Neighbors say he was a quiet man who kept to himself.
"That was his place?" remarked a stunned and astonished ——, who reportedly lived "just down the street" and wished to remain anonymous for fear that his own phone and internet service would get shut off. "My wife would kill me," he added. "Without the shopping channels and 'Celebrity Apprentice,' she wouldn't know what to do with herself. And don't get me started on the children, the stuff they watch ..."
Others seemed less surprised. ——, who also preferred to remain anonymous, telling reporters it was nothing personal, he had moved here "long before the area was fashionable, before they even had a Starbuck's," under an assumed name, and "in all the hullabaloo this morning," had forgotten it, said, "At first I thought it was the infidels building a new embassy, a place for Gates and Petraeus to relax, you know, get away from all the people and the noise—you can't believe all the racket in Islamabad these days—but then, every once in a while, late at night, I'd see him out walking, The Big O, we called him, whistling along to his IPod, stealing wi-fi from the ones who didn't have a lock and a password on their systems. At first I thought he was a famous basketball player, that fellow used to play for the Lakers back in the eighties, but then I see the dialysis machine and put two and two together ..."
One woman, who insisted she did housework and occasionally made big batches of lentil soup for the reclusive post-modernist writer Thomas Pynchon, who, she told incredulous reporters, "bought back when it was just old Humboldt and La Honda hippies and fancy pants hash-head Pakistanis living here," said that she was up early and on her way to work when "the SEALS Team 6—nice boys, I give them all massage afterwards—and the CIA undertaker come out with his body. Praise Allah, aside from the bullet through his head, you never see a man look so relaxed ..." Asked by the still distracted reporters with post-modernist literary pretensions what her purported employer thought of the situation, she said she was pretty sure he hadn't heard yet, since he, too, was without phone or internet service. "Unbelievable, yes? He has the money to pay me, but can't afford a flat screen? I have to sneak over to the neighbor's while he naps to watch my soaps," she complained. "Iz not right, I tell you." When asked if she might have a picture of her employer that they could borrow and upload onto the internet down at Starbuck's, say, or maybe even sell to someone who had money and a thing for Thomas Pynchon, she replied that he had had "so much work done you wouldn't recognize him." One reporter, taking notes with a pencil and packing a 1st edition of Gravity's Rainbow, offered the woman a year's salary in silver and gold if she could get Pynchon to sign it, but the woman replied, "You have better luck chasing down helicopter, my SEAL boys, getting dead man, the ex-Laker, to sign."
Starbuck's, meanwhile, as the sun rose in this otherwise quiet, affluent, inching toward trendy suburb of Islamabad (voted the #1 place in Pakistan by both The Onion and The Islamabad Weekly to raise a family and avoid Predators), was doing what all agreed was a brisk, predictable business. "People here just want to get back to their lives," said one of the baristas, a trust-funder from Telluride who'd hiked Everest and was "just taking some time to chill," who predicted that, by sundown, the women would have everything cleaned and straightened up again and the men would be back in "drinking their espresso and cursing the West." Asked if Osama had ever come in to shoot off some emails and otherwise hold forth on the evils of America and the like, he snorted, "Nah ... him and that Pynchon, they actually got a petition going when we first decided to put up a store here, to keep us out of town. Real snobs that way. Corporate this, corporate that. Come in here and see what we're charging for an Americano and they can't stop laughing. Fuck um, I say. Fuck um both.
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