One day Shawn was in a phone booth here in town, out on the street, one of those calls he really needed to make, everything possible was going wrong, he kept shoveling quarters, no dial tone, robots giving him shit, finally working himself up into the usual NYC rage, slamming the receiver against the unit while screaming fucking Giuliani, when he heard this voice, human, real, calm. “Having a little trouble, there?” Later on of course Leopoldo copped to drumming up business this way, hanging around places where mental-health crises are likely to occur, like NYC phone booths, after first removing any out-of-order signs. “Maybe a little ethical shortcutting,” Shawn figures, “but it’s fewer sessions per week, and they don’t always last the full fifty minutes. 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. Which is much less, and at the same time—”

“Much more, yes, thanks for clearing that up, Shawn.”

Considering Leopoldo’s history this does seem like a good moment to bring up the topic of Windust. “Does your shrink ever talk about the economy down there?”

“Not much, it’s a painful subject. Worst insult he can think of is to call somebody’s mother a neoliberal. Those policies destroyed the Argentine middle class, fucked with more lives than anybody’s counted so far. Maybe not as bad as getting disappeared, but totally sucks loquesea. Why do you ask?”

“Somebody I know who was in on all that, back in the early nineties, nowadays working out of D.C., still up to the same nasty kinds of business and I’m worried about him, I’m like the guy with the red-hot coal. I can’t let it go. It’s hazardous to my health, there isn’t even anything beautiful about it, but I still need to hold on to it.”

“You’ve developed a thing for, like, Republican war criminals now? Using condoms, I hope?”

“Cute, Shawn.”

“Come on, you’re not really offended.”

“‘Not really’? Wait a minute. This is a cast-iron Buddha here, right? watch this.” Reaching for the Buddha’s head, which of course, as soon as she touches it, will turn out to fit her grasp perfectly, as if designed expressly as a weapon handle. In the instant all unfriendly impulses are calmed.

“I’ve seen his rap sheet,” trying not to edge into Daffy Duck mode here, “he tortures people with electric cattle prods, he pumps aquifers dry and forces farmers off their land, he destroys entire governments in the name of a fucked-up economic theory he may not even believe in, I have no illusions about what he is—”

“Which is what, some misunderstood teenager, only needs to hook up with the right girl, who turns out to know even less than he does? This is high-school again? competing for boys who’re going to be doctors or end up on Wall Street, but all the time secretly yearning to run with the dopers, the car thieves, the convenience-store badasses . . .”

“Yes Shawn and don’t forget surfers. What, excuse me, gives you authority here? What happens in your practice, when you want to save somebody but lose them instead?”

“All I do is try for what Lacan calls ‘benevolent depersonalization.’ If I got hung up trying to ‘save’ clients, how much good do you think I’d do?”

“A lot?”

“Guess again.”

“Um . . . not so much?”

“Maxine, I think you’re afraid of this guy. He’s the Reaper, he’s on your case, and you’re trying to charm your way out of it.”

Oof. Isn’t this the moment to go stomping out the door with a dignified yet unequivocal over-the-shoulder fuck-you? “Well. Let me think about that.”

23

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.

Maxine isn’t that eager to see her sister but figures she has to do at least a drop-by. Turns out at the moment Elaine and Brooke are down at the World Trade Center eyeballing the unexplored shopping potential of Century 21. 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 at the Sony multiplex, so Maxine finds herself for an enchanted hour and a half in the company of her brother-in-law, Avram Deschler, who is minding a Tongue Polonaise of Elaine’s, which has been slowly cooking all day in the kitchen, filling the place with a smell initially intriguing, soon compelling. The matter of the federal visits can’t help but come up.

“I think it’s only about my clearance.”

“Your . . . ?”

“You heard of a computer-security firm called hashslingrz?”

A pointed look at the bottom of her shoe. “Dimly.”

“They get a lot of federal work, NSA and so forth, and they’ve offered me a job, and in fact I’m starting week after next.” Waiting for at least dazzled admiration.

That’s all the federal house calls were about? Sorry, somehow Maxine doubts it. Security clearances are routine low-level chores, and there is some deeper horseshit in progress here.

“So . . . you met the big guy, Gabriel Ice.”

“He actually showed up in person, in Haifa, to recruit me. We did breakfast at a falafel joint in Wadi Nisnas. He seemed to know the owner. I told him what I wanted for salary, benefits, and he said OK. No hondeling. Tahini all over his shirt.”

“Just a regular guy.”

“Exactly.”

As if only ditzing from topic to topic, “Avi, you know anything about a piece of software called Promis?”

A pause maybe a week or two further along than blue lines on a stick. “Kind of an old story in the business. The scheming and counterscheming at Inslaw, the court cases, the FBI stealing it away, and so forth. A cash cow for Mossad, however. From what people tell me.”

“And the rumor about a backdoor . . .”

“There wasn’t one originally, but certain customers insisted, so the program got modified. More than once. In fact, it’s an ongoing evolution. Today’s version, you wouldn’t recognize it. Or so I’m told.”

“Long as I’m picking your brain here, somebody also told me about a computer chip, some Israeli vendor, maybe you’ve run across it, sits quietly in a customer’s machine absorbing data, from time to time transmitting what it’s gathered out to interested parties?”

Not that he jumped or anything, but his eyes have begun to roam the room. “Elbit makes one that I know of.”

“Ever run across one, like, physically?”

He finally meets her gaze and then sits staring at her, as if she’s some kind of a screen, and she figures the point of diminishing returns has arrived.

Soon Brooke and Elaine come back from downtown with a number of Century 21 bags plus a strange vegan p’tcha into whose crystalline depths one can gaze with growing albeit perplexed fascination. “Lovely,” according to Elaine, “like a three-dimensional Kandinsky. Perfect with the tongue.”

Tongue Polonaise is a childhood favorite around here. Maxine used to think it meant some classical-piano novelty act. All day, a pickled beef tongue has been out in the kitchen simmering in an elaborate tsimmis of chopped apricots, mango puree, pineapple chunks, cherries with the pits out, grapefruit marmalade, two or three different varieties of raisin, orange juice, sugar and vinegar, mustard and lemon juice, and of the essence, for reasons lost in some snoozy nimbus of tradition, gingersnaps—Nabisco by default, since Keebler dropped the old Sunshine variety a couple of years back.