Against the Day (207 page)
Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Tags: #Literary, #World?s Columbian Exposition, #(1893, #Fiction, #Chicago (Ill.), #Historical
He
gradually understood that what everybody here had in common was
having survived some cataclysm none of them spoke about
directly—a bombing, a massacre perhaps at the behest of the U.S.
government
. . . .
“No it wasn’t
Haymarket.”
“It
wasn’t Ludlow. It wasn’t the Palmer raids.”
“It
was and it wasn’t.” General merriment.
In
the center of the turbulence was an elderly gent with a snowwhite beard and
great snarled eyebrows under a widebrim black hat he had never been seen to
take off by anyone in the room. The light rested on him in an unaccustomed way,
as if he were somewhere else, lending his image to the gathering. He reminded
Lew of the Tarot card of the hermit with the lantern, an ancient wiseman
personage who from time to time had stood near the path Lew thought his life was
taking, stood and gazed, and so spooked Lew that he’d done all he could to
avoid even a friendly hello. As it turned out he was Virgil Maraca, Jardine’s
father.
“Sometimes,”
Virgil was saying, “I like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free,
before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their longterm
evil purposes
. . . .
”
“And
what good’s that gonna do?” somebody objected. “Just more oldtimer’s dreaming.
Enough of that around. What we need to start doin’s go out and kill them, one
by one, painfully as possible.”
“No
argument. Easier for you to contemplate, o’ course.”
“Startin
with the
Times
bomb
. . .
you’ll
never convince me Gray Otis himself didn’t set it, paid off the McNamaras to
take the fall, and Brother Darrow to change the plea. It was all a scheme to
destroy union labor in the southern part of this state. Since that fateful
December of 1911, the picture business, land development, oil, citrus, every
great fortune down here’s been either founded or maintained on the basis of
starvation wages.”
“But
twenty employees of the paper were killed in that explosion.”
“Twenty
or two thousand, what did old Otis care? long as he got this eternal scab’s
paradise here in return?”
Lew
kept a close but sociable eye on Jardine Maraca, passing so smoothly among the
guests, smiling, drinking California Champagne from a juice glass, here to
visit her father at this reunion of outlaws
. . .
yet somehow more than everyday déjà vu, the old twoplacesatonce
condition, kicking up again, he couldn’t be sure if he was remembering this now
or, worse,
foreseeing
her in some way, so that he had to worry about the
possibility that not only might Jardine Maraca be dead but also that it
had
not happened yet
. . . .
He crept
closer. She smelled like cigarette smoke. Sweet Caporals. Intensely, abruptly,
she reminded him of Troth, his exwife from so long ago.
She
looked up, into his eyes, as if issuing a dare. As if, in this unaging and
temperate corner of the land, where everything was permitted,
she nevertheless would be forbidden.
“I’m
supposed to be trying to find you.”
“For
. . .” If she knew the name, she was reluctant to say it aloud.
“Tony Tsangarakis. The old gang down
at the Vertex Club—they’re worrying about you.”
“You
must be smarter than that. How long ago ’d you talk to Tony?”
“Haven’t,
yet. But a Negro gentleman named LeStreet—”
“Ah
. . .” Her face just for an instant might have emptied of hope. But then back
came the old publicitystill glaze.
“Chester
and Encarnación were married once, for a couple of weeks. It’s not that he’s a
suspect. But he has that history yet to paradiddle his way out of. So as a
resource he ain’t the first one you’d look to necessarily.”
“Well,
what can I do to help you out?”
“All
taken care of, sorry to say.”
“Uhoh.”
“Encarnación only came back for a
little while,” Jardine said, “just long enough to testify about who it was. A
little runt of a studio cop named Deuce Kindred. Police just picked him up for
a whole string of orgytype homicides. One girl, long ago, maybe somebody at the
studio could’ve bought his way out, in return for unquestioning future
obedience, but this’ll mean a death sentence. Our lawenforcement heroes in L.A.
being as bent as any, but only for the lesser felonies.”
“You’ll
be needing a ride out of town at least.”
They
arranged a time and place but Jardine already had other plans. As the papers
told it later, she went out to the airfield at Glendale and stole a
barnstormer’s Curtis JN and took off, flying low—people at a local fairground
remembered seeing her pass overhead, later she was reported following the
interurban tracks east, approaching in a carefree spirit electrical power
masts, city rooflines, smokestacks, and other dangerous objects, each time
zooming skyward at the last moment. She vanished over the desert, creating a
powerful shaped silence.
The next time
Lew went out to see Merle at the
beach, he brought a photograph of Troth, an old silvergelatin studio portrait.
He’d been keeping it in an old alchemy primer, so it had stayed in pretty good
shape over the years. Not knowing how to ask, or even what he should ask for.
“Feel like some damn downandouter in
a story, finds a genie, gets three wishes, maybe you better forget I said
anything.”
“No. No, it’s O.K. I’ll make a transparency,
we’ll put some light through it, see what we’ve got. Did you want to just go
back here, to—looks like about 1890, fact I think I remember that studio
in Chicago—or we could send it back even earlier, or . . .”
Merle let it hang there so gently
that Lew had scarcely any idea his mind had been read. “What you were saying
about sending these pictures off onto different tracks
. . .
other possibilities . . .”
“That’s that constantterm
recalibration, or C.T.R., drives Roswell out of the shop and down to the
nearest speakeasy, got no patience with that part of it. We’re still learning
about it, but it seems to be built into the nature of silver somehow. Back when
I was still a junior alchemist, passing through What Cheer, Iowa, met up with
this oldschool spagyrist name of Doddling, who showed me how to get silver to
grow just like a tree. Tree of Diana, he called it, goddess of the Moon and
all. Damnedest thing. Take some silver, amalgamate it with quicksilver, put it
in with just the right amount and strength of nitric acid, wait. Damn if pretty
soon it won’t start to put out branches, just like a tree only faster, and
after a while even leaves.”
“Branches,”
said Lew.
“Right before your eyes—or
lens, ’cause you do need some magnification. Doddling said it’s because silver
is alive. Has its own forks in the road, choices to make just like the rest of
us.
“This’ll
be silent, remember. You won’t hear her.”
Maybe
not. . . but maybe . . .
Amid a technical environment so
corrupted by lessthanelevated motives, usually mercenary, for “setting forth
against the Enemy Wind” (as early epics of timetravel described it), there must
now and then appear one compassionate timemachine story, time travel in the
name of love, with no expectation of success, let alone reward.
Now, as if the terrible flood of time
had been leapt across in a timeless instant, no more trouble than being
switched over to a different track
. . .
Troth
continued to live, in some way more tangible than memory or sorrow, eternally
young, while they were still courting, before they fell prey to Time, all in a
cascade unstoppable as a spring thaw, what he not that slowly at all understood
to be accelerated views of her face and body, of hair lengthening to prodigal
fair masses to be then pinned up, and released, and repiled again and again,
woman upon woman settling into the lamplit ends of days full of care, the
gingham redoubts of matronhood, the rougings, redefmings, emergences and
disguises, dimples and lines and bone realities, each year’s face tumbling upon
the next in a breathtaking fall
. . . .
“But. . . I don’t understand
. . . .
Do you mean that time the streetcar
crashed? Or the winter when I had the fever?” Speaking quietly, with downcast
eyes, as if all but stupefied by whatever she had come here out of, almost too
young for the woman he remembered, innocent as yet of her immortality. The
light seemed to have gathered preferentially about her face and golden hair. He
imagined himself reaching out to her through dustcrowded shafts of light, not
optical so much as temporal light, whatever it was being carried by Time’s
Æther, cruelly assembled in massless barriers between them. She might not know
anymore who he was, what they had been through together. Was that her voice
he’d heard? Could she see him from wherever in the mathematical mists she’d
journeyed to?
Merle looked up from the controls,
touched an invisible hatbrim. “It looks like one of them wonders of science.
But having been down your stretch of track myself, I just wish it could be more,
’s all.”
And at the end
of the working day, when all sources
of light seemed to have withdrawn as far as they were going to, making shadows
as long as they would be and Roswell was off to a circuit of friendly
speakeasies, as was his habit most every night, Merle cranked up the
Integroscope one more time and took one of the photos he’d kept of Dally, taken
when she was about twelve years old, back at Little Hellkite in the San Juans,
standing out by the pipeline in the snow, not just smiling for the camera but
laughing out loud at something Merle had since tried to remember but couldn’t.
Maybe someplace hanging in the invisible air was a snowball he’d just thrown at
her.
Though
it was usually enough to stay in their past together, before she’d left, tonight
he decided to bring it all the way up to the present day, on through a
highspeed blur of all her time since Telluride and New York and Venice and the
War, up to this very evening, except over there in Paris it was morning, and
she was just leaving her rooms and going to the train station and riding out to
a stop in some
banlieue
where hundreds of feet into the sky abruptly
towered the antenna of a millionwatt wireless transmitter, some
alreadyforgotten artifact of the War, where he thought he recognized a
BéthenodLatour alternator and beneath the tower a little studio with geraniums
at the windows where Dally drank coffee and ate a brioche and sat by a control
board while an operator with one of those pointed French mustaches found the
coordinates for Los Angeles, and somehow Merle now, tumbling, trembling in a
rush of certitude, was on his feet and across the shop, fiddling with the radio
receiver, its tubes blooming in an indigo haze,
finding the band and frequency, and all at once the image of
her silent lips on the wall smoothly glided into synchronization, and her
picture was speaking. A distant grown woman’s voice propagating through the
night Æther clear as if she was in the room. He gazed at her, shaking his head
slowly, and she returned the gaze, smiling, speaking without hurry, as if
somehow she could see him, too.
Five
Rue du Départ
“. . . he would have asked you for my hand,” Dally was
saying, “being that sort of kid, but we couldn’t have reached you even if we knew
where you were
. . . .
”
It would’ve felt like throwing a
bottle in the ocean, except that she knew Merle was there. Even with a fair
idea of the odds that he wasn’t, given the War and the ocean and the North
American continent and a radio spectrum that seemed to expand every time she
looked. Somehow the beams emerging far above her were finding their way
straight to him, straight and true.
René was smoking Gauloises one after
another, studying her through the smoke. He had some unformed notion of her as
a spiritual medium, talking to the dead. Clearly an unauthorized use of the
equipment, but to tell the truth it was new, and some of it was army parts, and
it all tended to drift a bit. These extra unlogged transmissions—and
Mademoiselle Rideout must not imagine that she was the only one in Paris so
occupied—afforded a way to make introductions, allow the components to
clash and partially cancel and learn one another’s expectations, seek average
values, adapt, slip in to some groove leading to smooth teamwork, power wisely
deployed and signals faithfully sent across.
When she was done Dally walked away
waving au ’voir with an awkward twirl of her hand behind her, the radio tower
in powerful and immediate ascent, like its cousin the Eiffel Tower drastically
out of scale with the rest of its neighborhood, and with her head slightly
bowed returned to the Métro station. She had no business in this neighborhood
beyond calling after Merle across the dimensions. She began to hum the Reynaldo
Hahn tune from
Ci
boulette
about the suburbanizing of passion,
which everybody was humming
this season,
“
C’est pas Paris, c’est sa banlieue.
”
By the time she was back in
Montparnasse, she was whistling “J’ai Deux Amants” from the latest Sacha Guitry
production.
“
’Jour, Dally,” called a pretty young woman in trousers.
“
’Jour, Jarri.”
A
group of Americans paused to stare.
“Scyuzay
mwah, but ain’t you that La Jarretière?”
“Oh,
yes, before the
. . .
War? I used to
dance under that name.”
“But
they say she died—”
“Αand
real horribly, too . . .”
The
young woman sniffed. “Grand Guignol. They came to see blood. We used the
. . .
raspberry syrup. My own life was
getting complicated
. . .
death and
rebirth as someone else seemed,
just the ticket.
They needed a
succès
de scandale,
and I didn’t mind. A young beauty destroyed before her time,
something the eternallyadolescent male mind could tickle itself with.
Mon
Dieu!
”
she sang,
“
que les hommes sont bêtes!
”
on
the tail end of which Dally joined, singing the harmony.
There
was a lively musicalcomedy scene here in postwar Paris, and after a while Dally
had drifted into its, well,
banlieue.
She currently had a small part in
Fossettes
l’Enflammeuse,
an operetta of the period by JeanRaoul Oeuillade—
about a type, pretty familiar by now, of hellraising adolescent seductress or
baby vamp who drinks, smokes, uses cocaine, so forth—and staged in New
York by famed impresario R. Wilshire Vibe, as
Dimples,
though Dally had
taken the time to learn a spoton impression of the star, Solange St.Emilion,
belting out Fossettes’ first big number—
Cassecou! C’est
moi!
Ce’p’ti j’m’en
fou’lalà!
Cassecou, mari,
tes femmes aussi—
Tous les autres,
n’importe quoi!
Dally climbed to her flat just off the rue du Départ and went
in the kitchen and made coffee. She had just told Merle the whole story of her
life since she’d left him at Telluride, and what a sorry spectacle
. . . .
She should have been thinking about
Merle, but instead for some reason it was Kit now who was on her mind.
Beside
the window were shelves with a set of terracotta bowls and plates from a shop
in Torino, a wedding present she and Kit had given to themselves. The first
time she had laid eyes on them, she’d felt immediate contentment. They were
glazed in some truly cheerful shade of green—no, more than that, as if
the color came from groundup crystals sensitive to
radio waves, able to call back Kit’s
voice singing “It won’t be a stylish marriage . . .” while she thought, This is
who we are. We don’t have to go worrying about more, and then, out loud, “Well
thank heaven you can cook.”
They
were married in 1915, and went to live in Torino, where Kit got a job working
on the Italian bomber aircraft. And then a year or two later came the disaster
up at Caporetto, when it looked like the Austrians would just sweep down out of
those mountains and keep rolling all the way to Venice. And by then they could
neither of them remember why they’d got married, or stayed married, and it was
no comfort that nearly everybody else they knew was going through the same kind
of misery. They blamed it on the War, of course, and that was true as far as it
went. But. . . well, Dally had also gone a little crazy, and did some stupid
things. One day she was at the plant when a small phalanx of men in dark suits
came out of a metal door, and she recognized one of them as Clive Crouchmas.
Like
many before her, Dally had a low tolerance—blamelessly low,
considering—for complexos and the work it took to put up with them. And
she knew that Clive’s demands would be as minimal as a girl could ask. Conjugal
bliss? Flings with other men? no problems for Clive. There
was
that
awkward business of his having once tried to shop her into white slavery, but
both understood that it was perhaps his one moment of genuine blind passion,
everybody deserves at least one of those, doesn’t he, and at the end of the day
Clive was grateful for it, and Dally was semisweetly amused.
It
wasn’t only that Clive had grown older but that in the highstakes gaming of the
life he’d chosen, he had somehow come away with fewer chips, not the night’s
biggest loser but far short of what he might once have believed was his
entitlement. So she wasn’t about to wish him too allout of a disaster.
While
his wife got back together with somebody she shouldn’t have, Kit was either at
the plant or up in the air, and next thing either of them knew, the War was
over, Dally was in Paris, and Kit was out in western Ukraine someplace, off on
some grand search after she didn’t know what. She did know there was fighting
still going on out there. He kept sending letters, with different stamps and
postmarks each time, and now and then it sounded like he wanted to come back,
and she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to or not.
This
kitchen table was no place to be sitting in the middle of the day. She grabbed
a few francs from under one of the green dishes and went out again, just as an
airplane flew overhead, muttering serenely to itself. A few blocks to the
boulevard and her local café, L’Hémisphère, where she’d discovered that if she
only sat at a table outside, before long her life, selections from her life,
would repeat themselves in slightly different form, featuring exactly the
people she “needed” to see again—as if the notorious café were one of
those
favored spots that Eastern mystics
talked about. Though it might be that the others “needed” to see her as well,
sometimes they only passed like ghosts, and looked right at her, and didn’t
recognize her.
In
those days a large American population was forever passing through Paris,
changing addresses or lying about them. Some might’ve been ghosts from the War
with unfinished business in the city. But most were the American young,
untouched, children with spending money but no idea of what it would or
wouldn’t buy, come toddling as if down the dark willowlined approach to some
sort of Club Europa of the maimed and gassed and feverracked, whose members had
been initiated by way of war, starvation, and Spanish influenza. Blessedly,
there was no telephone at L’Hémisphère, because the owner believed that the
instrument was another sort of plague, which would spread through and
eventually destroy Montparnasse. Where again would it be possible to leave your
note with Octave the barman with such total faith in his character? As soon as
the Americans found out there was no telephone, they tended to move on toward
the corner of boulevard Raspail and the more famous Dôme, Rotonde, Coupole, and
Select.
Sitting
here behind a cup of coffee, Dally was able to brood freely about her past,
fully confident that in all this rippling interwovenness of desires wise and
foolish she would be interrupted at just the right moment, before it got too
mopish.
Back when they
arrived
in Torino, Kit
had taken one look and felt right at home. “Can you believe this place? Not a
crooked street far’s you can see.”
Might as well be Denver. The
mountains were close, and there was hydroelectric power everywhere. “Well full
fuckin circle,” is what he muttered to himself, “ain’t it.”
Kit went to the address Viktor
Mulciber had given him in Constantinople and was hired on the spot, and soon
was turning his vectorist skills to matters of wing loading, lateral and
longitudinal stability, so forth
. . . .
He
ran into one or two familiar faces from Dr. Prandtl’s shop at Göttingen, who’d
fled Germany out of pacifistic dread at what was coming and comforted
themselves that Italian warplanes would only be used against Austria, which was
responsible for the War anyway. He was welcomed with a ceremonial shower of beer
and the solemn instruction, “Every wing section you’ll come across looks just
like a circle after a Zhukovsky transformation. Airfoil design’s shameful
secret. Tell no one.”
Based
nearby was a small
squadriglia
of Bleriot monoplanes, veterans of the
ItaloTurkish War, in which they had
mostly flown reconnaissance over Cyrenaica, with a few proudly displaying
bullet holes from the tribesmen’s rifle fire. Kit quickly became friendly with
the ground crew, who didn’t object if he took one up now and then.
One day he and Dally had been having
an adult exchange of views about the time she was spending with Clive
Crouchmas. Kit had met this bird and didn’t like him, though absent a working
time machine he didn’t see any real way he could deny Dally her past. One more
wartime sacrifice, he guessed.
“Come on up with me Dal.” His voice
suddenly shifting, though just how she couldn’t’ve said.
“Are
you crazy?”
“I mean it. I can fix it
easy—smuggle you on the ship, time you learned how to fly anyway, you
might even get to like it.” There was a look of entreaty on his face she failed
to register, an unprotected moment she would understand when it was too late.
“The
Austrians shoot people down, Kit.”
“Not
us. Not you and me.”
Later
she would also recall feeling both sorry for and angry at all his wishful
stupidity, and wondered if she’d have done better to lean to the side of pity,
even if in the long run pity would only have corroded them sure, more than the
rages and constant fights, which at least had some life to them. This time she
just shrugged and went into the other room to get dolled up once again for a
“dinner engagement” with Crouchmas, at the Cambio, most likely, she thought.
Kit
stalked away into town and took refuge as usual at a riverfront bar in I
Murazzi, near the Po bridge. His friend Renzo was there already, drinking some
vermouth concoction.
On
the ground Renzo always struck folks as a little phlegmatic, maybe clinically
depressed, not much to say, slept a lot—but in the presence of any sort
of airplane he was observed to perk up markedly. As soon as they were taxiing
he was all smiles and animation, and by the time the wheels left the ground,
his personality had undergone an all but polar shift. He had run through a
brisk turnover of
bombardierí,
few of whom lasted more than one mission,
many reduced to nervous wrecks long before any targets were even sighted. “I
tell you the trouble with just leaning out and looking around for something to
drop a bomb on—you don’t get the accuracy, plus it isn’t going
fast
enough
when it hits, you want as much kinetic energy as possible,
vero?
”
