Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  A plunge into advanced Vectorism. No looking over your shoulder. “Well, being busy is the thing I guess.”

  The Professor watched him carefully for a moment, as if judging the distance across a crevasse. “It works for some people,” he said quietly. “But it’s not a sure-fire cure. When human tragedies happen, it always seems as if scientists and mathematicians can meet the situation more calmly than others. But it’s as likely to be a form of escaping reality, and sooner or later comes the payback.”

  Kit could not quite take the thought where it had to go. He wanted to trust the Professor, but he was alone in the matter. He replied, “Just trying to work through one problem-set at a time, sir, and not get too blind drunk on the weekends.”

  Likewise he wanted to trust ‘Fax, who was a good skate all round, and yet strangers on and off campus with focused stares, too many to be coincidental, had made him wary. There had developed between him and ‘Fax this exquisite stupor of assumption about who knew what, or didn’t, branching and rebranching, none of it ever stated aloud, all pregnant eyebeaming and circumlocution. ‘Fax in any case had never been the feckless character his father had assumed him to be. Out of the corner of his eye, out the corners of ‘Fax’s own, Kit had caught a whole unacknowledged range of activity going on.

  It turned out ‘Fax was mighty intrigued with the mysterious tower across the Sound. “We could sail over and take a look. You could introduce me to your pal Dr. Tesla.”

  For half an hour, they breezed down the harbor, among the beds of Fair Haven oysters staked to show the boundaries of each plantation. When they got out into the Sound, ‘Fax began to cast anxious looks at water and sky. “Not happy about this wind,” he kept saying. “And the tide’s going out. Keep a sharp eye aft.”

  It was on them fast enough. One minute they were looking eastward at lightning flashes in black skies over Connecticut, the next they were all but careened and being borne toward the lee shore of Long Island and the looming face of Wardenclyffe. Sighting the tower, intermittently revealed through the torn mists, Kit might have imagined himself being storm-blown to some island as yet uncharted, in quite another ocean, had there been time for such reverie—but there was the little knockabout to be saved, the elements outwitted—bailing frantically, sailing loose-footed as they dared without even time to unship the boom—as the great skeletal tower drew steadily closer in the maritime uproar, a lone enigmatic witness to their desperate struggle.

  THEY SAT IN a masonry transmitter “shack” designed by McKim, Mead, and White, gradually getting used to being alive and on dry land again. A workman’s wife had brought them blankets and coffee Dr. Tesla had imported from Trieste. The rainlight came in through a series of high arched windows.

  The thin young scientist with the hypnotic eyes and Wild West mustache had remembered Kit from Colorado. “The vectorist.”

  “Still at it I guess.” Kit gestured across the Sound in the direction of Yale.

  “I was sorry to hear of Professor Gibbs’s passing. I greatly admired him.”

  “I hope he’s in a better place,” Kit said, more or less automatically, but understanding about a second and a half later that he had also meant better than Yale, and had maybe had Webb’s departed soul in mind as well.

  When Kit introduced ‘Fax, Tesla kept a straight face. “A pleasure, Mr. Vibe, I have had dealings with your father only marginally more cordial than with Mr. Morgan, and yet the son is not guardian of the father’s purse, as we used to say in Granitza . . . in fact, as we never said, for when, in daily life, was that likely to come up?”

  Across the water and all around them the storm still raged. Kit, shivering, forgot Curls and Laplacians, likely debutantes, his own recent caress from the wings of Silence, and sat unblinkingly attentive as Tesla spoke.

  “My native land is not a country but an artifact of Habsburg foreign policy, known as ‘the Military Frontier,’ and to us as Granitza. The town was very small, above the Adriatic coast in the Velebit range, where certain places were better than others for . . . what would you call them? Visual experiences that might prove useful.”

  “Visions.”

  “Yes, but you had to be in tip-top mental health, or they would prove only hallucinations of limited use.”

  “Back in the San Juans we always blamed it on the altitude.”

  “In the Velebit, rivers disappear, flow underground for miles, re-surface unexpectedly, descend to the sea. Underground, therefore, lies an entire unmapped region, a carrying into the Invisible of geography, and—one must ask—why not of other sciences as well? I was out in those mountains one day, the sky began to darken, the clouds to lower, I found a limestone cave, went in, waited. Darker and darker, like the end of the world—but no rain. I couldn’t understand it. I sat and tried not to smoke too quickly the last of my cigarettes. Not until a great burst of lightning came from out of nowhere did heaven open, and the rain begin. I understood that something enormous had been poised to happen, requiring an electrical discharge of a certain size to trigger it. In that moment, all this”—he gestured upward into the present storm clouds, which all but obscured the giant toroidal terminal nearly two hundred feet above, whose open trusswork formed a steel cap of fungoid aspect—“was inevitable. As if time had been removed from all equations, the Magnifying Transmitter already existed in that moment, complete, perfected. . . . Everything since, all you have seen in the press, has been theatrical impersonation—the Inventor at Work. To the newspapers I can never speak of that time of simply waiting. I’m expected to be consciously scientific, to exhibit only virtues likely to appeal to rich sponsors—activity, speed, Edisonian sweat, defend one’s claim, seize one’s chance— If I told them how far from conscious the procedure really is, they would all drop me flat.”

  Suddenly apprehensive, Kit looked over at ‘Fax. But his drowsing classmate showed no reaction—unless, like others of the Vibe persuasion, he was only pretending semiconsciousness.

  “I have been around them long enough, Dr. Tesla. They have no idea what any of us are about.” If he had waited an instant longer, this expression of solidarity would have been drowned out by a Parthian peal of thunder from somewhere over Patchogue Bay as the storm, having crossed the Island, withdrew to sea. Workmen came and went, the cook showed up with another urn full of coffee, the “shack” smelled like wet clothes and cigarette smoke, it could have been any Long Island workday, Neapolitans and Calabresi playing morra under the streaming eaves, wagons arriving with lumber and preshaped members of steel, welding torches spitting blue silent intensities through the rain.

  There was plenty of room here, and the boys were invited to stay over. Tesla looked in later to say good night.

  “Back in Colorado, by the way—those modifications to the transformer. You were right about all that, Mr. Traverse. I never had a chance to thank you.”

  “You have now. With interest. Anyway, it was pretty clear what you were up to. The curvatures had to be the right ones, and built exactly to shape.”

  “I wish I could offer you a job here, but—” gesturing with his head at ‘Fax, who appeared to be asleep.

  Kit with a sombre face nodded. “You might not believe it now, sir, but you are well out of that.”

  “If there is anything—”

  “Let’s hope there will be.”

  NEXT MORNING THE BOYS hitched a ride on a market wagon heading in to New York. Colfax seemed to be watching Kit more narrowly than usual. They rode swaying among sacks of potatoes and cabbages, cucumbers and turnips, along the dusty and clamorous North Hempstead Turnpike, stopping in from time to time at different crossroads saloons.

  “There’ll be search parties out by now,” ‘Fax supposed.

  “Sure. If it was my kid, I’d have the whole damned Atlantic Fleet out.”

  “Not for me,” ‘Fax morosely insistent. “For you.”

  Abruptly Kit could see, as if arc-lit, his trail right out of this unpromising patch he was in. “Wouldn’t�
�ve been too hard to get me out of the way, ‘Fax. You could’ve just pulled one them ‘North River jibes’ of yours and forgot to say ‘Duck,’ let the boom do it for you. Must happen all the time out on that Sound.”

  “Not my style,” ‘Fax blushed, so taken aback that Kit calculated he’d got the seed planted, all right. “Maybe if you were more of a son of a bitch . . .”

  “Then it’d be me putting you over the side, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, one of us should be just a little meaner, ‘stead of us both being unhappy like this.”

  “Who, me? I’m as happy as a Long Island steamer clam, what’re you talking about?”

  “You’re not, Kit. They know you’re not.”

  “Here I thought I was bein a real Sunny Jim.”

  ’Fax waited, but not long, before looking him in the eye. “I’ve been keeping them posted, you see.”

  “About . . .”

  “You. What you’re up to, how you’re feeling, they’ve been getting pretty regular reports, all along.”

  “From you.”

  “From me.”

  Neither surprised nor hurt but letting ‘Fax think he might be, “Well . . . I thought we were pardners, ‘Fax.”

  “Didn’t say it was pleasant for me.”

  “Hmmm . . .”

  “You’re angry.”

  “No. No, I’m thinking. . . . Now, let’s say you were to tell them I got lost in that storm yesterday—”

  “They wouldn’t believe it.”

  “They’d keep looking?”

  “You’d have to hide darned well, Kit. The City, maybe it looks easy to you, but it isn’t. Sooner or later you find you’re trusting people you shouldn’t, some who could even turn out to be on Father’s payroll.”

  “What ‘n hell do you suggest, then?”

  “What I do. Pretend. You’ve been talking a lot about Germany lately, well, here’s your chance. Pretend that our coming through that storm was a certified miracle. Go south of the Green someplace, go in a Catholic church, make a votive offering. Tell Father, who’s a man of religion despite all appearances, that you vowed, if you survived the ordeal, to go study in Germany. Kind of, I don’t know, math pilgrimage. Foley will be bending a much more skeptical ear, but it’s possible to deceive him as well, and I can back you up on that.”

  “You’d really help?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but . . . say, I’ve every reason to, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Guess so. Beats going over the side.”

  After a while Colfax said, “There’re people who hate him, you know.” He was looking sort of sidewise at Kit, almost resentfully.

  “Hell you say.”

  “Look here, Kit, sarcasm aside, he is my father.” Sounding so anxious for Kit to hear the truth that he was almost to be pitied for it. Almost.

  IN THE BRIGHT LIGHT of day, the figures still looked sinister—not gargoyles, not that elaborate, but with something purposeful about the way in which, denying the official structure, they strained outward from the façade, erect, clenched, trying to escape the conditions of human shelter, seeking the outside, the storm, all that freezes, roars, goes lampless in the dark.

  Kit took the elevator as far as it went and then climbed a spiral staircase of carved mahogany up to the executive offices, lit all the way to the top through windows showing in stained glass notable incidents in the history of the Vibe Corp. Cornering the Pickle Market. The Discovery of Neofungoline. Launching of the Steamer Edwarda B. Vibe. . . .

  Should’ve taken some elective courses in the Drama Department, he thought. He knocked at the dark wood door.

  Inside, Foley the dedicated substitute posed over by the window as if enthroned, against the marine daylight, a fine silver contour to his face as if it were familiar to the world as any on a postage stamp, as if proclaiming, Yes, this is who we are, how it is, how it always is, this is what you may expect of us, impressive, isn’t it? It better be.

  “This Germany business,” said Scarsdale Vibe.

  “Sir.” Kit had expected he’d be quaking like the young aspen before the mountain winds, but some unaccustomed light, light under the aspect of distance, had crept round him instead, bringing if not quite immunity, at least clarity.

  “Vital to your education.”

  “I believe I ought to go on to Göttingen.”

  “For mathematics.”

  “Advanced mathematics, yes.”

  “Useful advanced mathematics? Or—” He gestured in the air to suggest the formless, if not the unmanly.

  “Sometimes the real world, the substantial world of affairs, possessing greater inertia, takes a while to catch up,” Kit carefully pretended to instruct him. “The Maxwell Field Equations, for example—it was twenty years till Hertz discovered real electromagnetic waves, traveling at the speed of light, just as Maxwell had worked it out on paper.”

  “Twenty years,” smiled Scarsdale Vibe, with the worn insolence of someone expecting to live forever. “I’m not sure I have that long.”

  “All sincerely trust that you do,” replied Kit.

  “Do you think you have twenty years, Kit?” In the short silence, as the slight but fatal emphasis on “you” reverberated, Scarsdale was aware immediately that he might have misplayed his hand, while for Kit things quietly fell into their rightful places, and he understood that he could not allow hesitation, any more than anger, to betray him. “Back in Colorado,” trying not to speak too carefully, “what with avalanches and blue northers, desperate men, desperate and uncivilized, horses too, all apt to go unexpectedly loco from the altitude and so forth, you learn there’s no telling what the future holds is all, even one minute to the next.” And heard Foley over by the window grunt sharply, as if wakened from a snooze.

  Scarsdale Vibe beamed with what Kit could recognize by now as an effort, by no means reliable, to contain some underdefined rage, the scale of whose

  potential for damage maybe not even Vibe himself suspected. “Your professors are unanimous in recommending you. You’ll be happy to hear.” He produced a steamship ticket and held it out to Kit, implacably cordial. “Forward of the stacks. Bon voyage, sir.”

  This might be all in code, but the shape of it was clear. Scarsdale Vibe at this pitch of things would feel just as comfortable as Kit would with an ocean between them, and willing to pay first-class rates if he had to, to put it there. So back in ’63 had he paid not to have to go and fight—so had he continued to pay for the elimination from his life of many forms of inconvenience, including—what doubt could remain? ah, God—Webb Traverse. There it was, like a conjecture whose truth was obvious to all, though perhaps never to be proven with the furthest rigor.

  No longer waiting, then, as the interview progressed, for any expression of condolence over Webb, understanding that the moment for it had passed forever, one of those negative results with resonance far beyond itself, Kit felt the way he had his first time on a bicycle, in a slow measured glide, knowing as long as he kept on moving just this way, he could not fall over. He might not even have to work too hard right now to conceal his thoughts, except for one pure and steady light he kept well within—the certainty that one day this would have to be put right—the moment his to choose, details such as how and where not as important as the equals sign going in in the right place. . . .

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t thank me. Become the next Edison.” The man sat there smirking, secure in unquestioned might, unable to imagine how all he believed protecting him had just turned to glass—if not to be smashed to bits quite yet, then shaped for now into a lens that promised close and merciless scrutiny, or maybe someday, when held at the appropriate distance, death by focused light. And he should have said Tesla, not Edison.

  Kit found himself at Track 14 in the Grand Central Station in time for the 3:55 back to New Haven, with no idea how he’d got there, having apparently by some buggy-horse reflex walked through the sulfurous city safe from all misadv
enture by streetcar-brake failure, armed assault, mad dogs, or unbribed coppers, straight to this poised and seething express. Some always had homes to return to, Kit had departure gates, piers, turnstiles, institutional doorways.

  He still had no idea whether or not he’d got away with something, or whether he’d just put his life in danger. Back at Pearl Street, the two Vibes were sitting over brandy and cigars.

  “A tough one to figure, that kid,” Foley opined. “Sure hope we ain’t got another Red in the root cellar like his old man.”

  “Our duty would be no less clear. There are hundreds of these abscesses suppurating in the body of our Republic,” an oratorical throb creeping into Scarsdale’s voice, “which must be removed, wherever they are found. No other option. The elder Traverse’s sins are documented—once they were brought to light, he was as good as lost. Should there be moral reservations, in a class war, about targeting one’s enemies? You have been in this game long enough to appreciate how mighty are the wings we shelter beneath. How immune we are kept to the efforts of these muckraking Reds to soil our names. Unless—Walker, have I missed something? you aren’t developing a soft spot.”

  As Scarsdale’s was not the only voice Foley had to attend to, he erred, as usual, on the side of mollification. He held out his glowing Havana. “If you can find a soft spot, use it to put this out on.”

  “What happened to us, Foley? We used to be such splendid fellows.”

  “Passage of Time, but what’s a man to do?”

  “Too easy. Doesn’t account for this strange fury I feel in my heart, this desire to kill off every damned socialist and so on leftward, without any more mercy than I’d show a deadly microbe.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me. Not like that we haven’t bloodied up our hands already here.”

  Scarsdale gazed out his window at a cityscape once fair but with the years grown more and more infested with shortcomings. “I wanted so to believe. Even knowing my own seed was cursed, I wanted the eugenics argument to be faulty somehow. At the same time I coveted the bloodline of my enemy, which I fancied uncontaminated, I wanted that promise, promise unlimited.”