Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “You know the place?”

  “Hah, lookit this, he’s shocked. Charlie wanted to put money on it. Could’ve ate for a week bettin against your character.”

  “The Silver Orchid, Dally?”

  “All my Pa’s fault.” At some point Merle had decided they must address the sensitive matter of sexual congress or, often as not, it being a mining town, sexual congregation. Through the good offices of California Peg, the sousmaîtresse of the Silver Orchid, where he had been a steady patron, Merle arranged for a program of study, brief and clandestine, “offering occasion to be sure,” as Merle put it, “for Grundyesque screaming, but no worse when one thinks about it than giving a child a small glass of diluted wine at mealtimes so that she may grow up with some sense of the difference between wine with dinner and wine for dinner. You’re old enough anyhow,” he’d been telling her for years now, “and it sure ‘s heck beats hearing it from me, sooner or later you’ll be hitching up with the perfect young gent, and knowing the story now’ll save you both untold worlds of heartache—”

  “Not to mention sparing you a lot of work,” she pointed out.

  “You’ll see men at their best and worst, dear,” Peg added, “and all in between, which is where you’ll find most of them, but never, ever put money on the needs of men getting too complicated, least any more than, oh, say, the rules of blackjack.”

  So Dally, a girl of great good sense to begin with, came to pick up in and about Popcorn Alley a range of useful information. She discovered that lip-rouge for cracked lips made an interesting alternative to ear wax. For a month’s wages from up at the mine, she acquired, from a hurdy girl at the Pick and Gad, a .22-caliber revolver, which she wore in plain sight mainly on account of she didn’t own one dress or skirt to hide it under, but also for its simple presence, not as overwhelmingly obvious on her slight form as a full-size weapon would’ve been, yet leaving no one in doubt as to her ability to draw, aim, and fire it, which she practiced at devoutly whenever she got the chance, out in back of various spoil heaps, eventually able to win a little spare change from wagering with would-be crack shots among the miners. “Annie Oakley!” the Finns took to yelling when she came in sight, tossing small coins in the air in hopes she’d drill one for them, which now and then she was happy to do, providing many a future returnee to Finland with a lucky amulet to see him through the days of civil war and White Terror, sacking and massacre that lay beyond that—a promise that now and then odds might be beaten and the counterfactual manifest itself in that wintry world awaiting them.

  Erotic refinement was not among the allurements of the Telluride row—for that, she gathered, you’d have to go down to Denver—but at least she came out of the elementary course at the Silver Orchid immune to, if not real comfortable with, the usual rude surprises which have blighted the marriage state for so many and, best of all, as Peg confided, without “Love,” as defined by the heartsick and tumescent generations of cowpoke Casanovas out here, getting too mixed up in matters, which could easily have put her off of it altogether. “Love,” whatever that turned out to be, would occupy a whole different piece of range.

  “The sort of thing a girl should be talking over with her mother,” she told Frank, “that’s if her mother was handy and not hidden someplace among millions of folks in a city that might as well be on another planet. One more reason for me to be heading out of here to find her, sooner better than later, not to mention half the time Merle don’t seem to want me around, and to tell the truth I’m gettin bored being around him, and miners are not the world’s greatest beau material, and I sure need the change of scene. Let’s see, there was somethin else, but I forgot.”

  “Hope you’re not feeling like that you’re responsible for him.”

  “Course I do. Sometimes he might as well be my kid.”

  Frank nodded. “Called gettin out of the house. Just one of those things everybody gets around to.”

  “Thanks, Fred.”

  “Frank.”

  “Deceived again! Now you’ve got to buy me a beer.”

  THE “VACANCY” at the Silver Orchid turned out to be a space between two walls, way in the back, reached through a false fireplace. There was room for Frank and a cigarette, if he tore it in half. He was paid up at the Sheridan for another night but decided not to try and get his money back.

  Clientele went crashing in and out. The girls laughed way too much, and without mirth. Glass broke frequently. The piano, even to Frank’s tin ear, was seriously out of tune. Frank lay down between the walls with his coat rolled up for a pillow and drifted off to sleep. He was awakened about midnight by Merle Rideout hammering on the wall.

  “Picked up your things at the hotel. Good thing you didn’t. Bob Meldrum was in and out and making everybody nervous. Come along if you got a minute, want you to look at something.” He led Frank outside under the chill, imponderable cone of an electric bulb high on a pole, and they walked amid the feral discourse of the cribs, while a gunshot occurred back down Pacific Street, somebody climbed to a rooftop and began to recite “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and nearer at hand single-jackers climaxed and ruffled doves wailed, till they were down beside the river, where the Row had been squeezed to by more respectable forms of commerce, and it was possible to stand with the ungoverned electric town at your back, the untraveled night in front, with the San Miguel between, brand new out of the mountains throwing flashes of light like declarations of innocence.

  “There is back in New York,” said Merle, “a certain Dr. Stephen Emmens. Dismissed by many as a crackpot, but don’t you be fooled, for he’s the real article. What he does is, he’ll take some silver, just the smallest trace of gold in it, and start to pound on it, at very low temperature, runnin’ a bath of liquid carbonic to keep it cold, keep pounding onto it, pounding all day and night, till little by little the gold content, some strange and unknown way, begins to increase. At least up over point three hundred—sometimes even gone as high as nine ninety-seven.”

  “‘Unknown way,’ sure, this is how confidence operators talk.”

  “All right. Not ‘unknown’ to me, I just don’t like to spook people if I don’t have to. You’ve heard of transmutation?”

  “Heard of.”

  “All it could be. The silver gets transmuted to gold, and spare me that face. Dr. Emmens calls the stuff ‘argentaurum.”’ Merle brought out an egg-size nugget. “This is the stuff itself, argentaurum, about a fifty-fifty mix. And this”—into the other hand sprang a blurry crystal about the size of a pocket Bible but thin as a nymph’s mirror—“this is calcite, known in this particular format to some of the visiting labor as Schieferspath, a good pure specimen I happened to obtain one night back in Creede—yes, night does return now and then to Creede—off of a superstitious Scotchman holding a perfectly good nine of diamonds he couldn’t bring himself to hang on to. Think of this piece of spar here as the kitchen window, and just take a look through.”

  “Well holy Toledo,” said Frank after a while.

  “Don’t see much of that in mining school?”

  Not only had the entire scene doubled and, even more peculiarly, grown brighter, but as for the two overlapping images of the nugget itself, one was as gold as the other was silver, no doubt at all. . . . At some point Merle was obliged to remove the wafer-thin rhomboid from Frank’s grasp.

  “It is that way with some,” Merle remarked, “leaves em spoiled for anything but the one breed of ghost-light.”

  “Where’s this from?” Frank’s voice slow and stunned, as if he’d forgotten about the nugget altogether.

  “This piece of spar? Not from around here, most likely Mexican, from down that Veta Madre someplace around Guanajuato, Guanajuato, where silver mines and spar go together like frijoles and rice, they say. For the other thing gets taken out of there, strangely enough, is the same silver for the Mexican silver dollars that Brother Emmens uses exclusively in that secret process of his. A mother lode south of the border there of pre-arg
entauric silver, with all that spar right in the neighborhood, see what I’m gettin at.”

  “Not really. Unless you’re sayin that double refraction somehow is the cause of this—”

  “Yes and how could something weak and weightless as light make solid metals transmute? does seem crazy, don’t it—down here anyway, down at our own humble ground level and below, where it’s all weight and opacity. But consider the higher regions, the light-carrying Æther, penetrating everyplace, as the medium where change like that is possible, where alchemy and modern electromagnetic science converge, consider double refraction, one ray for gold, one for silver, you could say.”

  “You could.”

  “Just saw it yourself.”

  “Far beyond anythin the folks at Golden must’ve wanted their mine engineers to know about, sorry. I’m only trusting you not to take too much advantage of my ignorance.”

  “Appreciate that,” Merle twinkled back, “so I’ll let you in on something. This Emmens process, even with what it costs—and the figure ten thousand dollars per run’s been mentioned, but of course that’s now, and it’s bound to get cheaper—this stuff could knock the Gold Standard right onto its glorified ass. And what’ll happen to metal prices then? Did the Silver Act, all the foofooraw went with that, get repealed for nothing? Will gold turn out to be worth no more than silver plus the cost of this process, and what’ll there be then to crucify mankind on a cross of? Not to mention the Bank of England, and the British Empire, and Europe and all those empires, and everybody they lend money to—pretty soon it’s the whole world, you see?”

  “‘And I’ll sell you all the details of the Emmens process for just fifty cents’—that what you’re leadin up to? My brain ain’t quite made of pudding yet, Professor, and even if this is all on the straight, who’d be simple enough to want to buy any of that Argentina-whatever-it-is—”

  “Bureau of the Mint, for one.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Don’t take my word, ask around. Doc Emmens has been selling argentaurum ingots to the U.S. Mint since ‘97 or thereabouts, since the days of Lyman Gage, that old Gold Standard hand and bank president, you hadn’t been so bughouse over zinc you might’ve heard what everybody else knows. Big chunk of our damn U.S. economy resting squarely onto it, how about that?”

  “Merle. Why are you even showing me this?”

  “Because maybe what you think you’re looking for isn’t really what you’re looking for. Maybe it’s something else.”

  Frank could not escape the strange impression that he had walked into a variety theater and some magician, Chinese for example, had summoned him up front to be the stooge in some long complicated trick with a line of patter Frank was too confused to appreciate fully. “Looking for . . .”

  “Not this nugget. Not this little window of Iceland spar either. Fact,” Merle’s voice beginning to divide, like a kettle coming to the boil, into sharp little creaks of amusement, “there is a whole catalogue of things you’re not looking for.”

  “Well tell me. What it is I’m really looking for. Besides a saloon, about now.”

  “Just guessin’, but it’s also what your father Webb was looking for, except he didn’t know it any more than you do.”

  That damn Chinese feeling again.

  “Go talk to Doc Turnstone. He might have an idea or two.”

  At the shift in the sound of Merle’s voice, Frank felt a strange wave of internal disquiet. “Why?”

  But Merle had retreated behind his professionally impassive magician’s face. “You remember those tommyknockers you and Dahlia ran into up at the Hell-kite?” Well, there had been a spell where Merle too was seeing little people down in the stopes, some done up quite peculiarly indeed, unusual hats, military uniforms not of the U.S. Army exactly, little pointed shoes and so forth, and one evening he was injudicious enough to mention this to his fellow man of science, whereupon Doc Turnstone confidently declared it to be the Charles Bonnet syndrome, mention of which he had lately run across in Puckpool’s classic Adventures in Neuropathy. “Been attributed to any number of causes, including macular degeneration and disturbances of the temporal lobe.”

  “How about just some real duendes?” Merle said.

  “That’s not a rational explanation.”

  “All respect Doc, I can’t agree, for they’re down there, all right.”

  “You like to show me?”

  Third shift, of course, best time for that sort of thing. In a spirit of scientific inquiry, the Doc had abstained from his usual evening laudanum, though this hadn’t improved his mood, in fact to Merle he seemed quite jumpy as the two of them, wearing overalls and miners’ waterproofs and packing electric torches, entered a hole in the moonlit hillside and made their way through ancient, dripping debris down a sharply inclined tunnel into an abandoned part of the workings.

  “Having humans around causes ‘em discomfort,” Merle had explained up top. “So they tend to resort to places where the humans ain’t.”

  Not only had the tommyknockers found this sector of the Little Hellkite congenial—in the years since its abandonment they had converted it into a regular damn full-scale Tommyknockers Social Hall. And abruptly there they all were, sure enough, a regular subterranean tableau. Those duendes were playing poker and pool here, drinking red whiskey and home-brewed beer, eating food stolen out of miners’ lunch pails as well as the pantries of the unmarrieds’ eating hall, getting into fights, telling tasteless jokes, just as you might find in any recreational club aboveground, any night of the week.

  “Well, this one’s easy,” muttered the Doc as if to himself. “I’ve gone insane, is all.”

  “We couldn’t both be having exactly the same kind of Charles Whatsis-name trouble?” Merle supposed. “No. Wouldn’t make sense.”

  “More sense than what I’m seeing.”

  So they became in a way conspirators against, if not the owners at least the everyday explanations owners and the like tended to favor. The belief, for instance, that tommyknockers are not little people in whimsical costumes but “only” pack rats. The thing that owners found comforting about pack rats was their habit of constantly stealing explosives. Every stick of dynamite a pack rat stole was one less in the hands of Anarchists or Union men. “Someplace,” Dally declared, “there’s at least one tommyknocker with a hell of a lot of dynamite stashed away. A dang dynamite El Dorado. Now what’s he want with all that explosive?”

  “Sure it’s all the same critter?”

  “I know it. I know his name. I speak their language.”

  “Don’t,” said the Doc, “don’t bother telling me. Depends whether he’s stealing detonator caps, too, I guess. How many of them’s missing is what’d worry me a bit.”

  Frank found Doc Turnstone on the midnight-to-dawn shift at the Miners’ Hospital. “Merle Rideout said I should look you up.”

  “Then you’re Frank Traverse.”

  Were he and Merle in touch by direct wire, or what? Frank noticed the Doc staring at him. “Somethin?”

  “Don’t know if Merle mentioned it or not, your sister Lake and I kept company for a time.”

  Another one of Lake’s admirers. “She’s a beauty,” friends and runninmates had always been quick to assure Frank, though he seldom ever could see it. He asked Kit once, who seemed to spend more time with her than anybody, but the kid only shrugged, “I trust her.” As if that might be some help.

  “Yehp but I mean are we going to have to go up someday against some damn reptile can’t resist these charms of hers I’m always hearin about?”

  “Think she can take care of herself. You’ve seen her shoot, she ain’t bad.”

  “That’s what a brother likes to hear.”

  “Fact is,” Frank said now, “is we haven’t seen much of each other lately.”

  Another, seemed like a minute, passed before the Doc shook himself like a dog emerging from a mountain stream and apologized. “Lake, she broke my, just damn broke my heart.”

/>   Well, well. “Had that happen,” said Frank, though in fact he hadn’t. “Cases like yours,” kindly as he could, “what I usually tend to prescribe’s Old Gideon, three-finger doses, for as long as it takes?”

  The Doc beamed a little sheepishly. “Wasn’t looking for sympathy. Not as if she swept through like an act of nature. Still, if you’re buying . . .”

  Back in 1899, not long after the terrible cyclone that year which devastated the town, young Willis Turnstone, freshly credentialed from the American School of Osteopathy, had set out westward from Kirksville, Missouri, with a small grip holding a change of personal linen, an extra shirt, a note of encouragement from Dr. A. T. Still, and an antiquated Colt’s in whose use he was far from practiced, arriving at length in Colorado, where one day, riding across the Uncompahgre Plateau, he was set upon by a small band of pistoleros. “Hold it right there, miss, let’s have a look at what’s in that attractive valise o’ yours.”

  “Not much,” Willis said.

  “Hey, what’s this? Packing some iron here! Well, well, never let it be said Jimmy Drop and his gang denied a tender soul a fair shake now, little lady, you just grab a hold of your great big pistol and we’ll get to it, shall we?” The others had cleared a space which Willis and Jimmy now found themselves alone at either end of, in classic throwdown posture. “Go on ahead, don’t be shy, I’ll give you ten seconds gratis, ‘fore I draw. Promise.” Too dazed to share entirely the gang’s spirit of innocent fun, Willis slowly and inexpertly raised his revolver, trying to aim it as straight as a shaking pair of hands would allow. After a fair count of ten, true to his word and fast as a snake, Jimmy went for his own weapon, had it halfway up to working level before abruptly coming to a dead stop, frozen into an ungainly crouch. “Oh, pshaw!” the badman screamed, or words to that effect.