Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

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  by which their ancient predecessors had sworn their deepest oath. The idea, as nearly as Neville and Nigel could explain it, was to look at the array of numbers as occupying not two dimensions but three, set in a regular tetrahedron—and then four dimensions, and so on, until you found yourself getting strange, which was taken to be a sign of impending enlightenment.

  At the moment the boys, who planned to sponsor Lew for induction into the Order, were being kind enough as well to offer wardrobe advice.

  “What’s it matter,” Lew wanted to know, “if everybody’ll have on the same, what you call ‘postulant’ outfits anyhow?”

  “Nevertheless,” said Neville, “the cowboy boots are fatally inappropriate, Lewis—here at Chunxton Crescent it’s barefoot or begone.”

  “What—not even socks?”

  “Not even if that tartan were authentic,” Nigel looking pointedly at what Lew at the moment had on his feet.

  They had brought him tonight to the T.W.I.T. sanctuary, faced in Caen stone which at twilight somehow leached all color from the immediate surroundings, set back behind iron fencework in almost a miniature park, in which masses of shadow which might or might not have had counterparts in the animal kingdom moved with a sinister impatience. “Nice little hacienda,” Lew nodded.

  Inside, somebody was playing a duet on syrinx and lyre. Lew thought he knew the tune, but then it went off in some direction he couldn’t follow. Englishfolk, not obviously exotic, were down on the carpeting in poses reminding Lew of contortionists at the ten-in-one. People strolled around in peculiar outfits or often next to nothing at all. Faces well known from the illustrated press went drifting by. Light was subject to strange modifications not all accounted for by the smoke in the air, as bright presences appeared from nowhere into full view and then as abruptly vanished from it. Humans reincarnated as cats, dogs, and mice crept about or slept by the fire. Stone pillars loomed in the further reaches of the place, with the impression of steps descending into subterranean mystery.

  Lew was greeted by Nicholas Nookshaft, Grand Cohen of the London chapter of the T.W.I.T., a person in mystical robes appliquéd with astrological and alchemical symbols, and a bowl haircut with short fringes. “Neville and Nigel, allowing for some chemical exaggeration, tell us they saw you emerge out of an explosion. The question that arises is, where were you just before.”

  Lew squinted, perplexed. “Strolling down to the creek minding my business. Where else?”

  “Couldn’t have been the same world as the one you’re in now.”

  “You seem pretty sure.”

  The Cohen elaborated. “Lateral world-sets, other parts of the Creation, lie all around us, each with its crossover points or gates of transfer from one to another, and they can be anywhere, really. . . . An unscheduled Explosion, introduced into the accustomed flow of the day, may easily open, now and then, passages to elsewhere. . . .”

  “Sure, like death.”

  “A possibility, but not the only one.”

  “So when I went diving into that blast—”

  Grand Cohen Nookshaft nodded gravely. “You found passage between the Worlds. Your mysterious assailants presented you with an unintended gift.”

  “Who asked them?” Lew grumbled.

  “Yet mightn’t they, and others like them, in providing such passage, be considered agencies of the angelic?”

  “All respect, sir, I think not, they’re more likely Anarchistic terrorists, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Tsk. They are shamans, Mr. Basnight. The closest we in our fallen state may ever come to the uncivilized purity of the world as it was and shall never be again—not for the likes of us.”

  “Can’t buy it, sorry.”

  “You must,” insisted the Grand Cohen. “If you are who we are beginning to believe you might be.”

  Neville and Nigel, who had slipped away during this exchange, returned now in the company of a striking young woman, who regarded Lew out of eyes from which a suggestion of the Oriental might not have been altogether absent.

  “Allow us,” said Nigel, “to introduce Miss— Or actually, as she’s a seventeenth-degree Adept, one ought properly to say ‘Tzaddik,’ except that obviously—”

  “Well blimey, it’s really only old Yashmeen, isn’t it,” added Neville.

  “Well put Neville, and why don’t you go reward yourself with a pie or something?”

  “Perhaps Nigel you’d like one up your nose as well.”

  “Silence, driveling ones,” snarled the girl. “Imagine how idiotic they’d be if they could talk.”

  The two gazed back with expressions in which hopelessly smitten erotic obsession could not really be ruled out, and Lew thought he heard Nigel sigh, “The Tetractys isn’t the only thing round here that’s ineffable.”

  “Children, children,” admonished the Grand Cohen. Frankly as if she had not been standing a foot away, he began to acquaint Lew with the girl’s history. She had been the ward of Lieutenant-Colonel G. Auberon Halfcourt, formerly a squadron commander in the Eighteenth Hussars, seconded some while ago to the Political Department in Simla for the odd extra-regimental chore, and currently believed operating somewhere out in Inner Asia. Yashmeen, sent back here a few years previously for a British education, had been placed under the protection of the T.W.I.T. “Unhappily, to more than one element active in Britain, her degree of bodily safety too readily suggests itself as a means of influencing the Colonel’s behavior. Our custody hence extends rather beyond simple caution.”

  “I can look after myself,” declared the girl, not, it seemed, for the first time.

  Lew beamed in frank admiration. “A fellow can see that, surely enough.”

  “You are not soon to find out,” she turned to advise him.

  “Smartly taken at silly point!” cried Nigel and Neville together.

  Later in the evening, the Grand Cohen took Lew aside and began to explain his personal concept of the Psychical Detective. “The hope being someday to transcend the gray, literalist world of hotel corridors and requisition vouchers, and enter the further condition—‘To know, to dare, to will, to keep silent’—how difficult for most of us to observe these basic imperatives, particularly, you must have noticed, the one about keeping silent. Have I been talking too much, by the way? Frightfully awkward situation to be in, you appreciate.”

  “In the States, ‘detective’ doesn’t mean—” Lew started to point out.

  “Admittedly, ours is an odd sort of work. . . . There is but one ‘case’ which preoccupies us. Its ‘suspects’ are exactly twenty-two in number. These are precisely the cadre of operatives who, working in secret, cause—or at least allow—History upon this island to happen, and they correspond to the twenty-two Major Arcana of the Tarot deck.” Going on to explain, as he had times past counting, that the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana might be regarded as living agencies, positions to be filled with real people, down the generations, each attending to his own personally tailored portfolio of mischief deep or trivial, as the grim determinants appeared, assassinations, plagues, failures of fashion sense, losses of love, as, one by one, flesh-eating sheep sailed over the fence between dreams and the day. “There must always be a Tower. There must always be a High Priestess, Temperance, Fortune, so forth. Now and then, when vacancies occur, owing to death or other misadventure, new occupants will emerge, obliging us to locate and track them, and learn their histories as well. That they inhabit, without exception, a silence as daunting as their near invisibility only intensifies our challenge.”

  “And the crime, sir, if I’m not being too inquisitive, just what would be the nature of that?”

  “Alas, nothing too clearly related to any statute on the books, nor likely to be . . . no, it is more of an ongoing Transgression, accumulating as the days pass, the invasion of Time into a timeless world. Revealed to us, slowly, one hopes not terribly, in a bleak convergen
ce . . . History, if you like.”

  “So I can assume none of this will ever see a courtroom,” said Lew.

  “Suppose there were no such thing, after all, as Original Sin. Suppose the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was never symbolic, but a real being in a real history of intrusion from somewhere else. Say from ‘behind the sky’ Say we were perfect. We were law-abiding and clean. Then one day they arrived.”

  “And . . . and this is how you explain villains and badmen among an otherwise moral population?” Not that Lew was looking for an argument. He was genuinely puzzled.

  “You will see it in practice. I just wouldn’t want it to be too rude a surprise.”

  AS IF INNOCENCE were some sort of humorous disease, transmitted, as in a stage farce, from one character to another, Lew soon found himself wondering if he had it, and if so who he’d caught it from. Not to mention how sick exactly it might be making him. The other way to ask the question being, who in this was playing him for a fish, and how deep was their game? If it was the T.W.I.T. itself using him for motives even more “occult” than they’d pretended to let him in on, then this was a serious manure pile, and he’d best find a way out of it, soon as he could.

  There were mysteries enough. Windowless carriages were arriving at Chunxton Crescent in the middle of the night amid scientifically muffled hoofbeats, impressively sealed documents were shuffled aside whenever Lew approached the Grand Cohen’s desk, less than professionally clandestine attempts were made to have a look in his own field-books. Was it by way of a friendly word of caution, or did somebody want him to be suspicious? maybe even trying to provoke him into doing himself some damage?

  Miss Yashmeen Halfcourt seemed to him the most trustworthy of the bunch, both of them having been picked up, you might say, in more or less helpless condition, and brought here in under the protection of the T.W.I.T. apparatus, for reasons that might not have been fully shared with them. How much this gave them in common, of course, was open to question.

  “Is this what they call ‘walking out’?”

  “I hope not.”

  It was breezy today—Lew was packing the usual umbrella, slicker, dry socks, and miners’ boots against the several kinds of weather to be expected during the average day in south England. Yashmeen was gathering appreciative looks from passersby male and female. No surprise, though she was turned out no more glamorously than anybody else.

  Their route took them through the Park, generally toward Westminster. All around them, just behind a vegetational veil tenuous as the veil of maya, persisted the ancient London landscape of sacred high places, sacrificial stones, and mysterious barrows known to the Druids and whoever they had picked up their ways from.

  “What do you know about Brother Nookshaft?” Lew was wondering. “What was he before he was a Cohen, for instance?”

  “Anything,” she supposed, “from a schoolmaster to a petty criminal. I don’t see him as ex-military. Not enough of the indices there. Beginning with the haircut, actually. I mean it’s not exactly Trumper’s, is it.”

  “Think he might have only tumbled into all this? Some family business he’s taken over?”

  She shook her head, scowling. “These people— no, no, that’s just the trouble, they’re all so unanchored, no history, no responsibility, one day they just appear, don’t they, each with his own secret designs. It might be politics, or even some scheme to defraud.”

  “You sound like a detective. What if they’re sincere about who they say they are?”

  An amused flash of her interesting eyes. “Oh then I’ve judged them ever so unfairly.”

  They walked in silence, Lew frowning as if trying to think something through.

  “On this island,” she went on, “as you will have begun to notice, no one ever speaks plainly. Whether it’s Cockney rhyming codes or the crosswords in the newspapers—all English, spoken or written, is looked down on as no more than strings of text cleverly encrypted. Nothing beyond. Any who may come to feel betrayed by them, insulted, even hurt, even grievously, are simply ‘taking it too seriously.’ The English exercise their eyebrows and smile and tell you it’s ‘irony’ or ‘a bit of fun,’ for it’s only combinations of letters after all, isn’t it.”

  It seemed she was about to go up to University, to Girton College, Cambridge, to study maths.

  Lew must’ve been giving her a look, because she turned to him rather sharply. “Something wrong?”

  He shrugged. “Next they’ll be letting you folks vote.”

  “Not in your lifetime,” she scowled.

  “Only a bit of fun,” Lew protested. It was dawning on him that Yashmeen might be more than what others were claiming on her behalf.

  Evening drew on, the vast jangling thronged somehow monumental London evening, light falling seemingly without a destination across the wind-attended squares and haunted remnants of something older, and they went to eat at Molinari’s in Old Compton Street, also known as the Hôtel d’Italie, reputed to be one of the haunts of Mr. Arthur Edward Waite, though tonight the place was only full of visitors from the suburbs.

  AT FIRST A GREENHORN as to the true nature of the work, Lew depended on traditional readings of the Tarot deck, which in London in those days were pretty much referred to the designs provided by Miss Pamela (“Pixie”) Colman Smith under the guidance of Mr. Waite. But Lew was soon disabused. “In the grammar of their iniquity,” he was instructed, “the Icosadyad, or Company of Twenty-two, observe neither gender nor number. ‘The Chariot’ can turn out to be an entire fighting unit, not infrequently at regimental strength. Go calling on the Hierophant and the door could easily open on a woman, even in some way striking, whom you may in time come to desire.”

  “Man, oh man.”

  “Well, not necessarily you see.”

  As if testing a new policeman on the beat, the twenty-two lost little time in demonstrating to Lew this nomenclatural flexibility. Temperance (number XIV) proved to be an entire family, the Uckenfays, living in a disagreeable western suburb, each of whom specialized in a different pathological impulse he or she was unable to control, including litigiousness, chloral addiction, public masturbating, unexpected discharges of firearms, and, in the case of the baby, Des, scarcely a year old and already four stone, that form of gluttony known to students of the condition as gaver du visage. As of the latest information, The Hermit (IX) was the cordial proprietor of a cigar-divan where Lew soon became part of the regular clientele, The Wheel of Fortune (X) was a Chinese opium-den landlord, based in the Midlands, whose life of luxury was derived from “joints” all over London as well as Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, The Last Judgment (XX) was a streetwalker from Seven Dials, sometimes accompanied by her Pimp, and so forth. . . . Fine with Lew, who always liked to meet new and interesting people, and the chores they brought with them by way of self-introduction were easily disposed of. But then they started coming at him in twos.

  Lew had been in England less than a week when one night a neophyte in the T.W.I.T. had come running in, face white as plaster, in his agitation forgetting to remove his hat, a mauve fedora. “Grand Cohen, Grand Cohen! forgive my interruption! they wanted me to make sure you got this personally.” Handing over a scrap of pale blue notepaper.

  “Quite so,” nodded the G.C., “Madam Eskimoff’s sitting tonight, wasn’t it . . . let us have a look, then. . . . Oh dear.” The paper fluttered in what suddenly resembled a nerveless hand. Lew, who’d been hoping for a quiet evening, looked over in an inquiring way. The Cohen was already shrugging off his ceremonial robes and looking for his shoes. Lew pulled his socks from a jacket pocket, grabbed his own shoes, and together they proceeded to the street and into a growler, and were off.

  En route the Grand Cohen outlined the situation. “It likely has to do,” he sighed, producing from an inner pocket a Tarot pack and flipping through it, “with . . . here, this one, number XV, The Devil”—in particular, the Cohen went on, with the two chained figures found at the bottom of the ca
rd, imagined by their artist Miss Colman Smith, perhaps after Dante, as simple naked man and woman, though in the earlier tradition these had been shown as a pair of demons, genders unspecified, whose fates were bound and who could not separate even if they wanted to. At present this unhappy position among the Major Arcana was occupied by a pair of rival University professors, Renfrew at Cambridge and Werfner at Göttingen, not only eminent in their academic settings but also would-be powers in the greater world. Years before, in the wake of the Berlin Conference of 1878, their shared interest in the Eastern Question had evolved from simple bickering-at-a-distance by way of the professional journals to true mutual loathing, implacable and obsessive, with a swiftness that surprised them both. Soon enough each had come to find himself regarded as a leading specialist, consulted by the Foreign Office and Intelligence Services of his respective country, not to mention others who preferred to remain unnamed. With the years their rivalry had continued to grow well beyond the Balkans, beyond the ever-shifting borders of the Ottoman Empire, to the single vast Eurasian landmass and that ongoing global engagement, with all its English, Russian, Turkish, German, Austrian, Chinese, Japanese—not to mention indigenous—components, styled by Mr. Kipling, in a simpler day, “The Great Game.” The professors’ manœuvrings had at least the grace to avoid the mirrorlike—if symmetries arose now and then, it was written off to accident, “some predisposition to the echoic,” as Werfner put it, “perhaps built into the nature of Time,” added Renfrew. Howsoever, over their cloistering walls and into the map of the megacosm, the two professors continued to launch their cadres of spellbound familiars and enslaved disciples. Some of these found employment with the Foreign Services, others in international trade or as irregular adventurers assigned temporarily to their nations’ armies and navies—all sworn to loyalties in whose service they were to pass through the greater world like spirit presences, unsensed by all but the adept.