Bleeding Edge

41

In the train on the way back, Maxine must’ve fallen asleep. She dreams she’s still in the ZiL. The landscape out the windows has frozen to deep Russian midwinter, snowfields under a piece of moon, illumination from the olden days of sleigh travel. A snow-inundated village, a church spire, a gas station shut for the night. Crossfade to Brothers Karamazov, Doctor Zhivago and others, covering their winter distances like this, frictionless, faster than anything else, suddenly you can get more than one errand done per trip, a breakthrough in romantic technology. Somewhere between Lake Heatsink and Albany, across the dark wilderness, a fleet of black SUVs now with only their fog lights lit, on the way to intercept. Maxine falls into an exitless loop, the dream as she surfaces turning into a spreadsheet she can’t follow. She wakes up around Spuyten Duyvil to Tallis’s sleeping face, closer to her own than you’d expect, as if sometime in sleep their faces had been even closer.

They roll into Grand Central about 1:00 A.M., hungry. “Guess the Oyster Bar is closed.”

“Maybe the apartment is safe by now,” Tallis offers, not believing it herself, “come on back, we’ll find something.”

What they find, actually, is a good reason to leave again. Soon as they step out of the elevator they can hear Elvis-movie music. “Uh-oh,” Tallis looking for her keys. Before she can find them, the door is flung open and a less-than-towering presence starts in with the emotions. Behind him on a screen Shelley Fabares is dancing around holding a sign announcing I’M EVIL.

“What’s this?” Maxine knows what it is, she chased him across half Manhattan not so long ago.

“This is Chazz, who isn’t even supposed to know about this place.”

“Love will find a way,” Chazz replies, jive-assingly.

“You’re here because we broke the spy camera.”

“You kiddin, I hate them things, darlin, if I’d known, I would’ve broke it myself.”

“Go back, Chazz, tell your pimp it’s no sale.”

“Please just give me a minute, Sugar, I confess at first it was all strictly business, but—”

“Don’t call me ‘Sugar’.”

“Nutrasweet! I’m pleading here.”

Ah, the big, or actually midsize, lug. Tallis stalks on headshaking into the kitchen.

“Chazz, hi,” Maxine waving as if from a distance, “nice to meet you finally, read your rap sheet, fascinating stuff, tell me, how’d a Title 18 Hall of Famer end up in the fiber business?”

“All ’at old misbehavior, ma’am? try and rise above it ’stead of judgin me, maybe you’ll notice a pattern?”

“Let’s see, strong background in sales.”

Nodding amiably, “You try and hit ’em when they’re too disoriented to think. Last year when the tech bubble popped? Darklinear started hirin big time. Made a man feel like some kind of a draft pick.”

“At the same time, Chazz,” Tallis, switched briefly to her Doormat setting, fetching beers, dips, snacks in bags, “my ex-husband-to-be wasn’t paying your employer that much just to keep little me busy.”

“He really is just buyin fiber’s all it is, totally a fatpipe person, payin top dollar, tryin to nail down as many miles of cable as he can get, outside plant, premises, first it was just in the Northeast, now it’s anywhere out in the U.S.—”

“Tidy consultation fees,” Maxine imagines.

“There you go. And it’s legal too, maybe even more than some of the stuff…” pausing to downshift.

“Oh, go ahead, Chazz, you were never shy about the contempt you felt for me, Gabe, the business we’re in.”

“Real and make-believe’s all I ever meant, my artificial sweetener, I’m just a logistics- and infrastructure-type fella. Fiber’s real, you pull it through conduit, you hang it, you bury it and splice it. It weighs somethin. Your husband’s rich, maybe even smart, but he’s like all you people, livin in this dream, up in the clouds, floatin in the bubble, think ’at’s real, think again. It’s only gonna be there long as the power’s on. What happens when the grid goes dark? Generator fuel runs out and they shoot down the satellites, bomb the operation centers, and you’re all back down on planet Earth again. All that jabberin about nothin, all ’at shit music, all ’em links, down, down and gone.”

Maxine has a moment’s image of Misha and Grisha, surfers from some strange Atlantic coast, waiting with their boards far out on the winter ocean, in the dark, waiting for the wave no one else besides Chazz and maybe a couple others will see coming.

Chazz reaches again for the jalapeño chips, and Tallis snatches the bag away. “No more for you. Just good night already, and go tell Gabe whatever you’re going to tell him.”

“Can’t, ’cause I quit working for him. Ain’t about to be the clown in his rodeo no more.”

“Sounds good, Chazz. You’re here on your own, then, all because of me, how sweet is that?”

“Because of you, and because of what it was doing to me. Guy was beginnin to feel like a drain on my spirits.”

“Funny, that’s what my mother always said about him.”

“I know you and your mama have been on the outs, but you should really find some way to fix ’at, Tallis.”

“Excuse me, it’s two A.M. here, daytime TV doesn’t start for a while yet.”

“Your mama is the most important person in your life. The only one who can get the potatoes mashed exactly the way you need ’em to be. Only one who understood when you started hangin with people she couldn’t stand. Lied about your age down to the multiplex so’s you could go watch ’em teen slasher movies together. She’ll be gone soon enough, appreciate her while you can.”

And he’s out the door. Maxine and Tallis stand looking at each other. The King croons on. “I was going to advise ‘Dump him,’” Maxine pensive, “while shaking you back and forth… but now I think I’ll just settle for the shaking part.”

HORST IS NODDED OUT on the couch in front of The Anton Chekhov Story, starring Edward Norton, with Peter Sarsgaard as Stanislavski. Maxine tries to tiptoe on into the kitchen, but Horst, not being domestic, tuned to motel rhythms even in his sleep, flounders awake. “Maxi, what the heck.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to—”

“Where’ve you been all night?”

Not yet having slid far enough into delusion to answer this literally, “I was hanging out with Tallis, she and the schmuck just parted ways, she’s got a new place, she was happy to have some company.”

“Right. And she hasn’t had a telephone put in yet. So what about your mobile? Oh—the battery ran down, I bet.”

“Horst, what’s the matter?”

“Who is it, Maxi, I’d rather hear now than later.”

Aahhh! Maybe last night the vircator in the trunk of the ZiL came on by accident? and she got zapped around by some secondary lobe from it, which hasn’t worn off yet? Because she finds herself now declaring, with every reason to believe it’s true, “There is nobody but you, Horst. Emotionally challenged fuckin ox. Never will be.”

One tiny unblocked Horstical receptor is able to pick up this message for what it is, so he doesn’t lapse totally into Midwest Ricky Ricardo after all, only grabs his head in that familiar free-throw way and begins to unfocus the complaining a little. “Well, I called hospitals. I called cops, TV news stations, bail-bond companies, then I started in on your Rolodex. What are you doing with Uncle Dizzy’s home number?”

“We check in from time to time, he thinks I’m his parole officer.”

“A-and what about that Italian guy you go to karaoke joints with?”

“One time, Horst, one group booking, nothing I’m about to repeat anytime soon.”

“Hah! Not ‘soon,’ but sometime, right? I’ll be sitting at home, overeating to compensate, you’ll be out on that happy scene, red dress, ‘Can’t Smile Without You,’ showcase duets, gym instructors from the other side of some bridge or tunnel—”

Maxine takes off her coat and scarf and decides to stay a couple of minutes. “Horst. Baby. We’ll go down to K-Town some night and do that, OK? I’ll find a red dress someplace. Can you sing harmony?”

“Huh?” Puzzled, as if everybody knows. “Sure. Since I was a kid. They wouldn’t let me in the church till I learned.” Prompt to Maxine—add one more item to list of things you don’t know about this guy…

They may have dozed off on the couch for a second. Suddenly it’s daybreak. The Newspaper of Record splats on the floor outside the back door. The Newfoundland puppy up on 12 starts in with the separation-anxiety blues. The boys commence their daily excursions in and out of the fridge. Catching sight of their parents on the couch, they start in with some hip-hop version of the Peaches & Herb oldie “Reunited and It Feels So Good,” Ziggy declaiming the lovey-dovey lyrics in the angriest black voice he can locate at this hour, while Otis does the beatboxing.

THE LESTER TRAIPSE MEMORIAL PULSE, as Maxine will come to think of it, barely gets onto the local news upstate, forget Canadian coverage or the national wire, before being dropped into media oblivion. No tapes will survive, no logs. Misha and Grisha are likewise edited from the record of current events. Igor tosses hints that they might’ve been reassigned back home, even once again inside the zona, some numbered facility out in the Far East. Like UFO sightings, the night’s events enter the realm of faith. Hill-country tavern regulars will testify that out to some unknown radius into the Adirondacks that night, all television screens went apocalyptically dark—third-act movie crises, semifamous girls in tiny outfits and spike heels schlepping somebody’s latest showbiz project, sports highlights, infomercials for miracle appliances and herbal restorers of youth, sitcom reruns from more hopeful days, all forms of reality in which the basic unit is the pixel, all of it gone down without a sigh into the frozen midwatch hour. Maybe it was only the failure of one repeater up on a ridgeline, but it might as well have been the world that got reset, for that brief cycle, to the slow drumbeat of Iroquois prehistory.

AVI DESCHLER IS COMING HOME from work in a cheerier frame of mind. “The upstate server? No worries, we switched over to the one in Lapland. But the even better news,” hopefully, “is I think I’m gonna get bounced.”

Brooke gazes at her stomach like a geographer with a globe of the world. “But…”

“Nah—wait’ll you hear about the compensation package.”

“Look out for ‘enhanced severance’ language,” Maxine advises, “it means you can’t sue.”

Gabriel Ice, not too mysteriously, has gone silent. Distracted at least, Maxine hopes.

“Tallis ought to be a little safer,” she tries to reassure March. “She’s a good kid, your daughter, not the nitwit she initially comes across as.”

“Better than I ever gave her credit for,” which does come as a surprise, Maxine having assumed that March doesn’t even know how to do remorseful. “Too good for the shitty parent I’ve been. Remember when they were little and still held your hand in the street? I used to pull them along at my speed so they had to skip to keep up, where was I going in such a hurry I couldn’t even walk with my kids?” About to go off into some act of contrition.

“Someday shitty-parent skills will be an Olympic event, the Mishpochathon, we’ll see if you even qualify, meantime lose the holy face, you know you’ve done worse.”

“Much worse. Then I refused to think about it for years. Now it’s like, how can I even—”

“You want to see her more than anything. Look, you’re just nervous, March, why don’t you both come over to my place, it’s a neutral corner, we’ll have coffee, order in lunch,” as it turns out from Zippy’s Appetizing down on 72nd, where a person can still find for example a gigantically overstuffed rolled-beef and chicken-liver sandwich with Russian dressing on an onion roll, a rarity in this town since deep in the last century, in on the paragraph allotted it by the take-out menu Tallis instantly zooms.

“You would actually eat something like that?” March despite a warning glance from Maxine.

“Well, no Mother, I thought I’d just sit and gaze at it for a while, would that be all right?”

March thinking fast, “Only that if you do get one… maybe I could try just a small piece of it? Only if you could spare?”

“How long you been Jewish?” Maxine out the side of her mouth.

“Where do you think I got my eating profile?” Tallis passive-aggressively making with the fingernail. “The meals you would order in, I’d go to the door and find a small crew of delivery kids holding sacks—”

“Two. Maybe. And only that one time.”

“Obesity, cardiac issues, tra-la-la who cares, as long as the quantity’s right, eh Mother?”

This may call for some subtle intervention. “Guys,” Maxine announces, “the check, we’re gonna split it, OK? Maybe before it gets here, we could… March, you ordered the Sunrise Special with double beef bacon and sausage, plus the latkes and applesauce, plus the extra side of latkes and—”

“That’s mine,” sez Tallis.

“OK, and you have the rolled beef… the potato salad on the sandwich is another 50¢…”

“But you ordered that extra pickle, so call that an offset…” Degenerating, as Maxine hoped it might, into the old bookkeepers-at-lunch exercise, God forbid there should be real cash on a real table, which, while consuming energy useful elsewhere, is still worth it if it keeps everybody grounded, somehow, in reality. The downside, she admits, is that neither of these two is above playing this lunch strategically, trying to create anxiety enough to dampen or destroy somebody’s appetite, which better not be Maxine’s is all, as she herself is expecting the Turkey Pastrami Health Combo, whose menu copy promises alfalfa sprouts, portobello mushrooms, avocados, low-fat mayo, and more, in the way of redemptive add-ons. This has drawn looks of distaste from the other two, so good, good, they agree on something at least, it’s a start.

Competitive math, mistakes real and tactical, figuring out the tip and how to divide up the sales tax, go on till Rigoberto buzzes up. It turns out to be only one delivery kid, but he does seem to be wheeling the food down the hall on a dolly of some kind.

Presently the entire surface of the table in the dining room is covered with containers, soda cans, waxed paper, plastic wrap, and sandwiches and side orders, and everybody is intensely fressing without regard to where, besides into mouths, it’s all going. Maxine takes a short break to observe March. “What happened to ‘corrupt artifact of…’ whatever it was?”

“Yaycchhh gwaahhihucchihnggg,” March nods, removing the lid from another container of coleslaw.

When face-stuffing activities slow down a bit, Maxine is thinking of how to bring up the topic of young Kennedy Ice, when the mother and grandma beat her to it. According to Tallis, her husband is now looking for custody.

“OH, no,” March detonates. “No way, who’s your lawyer?”

“Glick Mountainson?”

“They got me off from a libel beef once. Good saloon fighters basically. How’s it looking so far?”

“They say the one bright spot is I’m not contesting the money.”

“It doesn’t, uh, interest you, the money?” Maxine curious more than shocked.

“Not as much as it does them—they’re working on contingency. Sorry, but all I can think about is Kennedy.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” sez March.

“Actually I should, Mom… keeping you guys apart all that time…”

“Well, full disclosure, actually we’ve been sneaking a couple minutes together when we can.”

“Oh, he told me about that. Afraid I’d be angry.”

“You weren’t?”

“Gabe’s problem, not mine. So we kept quiet about it.”

“Sure. Wouldn’t do to provoke any patriarchal anger.” Maxine, seeing the further but not always useful phrase “fucking doormat” taking shape, preemptively grabs a somehow overlooked pickle and inserts it into March’s mouth.

On through lunch and the fall of the afternoon, through a daylight-saving’s evening too bright for the winter most NYers still think they’re in. Maxine, Tallis, and March move into the kitchen, then out of the house, out onto the street, through slowly deepening streetlight over to March’s place.

At some point Maxine remembers to call Horst. “This is all girls tonight, by the way.”

“Did I ask?”

“OK, you’re improving. I might need the Impala also.”

“Will you be taking it out of state, by any chance?”

“There’s some, what, federal situation?”

“Li’l risk assessment is all.”

“May not come to that, just asking.”

TALLIS HAPPENS TO look out the window into the street. “Shit. It’s Gabe.”

Maxine sees a snow-white stretch limo pulling up in front. “Looks familiar, but how do you know it’s—” then she spots the well-known iterated diagonals of the hashslingrz logo, painted on the roof.

“His own personal satellite link,” Tallis explains.

“The staff here are all related, sort of emeritus members of the Mara Salvatrucha,” March sez, “so there shouldn’t be any problem.”

“If they’re acquainted with the appearance of $100 bills in quantity,” Tallis mutters, “Gabe will be up here before you know it.”

Maxine grabs her purse, which she’s happy to feel is as heavy today as it should be. “There’s another way out, March?”

Service elevator to the basement, fire door out into the courtyard in back. “You guys wait down here,” sez Maxine, “I’ll be back with the car soon as I can.”

Her local, Warpspeed Parking, is just around the corner. While they’re bringing up the Impala, she runs a quick Roth IRA tutorial for Hector, the guy on the gate, whom somebody has misinformed about the virtues of converting from traditional.

“Without a penalty? Not right away, they make you wait five years, Hector, sorry.”

She gets back to March’s building to find everybody somehow out on the sidewalk in front, in the middle of a screaming match. Ice’s chauffeur, Gunther, is waiting at the wheel of the idling limo. Far from the massive Nazi ape that Maxine was expecting, he turns out to be a perhaps overgroomed Rikers alumnus who’s wearing his shades down on his nose to accommodate the extra eyelash length.

Grumbling, Maxine double-parks and joins the merriment. “March, come here.”

“Soon as I kill this motherfucker.”

“Don’t put in,” Maxine advises, “her life is her business.”

Reluctantly March gets in the car while Tallis, surprisingly calm, continues her adult discussion with Ice.

“It isn’t a lawyer you need, Gabe, it’s a doctor.”

She means mentally, but at this point Gabe isn’t looking too fit either, his face all red and swollen, some trembling he can’t control. “Listen to me, bitch, I’ll buy as many judges as I need to, but you’ll never see my son again. Fuckin never.”

OK, Maxine thinks, he raises a hand, time for the Beretta.

He raises a hand. Tallis avoids it easily, but the Tomcat is now in the equation.

“It doesn’t happen,” Ice carefully watching the muzzle.

“How’s that, Gabe.”

“I don’t die. There’s no scenario where I die.”

“Batshit fuckin insane,” March out the car window.

“Better hop on in there with your mom, Tallis. Gabe, that’s good to hear,” Maxine calm and upbeat, “and the reason you don’t die? is that you come to your senses. Start thinking about this on a longer time scale and, most important, walk away.”

“That’s—”

“That’s the scenario.”

The odd thing about March’s street is that it would be rejected by any movie-location scout, regardless of genre, as too well behaved. In this fold of space-time, women accessorized like Maxine do not point sidearms at people. It must be something else in her hand. She’s offering him something, something of value he doesn’t want to take, wants to pay him back a debt maybe, which he’s pretending to forgive and will eventually accept.

“She forgot the part,” March can’t help hollering out the window, “where you don’t get to be master of the universe, you go on being a schmuck, all kinds of competition starts coming out of the woodwork and you have to scramble to not lose market share, and your life stops being your own and belongs to the overlords you always worshipped.”

Poor Gabe, he has to stand here at gunpoint and be lectured by his ex-mother-in-law-to-be, a forever-unreconstructed lefty yet.

“You guys gonna be all right?” calls Gunther. “I had tickets to Mamma Mia, it’s nearly curtain time, I can’t even scalp em now.”

“Try calling it a travel and entertainment deduction anyway, Gunther. And you be nice to him too,” Maxine warns Ice as he carefully backs away and gets in his limo. She waits till the elongated vehicle has made it to the corner and turned, slides behind the wheel of the Impala, cranks up the radio, which is in the middle of a Tammy Wynette set from someplace across the river, and proceeds cautiously crosstown.

“We better assume he saw your plates,” sez March.

“Means an all-points bulletin.”

“Killer drones, more likely.”

“Precisely why,” Maxine wrestling the power-steering-challenged monster up and down a number of underlit streets, “we’re going to keep off bridges, out of tunnels, stay right here in town, and go hide in plain sight.”

Which after a scenic spin against a deep panorama of lights down and up the West Side Highway, turns out to be Warpspeed Parking again. Glancing up in the mirror, still empty of anything but the night street, “OK if I take it down myself, Hector? You didn’t see us, right?”

“D and D, mami.”

Winding forever down into regions of older and more dilapidated brickwork, corroded from generations of car emissions. The Impala’s exhaust comes into its own, like a teen vocalist in a high-school boys’ room.

March lights a joint and after a while, paraphrasing Cheech & Chong, drawls, “I woulda shot him, man.”

“You heard what he said. I think this is in his contract with the Death Lords he works for. He’s protected. He walked away from a loaded handgun, that’s all. He’ll be back. Nothing’s over.”

“You think he meant all that about getting Kennedy away from me?” Tallis quavers.

“Might not be that easy. He’ll keep running cost-benefit workups and find that there’s too many people coming at him from too many different directions, the SEC, the IRS, the Justice Department, he can’t buy them all off. Plus competitors friendly and otherwise, hacker guerrillas, sooner or later those billions will start to dwindle, and if he has any sense, he’ll pack up and split for someplace like Antarctica.”

“I hope not,” sez March, “global warming’s not bad enough? The penguins—”

Maybe it’s this Luxury Lounge interior—forty years down the road with the not-yet-damped vibrations of Midwest teen fantasies that’ve worked their way into the grain of the metallic turquoise vinyl, the loop-carpet floor mats, the ashtrays overflowing with ancient cigarette butts, some with lipstick shades not sold for years, each with a history of some romantic vigil, some high-speed pursuit, whatever Horst saw in this rolling museum of desire when he answered the ad in the Pennysaver back whenever it was, set and setting, as Dr. Tim always liked to say, now, presently, has wrapped them, brought them in from the unprofitable drill-fields of worry about the future, here inside, to repose, to unfurrowing, each eventually to her own dreams.

Next thing anybody knows, it’s morning. Maxine is slouched across the front seat, and March and Tallis are waking up in back, and everybody feels creaky.

They ascend to the street, where once again, overnight, all together, pear trees have exploded into bloom. Even this time of year, there could still be snow, it’s New York, but for now the brightness in the street is from flowers on trees whose shadows are texturing the sidewalks. It’s their moment, the year’s great pivot, it’ll last for a few days, then all collect in the gutters.

The Piraeus Diner is coming off another overnight of dope-scourged hipsters, funseekers who have failed to hook up, night owls who’ve missed the last trains back to the suburbs. Refugees from the sunless half of the cycle. Whatever it was they thought they needed, coffee, a cheeseburger, a kind word, the light of dawn, they’ve kept watch, stayed awake and caught sight of it at least, or nodded off and missed it once again.

Maxine has a quick cup of coffee and leaves March and Tallis with a tableful of breakfast to revisit their food issues. Heading back to the apartment to pick up the boys and see them to school, she notices a reflection in a top-floor window of the gray dawn sky, clouds moving across a blear of light, unnaturally bright, maybe the sun, maybe something else. She looks east to see what it might be, but whatever it is shining there is still, from this angle, behind the buildings, causing them to inhabit their own shadows. She turns the corner onto her block and leaves the question behind. It isn’t till she’s in the elevator of her building that she begins to wonder, actually, whose turn it is to take the kids to school. She’s lost track.

Horst is semiconscious in front of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Fatty Arbuckle Story,” and does not look street-ready. The boys have been waiting for her, and of course that’s when she flashes back to not so long ago down in DeepArcher, down in their virtual hometown of Zigotisopolis, both of them standing just like this, folded in just this precarious light, ready to step out into their peaceable city, still safe from the spiders and bots that one day too soon will be coming for it, to claim-jump it in the name of the indexed world.

“Guess I’m running a little late, guys.”

“Go to your room,” Otis shrugging into his backpack and out the door, “you are, like, so grounded.”

Ziggy surprising her with an unsolicited air kiss, “See you later at pickup, OK?”

“Give me a second, I’ll be right with you.”

“It’s all right, Mom. We’re good.”

“I know you are, Zig, that’s the trouble.” But she waits in the doorway as they go on down the hall. Neither looks back. She can watch them into the elevator at least.