Bleeding Edge - Pynchon Thomas (список книг .TXT) 📗

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 jalapeno 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?”