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“I don’t do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?”
The coin-op washing machine of Intuition clangs on into a new cycle.
This woman here, despite her M.B.A., ordinarily a sure sign of idiocy, is playing you, smart-ass, and you need to be out of this place as quick as possible.
No hello, how you doing, “Are you on a secure line?” is what the digital tycoon would like to know. “I use it all the time for shopping, tell people my credit-card numbers and stuff, nothing bad’s happened yet.”
busy with handheld game consoles. “Doom,” Igor waving a thumb, “just came out for Game Boy. Post–late capitalism run amok, ‘United Aerospace Corporation,’ moons of Mars, gateways to hell, zombies and demons, including I think these two. Misha and Grisha. Say hello, padonki.”
“Madoff Securities. Hmm, maybe some industry scuttlebutt. Bernie Madoff, a legend on the street. Said to do quite well, I recall.” “One to two percent per month.” “Nice average return, so what’s the problem?” “Not average. Same every month.” “Uh-oh.” She flips pages, has a look at the graph. “What the fuck. It’s a perfect straight line, slanting up forever?” “Seem a little abnormal to you?” “In this economy? Look at this—even last year, when the tech market went belly-up? No, it’s got to be a Ponzi scheme, and from the scale of these investments he could be front-running also. You have any
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“I don’t suppose you’ve mentioned this to the cops or anything.” “In case they need a good laugh to lighten up their otherwise grim workday, you mean.
Cornelia puzzled, “But you . . . you are Jewish?” “Oh, sure.” “Practicing?” “Nah, I know how to do it pretty good by now.”
“Yes, but if you’re Jewish,” Maxine unperturbed, “it’s good luck. Bar mitzvah money, for instance, you should always give it in multiples of 18.” “Sell pussy? for bar mitzvah?” “No, no, in gematria, kind of . . . Jewish code? 18 computes to chai or life.” “Same thing with pussy!” This intercultural dialogue is disrupted by commotion from the men’s room.
“Me too, but the partners were all morphing into CSS nazis like that specimen in the toilet, and I’m just an old die-hard tables person, as you see—gray, left-justified, no apologies, there have to be dinosaurs or the little kids won’t have nothing to look at in the museum, right?”
there was more nerd delinquents hanging around that place than a Quake server.”
“No, no, it’s real ice cream,” Igor explains. “Russian ice cream. Not this Euromarket food-police shit.” “High butterfat content,” March translates. “Soviet-era nostalgia, basically.”
“Some kind of pyramid racket.” “Oh. Something a little different.” “You mean for Igor? like he has some history with—” “No, I meant late capitalism is a pyramid racket on a global scale, the kind of pyramid you do human sacrifices up on top of, meantime getting the suckers to believe it’s all gonna go on forever.”
which is like being Jewish and finding out that death is not the end of everything—suddenly denied the comfort of absolute zero.
It was like they actively went seeking it, this life they have now, this faraway, virtual life, leaving the rest of us stuck back here in meatspace, blinking at images on a screen.”
Now and then workers, in long-standing Sanitation Department tradition, have lengthy exhilarated screaming exchanges. “Strange shift to be working,” it seems to Maxine.
we are heading, you could say condemned, to the Hamptons. Who would dislike her enough to send her something like this,
Gusts of laughter from topside. Bruno’s hand comes into the shot with a butane lighter and a crack pipe, and the threesome now become affectionate. Jules and Jim (1962) it isn’t. Talk about double-entry bookkeeping!
Maxine rewinds, ejects, and, returning to realworld television programming, begins idly to channel-surf. A form of meditating.
A paranoid halo thickens around Maxine’s head, if not a nimbus of certainty.
Of course, in NYC it is not uncommon to catch sight of a face that you know, beyond all argument, belongs to somebody no longer among the living, and sometimes when it catches you staring, this other face may begin to recognize yours as well, and 99% of the time you turn out to be strangers.
“You two were romantically involved?” “Not romantically. Baroquely maybe. Years ago.”
“Envy,” supposes Heidi, “is so often all that stands between some of us and a sad, empty life.”
Heidi squints at the options. “There’s a breakfast menu? Long March Szechuan Muesli? Magic Goji Longevity Shake? what, excuse me, the fuck?”
The Twelve Flavors Drunken Squid is a little overdone. They settle for dropping pieces from different heights onto their plates to see how high they’ll bounce. The Green Jade Energetic Surprise comes in a plastic container molded to look like a jade box from the Qing dynasty. “The surprise,” Heidi nervously, “is a shrunken head inside.” It turns out to be mostly broccoli.
The Gang of Four Vegetarian Combo, on the other hand, is exquisite, if mysterious. Anybody eating it at the physical Ning Xia restaurant impulsive enough to ask what’s in it will only get a glare. The Chinese fortune-cookie fortunes are even more problematic.
out to Queens to a strip club called Joie de Beavre.
The one body part they won’t be staring at much is her eyes. This Male Gaze she’s been hearing about since high school is not about to intersect its female counterpart anytime soon.
“OK . . .” Maxine glances quickly at his dick, and her contacts flip inside out and go sailing across the room. “Eric, excuse me, is that some loathsome skin disease?” “This? oh it’s a designer condom, from the Trojan Abstract Expressionist Collection I believe, here—” He takes it off and waves it at her.
everything’ll be suburbanized faster than you can say ‘late capitalism.’
From what Maxine can gather, Shawn’s therapist, Leopoldo, is a Lacanian shrink who was forced to give up a decent practice in Buenos Aires a few years ago, due in no small part to neoliberal meddling in the economy of his country.
his luxury suite in the shrinks’ quarter known as Villa Freud,
And after a while I began to see how much Lacanian is like Zen.” “Huh?” “Total bogosity of the ego, basically. Who you think you are isn’t who you are at all.
Brooke and Avi finally show up back in the States looking like they’ve spent the year at some strange anti-kibbutz dedicated to screen-staring, keeping out of the sun, and not missing too many meals, Elaine taking one look at Brooke promptly conveys her over to Megareps, a neighborhood health club, and negotiates a trial membership while Brooke loiters at the snack bar on the ground floor, contemplating muffins, bagels, and smoothies in a less than objective way.
Ernie is supposed to be at Lincoln Center watching some well-received Kyrgyz movie but has actually snuck over to The Fast and the Furious
Channel 13 yakker hosted by Beltway intellectual Richard Uckelmann called Thinking with Dick,
“A time machine of the mouth, my darling, Proust Schmoust, this takes a man straight back to his bar mitzvah.” Singing a couple bars of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” just to prove it.
“It’s his mother’s recipe,” clarifies Elaine, “well, except for the mangoes, they hadn’t been invented yet.”
Armani, isn’t it?” “Just some schmatte from H&M, but how nice of you to notice.”
A silence arises, and lengthens, and not only a silence, as her glance, inadvertently wandering to that other indicator of the inward, confirms. It’s in fact a hardon of some size, and worse, he’s caught her looking.
At length, deep in, at the event horizon of closet oblivion,
In the fridge all she sees is a single beet, sitting, one would have to say insolently, on a plate.
a little way up the Deegan, just over the Yonkers line, is Sensibility, the ladies’ shooting range she’s just mailed in another year’s membership dues to, and that for this excursion to Loehmann’s she has somehow remembered to bring along the Beretta.
“The three of em, I got some snail mail yesterday, they’re getting married. To each other.”
She thinks she’s seen most of the looks of despair available to men of this pay grade, but what now briefly appears on his face you’d have to open a new file for.
A bitter chemical smell of death and burning that no one in memory has ever in this city smelled before and which lingers for weeks. Though everybody south of 14th Street has been directly touched one way or another, for much of the city the experience has come to them mediated, mostly by television—the farther uptown, the more secondhand the moment, stories from family members commuting to work, friends, friends of friends, phone conversations, hearsay, folklore, as forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize control of the narrative as quickly as possible come into play and
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“No problem,” is what Maxine tells Driscoll now, “you can have the spare room,” which happens to be available, Horst shortly after 11 September having shifted his sleeping arrangements into Maxine’s room, to the inconvenience of neither and to what, if in fact she ever went into it with anybody, would be the surprise of very few. On the other hand, whose business is it? It’s still too much for her to get her own head around, how much she’s missed him. How about what they call “marital relations,” is there any fucking going on? You bet, and what’s it to you? Music track? Frank Sinatra, if you
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“It’s not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world’s population—more cheap labor, more addicted consumers.”
Hesitation. “I’m temping at Microsoft.” “Oof.” “Yeah, the dress code takes some getting used to, all the breathing apparatus and stormtrooper gear . . .”
“You’re from New York, they’re expecting pushy.”
