, each in its little foam display holder, labeled with the dates of screw-in and burnout. Sylvania bulbs of a certain era seem to’ve lasted the longest.

Some kind of classical music coming from the TV room. Mozart. In these desperate stretches of early-morning programming, she finds Ernie tubeside, his face transfigured in the ancient Trinitron glow, watching an obscure, in fact never-distributed Marx Brothers version of Don Giovanni, with Groucho in the title role. She tiptoes in barefoot and sits next to her father on the couch. There’s a big plastic bowl of popcorn, too big even for two people, which Ernie after a while nudges in her direction. During a recitative he fills her in. “They cut the Commendatore so there’s no Donna Anna, no Don Ottavio, this way, without the murder, it’s a comedy.” Leporello is being played by both Chico and Harpo, one for lines and one for sight gags, Chico fast-talking his way through the Catalogue Aria for example while Harpo runs around after Donna Elvira (Margaret Dumont, in the role she was born for), pinching, groping, and honking his bicycle horn, as well as later picking harp accompaniment for “Deh, vieni alla finestra.” Masetto is a studio baritone who is not Nelson Eddy, Zerlina is a very young, lip-synced and more-than-presentable Beatrice Pearson, later to portray another ingenue with a fatality for scoundrels opposite John Garfield in Force of Evil (1948).

When the opera’s over, Ernie hits the mute button and spreads his hands along with a half shrug, like a basso taking a bow. “So? First time I ever saw you sit through an opera.”

“Don’t know, Pop, must be the company.”

“I taped it for the boys too, seems like it’s up their alley.”

“Cultural exchange, I notice they’ve got you playing Metal Gear Solid these days.”

“Better than the TV garbage I used to find you and Brooke staring at.”

“Yeah, you really hated all those cop shows. If you caught us watching one, you’d turn it off and ground us.”

“It’s like they’ve gotten any better? What happened to private eyes, lovable criminals? lost in all that post-sixties propaganda, Orwell’s boot on the face, endless prosecution and enforcement, cop cop cop. Why shouldn’t we want to keep you girls away from that, protect your sensitive minds? See how much good it did. Your sister the Likudnik, you chasing down poor schmucks who’re only trying to pay the rent.”

“Maybe TV back then was brainwashing, but it could never happen today. Nobody’s in control of the Internet.”

“You serious? Believe that while you still can, Sunshine. You know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours? It started back during the Cold War, when the think tanks were full of geniuses plotting nuclear scenarios. Attaché cases and horn-rims, every appearance of scholarly sanity, going in to work every day to imagine all the ways the world was going to end. Your Internet, back then the Defense Department called it DARPAnet, the real original purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and control after a nuclear exchange with the Soviets.”

“What.”

“Sure, the idea was to set up enough nodes so no matter what got knocked out, they could always reassemble some kind of network by connecting up what was left.”

Here in the capital of insomnia, it is hours yet from dawn, and this is what innocent father-daughter conversations can drift into. Beneath these windows they can hear the lawless soundscape of the midnight street, breakage, screaming, vehicle exhaust, New York laughter, too loud, too trivial, brakes applied too late before some gut-wrenching thud. When Maxine was little, she thought of this nightly uproar as trouble too far away to matter, like sirens. Now it’s always too close, part of the deal.

“Were you ever in on that Cold War stuff, Pop?”

“For me? Too technical. But people at Bronx Science I ran with… Crazy Yale Jacobian, nice kid, we used to go downtown, make a little change playing Ping-Pong. He went off to MIT, got a job with the RAND Corporation, moved to California, We lost touch.”

“Maybe he didn’t work in the blowing–up-the-world department.”

“I know, I’m a judgmental person, sue me. You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives.”

“Pop.”

“Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”

Maxine goes sorting among semiexploded kernels for what little popcorn is left. “But history goes on, as you always like to remind us. The Cold War ended, right? the Internet kept evolving, away from military, into civilian—nowadays it’s chat rooms, the World Wide Web, shopping online, the worst you can say is it’s maybe getting a little commercialized. And look how it’s empowering all these billions of people, the promise, the freedom.”

Ernie begins channel-surfing, as if in annoyance. “Call it freedom, it’s based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy’s wrist radio? it’ll be everywhere, the rubes’ll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. Terrific. What they dream about at the Pentagon, worldwide martial law.”

“So this is where I get my paranoia from.”

“Ask your kids. Look at Metal Gear Solid—who do the terrorists kidnap? Who’s Snake trying to rescue? The head of DARPA. Think about that, huh?”

“Pop.”

“Don’t believe us, ask your friends in the FBI, you know, those kind policemen with their NCIC database? Fifty, a hundred million files? They’ll confirm, I’m sure.”

She understands this for the opening it apparently is. “Listen, Pop. I have to tell you…” Out it comes. The unrelenting vacuum of Windust’s departure. Edited for grandparental anxieties, natch, like no mention of Ziggy’s krav maga episode.

Ernie hears her through, “Saw something in the paper. Mysterious death, they described him as a think-tank pundit.”

“They would. Hit man, they say anything about that? Assassin?”

“Nope. But I guess FBI, CIA, that wouldn’t rule out assassin.”

“Pop, the petty-fraud community I get to work with, we have our own losers’ code, like loyalty, respect, don’t snitch till you have to. But that gang, they’re out shopping each other before breakfast, Windust was living on borrowed time.”

“You think he was done in by his own? I would’ve guessed revenge, all the seriously pissed-off Third Worlders this guy must have collected along the way.”

“You saw him before I did, you passed me his card, you could’ve said something.”

“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.”