“In my little cubicle. Reading Tacitus.” The warrior-scholar routine. “Who makes a case that Nero didn’t set fire to Rome so he could blame it on the Christians.”
“Sounds familiar, somehow.”
“You people want to believe this was all a false-flag caper, some invisible superteam, forging the intel, faking the Arabic chatter, controlling air traffic, military communications, civilian news media—everything coordinating without a hitch or a malfunction, the whole tragedy set up to look like a terror attack. Please. My wised-up civilian heartbreaker. Guess what. Nobody in the business is that good.”
“You’re saying I don’t need to get too excited about this anymore? Well. Ain’t that a relief. Meantime you people have what you want, your War on Terror, war without end, and job security up the ol’ wazoo.”
“For somebody maybe. Not me.”
“Goonsquad skills no longer in demand? Aw.”
He looks downward, at his abs, his dick, his shoes, some vintage Mizuno Waves in an eye-assaulting color scheme the years have not been kind to. “Retirement looming, basically.”
“There’s exit options for you guys? Quit kidding.”
“Well… considering what the exits are, we do try to make private arrangements instead.”
“Saving up your spare change, Florida Keys, little skiff with an ice chest full of Dos Equis sort of thing…”
“Wish I could be more specific.”
According to the flash-drive dossier Marvin brought around last summer, Windust’s portfolio is stuffed with privatized state assets all across the Third World. She imagines a few blessed hectares down in the trackless retrocolonial, someplace “safe,” whatever that means, off the surveillance matrix, spared somehow from U.S.-engineered regime changes, children with AKs, deforestation, storms, famines, and other late-capitalist planetary insults… with somebody he can trust, some ultimate Tonto, keeping an eye on its perimeters for him as the years unroll… In the lives variously reported of Windust, are loyalties like that possible?
She should have tumbled before this to the peculiar lightlessness in his eyes today, a deficit beyond secular fatigue. “Retirement” is a euphemism, and somehow she doubts he’s up here on any midlife cardio-fitness program. This is coming more and more to feel like a checklist of winding-up chores he’s running through before moving on.
In which case, Maxine, enough with the date-night ditzing around, she can feel a cold draft through some failing seam in the fabric of the day, and there is no payoff here worth any further investment beyond, “Let’s see, you had how many, three? Gigaccinos, and then the bagels…”
“Three bagels, plus the Denver omelet deluxe, you had the plain toasted…”
Out on the sidewalk, neither can find a formula that will let them separate with any grace. After another half minute of silence, they end up nodding and turning in different directions.
On the way home she passes the neighborhood firehouse. They’re in working on one of the trucks. Maxine recognizes a guy she sees all the time in the Fairway buying huge amounts of food. They smile and wave. Cute kid. Under different circumstances…
Of which as usual there are not enough. She threads among the daily bunches of flowers on the sidewalk, which will be cleared in a while. The list of firefighters here who were lost on 11 September is kept back someplace more intimate, out of the public face, anybody wants to see it they can ask, but sometimes it shows more respect not to put such things out on a billboard.
If it isn’t the pay, isn’t the glory, and sometimes you don’t come back, then what is it? What makes these guys choose to go in, work twenty-four hour shifts and then keep working, keep throwing themselves into those shaky ruins, torching through steel, bringing people to safety, recovering parts of others, ending up sick, beat up by nightmares, disrespected, dead?
Whatever it is, would Windust even recognize it? How far has he journeyed from working realities? What sanctuary has he sought, and what, if any, given?
AS THANKSGIVING APPROACHES, the neighborhood, terrorist atrocities or whatever, reverts to its usual insufferable self, reaching a peak the night before Thanksgiving, when the streets and sidewalks are jammed solid with people who have come in to town to view The Blowing Up Of The Balloons for the Macy’s parade. Cops are everywhere, security is heavy. In front of every eatery, there are lines out the door. Places you can usually step inside, order a pizza to go, and wait no more than the time it takes to bake it are running at least an hour behind. Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement—colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism “Excuse me.”
This evening Maxine finds herself abroad in this pageant of classic NYC behavior, having made the mistake of offering to spring for a turkey if Elaine will cook it, and compounded it by putting in an advance order at Crumirazzi, a gourmet shop down toward 72nd. She gets there after supper to find the place jammed tighter than a peak-period subway with anxious citizens gathering supplies for their Thanksgiving feasts, and the turkey line folded on itself eight or ten times and moving very, very slowly. People are already screaming at each other, and civility, like everything on the shelves, is in short supply.
A serial line jumper has been making his way forward along the turkey line, a large white alpha male whose social skills, if any, are still in beta, intimidating people one by one out of his way.
“Excuse me?” Shoving ahead of an elderly lady waiting in line just behind Maxine.
“Line jumper here,” the lady yells, unslinging her shoulder bag and preparing to deploy it.
“You must be from out of town,” Maxine addressing the offender, “here in New York, see, the way you’re acting? It’s considered a felony.”
“I’m in a hurry, bitch, so back off, unless you want to settle this outside?”
“Aw. After all your hard work getting this far? Tell you what, you go out and wait for me, OK? I won’t be too long, promise.”
Shifting to indignation, “I have a houseful of children to feed—” but he’s interrupted by a voice someplace over by the loading dock hollering, “Hey asshole!” and here cannonballing over the heads of the crowd comes a frozen turkey, hits the bothersome yup square in the head, knocking him flat and bouncing off his head into the hands of Maxine, who stands blinking at it like Bette Davis at some baby with whom she must unexpectedly share the frame. She hands the object to the lady behind her. “This is yours, I guess.”
“What, after it touched him? thanks anyway.”
“I’ll take it,” sez the guy behind her.
As the line creeps forward, everybody makes sure to step on, not over, the fallen line jumper.
“Nice to see the ol’ town gettin back to normal, ain’t it.” A familiar voice.
“Rocky, what are you doing over in this neck of the woods?”
“It’s Cornelia, she can’t get through Thanksgiving without this one brand of stuffing mix she grew up with, Dean & DeLuca ran out of it and Crumirazzi’s is the only other place in NYC.”
Maxine squints at the giant plastic sack he’s carrying. “‘Squanto’s Choice, Authentic Old-Tyme WASP Recipe.’”
“Uses antique white bread.”
“‘Antique’…”
“Wonder Bread from back before they started sellin it sliced?”
“That’s seventy years, Rocky, it doesn’t get moldy?”
“It gets hard as cement. They have to take jackhammers and break it up. Gives it that extra something. Why are you waiting in this line, I took you for more of a Swift Butterball person.”