Bleeding Edge

38

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.”

BUT SHE CAN’T stay out of DeepArcher. Since it went open source and welcomed in half the planet, none of them who they say they are, acquiring a set of option menus the size of the Internal Revenue Code, anybody is likely to be wandering around the site, herds of tourist-idle, cop-curious, the end of life below the spiders as we’ve known it, ROM hackers, homebrewers, RPG heretics, continually unwriting and overwriting, disallowing, deprecating, newly defining an ever-growing inventory of contributions to graphics, instructions, encryption, escape… the word is out, and it seems they’ve been waiting years, such is the what’s called pent-up demand. Maxine is able to settle in among the throngs, invisible and at ease. Not addicted exactly, though one day she happens to be back out in meatspace for a second, looks at the clock on the wall, does the math, figures three and a half hours she can’t account for. Luckily there’s nobody but herself to ask what she’s down there looking for, because the answer’s so pathetically obvious.

Yes, she’s aware DeepArcher doesn’t do resurrections, thanks for pointing it out. But something odd has been going on with Windust’s dossier, the one she copied onto her computer shortly after Marvin brought the thumb drive it was on. She’s been sneaking moments away to look at it, not, lately, without twinges of colonorectal fear, because each time she consults it now, there’s been new material added. As if—a breeze given her generations-old firewalls—somebody has been hacking in whenever they feel like it.

“Consider the recently advanced theory,” for example, “that subject, while not a double agent in the classic sense, may have been pursuing a well-defined personal agenda. According to recently downgraded files, this may have begun as early as 1983, when subject allegedly expedited the escape of a Guatemalan national, of interest to the Archivo as an insurgent element and to whom subject was married at the time.” And similar updates, all strangely nonnegative when not outright eulogy material. For whose eyes would stuff like this be intended? For Maxine’s Only? who would benefit from knowing that twenty years ago Windust was still capable of a good deed, in saving his then-wife Xiomara from the fascist murderers he was technically working for?

The first author to suspect here would be Windust himself, trying to look good, except this is insane because Windust is dead. Either it’s Beltway tricksters out on maneuvers or the Internet has become a medium of communication between the worlds. Maxine begins to catch sight of screen presences she knows she ought to be able to name, dim, ephemeral, each receding away into a single anonymous pixel. Maybe not. Much more likely that Windust remains unlit, terribly elsewhere.

Even though its creators claim not to Do Metaphysical, that option in DeepArcher remains open, alongside more secular explanations—so when she runs unexpectedly into Lester Traipse, instead of assuming it’s a Lester impersonator with an agenda, or a bot preprogrammed with dialogue for all occasions, she sees no harm in treating him as a departed soul.

Just to get it out of the way, “So! Lester. Who did the deed?”

“Interesting. First thing most people want to know is what’s it like being dead.”

“OK, what’s it—”

“Ha, ha, trick question, I’m not dead, I’m a refugee from my life. As for whodunit, I’m supposed to know? I arranged over the phone to drop a shrink-wrapped cube of cash as a first installment for Ice underneath The Deseret pool at midnight, next thing I know, I’m here wandering around with my spectral thumb in my metaphysical ass.”

“Igor Dashkov said you talked about trying to seek some kind of asylum in DeepArcher. Is this who I’m really talking to now, Igor? Misha, Grisha?”

“Don’t think so, I say ‘the’ too much.”

“All right, all right. Assuming there’s still an edge somewhere. And beyond it a void. If you’ve been out there—”

“Sorry. Just a mail-room scrambler here, remember? You want prophecy, sure, I can do that, but it’ll all be bullshit.”

“How about at least letting me bring you back up. Whoever you are.”

“What. Up to the surface?”

“Closer anyway.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” She doesn’t. “If it’s really you, Lester, I hate to think of you being lost down here.”

“Lost down here is the whole point. Take a good look at the surface Web sometime, tell me it isn’t a sorry picture. Big favor you’d be doing me, Maxine.”

MIGHT AS WELL BE HOMECOMING weekend down here. Next thing she knows, here’s who but her very own Ziggy and Otis. With a whole expanding universe to choose from, among the global torrents somehow the boys have located graphics files for a version of NYC as it was before 11 September 2001, before Ms. Cheung’s bleak announcement about real and make-believe, reformatted now as the personal city of Zigotisopolis, rendered in a benevolently lighted palette taken from old-school color processes like the ones you find on picture postcards of another day. Somebody somewhere in the world, enjoying that mysterious exemption from time which produces most Internet content, has been patiently coding together these vehicles and streets, this city that can never be. The old Hayden Planetarium, the pre-Trump Commodore Hotel, upper-Broadway cafeterias that have not existed for years, smorgasbords and bars offering free lunches, where regulars hang around the door to the kitchen so they can get first shot at whatever’s being carried in, city-summertime movie theaters with signs in blue display type bordered by frost and icicles promising IT’S COOL INSIDE, Madison Square Garden still at Fiftieth and Eighth Avenue and Jack Dempsey’s still across the street, and in the old Times Square, before the hookers, before the drugs, arcades like Fascination, pinball machines so classic now that only overly compensated yups can afford to buy them, and recording booths where half a dozen of you can jam inside and cover the latest Eddie Fisher single on acetate. The retro machinery in the streets, though undefined as to makes and years, is plentiful and ever on the move. Ernie and Elaine, as probable sources for all this, would be screaming with recognition.

She sees the boys, but they haven’t seen her. There aren’t any passwords, still she hesitates to log in without an invitation, it’s their city after all. They have different priorities here, the cityscapes of Maxine’s DeepArcher are obscurely broken, places of indifference and abuse and unremoved dog shit, and she doesn’t want to track any more of that than she can help into their more merciful city, with its antiquated dyes, its acid green shrubbery and indigo pavements and overdesigned traffic flows. Ziggy has his arm over his brother’s shoulder, and Otis is looking up at him with unhesitating adoration. They are ambling around in this not-yet-corrupted screenscape, at home in it already, unconcerned for their safety, salvation, destiny…

Don’t mind me, guys, I’ll just lurk here on the visitors’ page. She makes a note to bring it up, carefully, gently, when they’re all back in meatspace, soy-extenderspace, whatever it is anymore. Because in fact this strange thing has begun to happen. Increasingly she’s finding it harder to tell “real” NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis… as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther each time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.

Out of the ashes and oxidation of this postmagical winter, counterfactual elements have started popping up like li’l goombas. Early one windy morning Maxine’s walking down Broadway when here comes a plastic top from a nine-inch aluminum take-out container, rolling down the block in the wind, on its edge, an edge thin as a predawn dream, keeps trying to fall over but the airflow or something—unless it’s some nerd at a keyboard—keeps it upright for an implausible distance, half a block, a block, waits for the light, then half a block more till it finally rolls off the curb under the wheels of a truck that’s pulling out and gets flattened. Real? Computer-animated?

Same day, after lunch at a hummus joint where you can’t always rule out psychedelic toxins in the tabouli, she happens to be passing the neighborhood Uncle Dizzy’s and here’s the ol’ eponym himself, around the corner with the usual delivery truck thumping it on its side and hollering “Go! Go!” She pauses to stare one eyeblink too long and Dizzy spots her. “Maxi! Just the person I want to see!”

“No Diz, I’m not, really.”

“Here. This is for you. In appreciation.” Holding out a small hinged box with what seems to be a ring inside.

“What’s this, he’s proposing?”

“Just in from the jobber, brand-new. It’s Chinese. Not even sure what I should be charging.”

“Because…”

“It’s an invisibility ring.”

“Um, Diz…”

“I’m serious, I want you to have it, here, try it on.”

“And… it’ll make me invisible.”

“Uncle Dizzy’s personal guarantee.”

Not sure why she’s doing this, she slips on the ring. Dizzy performs a couple of unassisted spins and begins groping in the air. “Where’d she go? Maxi! You there?” so forth. She finds herself skipping around to avoid him.

This is such bullshit. She takes off the ring, hands it back. “Here. Tell you what, you try it.”

“You’re sure…” She’s sure. “OK, it was your idea.” He puts on the ring and abruptly vanishes. She spends more time than she really has today looking for him, can’t find him, passersby begin making with the curious stares. She returns to the office, finds the day somehow blighted by this what-is-reality issue, gives up around four, and is down on 72nd Street, soon to be known as midtown, where she runs into Eric coming out of Gray’s Papaya with a teenage accomplice all of whose signifiers scream sublegal.

“Maxi, meet my man Ketone, fake ID portraits a specialty, come on, you can help us look.”

“For what?”

A white van, Eric explains, preferably parked, free of dings, dirt, logos, or lettering. They track up and down a number of blocks, over to CPW and back, before finding a van acceptable to Ketone, who has Eric pose against it, takes out a flash camera, and tells him to smile. He gets about half a dozen shots, and they go over to Broadway and into a low-end luggage store, which puts Maxine’s sensors on full alert, for stashed inside any of these attractive travel bags and trolley cases out on display is sure to be whatever contraband you, and the boys from the precinct, can imagine. After a brief download interval, Ketone comes back with a selection of Eric ID photos. “Which one you like, Maxi?”

“This one here’s nice.”

“Five, ten minutes,” sez Ketone, heading for the printing and laminating setup in the back room.

“Some exploit,” she guesses, “I don’t want to know about?”

Eric gets a little shifty. “In case I have to be out of town in a hurry.” Pause, as if for thought. “Is, things are getting weird?”

“Tell me.” She fills him in on the rolling container top and Uncle Dizzy’s disappearing act. “Just seem to be having some of this, don’t know, virtuality creep lately.”

Eric has noticed it too. “Maybe it’s those Montauk Project folks again. Like, traveling back and forth in time, busy interfering with cause and effect, so whenever we see things begin to break up, pixelate and flicker, bad history nobody saw coming, even weather getting funny, it’s because the special time-ops folks have been out meddling.”

“Sounds good to me. No harder to buy than what’s on the news channels. But we’d never have any way to tell. Anybody comes too close to the truth, they disappear.”

“Maybe what we’ve been living through is just a privileged little window, and now it’s going back to what it always was.”

“You see, ah, trouble down the tracks?”

“Only this strange feeling about the Internet, that it’s over, not the tech bubble, or 11 September, just something fatal in its own history. There all along.”

“You sound like my father, Eric.”

“Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage—

“Gee Eric, li’l judgmental. How about some what the Buddha calls compassion here?”

“Meantime hashslingrz and them are all screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handing more and more of it over to the bad guys… They get us, all right, we’re all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us… We’re being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed, and it won’t end till the Internet—the real one, the dream, the promise—is destroyed.”

“So where’s the Undo command?”

Some all but invisible tremor. Maybe he’s laughing to himself. “Could be there’s enough good hackers around interested in fighting back. Outlaws who’ll work for free, show no mercy for anybody who tries to use the Net for evil purposes.”

“Civil war.”

“OK. Except the slaves don’t even know that’s what they are.”

It isn’t till later, in the unpromising wastelands of January, that Maxine understands this was Eric’s idea of saying so long. Something like it may’ve always been in the cards, though she expected more of a slow virtual slideaway, beneath the overlit pondscum of shopping sites and gossip blogging, down through an uncertain light, slipping behind veil after veil of encryption, deeper into the Deep Web. No, instead just one day, pow—no more L train, no more Joie de Beavre, just abruptly dark and silent, another classic skip, leaving only an uneasy faith that he maybe still exists somewhere on the honorable side of the ledger.

Driscoll as it turns out is still in Williamsburg, still answering e-mails.

“Is my heart broken, thanks for asking, I never knew what was going on anyway. Eric all along had this, can I say alternative destiny? Maybe not, but you must have noticed. Right now I have to deal with more immediate shit like too many roommates around here, hot-water issues, shampoo and conditioner theft, I need to focus on getting far enough ahead to afford a place of my own, if it means changing phase, daylight hours in a cube in a shop someplace across the bridge, so be it. Please don’t move to the burbs or nothing just yet, OK? I may want to drop by if I get a minute.”

Fine, Driscoll, 3-D and out here in “objective reality” would sure be nice if you could manage it, which side of the river being not so important as which side of the screen. Maxine is no happier than she was with the epistemological bug going around, avoiding only Horst, who, typically immune, before long finds himself coming in handy as the calibration standard of last resort. “So, Dad, is this real? Not real?”

“Not real,” Horst sparing Otis a brief glance away from, say, Ben Stiller in The Fred MacMurray Story.

“It’s just the strangest feeling,” Maxine confides impulsively to Heidi.

“Sure,” Heidi shrugs, “that’d be GAPUQ, the old Granada–Asbury Park Uncertainty Question. Been around forever.”

“Inside the closed, inbred world of academia, you mean, or…”

“Actually you might enjoy their Web site,” just as pissily, “for victims whose struggle to tell the difference is especially vivid, like your own, for example, Maxi—”

“Thank you, Heidi,” with a certain upward cadence, “and Frank, I believe, was singing about love.”

They’re at JFK, in the Lufthansa business-class departure lounge, sipping on some kind of organic mimosa, while everybody else in the room is busy getting hammered as quickly as possible. “Well it’s all love isn’t it,” Heidi scanning the room for Conkling, who has gone off on a nasal tour of the premises.

“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.