Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Let alone judgment in the dock of Christian Morality, certain and pitiless, by That Which all temporal powers, judges included, must one day bow to—”

  “Lady,” observed the impertinent snip under discussion, “if I can get through the average Saturday night in Telluride, there’s nothing back east’ll present much of a problem.”

  Merle beamed, as close as he ever got to fatherly pride. “You take care now, Dahlia.” Everybody else was aboard, the train about to make its backward departure, as if it couldn’t bear to lose sight of Telluride till the last minute.

  “So long, Pa.”

  They had been in and out of each other’s arms so often, she had no uneasiness with good-bye abrazos. Merle, who had a sense of the bets on the table here, knew he better not spook her now. Neither of them had ever had much interest in breaking each other’s heart. In theory they both knew she had to move on, though all he wanted right now was to wait, even just another day. But he knew that feeling, and he guessed it would pass.

  Tengo que get el fuck out of aqui,” Kit reckoned. First thing up in the morning, last thing before climbing into bed at night, he found himself repeating it, like a prayer. Yale’s charm had not only worn away at last but also was revealing now the toxic layers beneath, as Kit came to understand how little the place was about studying and learning, much less finding a transcendent world in imaginaries or vectors—though sometimes, to be sure, he’d caught hints of some Kabbalah or unverbalized knowledge being transferred as if mind to mind, not because of so much as in spite of Yale. To do with the invisible new waves especially, latent in the Maxwell Field Equations years before Hertz found them—Shunkichi Kimura, who had studied with Gibbs here, had returned to Japan, joined the Naval Staff college faculty, and co-developed wireless telegraphy in time for the war with Russia. Vectors and wireless telegraphy, a silent connection.

  Gibbs had died at the end of April, and amid the general despondency in the math department, Kit realized it was the last straw, revealing Yale to be no more really than a sort of high-hat technical school for learning to be a Yale Man, if not indeed a factory for turning out Yale Men, gentlemen but no scholars except inadvertently, and that was about it.

  ’Fax was no help with this. Kit wouldn’t have known how to begin to bring the subject up, even though ‘Fax offered him more than enough openings.

  “All the time you’ve been here, and you haven’t joined any clubs.”

  “Too busy.”

  “Busy?” They looked at one another at some interplanetary range. “I say Kit, I mean you might as well be a Jew, you know.”

  This did not clarify anything. Jews at Yale at that time were an exotic species.

  Early in his hitch at Yale, Kit had been at a track meet one day and seen a boy in his class being greeted by a party of older men dressed in what Kit recognized by now as very expensive town suits. They all stood and chatted, smiling and easy, paying no attention to the young athletes in plain sight all across the deep green field who ran, jumped, swiveled, and launched, entering unsuspected reaches of pain and body damage, striving toward the day’s offers of simulated immortality. Kit thought, I will never look like this fellow, talk like that, be wanted in that way. At first it produced a terrible feeling of exclusion, a piercing conviction that because of where and to whom he had been born, some world of visible privilege would forever be denied him. There would arrive a point where, returned to his right mind again, he could ask, reasonably, why did I want that so much? though until then it had felt for months like his life had gone into eclipse.

  He began to keep an eye out for this peculiar traffic, on the campus, in town, at ceremonies and socials, soon recognizing a purposeful two-step of college boys and older men whose story of success the boys wished to re-enact. He supposed that was it.

  In classes, Gibbs, before working through a problem, had been fond of saying, “We shall pretend to know nothing about this solution from Nature.” Generations of students, Kit among them, had taken that to heart, in all its metaphysical promise. Though Vectorism offered a gateway into regions the operatives of Wall Street were unlikely ever to understand, let alone penetrate, there nonetheless, set closely every way Kit looked, were Vibe sentinels, eyes in leafy ambuscade, as if Kit were a species of investment, clues to whose future performance could be gathered only through minute-to-minute surveillance, shift an eyelid and they might miss out on something essential. Worse, as if the plan all along had been to drive him so far inside his head he’d lose the way back. Being the sort of mathematician he was, Kit found himself with contradictory allegiances, knowing that he must not turn by much from the mechanics of the given world, yet at the same time remaining aware that there was no role for his destiny as a Vectorist within any set of Vibe goals he could imagine, any more than the magnate could imagine Gibbs’s grand system, or the higher promise.

  “Because you can understand these airy-fairy scratch-marks,” Scarsdale Vibe had scolded, when it became clear that Kit’s reluctance to become a Vibe heir was not coyness merely for the sake of improving the deal, “do you imagine yourself better than us?”

  “More a case of what it leads on to, I think,” said Kit, not about to be badgered into a dispute with the gent paying the bills.

  “While the rest of us, you mean, are left behind in this soiled Creation.”

  “Is that what I mean? Here—” still amiable, he drew toward them a block of paper quadrilled into quarter-inch squares.

  “No, no, don’t bother.”

  “It’s nothing too spiritual.”

  “Young man, I am as spiritual a person as any you are liable to run into at the formerly proud institution you now attend.” He stalked out, leaving a glowing trail of offended righteousness.

  KIT DREAMED HE was with his father in a city that was Denver but not really Denver, in some kind of strange variety saloon full of the usual collection of lowlifes, though everybody was acting unnaturally well-behaved. Except for Webb, who was yelling. “The Æther! What’n the hell have I got here, a little damn Tesla on my hands? What do you care about the Æther?”

  “I have to know if it exists.”

  “Nobody has to know that.”

  “Right now, Father, I do. I always believed that children came from Heaven. . . .”

  He went silent, expecting Webb to complete the thought he was suddenly too sad to elaborate. Webb, as if with no idea what had brought on such intensity, couldn’t answer. Everybody else, every boozehound, mule-skinner, opium smoker, and flimflam artist in the place, paid them no notice, preferring shoptalk, gossip, and chitchat about sports. He woke. The hand on his shoulder was that of his scout, Proximus. “That Professor Vanderjuice wants to see you up at the Sloane Lab.”

  “What time is it, Prox?”

  “Don’t ask me, I was asleep, too.”

  All the way out Prospect Street, past the cemetery, the feeling grew that something awful was about to happen. Kit doubted it was about Theories of Light, which he happened to be taking that semester with the Professor, who had studied it under Quincke in Berlin, back before Michelson and Morley, so there was kind of a distinct Ætheric residue there. Out of academic enclosure, south of the Green, splashing beer about the room, waving for emphasis a triangular slice from the Italian cheese-and-tomato pastries to be found everywhere in that neighborhood, the old bird thank goodness was quite another species entirely, recalling tales of the early electrical days that even the most beer-soaked of freshman attended to, wide-eyed.

  At last he reached the rat’s-nest office where Professor Vanderjuice was waiting with a solemn look. Rising, he handed Kit a letter, and Kit saw immediately that it brought news he was not ready for. The envelope was postmarked Denver, but the date was illegible, and someone had already opened and read the letter inside.

  Dear Kit,

  Mamma asked me to write and tell you that Pa is gone. They say it happened over in the McElmo someplace. And not from “natural causes.” Reef brought back
his body and he is buried in the miners cemetery at Telluride. Reef says there is no need for you to come back right now, he and Frank will take care of all that must be done. Mamma is being strong, saying like she knew it would always happen, enemies wherever he went, borrowed time and so on.

  I hope you are well and that someday we will see you again. Keep studying hard back there, don’t quit and try not to worry much about this, for we are all able to do what we have to.

  We miss you.

  Your loving sister,

  Lake

  Kit gazed at the violated cover, so unraggedly slit open as to suggest a letter-knife from a desk-set of some quality. First things first. “Who opened this, sir?”

  “I don’t know,” replied the Professor. “This is how they handed it to me.”

  “They.”

  “The provost’s office.”

  “It’s addressed to me.”

  “They have been keeping it there for a while. . . .” Pausing as if to consider the next part of the sentence.

  “It’s all right.”

  “My boy . . .”

  “Your position. I understand. But if it means there was some doubt about passing it on to me at all . . .”

  “We do our best around here not to be altogether bought and sold. . . .”

  “Sir, there is still an implication here. Of conniving, at least. More, maybe, though that is so terrible . . .”

  “Yes.” The old fellow’s eyes had begun to brim.

  Kit nodded. “Thank you. I’ll have to think about what to do.” He felt inside himself the presence of a small, wounded girl who was trying to cry—not in pain, or to appease any who would harm her further, but as if in fear of being left to the hazards of a winter street in a city known to abandon its poor. He had not cried for a long time.

  He wandered without any clear plan, wanting to be anonymous among the town mobility, wanting at the same time to be alone. He knew that nothing known to the alternate universe of vector analysis could bring him comfort or help him see a way out. Moriarty’s wasn’t open yet, Louis Lassen’s lunch stand would have been good for a hamburger sandwich if Kit could’ve been sure he wouldn’t choke on it. Canonical Eli venues were not the ticket today. He came to rest about a mile up the Quinnipiac on top of West Rock, lay on the ground, and let himself cry.

  NOT A WORD then from any of the Vibes about his father, not even from Colfax—no condolences, inquiries as to Kit’s current state of mind, nothing like that. Could be they believed Kit hadn’t found out yet. Could be they were waiting for him to bring it up. Could be they didn’t care. But there was the other possibility, growing more probable the longer the silence continued. That they knew all about it, because—but could he afford to pursue that line of thought? If his suspicions proved to have anything to them, what would that oblige him to do about it?

  The academic year went two-stepping on toward summer, and the girls wondered why Kit had stopped showing up at dances. One day, gazing out across the Sound, he observed a peculiar dark geometrical presence where previously there’d been only the misted shores of Long Island. Day by day, when visibility permitted, he noticed whatever it was increasing in height. He borrowed a telescope from a classmate, took it up on top of East Rock, ignored the spooning couples and dedicated drinkers, and devoted what time he could to observing the structure’s vertical progress. A trusswork tower, apparently eight-sided, was slowly rising over there. Whatever it was supposed to be, it was the talk of New Haven. Soon, at night, from that same general direction, came heavenwide multicolored flashes of light, which only the incurably complacent tried to explain away as heat lightning. Kit couldn’t help recalling Colorado Springs and Fourth of July Eve 1899.

  “It’s Tesla,” confirmed Professor Vanderjuice, “putting up another transmitter. I understand once you worked with him in Colorado.”

  “In a way it’s how I got to Yale.” Kit told him about meeting Foley Walker in Colorado Springs.

  “That’s odd,” said the Professor. “The Vibe interests once hired me—” He looked around the office. “Do you mind taking a walk?”

  They headed into the Italian neighborhood south of the Green. The Professor told Kit about the agreement he and Scarsdale Vibe had come to in Chicago ten years before. “I’ve never felt proud of it. There was always something vaguely criminal.”

  “Vibe was financing Tesla but wanted you to sabotage his work?”

  “Morgan’s had been doing much the same thing, but more effectively. Eventually Vibe saw there’d never be a practical system of wireless power transmission, that the economy had long before devised means to prevent it.”

  “But Tesla’s building a transmitter now.”

  “It doesn’t matter. If it ever gets to be too much of a threat to the existing power arrangements, they’ll just have it dynamited.”

  “So they didn’t really need your anti-transmitter.”

  “To tell the truth, I never worked all that diligently on it. One day, just around the time I was beginning to feel dishonest taking Vibe’s money, the checks stopped arriving—not even a letter of dismissal. I know I should have quit sooner, but things worked out anyway.”

  “You were able to do the right thing,” Kit said miserably, “but the longer this goes on, the more I owe them, the less likely it’ll be I can ever turn it around. What can I do? How do I buy my way out?”

  “You could first convince yourself that you owe them”—he would not say “him”—“nothing.”

  “Sure. In Colorado people get shot for that all the time. It’s called poker.”

  The Professor breathed deeply, once or twice, as if preparing to lift an unaccustomed weight. “Allow for the possibility,” he said as evenly as he could, “that forces unnamed for the moment are corrupting you. It is their inevitable policy. Those they may not at the moment harm, they corrupt. Usually all it takes is money, for they have so much that no one feels any moral hesitancy about taking it. Their targets become rich, and where’s the harm in that?”

  “And if money doesn’t do the trick . . .”

  “Then there must follow the slow and evil work they have made their specialty, conducted all in silence. Perhaps years of it, until one day, money having been traded off for time, the same soulless condition is brought about, with the money meanwhile having been put somewhere else and bringing a better rate of return.”

  They were passing the entrance of an “apizza” establishment. The aroma was distracting, you’d say compelling. “Come on,” said the Professor, whose condition, over the preceding year, had progressed from a simple tropism to advanced pizzamania, “let’s perhaps grab a slice, what do you say?”

  As his relations with Scarsdale Vibe had dwindled to yearly tycoonical head-insertions into Sloane Lab and eventually, blessedly, to none at all, Heino Vanderjuice began to think that once or twice he’d detected, out at the far edges of his visual field, a glimmering winged object among the rusticated stonework and the rippling elms, and there grew upon him the curious notion that this might actually be his soul, whose exact whereabouts since 1893 had been in some doubt.

  His conscience was also showing signs of feeling, as if recovering from frostbite. One day, chatting with young Traverse, he happened to pull an old copy of the British science journal Nature from a row of them on his bookshelf, and leaf through to one of the articles. “P. G. Tait on Quaternions. Regards their chief merit as being ‘uniquely adapted to Euclidean space . . .’ because—‘lamp’ this—‘What have students of physics, as such, to do with more than three dimensions?’ I invite your attention to ‘as such.’”

  “A physics student, as something else, would have need for more than three dimensions?” Kit puzzled.

  “Well, Mr. Traverse, if you ever considered becoming that ‘something else,’ Germany would seem the logical place for you. Grassmann’s Ausdehnungslehre can be extended to any number of dimensions you like. Dr. Hilbert at Göttingen is developing his ‘Spectral Theory,’ which r
equires a vector space of infinite dimensions. His co-adjutor Minkowski thinks that dimensions will eventually all just fade away into a Kontinuum of space and time. Minkowski and Hilbert, in fact, will be holding a joint seminar at Göttingen next year in the electrodynamics of moving bodies, not to mention Hilbert’s recent work on Eigenheit theory—vectors right in the heart and soul of it all, mightn’t it be, as you lads say, just the ticket’?”

  Overflowing with an all-but-elated idea of how he might actually do someone some good, the old fellow produced as from empty space a ukulele of some dark exotic wood trimmed with tortoiseshell and, after strumming a peppy eight-bar intro, sang—

  THAT GöTTINGEN RAG

  Get in-to, your trav’ling coat,

  Leave Girl-y, a good-bye note,

  Then hop-on, the very-next boat,

  To Ger—manee—

  Those craz-y, pro-fessors there,

  They don’t ev-er cut their hair,

  But do they, have brains to spare—

  You wait and see!

  Out on that,

  Ham-burg-A-merika Line, ‘fore

  You-know-it-you’ll-be-chinnin-with

  Fe-lix Klein—don’t -cha pay-no-mind to

  The rent or the house-key (say,

  Howdy there, Hilbert! pleased to

  meetcha, Minkowski!) Tell-ya,

  Col-lege Joe,

  You think there’s nothin-that, you don’t know,

  You ain’t seen nothing un-til you go—so!

  Pack up that ba-a-ag—

  Go east, young Yank, to where the

  Sabers clank, a-and th’

  Four-Color Problem’s just a

  Stu-dent prank, while they’re

  Frolicking, flirting ‘n’

  Doin’ That Göttingen, Rag!

  “Yes, a wonderful place, among my old stomping grounds, in fact. I keep in regular touch, and I could drop them a line if you like.”