Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “So you could make a case,” Foley concluded, “for me being more Scarsdale Vibe than Scarsdale Vibe himself.”

  Kit was respectful but not convinced. “You see the problem for me, I hope. Supposed to believe that some remittance’ll show up every month, on time, for three or four years straight? With that kind of personal faith, I could be out in some tent handling snakes and really making a name for myself.”

  The famed inventor was at this moment observed passing swiftly left to right. “Izvinite, there, Dr. Tesla!” Foley cried out, “—mind if we use your telegraph?”

  “In the office,” the reedy Serb called over his shoulder, breezing on to meet the day’s next intractable difficulty.

  “Hvala! Come on along, buckaroo, prepare to be amazed.”

  Once in Tesla’s shack, Foley lost no time getting onto the telegraph key and in touch with the Vibe offices back East. A few moments later, as if remembering Kit’s existence, “How much earnest money on this deal would you be thinking?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Would five hundred dollars take care of it for the moment?” Foley’s finger starting in again with the beetle-banter, faster than eyes could follow—then an attentive stillness as the other end chattered back. “O.K., all set. It’ll be there tomorrow at the Bank of Colorado Springs, made out to you personally. Just go on in and sign.”

  Kit kept a poker face. “Long night ahead.”

  Longer than expected. Around eight o’clock, a secondary winding on one of the transmitters blew up, having been repeatedly charged at, somewhere out along the miles of coil length required by the low frequencies of the waves in use, by a maddened elk. Near midnight a couple of prairie tornadoes roared by as if seeking in the two-hundred-foot transmission tower a companion in electrical debauchery, and about the middle of the midwatch a couple of stimulated freightmen down from Leadville got in a dispute and exchanged shots, which, as usual, nothing came of, owing to the magnetic fields around here being so strong and erratic they kept pulling the pistol barrels off target. Lurid bursts of blue, red, and green light, with their man-made thunderclaps, kept the skies busy till dawn. Kids at the adjoining Deaf and Blind School reported hearing and seeing frequencies hitherto unaccounted for in the medical science of the day.

  In the morning, after a pot of trail coffee, Kit saddled up and rode in to the bank, where all was just as Foley had promised. A teller with some green celluloid rig across his brow peered up at Kit with an interest few had ever shown. “Another one of Doc Tesla’s boys, eh?” Kit, sleepless after thirty-six hours of voltaic frenzy and odd behavior human and animal, took it as a message from perhaps farther beyond where it’d actually come from. Somewhere along East Platte Street on the way back, guiding on the tower with its three-foot copper sphere on top catching the sun across the prairie, Kit was assaulted all at once by a yearning, or that’s how he’d think of it later—a clarity of desire—to belong to that band of adventurers into the Æther and its mysteries, to become, por vida, one of Doc Tesla’s boys. Well inside the mile or so back to the test station, he found himself, unaccountably, ready to sign up with Foley’s plan for his life.

  “After I finish college I come work for Mr. Vibe till the debt’s paid off, that right?”

  “Right—and if you’ll sign this one here, too, just a standard release . . . Sure, think of it as paid conscription. Us geezers from the days of the Rebellion, we tend to take it for the way of the world, one element in society wishing to keep clear of some spell of unpleasantness—your case, having to learn all that college stuff—paying another element to take it on instead. Basic arrangement. Those above get their piece of time untroubled and free, us below get our cash right away, and depending on the job, maybe even a thrill now and then.”

  “But after the War, as you tell it, you thought your man still owed you.”

  “Might’ve been from observing how Mr. Vibe and other notable ransomed souls of his era had been left free to behave. Not to mention the profit curve that resulted for them, while they just went waltzing on, some of them even today unable to imagine any form of real trouble. We that went and found more of that than we could bear felt like that we ought to be seeking reparations, our damages to body and spirit being the debit side of all their good fortune, you could say.”

  “If you were a socialist, you could,” Kit supposed.

  “Sure, and isn’t that just the class system for ya? Eternal youth bought with the sickness and death of others. Call it what you like. If you go back East, you may run into more thinking along these same lines, so if it offends you now, better speak up, we’ll go make other arrangements.”

  “No, no, I’ll be all right.”

  “That’s also what Mr. Vibe thinks.”

  “He doesn’t know me.”

  “That will change.”

  Later in the shack, Kit came upon Tesla, frowning at a pencil sketch. “Oh. Sorry, I was looking for—”

  “This toroid is the wrong shape,” said Tesla. “Come, look at this a moment.”

  Kit had a look. “Maybe there’s a vector solution.”

  “How’s that?

  “We know what we want the field to look like at each point, don’t we. Well, maybe we can generate a surface shape that’ll give us that field.”

  “You see it,” Tesla half-inquired, looking at Kit with some curiosity.

  “I see something,” Kit shrugged.

  “The same began to happen to me also at your age,” Tesla recalled. “When I could find the time to sit still, the images would come. But it’s always finding the time, isn’t it.”

  “Sure, always something. . . . Chores, something.”

  “Tithing,” Tesla said, “giving back to the day.”

  “Not complainin about the hours here, nothin like that, sir.”

  “Why not? I complain all the time. Not enough of them, basically.”

  WHEN KIT GOT BACK from Colorado Springs all on fire with the news of Foley’s offer, Webb would have none of it. “You crazy? I’ll get somebody to write em, tell em no.”

  “Wasn’t you they asked.”

  “It’s me they’re after, son.”

  “They don’t know you down there,” Kit argued.

  “They own the mines here. You think I’m not on their list? I’m on everbody else’s. They’re tryin to buy my family away. And if gold don’t work, sooner or later they get around to lead.”

  “I don’t think you understand this.”

  “Everbody’s ignorant about somethin. Me, it’s the electricity. You, looks like it’s rich folks.”

  “They can afford this so easily. Can you?”

  It was falling apart. Webb could feel himself losing this argument, losing his son. Too fast, he said, “And what’s the payback?”

  “I go to work for the Vibe Corp. when I graduate. Anything wrong with that?”

  Webb shrugged. “They own you.”

  “It’ll mean steady work. Not like . . .”

  “Like around here.” Kit just stared back. It was over, Webb guessed. “O.K., well. You’re either my boy or theirs, can’t be both.”

  “That’s the choice?”

  “You’re not goin, Kit.”

  “Oh ain’t I.” It was out, just that tone of voice, before the boy could think, nor did he register too deeply then what sorrow came flooding into Webb’s face, usually a little upturned these days owing to Kit’s still-increasing height.

  “That case,” Webb pretending to look at some kind of shift-boss paperwork, “leave just when you want. Jake with me.” They would make a practice from there on of not letting their eyes meet, which as things turned out was never to happen again, not here on the desolate lee shore whose back country is death.

  “Being a little hard with him,” it seemed to Mayva.

  “You too? You look at him lately, May, he ain’t exactly some damn baby anymore, you can’t just keep girlyin onto him till he’s no damn good for nothing.”

  “But he is our
baby, Webb.”

  “Baby’s ass. He’s old enough and sure big enough to see what this is, now. How the deal works.”

  It took a while, till Kit had left and the emotions had lost some of that knife edge, before Webb began to remember times him and his own father, Cooley, had gone round and round, and just as loud, and just as senseless, and he couldn’t even remember what it had been about, not every time. And though Webb was younger when Cooley died, it had never occurred to him, from that day to this, how Cooley might have been feeling the same way Webb felt now. He wondered if it would stay this way for the rest of his life—he had never made it right between him and his Pa, and the same thing now, like some damn curse, was happening between him and Kit. . . .

  Mayva saw Kit off at the depot, but it was a chilly parting, and not too long on hope. He was pretending not to understand why nobody else had showed up, none of the men. She was wearing her church hat—“church” having been conducted often as not out under the sky, the old maroon velvet had picked up some years of trail dust and grown sun-faded along its many miniature ridgetops. Wasn’t too long ago that he’d still been too short to look down and notice that. She fussed in and out of the depot, making sure its clock was working all right, learning what she could of the train’s whereabouts from the lady telegraph operator and her assistant, asking Kit more than once if he thought she’d packed him enough food for the journey. Cornish pasties and so forth.

  “Not like it’s forever, Ma.”

  “No. Course not. Only me, just being, I don’t know . . .”

  “Might not even work out. Easy to see that happening, in fact.”

  “Just so you mind that, that penmanship. In school you always wrote so neatly.”

  “I’ll be writing to you, Ma, regular, so you can keep an eye on that.”

  Some stirring now along the line of town trainwatchers, as if they’d caught signals from the invisible distance in that joint waking dream of theirs, or maybe, as some swore, like that they’d seen the track shift, just a hair, long before the first smoke over the rise or steam whistles in the distance.

  “I’ll never see you again.” No. She didn’t say that. But she might’ve, so easy. A look from him. Any small gesture of collapse from his careful, young man’s posture back into the boy she wanted, after all, to keep.

  The call had come just a week before, in the midwatch, which the Chums, even in this era of desuetude, nonetheless continued, every night, to stand. A boy with the face of an angel in an old painting under a baggy cap with its bill turned sidewise had appeared with a telephone set whose cord trailed out the door into the scarcely lit darkness. It could’ve been someone up too late, playing a practical joke. Opinion next morning, over watery oatmeal and fatback and the dregs of the previous day’s coffee, was in fact divided. There were no navigational charts to help them to find the way. Their only instructions were to steer southwest and await course correction from a station unnamed, at a distance indeterminate, which would be calling in via the airship’s new Tesla device, which had remained silent since the day it was installed, though kept ever electrified and flawlessly calibrated.

  The voices which arrived over the next few days were difficult to credit with any origin in the material sphere. Even the unimaginative Lindsay Noseworth reported feeling a fine sustained chill across his shoulders whenever the instrument began its hoarse whispering.

  Presently they had picked up the westerlies which would convey them with all-but-geometrical precision to the uninhabited and little-known Indian Ocean islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul, recently annexed by France.

  They were borne scant dozens of feet above a high and hostile sea scattered with islands of bare black rock, unpopulated, without vegetation. “At one time,” related Miles Blundell, “in the days of the first explorers, each one of these islands, no matter how small, was given its own name, so amazing was their abundance in the sea, so grateful to God were their discoverers for any sort of landfall . . . but nowadays the names are being lost, this sea is lapsing back into anonymity, each island rising from it only another dark desert.” As, no longer named, one by one the islets vanished from the nautical charts, and one day from the lighted world as well, to rejoin the Invisible.

  On certain of these wind-haunted rocks, the Chums could observe work details, rigged with safety lines, scrambling over wet surfaces scarcely big enough to hold them all, moving swiftly and purposefully, though there was nothing evident, not even guano, worth risking their safety for. The ships anchored close by were of the latest design and appeared to be carrying armament available only to the European Powers. Their presence in these waters, not so much as hinted at in any of the extensive communiqués reaching the boys from Chums Headquarters, was a mystery dark as the storm-lit seascape.

  The last island where they could take on perishable supplies, such as milk, was St. Masque, which at first, as they landed, appeared to be uninhabited. Then, slowly, in ones and twos, people began to appear, until soon the Chums were surrounded by a considerable population and a city to go with it, as if it had been there all along, waiting for their arrival . . . a city of some size, English-speaking, so clean and litter-free that everyone walked around barefoot, no matter how formally they might be dressed otherwise—town suits, tea gowns, no matter—it was the visitor wearing shoes who was stared at. In the center of town, some huge underground construction venture was in progress, citizens stood on overpasses and catwalks gazing down into concrete pits full of steam-machinery, draft animals, and debris. When asked its purpose, they frowned, puzzled, as if they had not quite heard the visitors. “Home,” some said, “it’s home. What is home where you come from?” But wandered away before any of the lads could answer.

  In a seamen’s tavern down by the docks, one of those low haunts he had a sure instinct for finding wherever in the world the boys happened to go, Chick Counterfly met up with a shadowy sea-derelict who claimed to be a survivor of the frigate H.M.S. Megaera which had been wrecked on Amsterdam Island nearly thirty years before. “Miserable place. Took months for us to be rescued. No different from sea duty . . . oh, that absence of motion of course, bit more fish in the diet as you’d imagine. . . . One continued to stand watch, and share space with the same people one had already learned to tolerate, or hate, or both at the same time, which taken from the standpoint of pure survival proved a great blessing—imagine if the old Meg had been a passenger ship full of strangers—half of us would have murdered the other half within the first week and perhaps eaten them as well. But four hundred of us made it.”

  “Curious,” Chick said. “That’s about what I estimated the population of St. Masque to be.”

  AND ONLY HOURS after leaving behind these de-christened fragments in the sea’s reasserted emptiness, they had raised the volcano, dark and ruinous, which was their destination. The assignment was to observe what would happen at the point on the Earth antipodal to Colorado Springs, during Dr. Tesla’s experiments there. They had been provided via Chums of Chance Logistical Services, never questioned, always on time, an expensive array of electrical instrumentation, reflecting everything within the current state of technical knowledge, delivered uninvoiced by Oriental laborers who trooped in and out of the encampment, shift after shift, beneath often quite staggering burdens. Pallets and nails from opened crates soon littered the area. Thatch debris fallen bit by bit from coolie hats drifted here and there ankle deep. Vermin brought ashore with the cargo, sometimes all the way from California, scrambled off and soon had found homes on the slopes of the volcano, venturing down to the camp only on late-night galley raids.

  The stevedoring at length done with, the itinerant work crews were rowed away silently, out to the flagless vessel lying offshore, to be body-jobbed away somewhere else in the hemisphere. South Africa, most likely. Leaving the boys to gather closely, beneath the mephitically seeping volcano which rose nearly a thousand feet overhead, on a beach so intensely sunlit as to appear almost colorless, the blindness at
the heart of a diamond for all they knew, while ocean waves came towering in one by one, arriving measured as the breath of some local god. No one at first had anything to say, even if it had been possible to hear above the battery of the surf.

  MEALTIMES LATELY HAD been fraught with political instability, owing to an ongoing dispute over the choice of a new figurehead for the ship. The previous one, representing the head of President McKinley, had been seriously damaged in an unpremeditated collision with a Chicago skyscraper building which had not, as far as any of the boys knew, been there the day before.

  Chick Counterfly and Darby Suckling had been lobbying for a naked woman, “A-and th’ more curvaceous, the better!” as Darby demanded at each of their frequent ad hoc gatherings on the subject, bringing to the lips of Lindsay Noseworth a reproof by now all but reflexive—“Suckling, Suckling . . . your list of demerits grows at a dishearteningly vertiginous rate.”

  “And not one of em that ain’t just danged shipboard politics,” expostulated Darby, with a red-faced scowl. Since his voice had changed, its charmingly

  insubordinate tone, once tolerable, had darkened to something more considered and, to that degree, disquieting. The once cheery mascotte had passed from political innocence, through a short period of adolescent uncertainty, into a distrust of authority approaching the very slopes of Nihilism. His shipmates, even the reliably humorous Chick Counterfly, now reflected at length before uttering even the most routine of jocularities in Suckling’s hearing, lest he take offense.

  Randolph St. Cosmo had continued, in the matter of choosing a figurehead, to promote the National Bird, as a safe and patriotic choice. Miles Blundell, for his part, didn’t care what the figurehead represented, as long as it was something to eat—while Lindsay, as if offended by the worldliness of these choices, argued as always for pure abstraction—“One of the Platonic polyhedra, perhaps.”