BEg2 ch 39 - brief summary

[Michael Bailey]

Corrigendum from Chapter 38: Uncle Dizzy, who proffers a ring of
invisibility. When she gives it back to him, he puts it in, *and
disappears!*



Maxine riding the subway seeing faces in windows of trains on parallel
tracks, as if they are Tarot cards.
Those whose eyes meet hers she figures are portentous. Eventually she
wonders if she’s performing the same function for some of them.


One of these people makes contact with her. It’s Windust’s Guatemalan
honey! She’s got an envelope, redolent of 9:30 Cologne, with the money
Windust borrowed from her at their last meeting, and some “vig.”

After apologizing that it’s not the earrings she’d requested, Xiomara
suggests they walk over the Brooklyn Bridge together. Maxine agrees,
stipulating to a meal thereafter.

Xiomara’s apparently in academia now, and is repaying Maxine as a favor to
Windust’s 2nd wife, now widow, Dotty (and also perhaps in aid of learning &
relaying news to interested Beltway parties on the likelihood of Maxine
making waves vis a vis Windust’s quietus.)

At lunch, they converse.

Xiomara has been on friendly terms with Dotty since the Clinton years.
She’s got some words on ultra-violent ancient Mayan ballgames & hellish
underground playing fields, & how they’d captured Windust’s imagination,
for Maxine to add to her collection of horror stories, intermingled
meaningfully with Rios Montt horrors & Windust’s role in those, before he
smuggled her out of that danger zone.

He gave Xiomara a much-belated (like, way, way, way belated! He was already
married to Dottie, Maxine surmises) huge diamond engagement ring,

“When you get to D.F.*, I want
            you to sell it,” and it wasn’t till then, that “you” instead of
“we,” that she understood
            he was leaving”

* Mexico City


They walk to Fulton Landing where they can look across the river at “Ground
Zero.” Xiomara initiates another walk back across the Brooklyn Bridge.

>From an observation platform they look at the site.

Maxine thinks, but doesn’t speak, of DeepArcher, where in a virtual way the
undestroyed site still “exists.”

Xiomara says Windust had come there often in his last days, thinking he had
unfinished business. She thinks, though, that his soul is in Xibalba now.
The Mayan hell.


Later at home, Maxine sniffs the last of the 9:30 Cologne on the envelope
and money,
“ trying to summon back something as invisible and weightless
            and inaccountable as his spirit . . .”



(With a similar longing to that that she’d felt for the untrammeled WTC at
the observation deck?)


“ And later, next to snoring Horst, beneath the pale ceiling, city light
diffusing through
            the blinds, just before drifting downward into REM, good night.
Good night, Nick.”