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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THOMAS PYNCHON is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974.
ALSO BY THOMAS PYNCHON
Slow Learner
V.
The Crying of Lot 49
Gravity’s Rainbow
Vineland
Mason & Dixon
Against the Day
Inherent Vice
Copyright
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Thomas Pynchon
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pynchon, Thomas.
Bleeding edge / Thomas Pynchon.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-14268-8
1. Women private investigators—Fiction. 2. High technology—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.Y55B54 2013
813'.54—dc23 2013017173
TITLE PAGE IMAGE © STUART WESTMORLAND / GETTY IMAGES
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.