“Window dressing. The tech sector tanks, a few companies happen to survive, awesome. But a lot more didn’t, and the biggest winners were men blessed with that ol’ Wall Street stupidity, which in the end is unbeatable.”

“C’mon, everybody on Wall Street can’t be stupid.”

“Some of the quants are smart, but quants come, quants go, they’re just nerds for hire with a different fashion sense. The jocks may not know a stochastic crossover if it bites them on the ass, but they have that drive to thrive, they’re synced in to them deep market rhythms, and that’ll always beat out nerditude no matter how smart it gets.”

As happy hour begins and the price of well drinks goes down to $2.50, Driscoll switches to Zimartinis, which are basically Zima and vodka. Maxine, humming the working-mom blues, stays with Zima.

“Really like your hair, Driscoll.”

“I was doing it like everybody else, you know, seriously black, with those short bangs? but all the time I secretly wanted to look like Rachel on Friends, so I started collecting these Jennifer Aniston images? off of Web sites and tabloids and shit?”

Finding herself soon enough with a purseful of photo clips and screen grabs, going from one hair salon to another, increasingly desperate, trying to get her own do exactly the way it looked on JA—something that might, it finally began to dawn on her, be easier to get wrong than right, because even with the hours of obsessive hair-by-hair color blending and strange custom-styling equipment out of geek-movie lab sets, the results never came in better than close-but-no-cigar.

“Maybe,” Maxine gently, “you aren’t really supposed to, like, what’s the word, be . . . ?”

“No, no! that’s just it! I love Jennifer Aniston! Jennifer Aniston is my role model! on Hallowe’en? I’ve always been Rachel!”

“Yes, but this . . . wouldn’t have anything to do with Brad Pitt, or . . .”

“Oh, that, that’ll never last, Jen is way too good for him.”

“Too . . . ‘good’ . . . for Brad Pitt.”

“Wait and see.”

“OK, Driscoll, this is against my better judgment, but you might want to go try Murray ’N’ Morris, over in the Flower District?” Rooting through her purse to find one of their cards, or, well, more like a 10%-off introductory coupon. These two demented yet somehow board-certified trichologists have recently spotted an opportunity in the Jennifer Aniston wannabe boom, and are investing heavily in Sahag curlers and forever going off to Caribbean resorts for intensive tutorial workshops in color weaving. Their remorseless urges toward innovation extend to other salon services as well.

“Our Meat Facial today, Ms. Loeffler?”

“Uhm, how’s that.”

“You didn’t get our offer in the mail? on special all this week, works miracles for the complexion—freshly killed, of course, before those enzymes’ve had a chance to break down, how about it?”

“Well, I don’t . . .”

“Wonderful! Morris, kill . . . the chicken!”

From the back room comes horrible panicked squawking, then silence. Maxine meantime is tilted back, eyelids aflutter, when— “Now we’ll just apply some of this,” wham! “. . . meat here, directly onto this lovely yet depleted face . . .”

“Mmff . . .”

“Pardon? (Easy, Morris!)”

“Why is it . . . uh, moving around like that? Wait! is that a— are you guys putting a real dead chicken in my— aaahhh!”

“Not quite dead yet!” Morris jovially informs the thrashing Maxine as blood and feathers fly everywhere.

Each time she comes in here, it is something like this. Each time she exits the salon swearing it’s for the last time. Still, she can’t help noticing the crowds of Jennifer Aniston more-or-less look-alikes competing for dryer time lately, as if downtown is Las Vegas and Jennifer Aniston the next Elvis.

“This is expensive?” Driscoll wonders, “what they do?”

“It’s still what you guys would call in beta, so I think they should offer you a price.”

The crowd has begun to sort into a mix of hackers and hacker grrrlz and corporate suits repackaged in somebody’s idea of barhopping gear, out looking for romance or cheap labor, whichever way the night develops.

“The one element there ain’t so much of anymore,” Driscoll points out, “is the gold diggers of both sexes who thought there was all these nerd billionaires just about to come step out of the toilet and fiercely into their lives. Never was better than delusional back then, but these days even a hardcore techno-adventuress has to admit, it’s mighty slim pickings.”

Maxine has noticed a pair of men at the bar who seem to be eyeballing her, or Driscoll, or both of them, with uncommon intensity. Though it’s hard to say what normal is around here, they don’t look too normal to Maxine, and it ain’t just the Zima talking.

Driscoll follows her gaze. “You know those guys over there?”

“No, uh-uh. Thought it was somebody you knew.”

“It’s their first time in here,” Driscoll is pretty sure, “and they look like cops. Should this be freaking me out?”

“Just remembered it’s my curfew,” snickers Maxine, “so I’m outta here. You stay. See which one of us they’re tailing.”

“Let’s make a big deal about writing down our e-mail and phone numbers and shit, that way we don’t look so much like longtime associates.”

Turns out it’s Maxine who’s their Person of Interest. Good news, bad news, Driscoll seems like a nice kid and doesn’t need these idiots, on the other hand it’s Maxine, now inside a lemon-lime alcopop haze, who has to try and shake them. She gets in a taxi headed down- instead of uptown, pretends to change her mind much to the driver’s annoyance, and ends up in Times Square, which for a few years now she has made a conscious effort not to go near if she can help it. The sleazy old Deuce she remembers from her less responsible youth is so no more, Giuliani and his developer friends and the forces of suburban righteousness have swept the place Disneyfied and sterile—the melancholy bars, the cholesterol and fat dispensaries and porno theaters have been torn down or renovated, the unkempt and unhoused and unspoken-for have been pushed out, no more dope dealers, no more pimps or three-card monte artists, not even kids playing hooky at the old pinball arcades—all gone. Maxine can’t avoid feeling nauseous at the possibility of some stupefied consensus about what life is to be, taking over this whole city without mercy, a tightening Noose of Horror, multiplexes and malls and big-box stores it only makes sense to shop at if you have a car and a driveway and a garage next to a house out in the burbs. Aaahh! They have landed, they are among us, and it helps them no end that the mayor, with roots in the outer boroughs and beyond, is one of them.

And here they all are tonight, converged into this born-again imitation of their own American heartland, here in the bad Big Apple. Blending with this for as long as she can, Maxine finally seeks refuge in the subway, takes the Number 1 to 59th, changes to the C train, gets off at The Dakota, threads in and out of a busload of Japanese visitors snapping photos of the John Lennon assassination site, and next time she looks back, she can’t see anybody following her, though if they’ve had her on their radar since before she walked into the Bucket, then they probably also know where she lives.

6

Pizza for supper. What else is new?

“Mom, this really crazy lady showed up at school today.”

“And so . . . somebody, what, called the cops?”

“No, we had assembly and she was the guest speaker. She graduated from Kugelblitz sometime back in the olden days.”

“Mom, did you know that the Bush family does business with Saudi Arabian terrorists?”