Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

  The smell of wood-smoke is more and more with them, as often, thro’ the newly green Trees, Cabins and out-buildings appear. They are challeng’d by Bulls, and chas’d by farm-dogs whose meanness is not improv’d by the doubtful Edibility of their intended Prey.

  “That’s what they call ‘Chinese,’ Buck.”

  “Not sure I’d want to eat that.”

  “Not sure you’re going to catch that.”

  The other Dogs are pacing and posing like Wolves, putting on tight-lipp’d Smiles. “Well, they’re fast, but,— ”

  “— not that fast. . . .”

  The fugitives learn to carry Staffs. Soon they look like Pilgrims, soon after that they begin to feel like Pilgrims. All the while, the Luo-Pan is trembling and growing hot to the Touch.

  At last, as the Green Halations about the Hillsides reduce to material Certainty, they arrive at the West Line, and decide to follow the Visto east, and ere long they have come up with the Party. They are greeted by most of the Commissary, headed by Mo McClean,— the Hands more agog than they should be allowing themselves, by now, to be sent, by such Apparitions,— and assign’d Quarters separated by a good Chain and a Half’s worth of Gazes, Stares, and Glares. . . .

  “Shall I see you more?” she mutters more than pleads.

  “Shall you continue to question your choice?”

  “Yes.— Pleas’d you’re smiling, for a Change. You must think we’re all amusing.”

  “What non-Chinese people find of Importance, may now and then be very amusing indeed. . . . Will you return to Canada?”

  “It wasn’t all bad there,” she lets him know.

  “Easy for you to say,— Viudita.”

  “Sir.”

  “You are provoking me. My own experience was a bit different.”

  “Oh, you weren’t having such a bad time of it, that I could see, missing few if any mess calls, indeed quite plump, and ever in good Humor, not as you are now. Why should you’ve ever wanted to leave, is past me.”

  “In China ’tis consider’d greatly unwise, to escape one Captivity in order to embrace another. To my Sins, so must I add Foolishness.”

  “Why, you’re free as a bird. What Captivity,—” But he is gazing at her with those enigmatic Chinese Eyes she pretends she cannot read. She turns her head a bit, then looks back sidewise. “And will the Spaniard come after us?”

  “Because he believes I stole you.”

  “Another Reason, then, for me to be upon my Way. Once, I would have sigh’d. Please, one Day, imagine me as having sigh’d.”

  “Shall you return to your Husband, then?”

  “Either to the Jesuits, or to him?— That’s my full list of Choices? Poh upon ye, Zhang, and poh upon your Yin-Yang, too.” She twirls her Nose in the air, and departs.

  She is bunking with Zsuzsa Szabó, the operator of the automatick Battle of Leuthen, a pleasant-looking young woman who, wearing the dress uniform of the Nádasdy Hussars, had one day, astride a splendid Arab Horse, overtaken the Party. “Hello, Boys,— it’s Zsuzsa.” She has a charmingly un-English way of saying this. Axmen arrest their swings, so violently that Axes stand still in the Air, their Recoils sending some of their axmen a-whirl the other way,— Indians crouch’d in the Brush gaze, and marvel at how she’s painted her face, the Milk-maids whisper together at length. She has been on the move since the Battle of Leuthen, in 1757, in which, disguis’d as a Youth, riding in a detachment of light cavalry, she was not so much visited by understanding, as allow’d briefly to pay Attention to what had been there all the time,— seeing then her clear duty, to bring word of what was about to emerge into the World from the Prussian Plains. From a simple recital, with gestures, of the Events of the Battle, has develop’d a kind of Street-Show, with Accordion musick, Dog tricks and Gypsy Dancing, and an automatick miniature or Orrery of Engagement, displaying the movements of the troops as many times as the curious Student may wish.

  Later, the Surveyors come by the Tent, each for a short Visit. Dixon, now that Eliza knows what to look for, seems to her fully as fascinated as the Chinaman, with her Deerskin Costume. As he leaves, backing out the tent-flap, all a-hum, he nearly collides with Mason, who mutters, “That likely, is it?” glaring Dixon upon his way before adverting to the young Woman,— whereupon he is seiz’d with what later he will describe to Dixon as an “Ague of Soul,”— fierce heat, deep shivering,— for a moment, she assumes ’tis the Indian turnout again, till she sees his so pale and sadden’d Face.

  “Excuse me.” He sits in an oblate Heap upon the tent-floor, removes his Hat, fans himself. “You resemble far too faithfully One whom I have not beheld,— not in Body,— for seven years. More than merely some general Likeness, Madam,— you are her Point-for-Point Representation.”

  She runs a hand over her Crop. “I can’t imagine her Hair was the same.” This was how the Widows taught their Novices to Flirt. “Or,—” deciding Hair may be a safe Topick with this one, but little else, she doesn’t go on.

  “Allowing for all that, of course.” His eyes shifting about in their Sockets like insects about Candle-flames.

  “Sir . . . I am the elder daughter of Joseph Fields, of Conestoga Creek. Last Winter, I was taken by a band of Shawanese,— ”

  “Be easy, Child. I shan’t insanely presume you to be she, I’m merely Torpedo-struck,— it’s not only the separate Parts, but your Bearing of them as well . . . your bodily Gesturing, your Voice. . . . Attend me,— do you believe that the Dead return?”

  “Sir, you are distraught, perhaps even about to behave irresponsibly?— Eeoo, Mr. Mason!— I think not!— Is there by chance a Chaplain attach’d to your Party?”

  “Regrettably, yes. I try never to seek his Counsel.”

  “I meant, that I might wish to.”

  “Of course. Our Reverend Cherrycoke. Excellent man.”

  (“You’re making that one up,” Uncle Lomax now wagging a Finger he eventually hits himself in the Nose with.

  “And did she seek your counsel?” inquires Ives.

  “Oh, I got into the matter, after a bit,” recalls the Revd. “Tho’ Mason was the one who needed Spiritual Advice.”)

  “Is it Transmigration, Rev?” all but pleading, following me ev’ry-where, even out to the Latrine, “What are the Chances? Come, Sir. You can give it to me straight.”

  The Revd cannot help having a fast look over at the Visto, and remarking in his own Tap-room cadence, “Around here? how else?” Squatting over the noisome Trench, as Mason paces to and fro, he speculates that the Resemblance so confounding Mason is less likely the Transmigration of a Soul, than the Resurrection of a Body,— in enough of its Particulars to convince him ’tis she. Yet the Soul he imagines as newly inhabiting their Guest, must in any case have forgotten its previous life as Rebekah Mason. “The Slate cleanly wash’d,— no way to prove who she’s been. As in Plato’s Tale of Er, she’ll have drunk from Lethe, and begun anew.”

  “And if she comes,— or is sent,— as a sort of Corporeal Agent, to finish, in behalf of my Wife’s Spirit, some Business that only the Body knows how to transact?” His Voice much too high and loud, about to careen upon him.

  The Revd runs thro’ the possibilities, now and then, he fears, clucking. “Well I do hope not. That is, you are titular Party-Chief here, and may come and go as you please,— yet . . .”

  “Yet I grow, I fear, not more bestial as you imply, but less,— even the activity you now so freely engage in, being denied me for longer than I now remember.”

  “Ye’ve taken Daffy’s Elixir?”

  “It means first asking Dixon, who holds the Key to the Dispensary. It thus means, as well, a certain Smirk, that I am not sure I can abide.”

  “He is, I collect, an Habitué of that Compound.” The Revd, having wip’d his Arse with a handful of Clover, draws up his Breech
es again.

  “Just so. I have felt oblig’d to abstain from it, even as he superdoses himself,— for the sake of Equilibrium in the Party.”

  “Admirable, of course, as are all acts of self-denial. Usually. Are you certain you’re telling me ev’rything?”

  “Being clench’d in all other Ways,” remarks Mason, “there likely is something I’m holding back.”

  That night, or perhaps the next, Mason wakes from a dream, one he has had before. Trying to get back to the mill in Wherr, he keeps being set down by carts and coaches farther and farther away . . . all at once he and Rebekah are traveling together, on foot, till they are pick’d up by a Stranger in a Coach and taken to a House whose residents she knows, where she is seduced, not entirely against her will, by this band of foreign, dimly political, dimly sinister men and women. She lies still, passive, allowing them all to handle her. Mason, in despair, watches a kind of lengthy Ritual. He does not intervene because she has told him, in painfully direct language, that he no longer has the right. Once she flicks her eyes toward him, as if to make sure he’s looking . . . but only once, and briefly. Who are they? what is their mission? their Name?

  Structur’d servitude, a fore-view of Purgatory, a Prison that works thro’ bribes, threats, favors, with rules it may be fatal not to know . . . she, perhaps willingly, taken into it, under it,— he cannot follow. Can as little charm as sing his way in. He knows only straightforwardly squalid Pelhamite arrangements,— here all is illegible, in a light forever about to fail.

  Worse, he shall have to return in dreams to this same place, again and again, the layout of the rooms ever the same, the same doors having but just closed, the invisible occupants having only just gone away, . . . the whispering across the Wall he can almost hear. . . . He wakes with his hands in fists, dried tears in cold lines ’cross his Temples. She is where the Frenchmen in their make-believe chateaux, perfum’d, intricately bewigg’d, stop all day at their toilettes, safe from the cold consensus that ignores dream in its Reckonings,—

  France, French agents of Death,— at the worst of the fight between the Seahorse and l’Grand, in all that tearful fall from humanity, his Bowels seconds away from letting go, there had wrapp’d ’round him the certainty that whatever was come for him now, had also come for her then,— not in the way of a Bailiff or Assassin, at all selective, but rather as a Dredge, a Scavenger, foraging blind, unto which Mason sens’d himself about to be gather’d, as mindlessly as any seaman above-decks, forever to him nameless.

  They were possessing her in ways more intimate than had ever been allow’d him . . . interfering at orders of minitude invisible to human Eye, infiltrated without need of light or Map, commanding the further branches of whatever flows in a Soul like blood, . . . she and her Captors whispering together incessantly, in a language they knew, and he did not, and what language could it be? not any French as he’d ever heard it,— too fast and guttural and without grace . . . they all spoke at incredible Speed, without pause for breath. For where breath has ceas’d, what need for the little pauses of mortal speech, that pass among us ever unnotic’d?

  His father appear’d. “And give some thought to your spinsterr there, so abandon’d and gay. You’rre a genius at pickin’ ’em, Boy. It has only now come to light, how she was the thrown-aside toy of a Leadenhall Street Nabob, who visits your dearr friends the Peaches now and then for East India business, and country Sport,— and their attentions to you are conditional upon your marrying her.”

  They were together in a room. She was about to depart. “I commend you upon your Forbearance, Madam. Most Christian.”

  “You mean considering all that your Father has said about me. Why, Sensibility,— ’tis nothing to me anymore. Pray release yourself.”

  He felt he had to go on.” ’Twas never you, ’Heart, ’twas me he wish’d to wound.— ”

  “On second thought,” Rebekah swiftly return’d, “cherish your Antagonism. Let it freeze your souls, both of you. Either Choice lies far from me now.”

  Her representative in the waking world, pale and distant, squats by the Coffee, poking the Morning Fire. A little less solid each day, she is drifting toward her own Absence. She looks up warily as Mason makes a Loxodrome for the Pot.

  “You’ve dreamt of her, again.”

  “Thankee. With your Hair growing in, you don’t look like her that much anymore.”

  “I never did. Zsuzsa wants us to go off and be Adventuresses.”

  “Seth . . . quite out of the Picture, then, I take it?”

  “If your Travels take you by Conestoga, put your Ears to the Wind, follow the sounds of merry Indulgence, and where they are loudest, there shall Seth be, and you will note how he mourns me.”

  “Ne’er met the Lad, of course,— ”

  “Good Morning, kicsi káposta,” Zsuzsa striding in and embracing her co-adventuress-to-be from behind. They smile and stretch, glowing like cheap iron Stoves burning Heart-Wood in the Dark, just that distance from no light at all.

  Rebekah, her eyelids never blinking, for where all is Dust, Dust shall be no more, confronts him upon surfaces not so much “random” as outlaw,— uncontroll’d by any apparent End or Purpose,— in the penumbra of God’s concern, that’s if you don’t mind comparing his Regard with a solar Eclipse. Moving water,— Mason tries to go fishing whenever he can, for there is no telling what the next Riffle may present him,— the rock Abysses and mountainsides, leaves in the wind announcing a Storm, . . . Shadows of wrought ironwork upon a wall, . . . the kissing-crusts of new-baked loaves. . . . On the Indian warrior paths to and from triumphs, captivities, and death, in the lanes overgrown of abandoned villages at the turn of the day, in the rusted ending of the sky’s light, in the full eye of the wind, she stands, waiting to speak to him. What more has she to say? He has long run out of replies. “Then I am not she, but a Representation. This Thing,”— she will not style it, “Death.” “I am detain’d here, in this Thing . . . that my Body all the while was capable of and leading me to, and carried with it surely as the other Thing, the Thing our Bodies could do, together . . . ,” she will not style it, “Love.” Has she forgotten Words, over there where Tongues are still’d, and no need for either exists?

  55

  “Terrible Feng-Shui here. Worst I ever saw. You two crazy?”

  “Because of . . . ?” Dixon indicating behind them, in thickening dusk, the Visto sweeping away.

  “It acts as a Conduit for what we call Sha, or, as they say in Spanish California, Bad Energy.— Imagine a Wind, a truly ill wind, bringing failure, poverty, disgrace, betrayal,— every kind of bad luck there is,— all blowing through, night and day, with many times the force of the worst storm you were ever in.”

  “No one intends to live directly upon the Visto,” Mason speaking as to a Child. “The object being, that the people shall set their homes to one side or another. That it be a Boundary, nothing more.”

  “Boundary!” The Chinaman begins to pull upon his hair and paw the earth with brocade-slipper’d feet. “Ev’rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature,— coast-lines, ridge-tops, river-banks,— so honoring the Dragon or Shan within, from which Land-Scape ever takes its form. To mark a right Line upon the Earth is to inflict upon the Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live out here the year ’round to see as other than hateful Assault. How can it pass unanswer’d?”

  This is the third continent he has been doing Feng-Shui jobs on, and he thought he’d seen crazy people in Europe, but these are beyond folly. Whig country-homes, sinister chateaux, Adriatic villas, Hungarian hot springs, Danish harems in the Turkish style,— not one of their owners having hir’d him out of respect for the Dragon, nor for what he could do or find out or even tell them,— when ’twas not innocently to indulge a fascination with the exotic, ’twas to permit themselves yet one more hope in
the realm of the Subjunctive, one more grasp at the last radiant whispers of the last bights of Robe-hem, billowing Æther-driven at the back of an ever-departing Deity. A people without faith,— very well, he could understand it, now and then even respect it,— yet here in America, is little but Faith,— church-spires on every town skyline, traveling ministers who draw congregations by the hundreds and thousands, across flooded pastures, beneath rain-combed skies and in under the outspread wings of their white tents, singing far off in the woods, full of fervent strange harmonies that grow louder as the traveler approaches. . . .

  Frowning at his Luo-Pan, the mystic Chinaman shakes his head and mutters, “Even the currents of Earth are with them.”

  “ ‘Them’?”

  “I have an enemy in these parts, I believe,— a certain Jesuit who does not wish me well.”

  “French?” inquires Mason.

  “Spanish, I believe. Father Zarpazo, the Wolf of Jesus, as he is known in his native Land, though I had the misfortune to meet him in my own. He has his Training directly from those who persecuted Molinos and his followers,— he is accordingly sworn to destroy all who seek God without passing through the toll-gate of Jesus. The Molinistas, as do certain Buddhists of my own land, believ’d that the most direct Way to the Deity was to sit, quietly. If this meant using Jesus as but a stage on a journey, or even passing him by, why so be it. Buddhists speak of finding it necessary, if the Buddha be blocking one’s Way, to kill him. Jesuits do not like to hear this sort of thing, of course, it puts far too much into question. If access to God need not be by way of Jesus, what is to become of Jesuits? And the sheer amount of Silence requir’d,— do you think they could ever abide that?

  “Zarpazo,— as relentless in his hatred of those he hunts down as they are indifferent, in their love of God, to the passions driving him. Jansenist Convulsionaries, Crypto-Illuminati, and Neo-Quietists alike have felt his cultivated Wrath, some taken before dawn by men in black, others accosted brazenly upon the steps of cathedrals,— clapp’d into iron and leather restraints, going along amiably enough, puzzl’d, sure it must be a mistake.