If there’s business being talked tonight, it’s someplace else in town, where time is too valuable to waste on partying. Third-quarter earnings are in the toilet, deal flow is down to a slow drip, corporate IT budgets are as frozen as machine margaritas in a Palo Alto bar, Microsoft XP has just emerged from beta, but already there is nerdal muttering and geekish discontent over security and backward-compatibility issues. Recruiters are out discreetly prowling the crowd, but with none of the usual color-coded bracelets visible tonight, hackers looking to work for short money have to default to intuition about who’s hiring.

Later those who were here will remember mostly how vertical it all was. The stairwells, the elevators, the atria, the shadows that seem to plunge from overhead in repeated assaults on the gatherings and ungatherings beneath . . . the dancers semi-stunned, out under the strobing, not dancing exactly, more like standing in one place and moving up and down in time to the music.

“Doesn’t look that complicated,” Horst observes, sort of to himself, wandering away into the bright commotion of temporal aliasing.

“Maxi, hi?” It’s Vyrva, with her hair up, eyes dramatized, wearing basic black and spike heels. Justin puts his head around from somewhere behind her and with a stoner’s smile wiggles his eyebrows. Even in this pullulating decadence, he’s still his reliable West Coast sweetheart self, wearing a T-shirt that reads JUSTIN\NOTHER PERL HACKER. Lucas is along, wearing roomy homeboy jeans and an I-spotted-the-fed Defcon shirt.

“Wow, back off Kim Basinger. Making me feel even frumpier than usual here, Vyrva.”

“What, this old schmatte, the dog likes to sleep on it, she let me borrow it for the evening.” No direct eye contact, decidedly off-profile for Vyrva, her gaze wandering instead to the giant screens overhead as if waiting for something there, some possibly fateful film clip. Maxine doesn’t perform brain scans but does have a longtime acquaintance with jumpy.

“Quite a ballroom ain’t it. Bar mitzvah theme ideas everywhere you turn. The Ice individual has spared no expense, he must be lurking around someplace.”

“Don’t know, haven’t been looking.”

“Myself,” sez Lucas, “I think he’s in some creepy retro-pissing contest with Josh Harris. Remember that millennium-eve party at pseudo? Went on for months?”

“You mean,” sez Justin, “like, people in clear plastic rooms fucking in public view, where? Where?”

“Yo, Maxi.” Eric, hair dyed a sort of pale electric green, a flirtatious eye, a grin that on analysis might test over in the shit-eating part of the scale. Maxine senses Horst, invisibly nearby, gazing at them, about to lapse into sad-sack mode. Oy vey “Did you see my husband around here anyplace?” Loud enough for Horst if he’s there to hear.

“Your what?”

“Oh,” normal tone, “sort of quasi ex-husband, did I not ever mention that?”

“Big surprise,” mumbling cheerfully, “and whoa, what’s this we’ve got here tonight, Giuseppe Zanotti, right?”

“Stuart Weitzman, smartass, but wait, somebody you should meet here, partial to Jimmy Choo if I’m not mistaken.” It’s Driscoll, the all-out Anistonian version, causing a screen to begin blinking on Maxine’s Lobodex of Love, or in-brain matchmaking app. “Unless you guys know each other already . . .”

At it again, Maxine, why can’t she resist these ancient yenta forces that seek to control her? enough, please, with the meddling, parties take care of yenta business better than yentas do, economies of scale or something, no doubt. Eric squints in a charming way. “Didn’t we . . . one of those Cybersuds affairs, you tried to throw me in the river or something? No, wait, she was shorter.”

“Maybe a nonbeer event?” crypto-Rachel-to-Ross-wise, “some Linux installfest?” Phone numbers in marker pen on palms or some such ritual, and Driscoll is off again.

“Listen, Maxi,” Eric turning serious, “there’s somebody we need to find. Lester Traipse’s partner, the Canadian guy.”

“Felix? He’s still in town?” Somehow, not such good news. “What’s his problem?”

“He needs to see you, something about Lester Traipse, but he’s also acting paranoid, keeping on the move, partying heavily.”

“Security through immaturity.” Lester, what about Lester?

Not a word from Felix since that night at the karaoke and suddenly now he wants to talk. Where was he when his trusting business partner got murdered? Conveniently back in Montreal? How about out in Montauk with Gabriel Ice, scheming how to set Lester up? What’s so urgent tonight that Felix needs to tell Maxine, she wonders.

“Come on, we’ll do a pseudo-random sweep of the toilets.”

She follows him into the strummed and seething maw of this work space now fallen into event space, scanning the crowd, getting a quick glimpse of Horst out on the floor doing the same Z-axis Bounce as everybody else, and at least not not enjoying himself.

Eric motions her through a door and down a corridor to a toilet that proves to be unisex and privacy-free. Instead of rows of urinals, there are continuous sheets of water descending stainless-steel walls, against which gentlemen, and ladies so inclined, are invited to piss, while for the less adventurous there are stalls of see-through acrylic which in more prosperous days at Tworkeffx also allowed slacker patrols to glance in and see who’s avoiding work, custom-decorated inside by high-ticket downtown graffiti artists, with dicks going into mouths a popular motif, as well as sentiments like DIE MICROSOFT WEENIES and LARA CROFT HAS POLYGON ISSUES.

No Felix here. They hit the stairs and proceed upward floor by floor, ascending into these bright halls of delusion, prowling offices and cubicles whose furnishings have been picked up from failed dotcoms at bargain prices, too soon in their turn destined for looting by the likes of Gabriel Ice.

Partying everywhere. Sweeping into it, swept . . . Faces in motion. The employees’ lap pool with champagne empties bobbing in it. Yuppies who appear only recently to have learned how to smoke screaming at each other. “Had a brilliant Arturo Fuente the other day!” “Awesome!” A parade of restless noses snorting lines off of circular Art Deco mirrors from long-demolished luxury hotels dating back to the last time New York saw a market frenzy as intense as the one just ended.

In and out of a number of theme restrooms, gigantic all but wraparound Irish-bar urinals, vintage embossed toilets from a hundred years ago, wall-mounted tanks and pull chains, other spaces, dimmer and less elegant, seeking to evoke classic downtown club toilets, without a spritz of Lysol since the mid-nineties and only one toilet bowl, distressed and toxic, which people have to queue up for.

Felix meanwhile is in none of these. Reaching the top floor at last, Eric and Maxine enter the godfather of postmodern toilets, a piazza-size expanse of Belgian encaustic tiling in ocher, pale blue and faded burgundy, recycled from a mansion on lower Broadway, with three dozen stalls, its own bar, television lounge, sound system, and deejay, who at the moment, while a six-by-six matrix of dancers perform the Electric Slide across the antique tiling, is playing Nazi Vegetable’s once-chartbusting disco anthem

In the Toilet [Hustle tempo]

Such a weird ’n’ wack-y feeling, wit’ your

Brains up on th’ ceiling, in the

Toi-let!

[Girl backup]—In the toi-let!

Coke and Ecstasy and weed,

Never know when you might need

Them in the toi-let

(All in-that, toi-let!)

Just come in to take a peek, end up

Stayin’ for a week, down in the

Toi-let! . . .

(Toilet! Toilet!)

All those mirrors, lotsa chrome, stuff you’d

Never try at home, here in thuhuh

Toi-let—

Whoa, oh, girl a-nd

[Release]

Boy, let

The night have its way,