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