Bleeding Edge (32 page)

“When were you ever? He didn’t know that?”

“He appreciated attitude in a woman. He said. I thought. But since the attack . . .”

“Yeah, you can’t help noticing some attitude escalation.” New York cops have always been arrogant, but lately they’ve been parking routinely on the sidewalk, yelling at civilians for no reason, every time a kid tries to jump a turnstile, subway service gets suspended and police vehicles of every description, surface and airborne, converge and linger. Fairway has started selling coffee blends named after different police precincts. Bakeries who supply coffee shops have invented a giant “Hero” jelly donut in the shape of the well-known sandwich of the same name, for when patrol cars show up.

Heidi has been working on an article for the
Journal of Memespace
Cartography
she’s calling “Heteronormative Rising Star, Homophobic Dark Companion,” which argues that irony, assumed to be a key element of urban gay humor and popular through the nineties, has now become another collateral casualty of 11 September because somehow it did not keep the tragedy from happening. “As if somehow irony,” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious—weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”

“Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching
Rugrats
or reruns of
Rocko’s Modern Life,
and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung!”

“You notice,” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of
evil drug
abuse
that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again. What’s that going on in the other room, by the way?”

“Couple kids I do some business with off and on. Used to live downtown. Another of these relo stories.”

“Thought it might be Horst watching porn on the Internet.”

Once Maxine would have zinged back, “He was only driven to do that while he was seeing you,” but feels reluctant these days to include Horst in the back-and-forth she and Heidi like to get into, because of . . . what, it can’t be some kind of loyalty to Horst, can it? “He’s over in Queens today, that’s where they evacuated the commodity exchange to.”

“Thought he’d be long gone by now. Back out there someplace,” waving vaguely trans-Hudson. “Everything all right otherwise?”

“What?”

“You know, in terms of, oh, Rocky Slagiatt?”

“Copacetic, far ’s I know, why?”

“I guess ol’ Rocky’s a lot chirpier these days, huh?”

“How would I know?”

“With the FBI shifting agents off of Mafia duty and over to antiterrorism, I mean.”

“So 11 September turns out to be a mitzvah for the mob, Heidi.”

“I didn’t mean that. The day was a terrible tragedy. But it isn’t the whole story. Can’t you feel it, how everybody’s regressing? 11 September infantilized this country. It had a chance to grow up, instead it chose to default back to childhood. I’m in the street yesterday, behind me are a couple of high-school girls having one of these teenage conversations, ‘So I was like, “Oh, my God?” and he’s like, “I didn’t say I wasn’t see-een her?”’ and when I finally turn to look at them, here are these two women my own age. Older!
your
age, who should know better, really. Like trapped in a fuckin time warp or something.”

Oddly enough, Maxine’s just had something like it happen around the corner on Amsterdam. Every schoolday morning on the way to Kugelblitz, she’s been noticing the same three kids waiting on the corner for a school bus, Horace Mann or one of them, and maybe the other morning there was some fog, maybe the fog was inside her, some incompletely dissipated dream, but what she saw this time, standing in exactly the same spot, was three middle-aged men, gray-haired, less youthfully turned out, and yet she knew, shivering a little, that these were the
same kids
, the same faces, only forty, fifty years older. Worse, they were looking at her with a queer knowledgeable intensity, focusing personally on her, sinister in the dimmed morning air. She checked the street. Cars were no more advanced in design, nothing beyond the usual police and military traffic was passing or hovering overhead, the low-rise holdouts
hadn’t been replaced with anything taller, so it still had to be “the present,” didn’t it? Something, then, must’ve happened to these kids. But next morning all was back to “normal.” The kids as usual paying no attention to her.

What, then, the fuck, is going on?

W
hen she goes to Shawn with this, she finds her guru, in his own way, freaking out also. “You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?”

“Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what.”

“The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fuckin market.”

“A religious beef, you’re saying?”

“It’s not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world’s population—more cheap labor, more addicted consumers.”

“You sound like March Kelleher.”

“Yeah, or,” that trademark sub-smirk, “maybe she sounds like me.”

“Uh-huh, listen, Shawn . . .” Maxine tells him about the kids on the corner and her time-warp theory.

“Is that like the zombies you said you were seeing?”

“One person, Shawn, somebody I know, maybe dead maybe not, enough with the zombies already.”

Hmm yes, but now another, you’d have to say insane, suspicion has begun to bloom in all the California sunshine around here, which is, suppose these “kids” are really operatives, time troopers from the Montauk Project, abducted long ago into an unthinkable servitude, grown solemn and gray through years of soldiering, currently assigned to Maxine expressly, for reasons never to be made clear to her. Possibly in strange cahoots also, and why not, with Gabriel Ice’s own private gang of co-opted script kiddies . . . aahhh! Talk about paranoid jitters!

“OK”, soothingly, “like, total disclosure? It’s been happenin to me too? I’m seeing people in the street who are supposed to be dead, even sometimes people I know were in the towers when they went down, who can’t be here but they’re here.”

They gaze at each other for a while, down here on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched, no clear way to get up and on with a day which is suddenly full of holes—family, friends, friends of friends, phone numbers on the Rolodex, just not there anymore . . . the bleak feeling, some mornings, that the country itself may not be there anymore, but being silently replaced screen by screen with something else, some surprise package, by those who’ve kept their wits about them and their clicking thumbs ready.

“I’m sorry, Shawn. What do you think it could be?”

“Besides how much I miss them, beats me. Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?”

“You’d prefer retail?”

“Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store,
just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window . . . that was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”

“And what we’ve always been is . . . ?”

“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs . . . planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”

After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or . . .”

“Course not, it’s a koan.”

•   •   •

THAT EVENING UNACCUSTOMED LAUGHTER
from the bedroom. Horst is horizontal front of the tube, helplessly, for Horst, amused. For some reason he’s watching NBC instead of the BioPiX channel. A diffident long-haired person in amber sunglasses is doing stand-up on some late-night show.

A month after the worst tragedy in everybody’s lifetime and Horst is laughing his ass off. “What is it Horst, delayed reaction you’re alive?”

“I’m happy to be alive, but this Mitch Hedberg guy is funny, too.”

Not a hell of a lot of occasions she’s seen Horst really laugh. Last time must’ve been Keenan and Kel’s “I dropped the screw in the tuna” episode four or five years ago. Sometimes he’ll chuckle at something, but rarely. Whenever somebody asks how come everybody’s laughing at something and he isn’t, Horst explains his belief that laughter is sacred, a momentary noodge from some power out in the universe, only cheapened and trivialized by laugh tracks. He has a low tolerance for
unmotivated and mirthless laughter in general. “For many people, especially in New York, laughing is a way of being loud without having to say anything.” So what’s he still doing in town, by the way?

•   •   •

GOING IN TO WORK
one morning, she runs into Justin. It seems accidental, but there may be no accidents anymore, the Patriot Act may have outlawed them along with everything else. “Mind if we talk?”

“Come on up.”

Justin slouches into a chair in Maxine’s office. “It’s about DeepArcher? Remember back just before the attack on the Trade Center, Vyrva must’ve told you, everything got a little weird with the random numbers we were using?”

“Dimly, dimly. Did that ever get back to normal?”

“Did anything?”

“Horst says the stock market went crazy too. Just before.”

“You heard of the Global Consciousness Project?”

“Some . . . California thing.”

“Princeton, as a matter of fact. These folks maintain a network of thirty to forty random-event generators all around the world, whose outputs all flow into the Princeton site 24/7 and get mixed together to produce this random-number string. First-rate source, exceptional purity. On the theory that if our minds really are all linked together somehow, any major global event, disaster, whatever, will show up in the numbers.”

“You mean, somehow, make them less random.”

“Right. Meantime, for DeepArcher to be untraceable, we happen to need a high-quality supply of random numbers. What we’ve done is create globally a set of virtual nodes on volunteer computers. Each node only exists long enough to receive and resend, and then it’s gone—we use the random numbers to set up a switching pattern among the nodes. Soon as we found out about this Princeton source, Lucas and I were into the site, bootlegging the product. All goes well till the night of September 10th, when suddenly these numbers coming out of Princeton began
to depart from randomness, I mean really abruptly, drastically, no explanation. You can look it up, the graphs are posted on their Web site for anybody to see, it’s . . . I’d say scary if I knew what any of it meant. It kept on that way through the 11th and a few days after. Then just as mysteriously everything went back to near-perfect random again.”

“So . . .” and like why is he telling her this exactly, “whatever it was, it’s gone away?”

“Except that for those couple of days, DeepArcher was vulnerable. We did our best with serial numbers off dollar bills, which do pretty good as seeds for a low-tech pseudorandom-number generator, but still, DeepArcher’s defenses began to disintegrate, everything was more visible, easier to access. It’s possible some people may have found their way in then who shouldn’t have. Soon as the GCP numbers got random again, the way back out would’ve become invisible to any intruders. They’d be caught inside the program. They could still be there.”

“They can’t just click on ‘Quit’?”

“Not if they’re busy trying to reverse-engineer their way to our source code. Which is impossible, but still they can compromise a lot of what’s in there.”

“Sounds like another reason to go open source.”

“Lucas says the same thing. I wish I could just . . .” He looks so perplexed that Maxine against her better judgment sez, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Guy’s walking around holding a blazing-hot coal . . .”

•   •   •

THAT EVENING,
first thing in the door, she notices something sure smells good. Horst is cooking supper. Seems to be coquilles Saint-Jacques and daube de boeuf provençal. Again. Of course, the Guilt Special. By a strange invariance in the parameters of wedlock, Horst lately has been turning, all but insufferably, into a homebody. The other night she came in late, all the lights were off, wham, she’s suddenly assaulted at ankle level by a mechanical device, which turns out to be a robot vacuum cleaner. “Trying to kill me here!”

“Thought you’d be pleased,” sez Horst, “it’s the Roomba Pro Elite, brand-new from the factory.”

“With the spousal-attack feature.”

“Actually, it won’t be released till fall, got this one at an early-adopters preview sale. Wave of the future, honeybunch.”

Irony-free. Unthinkable a year or two ago. Meantime it’s Maxine’s turn now to have these, hmm, undomestic urges. Which, for those to whom balanced books appeal, seems fair. Guilt? What’s that?

Eric and Driscoll are in and out of the house together and separately and unpredictably, though they do respect school nights and an informal curfew of 11:00
P.M.
Out any later than that and they make other sleeping arrangements, which everybody is cool with, besides relieving Maxine of some worry. The boys, in any case, like their father, continue to sleep so unperturbed that next to them the average sawmill inventory is insomniac.

One day Maxine finds Eric in the spare room with a 27-ounce spray bottle of Febreze, spritzing his dirty laundry, item by item. “There’s a laundry room in the basement, Eric. We can lend you detergent.”

He drops the T-shirt he’s holding on to a pile of already-Febrezed laundry and remains pointing the bottle at his ear, as if about to shoot himself with it. “Does it come with Downy April Fresh Scent?” Diminishing returns. But he also has a worried look.

Angling an antenna, “Something else, Eric?”

“I was up all night with this again. Fuckin hashslingrz. Can’t let it go.”

“You want some coffee? I’m going to make some coffee.”

Following her into the kitchen, “That hashslingerz money pipeline to the Emirates, remember? banks in Dubai and shit, I couldn’t stop going back, over and over it, what if that was helping finance the attack on the Trade Center? then Ice isn’t only just another dotcom douchebag, he’s a traitor to his country.”

“Somebody in Washington agrees with you.” She gives Eric a quick recap of the dossier that Windust handed her, with his punk-rock cologne all over it.

“Yeah, how about this ‘Wahhabi Transreligious Friendship,’ they happen to mention them?”

“They think it’s some kind of front for moving money into jihadist operating accounts.”

“Even cuter than that. It’s a front, all right, but it’s really the CIA, pretending to be jihadist.”

“Get outta here.”

“Maybe it was the Ambien, maybe it was always there right in front of me and I just didn’t see it, but somehow this time all the veils go droppin one by one, and there’s Mata Hari herself. It’s all been a way to get funds out to different anti-Islamic undergrounds in the region. In return Ice gets to keep a commission on everything moving through, plus some heavy-ass consultancy fees.”

“Why, the man’s a patriot.”

“He’s a greedy little shit,” Eric’s head now in a halo of Daffy Duck froth droplets, “eternity in a motel lounge in Houston Texas with a Andrew Lloyd Webber mix repeating forever on the stereo is too good for his sorry ass. Just totally trust me on one thing, Maxine. I’m gonna fuck him up.”

“Sounds like an exploit in the wind.”

“Maybe.”

“One brush with Rikers isn’t enough already, now you’re planning denial-of-service attacks?”

“Way too good for Ice. If every company with an asshole in charge deserved a DOS hit? be nothing left of the tech sector. But here, let me share with you my latest invention, this is like a hors d’oeuvre.”

He shows her on his laptop. Seems he has recently launched the Vomit Kurser, named in homage to the ill-regarded Comet Cursor of the nineties and developed in partnership with a
bruja
from one of his old neighborhoods. Via eye-catching but fake pop-up ads promising health, wealth, happiness &c, the Kurser will surreptitiously lay old-school curses on selected targets—click in once, your ass is grass. Somehow, as
the Latina sorceress has explained to Eric, the Internet as it turns out exhibits a strange affinity for the dynamics of curses, especially when written in the more ancient languages predating HTML. Through the uncountable cross-motives of the cyberworld, the fates of unreflective click-happy users are altered for the worse—systems crash, data are lost, bank accounts are looted, all of which being computer-related you might expect, but then there are also the realworld inconveniences, such as zits, unfaithful spouses, intractable cases of Running Toilet, providing the more metaphysically inclined further evidence that the Internet is only a small part of a much vaster integrated continuum.

“This will bring down Ice’s system? He’s Jewish, he doesn’t know from Santería, this sounds over toward the woowoo end of the spectrum even for you, Eric.”

“You may chill, it’s not the main event, only a trailer, meantime not only have I been corrupting his malloc(3), I’ve turned it out trickin in the street, years of therapy before it’s straight again.”

“Please just watch your ass, I think I saw the movie, it ends on a sort of vindictive note. Something in the tail credits about ‘is currently serving a life sentence in the federal pen’?”

She hasn’t seen this look on his face before. Scared but resolute also. “There’s no Escape key here. No way back to Game Shark hex cheats and them high-spirited li’l overflow stunts, no more happy times, now the only way left for me to go is deeper.”