Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Later he made it back to the Anarchists’ saloon, and there, as he’d half expected, was this customer giving him one of those unfinished-business looks. Probably not the Kieselguhr Kid, but Lew by now being in an experimental frame of mind decided to go ahead on the assumption that he was. “Buy you a beer?”

  “Depends if you’ve come to your senses yet.”

  “Let’s say I have.”

  “Pretty soon, then, everybody’ll know, and it’ll be run Anarchist run for you, Brother Basnight.”

  “Mind if I ask something? Not that I’m about to just yet, but you must’ve set off a stick or two of dynamite in a what they call purposeful way. Any regrets about that?”

  “Only if there was innocent lives caught into it. But none ever was, not by me.”

  “But if ‘there are no innocent bourgeoisie,’ as many Anarchist folks believe—”

  “You follow the topic, I see. Well. I might not know a bourgeoisie ‘f one ran up and bit me, for there’s not been a hell of a lot of them back where I’ve been, more like you’d call ‘em peasantry and proletariat. Mostly, doing my work, it comes down to remembering to be careful.”

  “Your work.” Lew wrote himself a lengthy note on his shirt cuff, then, looking up again guilelessly, “Well what about me? me or somebody in the same line, getting hurt?”

  “You think you’re innocent? Hell, man, you’re working for them—you’d’ve killed me if it ever came up.”

  “I’d’ve brought you in.”

  “Maybe, but it wouldn’t’ve been alive.”

  “Getting me confused with Pat Garrett, Wyatt Earp, hardcases of the frontier never cared nor maybe knew which side they were on. Not having had that luxury, I wouldn’t’ve done you in then any more than now, when I know better.”

  “That’s sure a relief. Here, you’re dry. Herman, give this screamin Red threat to society another of them.”

  Little by little the place filled up and turned into a hoedown of sorts, and the Kid, or whoever he was, sort of faded into the mobility, and Lew didn’t see him again for a while.

  BACK IN CHICAGO, Nate, in his own paper homeland again, kept wasting Agency money rattling off one telegram after another. Figuring nothing had changed, regional office on the job, all serene. But now there might as well be hired roughnecks with wire-cutters up on every pole in the thousand miles between them, for all Nate was ever going to find out from Lew anymore.

  It was about then that what Lew came to regard as his Shameful Habit began. He was in the pleasant little desert oasis of Los Fatzos, handling explosives most of the day, must have had his gloves off (though some were never to buy that story), P.E.T.N. as best he could recall—well, maybe something a little more experimental, for he’d been visiting widely-respected mad scientist Dr. Oyswharf, a possible unwitting supply source for Kieselguhr Kid-related bomb outrages, recently rumored to be working on different mixtures of nitro compounds and polymethylenes. Lethally tricky stuff. Somehow the afternoon just drifted on into the dinner hour, and Lew must’ve forgot to wash his hands, because next thing he knew, he was experiencing the hotel dining room in a range of colors, not to mention cultural references, which had not been there when he came in. The wallpaper in particular presented not a repeating pattern at all but a single view, in the French “panoramic” style, of a land very far away indeed, perhaps not even on our planet as currently understood, in which beings who resembled—though not compellingly—humans went about their lives—in motion, understand—beneath the gigantic looming of a nocturnal city full of towers, domes, and spidery catwalks, themselves edged by an eerie illumination proceeding not entirely from municipal sources.

  Presently Lew’s “food” arrived, and immediately caught his attention—the details of his “steak,” the closer he looked at that, seeming to suggest not the animal origins a fellow might reasonably expect so much as the further realms of crystallography, each section he made with his knife in fact revealing new vistas, among the intricately disposed axes and polyhedra, into the hivelike activities of a race of very small though perfectly visible inhabitants who as they seethed and bustled about, to all appearances unaware of his scrutiny, sang miniature though harmonically complex little choruses in tiny, speeded-up voices whose every word chimed out with ever-more-polycrystalline luminosities of meaning—

  Yes we’re Beavers of the Brain,

  Just as busy as you please

  Though we’re frequently reported

  To behave like lit-tle bees

  Keep that Bulldog in your pocket

  Do not bother to complain

  Or you might get into trouble

  With the Beavers of the Brain. . . .

  Exactly, puzzled Lew, a-and now what about— “Everything all right, Mr. B.?” Curly the waiter standing over Lew with an anxious and, it appeared to Lew, ominous look. It was Curly, of course, but in some more profound sense it was not. “You were looking at your food funny.”

  “Well that’s ‘cause it is funny,” Lew replied reasonably, or so he thought, until noticing everybody in the room now all frantically trying to get out the door at the same time. Was it something he’d said? done? Perhaps he should inquire. . . .

  “He’s insane!” screamed a woman. “Emmett, now don’t let him near me!”

  Lew came to in the town pokey, in the company of one or two regulars who were conferring together indignantly while casting that judgmental alcoholic eye Lew’s way. Soon as the Marshal had had a look in and deemed him street-safe, Lew was back out at the Doctor’s lab, looking you’d say a little sheepish. “About that— I forget its name—”

  “Sure. Being more or less cyclopropane plus dynamite,” grinned the Doc, mischievously it seemed to Lew, “no reason we shouldn’t call it ‘Cyclomite,’ eh? go ahead, free samples today, take as much ‘s you like, it’s pretty stable, so if it was blasting work you wanted it for, you’d have to use detonator caps, DuPont number sixes seem to work as good as any. Though you might also want some plasticerator for it, some say it helps with the . . . allover effect.” He did not quite add, “Easier on the old choppers as well,” but Lew somehow sensed that was coming, so he shook his head vigorously no, grabbed the goods, muttered his thanks, and left as quick as he could.

  “And have your ticker looked at now and then,” the Doc called after him. Lew paused. “How’s that?”

  “A croaker could explain it to you maybe, but there’s a strange chemical relation between these nitro explosives and the human heart.”

  From then on, whenever a dynamite blast went off, even far away out of earshot, something concurrent was triggered somewhere in Lew’s consciousness . . . after a while even if one was only about to go off. Anywhere. Soon he was pursuing a Cyclomite habit, you’d have to say energetically.

  First dynamite blast Lew had ever witnessed was at a county fair in Kankakee. There were motorcycle daredevils snarling round and round half blind from their own exhaust smoke inside a Wall of Death. There were young women in carnival attire, to view whom in anything less would cost an extra nickel and into whose fenced-off vicinity kids could only hope to sneak. There was the Astounding Galvanic Grandpa, who sprouted electric plumes of many colors from his toetips to his ears while hanging on to a generator being cranked by some lucky local kid. And there was the attraction known as the Dynamite Lazarus, where an ordinary-looking workhand in cap and overalls climbed inside a pine casket painted black, which a crew then solemnly proceeded to stuff with a shedful of dynamite and attach a piece of vivid orange fuse to that didn’t look nearly long enough. After they’d nailed down the lid, their foreman flourished a strike-anywhere match, ignited it dramatically on the seat of his pants, and lit the fuse, whereupon everybody ran like hell. Somewhere a drummer began a drumroll that grew louder, rough-ins overlapping faster and faster as the fuse burned ever shorter—Lew, in the grandstand, was far enough away to see the box begin to explode a split-second before he heard the blast, time enough to think maybe nothing would hap
pen after all, and then the front of that compression wave hit. It was the end of something—if not his innocence, at least of his faith that things would always happen gradually enough to afford time to do something about it in. It wasn’t just the loudness, mind, it was the shape.

  He had run across a homeopathic doctor or two and was aware of the theory that you could cure an ailment with very small doses of some specific chemical which, if swallowed full strength, would produce the same symptoms. Maybe eating Cyclomite had been helping him build up an immunity to explosions. Or maybe it was dumb luck. But wouldn’t you know, the minute Lew had brought up with Nate Privett his doubts about the Kieselguhr Kid—in effect quitting the case—that’s just when whatever it was decided to have a crack at him. He’d left his horse back upstream and was quietly pissing into a small arroyo when the world turned all inside out. Lew knew the carnival theory, which was to throw yourself into the middle of the blast the second it went off, so that the shock-wave would already be outside of and heading away from you, leaving you safe inside the vacuum at the center—maybe knocked out for a little, but all in one piece. But when it came right to doing it, with no choice left but to dive at the sparks of the too-short fuse, into that radiant throatway leading to who knew what, in the faith that there would be something there, and not just Zero and blackness . . . well if there’d been time to think about it, he might have hesitated, and that would’ve done him for certain.

  Wherever he was when he came to, it didn’t seem like Colorado anymore, nor these creatures ministering to him your usual run of trail scum either—more like visitors from elsewhere, and far away, too. Through it all, as he began now to recall, he had stayed awake, out of his body, gliding above the scene without a care in the world—whatever “the world” meant right at the moment—trying to keep it just like that, non-mental and serene, for as long as possible—till he saw they were about to give up, pile a few rocks over him and leave him there for the critters, which is what at last obliged him to make a hasty jump back into his carcass—by now, he couldn’t help noticing, strangely aglow.

  “I say Nigel, he is at least breathing, isn’t he?”

  “Honestly Neville, however should I know, isn’t one supposed to hold a mirror or something?”

  “Wait! I’ve one in my kit. . . .”

  “Vain creature!”

  So the New Lew’s first sight of the world reconstituted was his own astonished, hair-clogged nostrils, bobbing around in some fancy oval traveler’s mirror framed by silver lady’s tresses, or maybe weeds in the water, expensive no doubt, and being rhythmically blurred by breathing, apparently his own.

  “Here.” One of them had produced a flask. Lew didn’t recognize what was inside, some kind of brandy he guessed, but he took a long pull anyhow and was soon on his feet. The boys had even found his horse close by and physically undamaged, though mentally could be a different story.

  “Thanks, fellows, guess I’ll be on my way.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it!” cried Neville.

  “Whoever tried to blow you up back there might want another go,” said Nigel.

  Lew had a look at the two of them. His rescuers did not on first inspection seem to offer much deterrent to further bomb-roller interest in his person. Trilby hats, velvet knee-britches, fringe haircuts, gunbelts adorned with avalanche lilies and wild primrose. The Oscar Wilde influence, he guessed. Since the famous poet had returned to England from his excursion to America, brimming with enthusiasm for the West and Leadville in particular, all kinds of flamboyant adventurers had been showing up in these mountains.

  Then again, where else did he have to go to anymore, now that he’d crossed over what had just been revealed with such clarity as the terrible American divide, between hunter and prey?

  BY NIGHTFALL THEY were among old Anasazi ruins up west of Dolores Valley someplace.

  “Like a Red Indian Stonehenge!”

  “Only different!”

  They sat in a “mystic triangle” and lit aromatic candles and some hand-rolled cigarettes of local grifa, and one of them produced a strange, though not all that strange, deck of cards.

  “What are these—they’re Mex, ain’t they?”

  “British, actually. Well, Miss Colman-Smith is West Indian. . . .”

  “These espadas here I recognize, and these are copas, but what’s with this customer hangin’ upside down with his leg bent in a figure four—”

  “It’s the Hanged Man, of course. . . . Oh, I say, do you mean you’ve never seen a Tarot pack before?”

  “Every chartomancer’s dream!” and “Whizzo!” and so forth, including an embarrassingly long examination of Lew’s face. “Yes, well, dark hair and eyes, that’s usually the Knight of Swords—”

  “What you must do now, Lewis, as Querent, if you don’t mind, is to ask the cards for the answer to a specific question.”

  “Sure. How many Chinese living in South Dakota?”

  “No, no—something about your life, that you need to know. Something personal.”

  “Like, ‘What in hell’s going on here,’ would that do it?”

  “It might. Let’s inquire, shall we.” And sure enough, the last card to turn up in the layout, the one these birds kept saying really mattered, was that Hanged Man again.

  Overhead every few seconds, arcs of light went falling in all directions. It was the Perseid meteor shower, a seasonal event, but for a while it seemed like that the whole firmament was coming unstitched. Not to mention Indian ghosts sweeping by all night, as amused as Indians ever got with the mysteries of the white man.

  Next morning the trio rode south, looking to pick up the train in New Mexico—Neville and Nigel being on the way back to their native England—and within the week found themselves aboard a strangely luxurious string of oversize parlor, dining, and club cars, even the crew’s caboose turning out to be fancier than the average Chicago hotel suite. The payback for all this lavish appointment was a rumor, inescapable as engine soot, of a mysterious plot to blow the train up. “Probably gonna all have to get out and walk,” opined Mr. Gilmore, the senior conductor.

  “Not a cozy situation, Chief,” Lew reverting to his former identity, which seemed more and more lately to be off on an extended vacation, or maybe even world tour. “What’ve we got here, reds? Wops? some gang of box-blowers?”

  Mr. Gilmore produced a handkerchief the size of a saloon towel to mop off his brow. “You name it, and there’s at least one story. Only part they all have in common is it’s gonna be a hell of a blow-up. Bigger than dynamite. Whole stretch of Texas, maybe New Mexico, turned to badlands quick as a maiden’s sigh.”

  So they proceeded from one depot to the next, waiting for the terrible moment, palatial towers of carved stone and fancy millwork coming up over the edge of the brushland, looming out of early-morning thunderstorms, then, presently, shining in the downpours, roads and shacks, fences and crossroads saloons . . . passing down main streets of towns, attended as they crept in and through by riders in trail slickers who galloped alongside for miles, small boys who jumped on and off whenever the train slowed for grades or curves, elderly humorists who pretended to lie down on the track to catch a snooze only to roll out of the way cackling at the last minute, lines of drovers at track-side who just stood and watched the leisurely trundling, no telling what was on their minds, reflections of clouds in the sky blowing smoothly across their eyeballs, horses patiently hitched nearby, exchanging looks now and then, all of whom seemed to be in on the story, which, however, varied. Sometimes whatever was on the way might resemble a tornado the size of a county, a night-bringing presence at the horizon, moving across the plain, while for others it might be lights in the sky, “A second Moon, that you can’t tell how close or how dangerous. . . .” What Lew had been trying not to think about was the Kieselguhr Kid or somebody who’d decided to call themselves that, because sometimes it was like he was out there, a spirit hovering just over the nearest ridgeline, the embodiment of a past obl
igation that would not let him go but continued to haunt, to insist.

  Lew, bewildered, sat and watched and mostly just smoked cigars and covertly nibbled at his dwindling Cyclomite supply, trying to make sense of the alterations proceeding inside his brain, eyes gleaming with unaccustomed emotional dew.

  They arrived in Galveston without incident but with whatever was nearly upon them hanging, waiting to descend. Neville and Nigel booked transatlantic passage on a louche-looking freighter whose flag neither of them recognized, and spent the rest of the day attempting to communicate with a Chinese gentleman who they had somehow convinced themselves was a retailer of opiates.

  “Good heavens, Nigel, we nearly forgot! The others are going to be ever so frightfully upset if we don’t bring them back some Wild West souvenirs, if not an actual scalp or something.”

  “Well, don’t look at me,” said Lew.

  “Yes, but you’d be perfect!” cried Neville.

  “For what?”

  “We’ll bring you to England,” Nigel declared. “That’s what we’ll do.”

  “Don’t have a ticket.”

  “It’s all right, we’ll stow you away.”

  “Don’t I need a passport?”

  “Not for England. Just don’t forget your cowboy sombrero. It is authentic, isn’t it?”

  Lew had a close look at them. The boys were flushed around the eyeballs, their pupils were tiny pinpoints you could hardly make out, and they were giggling so much you had to ask them to repeat things more than once.

  He ended up down in a cargo hold for the next two weeks, inside a steamer trunk with a couple-three discreet airholes bored into it. From time to time, one of the N’s crept down with food stolen from the mess decks, though Lew didn’t have an appetite.

  “This tub’s been rocking around some,” he stopped vomiting long enough to mention.

  “They say there’s some sort of dreadful storm blowing up from the south,” Nigel said.