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.”