“Justin’s got his mobile, you want me to call and—”
“It’s The Deseret, off-planet, likely to be roaming charges here nobody can afford, I’ll just cruise around, thanks.”
Out into this overdue-for-exorcism building she has never found even marginally likable. Lining the streetlike corridors, where a hundred years ago pony-drawn delivery wagons, cranked up here on massive hydraulic lifts, brought directly to the doorsills of tenants cans of milk, bushels of flowers, cases of champagne, tonight Maxine finds elaborate mock-ups of Camp Crystal Lake, mummies’ tombs, Frankenstein’s Art Deco lab all in black and white. Tenant hospitality is you’d have to say proactive. Before long, without so much as raising an eyebrow, she finds herself schlepping sacks full of Hallowe’en plunder too heavy for a child even to lift.
As the evening advances, so does the median age of the crowd of walk-ins, with much more emphasis on eye makeup, glitter, fishnet hose, axes in skulls, fake blood. It is inevitable that somebody should be masquerading as Osama bin Laden, and here in fact are two of them, whom Maxine recognizes sooner than she wants to as Misha and Grisha.
“We were going to go as World Trade Center,” Misha explains, “but decided OBL would be even more offensive.”
“So how come you’re not down in the Village someplace, where the TV coverage is?”
They exchange a Can-we-trust-her look.
“It’s for a reason,” she guesses, “private not public.”
“It’s fuckin Hallowe’en, right?” sez Grisha.
“Paying respects,” explains Misha.
To whom? Here at The Deseret, of course, to whom else but Lester Traipse, the real Hallowe’en ghost tonight, Lester the jive-ass ballistic blade victim with the unfinished business, doomed to wander those century-old corridors until accounts are balanced, or for eternity, whichever comes first. Lester was a creature of Silicon Alley, Alley to the core, and down the Alley the stories are never that short let alone sweet, down there it’s not only a mediagenic neighborhood of dreams recently faded but also the latest in a tradition of New York Alleys It Is In Fact Best To Avoid, shadows full of mentally unstable voices, echoes off the masonry, cries of city desolation, metallic noises less innocent than ancient trash cans in the wind.
“You guys were friends with Lester? Did business?” Or to put it another way, what earthly connection… unless that’s the point, and the connection is anything but earthly. It’s fuckin Hallowe’en.
“Lester was fellow podonok,” Misha blushing a little, as if embarrassed at how lame this sounds, “friend of scumbag hackers everywhere.”
“Including,” a thought occurring to her, “the former Soviet Union. Maybe this was even some secret-police business?”
Misha and Grisha begin to giggle, watching each other’s face to see, as it turns out, who is going to slap whom first back into sobriety and respect for the departed. A prison thing.
“You two,” noodging cautiously, “really did attend that Civil Hackers’ School in Moscow, didn’t you?”
“Umnik Academy!” cries Misha, “those guys, no, uh-uh!”
“Not us! We’re only chainiki!”
“From Bobryusk!” Misha nodding vigorously.
“Don’t even know how to sit facing keyboard!”
“Not that I mean to pry, it’s only that Lester may have fallen afoul of Gabriel Ice, who as you must know is practically synonymous with U.S. security arrangements. So Russian intelligence would naturally have an interest in his activities.”
“He owns this building,” Grisha sort of blurts, getting a look from his coadjutor. “If he’s here tonight, maybe we’ll run into him. Him or one of his people. Maybe they won’t like seeing Osama twins. Who knows? Little Mortal Kombat maybe.”
Note to self. Noodge Igor, who must know what the fuck this is all about. Scribbled illegibly on a virtual Post-it, stuck on a little-frequented brain lobe it presently falls off of, but there for marginal nagging value at least.
A flamboyance of French maids, street hookers, and baby dominatrices, none of then in junior high yet, comes jittering up the stairs. “Look! What’d I tell you?”
“OhmyGod?”
“Eeew, creepy?”
Misha and Grisha beam, puts their hands on their hearts, and bow slightly. “Tha tso kalan yee?”
“Tha jumat ta zey?”
Sending the young ladies into rewind, all in a frenzy, back down the stairs, Misha and Grisha calling genially after them, “Wa alaikum u ssalam!”
“That’s Hebrew?” sez Maxine.
“Pashto. Wishing them peace, also how old are you, do you go to mosque regularly.”
“Here come my kids.”
Ziggy’s Empire State Building outfit has acquired spray-painted graffiti, and somebody has slipped a miniature souvenir Red Sox cap onto King Kong’s head. Otis’s hair is still defiantly vertical, and like the gent he is, he’s schlepping Fiona’s bag along with his own.
“Fiona, nice getup, help me out, you’re supposed to be—”
“Misty?”
“The girl in Pokémon. And this is—”
Fiona’s friend Imba, who’s got up as Misty’s chronically bummed-out companion Psyduck.
“We flipped for it,” Fiona sez.
“Misty’s a gym leader,” Imba explains, “but she has impatience issues. Psyduck has powers, but such unhappiness.” Synchronized, she and Fiona grab the sides of their heads like S. Z. Sakall and utter the characteristic “Psy, psy, psy.” It occurs to Maxine that Psyduck, though Japanese, could be Jewish.
“Good evening, Tech Support, how may I abuse you?” Justin has come tonight as Dilbert’s power-freak dog, Dogbert, wearing indigo shades instead of clear lenses. Maxine introduces everybody.
“You are the Justin McElmo?” First time Maxine has heard either of these goons say “the.”
“Don’t know, there’s probably more of em out there.”
“Of DeepArcher,” Grisha amplifies.
“Just a couple of Game Boy fans,” Maxine mutters.
“You guys have been down there? Since how long?” Justin not alarmed so much as curious.
“Since 11 September maybe? Before then, was much harder to hack in. Then suddenly, day of attack, gets easier. Later, gets impossible again.”
“But you’re still getting in.”
“Can’t stay away!”
“Pizdatchye,” kvells Grisha, “always some new story, new graphics, different each time.”
“Everything evolving,” Misha sez. “Tell us, Justin. Did you design it that way?”
“To evolve?” Justin looking surprised. “No, it was only supposed to be the one thing, like, timeless? A refuge. History-free is what Lucas and I were hoping for. Now you guys are seeing, what?”
“Usual govno,” sez Grisha. “Politics, markets, expeditions, asskicking.”
“Not gamer scenarios, you understand. Down there we cannot be gamers, we must be travelers.”
A good enough basis to exchange business cards.
Just before moving on to further shenanigans, the torpedoes draw Maxine aside. “DeepArcher—you know it too. You’ve been there.”
“Um,” nothing to lose, “see, it’s only, like, code?”
“No! Maxine, no!” with what could be either naïve faith or raving insanity, “it’s real place!”
“It is asylum, no matter, you can be poorest, no home, lowest of jailbirds, obizhenka, condemned to die—”
“Dead—”
“DeepArcher will always take you in, keep you safe.”
“Lester,” Grisha whispers, eyes angling upstairs toward the pool, “Lester’s soul. You understand? Stingers on roof. That.” A head gesture out into the All Saints night, toward far downtown where the Trade Center used to stand, past the invisible swarming hundreds of thousands of masked celebrants in streets lighted and semi-lit, out to the reeking hole with the Cold War name at the lower edge of the island.