Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “There is a master list,” Webb announced one day, “in Washington, D.C., of everybody they think is up to no good, maintained by the U.S. Secret Service.”

  “Thought those boys ‘s there to keep the President from gettin shot,” Reef said.

  “By law, that and go after counterfeiters. But there’s no law says they can’t loan their agents out to anybody who needs well, say a secret type of individual. So these federal gumshoes’re really all over the place, and noplace thicker on the slopes than Colorado.”

  “Come on, Pop, where are we, Russia?”

  “Say, open up em peepers ‘fore you walk over a cliff someplace.”

  It was more than the usual teasing around. Webb was worried, and Reef guessed it was about being on that list. When Webb didn’t smile, which more and more got to be days on end, he looked years older. Of course, when he did smile, the pointed ears, nose, and chin, the furrows from here to there, the cheerily snarled eyebrows, all revealed a foxlike charm that extended to confidences kept safe, advice offered, rounds stood without hesitation. But always, Reef noted, that part withheld that you felt you couldn’t get to. The other Webb who rode by night, invisible. He wanted to say, don’t it get you crazy, Pop, don’t you want to just kill some of em, and keep on killing, and how can everybody out here just allow em to get away with what they do? He started hanging around with known recreational blasters his age and a little older, whose ideas of amusement included loitering out by the tailings, drinking jug whiskey, and tossing among themselves a lit stick of dynamite, timing it all so as not to be too close when it went off.

  Alarmed, Mayva brought up the practice with Webb, who only shrugged. “Just good old dynamite rounders, every sheriff has at least a dozen in his county. Reef knows enough to be careful with the stuff, I trust him.”

  “Just to set my own mind at rest, though—”

  “Sure, I’ll have a word if you like.”

  He caught up with Reef out by one of the lesser avalanche sites near Ouray, just sitting there as if he was waiting for something. “Hear you and Otis and them’ve discovered Holdin-the-Bag. Fun ain’t it?”

  “So far.” Reef’s grin was so fake even Webb could see it.

  “And it don’t scare you, son?”

  “No. Some. Not enough, maybe,” with one of those insane adolescent laughs at his own stumbling tongue.

  “It scares me.”

  “Oh, sure it does.” He looked at his father, waiting for the rest of the joke. Webb understood that regardless of how seriously Reef might someday come to take the subject, he himself would never find a way to take dynamite as lightly as his son did. He gazed at Reef in almost unconcealed envy, failing completely to recognize the darker thing, the desire, the desperate need to create a radius of annihilation that, if it could not include the ones who deserved it, might as well include himself.

  Webb was no professor, he could only doggedly repeat to his kids the same old lessons, point to the same obvious injustices, hope some of it managed to sprout, and just continue with his own work all dummied up, poker-faced and unaccompanied, letting his anger build a head of pressure till it was ready to do some useful work. If dynamite was what it took, well, so be it—and if it took growing into a stranger to those kids and looking like some kind of screaming fool whenever he did show up at home, and then someday sooner or later losing them, their clean young gazes, their love and trust, the unquestioning way they spoke his name, all that there is to break a father’s heart, well, children grow up, and that would have to be reckoned into the price, too, along with jail time, bullpens, beatings, lockouts, and the rest. The way it happens. Webb would have to set aside his feelings, not just the sentimental baby stuff but the terrible real ballooning of emptiness at the core of his body when he paused to consider all that losing them would mean. When he did get to pause. Good kids, too. All he knew how to do was smash around the place, helpless, and risk them thinking it was aimed at them, no counting on Mayva to get him out of it, being she was the target, too, often as not, and no way he knew of to tell any of them otherwise. Not that they’d believe it if he did. Not, after too short a while, not anymore.

  “WE READY?”

  Veikko shrugged, reaching for the plunger handle on the magneto box.

  “Let’s do ‘er.”

  Four closely set blasts, cracks in the fabric of air and time, merciless, bone-strumming. Breathing seemed beside the point. Rising dirt-yellow clouds full of wood splinters, no wind to blow them anyplace. Track and trusswork went sagging into the dust-choked arroyo.

  Webb and Veikko watched across a meadow of larkspur and Indian paintbrush, and behind them a little creek rushed down the hillside. “Seen worse,” Webb nodded after a while.

  “Was beautiful! what do you want, end of the world?”

  “Sufficient unto the day,” Webb shrugged. “Course.”

  Veikko was pouring vodka. “Happy Fourth of July, Webb.”

  For years after, there were tales told in Colorado of the amazing, world-reversing night of Fourth of July Eve 1899. Next day’d be full of rodeos, marching bands, and dynamite explosions—but that night there was man-made lightning, horses gone crazy for miles out into the prairie, electricity flooding up through the iron of their shoes, shoes that when they finally came off and got saved to use for cowboy-quoits, including important picnic tourneys from Fruita to Cheyenne Wells, why they would fly directly and stick on to the spike in the ground, or to anything else nearby made of iron or steel, that’s when they weren’t collecting souvenirs on their way through the air—gunmen’s guns came right up out of their holsters and buck knives out from under pants legs, keys to traveling ladies’ hotel rooms and office safes, miners’ tags, fence-nails, hairpins, all seeking the magnetic memory of that long-ago visit. Veterans of the Rebellion fixing to march in parades were unable to get to sleep, metallic elements had so got to humming through their bloodmaps. Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers’ offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed.

  Young Kit Traverse happened to be in on the high-voltage experiment that had caused it all, working as a matter of fact that summer in Colorado Springs, for Dr. Tesla himself. By now Kit thought of himself as a Vectorist, having arrived at that mathematical persuasion not by any abstract route but, as most had up till then, by way of the Electricity, and its practical introduction, during his own early years, at an increasingly hectic clip, into lives previously innocent of it.

  In those days, he was a roving electrical apprentice—“Could call me a circuit rider, I guess”—journeying one mountain valley to the next, looking to keep from ever going down into another mine, taking any job that happened to be open, long as it was something, anything, to do with electricity. Electricity was all the go then in southwest Colorado, nearly every stream intersecting sooner or later with some small private electrical plant for running mine or factory machinery or lighting up towns—basically a turbine generator located underneath a waterfall, which given the altitudes out here could be pretty near anyplace a fellow might want to look. Kit was big enough for his age, and foremen were willing to go along with whatever age he filled in on the forms, when there were forms at all.

  Something, some devotedness or need that in those days among less credentialed working stiffs was finding its expression in union loyalty, disposed slightly older kid engineering students, out here usually for the summer from back east, Cornell, Yale, so forth, to help Kit out, to lend him books he needed, Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism of 1873, Heaviside’s more recent Electromagnetic Theory (1893), and so forth. Once Kit had the knack of the notation, which didn’t take long, he was off to the races.

  It could have been a religion, for all he knew—here was the god of Current, bearing li
ght, promising death to the falsely observant, here were Scripture and commandments and liturgy, all in this priestly Vectorial language whose texts he had to get his head around as they came, study when he ought to be sleeping, by miners’ candles or coal-oil light and often enough by the actual incandescence from the same electrical mystery he was studying, growing hit-or-miss into an understanding, out of his hankering in the course of a day’s work just to see in some way—directly, without equations, the way Faraday had, according to the folklore anyway—what was going on inside the circuits he was obliged to work with. Which seemed fair enough. After a while, now and then, he found it was him explaining things to the collegiate hotshots—not everything, of course, they knew everything—but maybe a detail here and there, manipulating vector symbols that stood for unseen—though easily enough and sometimes dangerously felt—electrical events being a chore not too different when you came to it from situating the wheelcases under the falls, getting the turbines leveled and solidly supported, tweaking the shapes of their blades, wrestling together the penstocks, suction pipes and wheelcases and so forth, all or most of it sweat and sore muscles and arguing with foremen, struggling up and down the terrain finding purchases and setting up tackle, not to mention when necessary some bricklaying, carpentry, riveting, and welding—going without sleep and being yelled at, but none of it too mysterious until one night out west of Rico someplace a window opened for him into the Invisible, and a voice, or something like a voice, whispered unto him, saying, “Water falls, electricity flows—one flow becomes another, and thence into light. So is altitude transformed, continuously, to light.” Words to that effect, well, maybe not words exactly. . . . And he found himself staring into the ordinarily blinding glow of a lamp filament, which he found instead unaccountably lambent, like light through the crack of a door left open, inviting him into a friendly house. With the stream in question roaring in sovereign descent just a few feet away. It had not been a dream, nor the sort of illumination he would someday learn that Hamilton had experienced at Brougham Bridge in Ireland in 1845—but it represented a jump from one place to another with who knew what perilous Æther opening between and beneath. He saw it. The vectorial expressions in the books, surface integrals and potential functions and such, would henceforth figure as clumsier repetitions of the truth he now possessed in his personal interior, certain and unshakable.

  WORD ONE DAY was out on the electricians’ grapevine that the renowned Dr. Nikola Tesla was on his way out to Colorado Springs, to set up an experimental station. Kit’s sidekick Jack Gigg was unable to sit still. He kept running in and out of Kit’s vicinity. “Hey Kit, ain’t you ready yet, come on, Kit, we’ll camp out up there, there’s got to be plenty of jobs just waiting for a couple of old hands like us.”

  “Jack, we’re seventeen.”

  “Is what I’m sayin. Pike’s Peak or Bust!”

  Kit remembered visiting Colorado Springs as a youngster. Streetcars and a seven-story building. Violent red sunsets behind Pike’s Peak. The cog-railway car with its roof the same color. The station at the summit and the spidery observation deck on top of it, that Frank got so nervous about climbing up on he was kidded mercilessly about it forever after.

  They found the Tesla operation set up about a mile out of town, near the Union Printers’ Home. They were greeted by a blunt individual with some way of the Cañon City alumnus about him, who introduced himself as Foley Walker. Kit and Jack assumed he was in charge of hiring. Later they found out he was special assistant to famed financier Scarsdale Vibe, and out here to keep an eye on how the money, much of it Mr. Vibe’s, was being spent.

  Next day, on his way to the mess tent, Kit was accosted by Foley. “You are crazy, as I see it,” this deputy of Wealth suggested, “to get out of the house, and be doing somethin besides the swamping, am I close?”

  Kind of a line you used on girls, it occurred to Kit—tried it himself, never worked. “I’ve been out of the house,” he muttered, “as you call it, for a few years now.”

  “Nothin’ personal,” said Foley. “Only wonderin if you’ve heard of Mr. Vibe’s Lieutenants of Industry Scholarship Program.”

  “Sure. Last barrelhouse I was in, ‘at’s all they talked about.”

  Foley patiently explained that the Program was always scouting around for kids with potential engineering talent to finance through college.

  “School of Mines, something like that?” Kit interested despite himself.

  “Even better,” said Foley. “How does Yale College sound to you?”

  “Like ‘Mr. Merriwell, we really need this touchdown,”’ said Kit in a passable back-east voice.

  “Seriously.”

  “Tuition? Room and board?”

  “All included.”

  “Automobile? Champagne deliveries day or night? Sweater with a big Y on it?”

  “I can do that,” said Foley.

  “Horsefeathers. Only Scarsdale Vibe his mighty self can do that, mister.”

  “I am he.”

  “You’re not ‘he.’ I read the papers and look at the magazines, you ain’t even ‘him.’”

  “If I may elucidate.” Foley once again was obliged to tell his Civil War Substitute story, a chore growing, with the years, ever more wearying. During the Rebellion, shortly after Antietam, just as he was beginning his sophomore year at New Haven, Scarsdale Vibe, having turned the right age for it, had received a notice of conscription. Following the standard practice, his father had purchased for him a substitute to serve in his place, assuming that upon obtaining a properly executed receipt for the three hundred dollars, why that would be that. Imagine everyone’s surprise when, a couple of decades later, Foley appeared early one day in the outer offices of the Vibe Corporation, claiming to’ve been this very substitute conscriptee and producing documents to back it up. “I’m a busy man,” Scarsdale might have said, or “How much does he want, and will he take a check?” Instead, curious, he decided to have a look personally.

  Foley was ordinary-enough looking, not having yet taken on the more menacing aspect that the years in their peculiar mercy would provide him—what might’ve been exceptional was his idea of social or phatic conversation. “Took a Reb bullet for you, sir,” was the first thing out of his mouth. “Pleased to meet you, of course.”

  “A bullet. Where?”

  “Cold Harbor.”

  “Yes, but where?”

  Foley tapped his head beside the left temple. “Pretty spent by the time it got to me—didn’t make it all the way through, and nobody has ever known how to get it out. They used to stand around like I wasn’t there, discussing the Brain and Its Mysteries. If a fellow could keep his ears open, why it was like going to medical school on the cheap. Fact is, guided only by what I remember of those bedside conferences, I did go on to perform a few minor head surgeries in my time.”

  “So it’s still in there?”

  “Minié ball, judging from everybody else’s wounds around that time.”

  “Giving you any trouble?”

  His smile, in its satisfaction, struck even Scarsdale as terrible. “Wouldn’t call it trouble. You’d be amazed what I get to see.”

  “And . . . hear?”

  “Call em communications from far, far away.”

  “Is your army pension taking care of this? Anything you need that you’re not getting?”

  Foley watched Scarsdale’s hands getting ready to reach, for either a pistol or a checkbook. “You know what the Indians out west believe? That if you save the life of another, he becomes your responsibility forever.”

  “That’s all right. I can take care of myself. I have all the bodyguards I need.”

  “Isn’t exactly your physical well-being I’m instructed to look after.”

  “Oh. Of course, those voices you hear. Well, what are they saying to you, Mr. Walker?”

  “You mean lately? A lot of talk about some kerosene company out in Cleveland. Fact, not a day goes by there isn’t something. You’
d know better’n me. ‘The Standard Oil’? Supposed to be ‘expanding their capital,’ whatever that means. Voices say now’d be a good time to buy in?”

  “Everything all right in here, Mr. Vibe?”

  “Fine, Bruno, just fine, thanks. Let’s indulge this gentleman, shall we. Let’s just buy a hundred shares of this kerosene stock, if it exists, and see what happens.”

  “Voices say five hundred’d be better.”

  “Had your breakfast yet, Mr. Walker? show him the company mess hall, Bruno, if you’d be so kind.”

  Foley Walker’s advice that day provided critical acceleration in the growth of the legendary Vibe fortune. He polished off a side of bacon and the day’s output of the Company henhouse up on the H.Q.’s roof, plus a loaf of bread and ten gallons of coffee, give or take a cup, before Bruno, expecting never to lay eyes on him again, was able to usher him into the street puffing on one of a fistful of Scarsdale’s second-best Havanas. A week later, after a frantic search of various opium joints and concert saloons, he was located and hired on as an “investigative consultant,” and thenceforward Scarsdale grew increasingly reluctant to make any move of a business nature without him, expanding that definition, in the course of time, to include the outcomes of boxing matches, baseball games, and especially horse races, as to which Foley’s advice was seldom in error.

  The Twin Vibes, as they soon came to be known, were sighted together often at Monmouth Park and Sheepshead Bay as well as tracks farther afield, togged out in matching sport ensembles of a certain canary-and-indigo check, screaming and waving fistfuls of betting slips—when they were not careering at excessive speeds up and down the avenues of Manhattan in a maroon phæton whose brass and nickelwork were kept rubbed to a blinding shine, side by side in their pale dusters, appearing to the unwary spectator as ineluctable as any other Apocalyptic Riders.