Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  THEY TOOK the sixth Avenue El downtown and got off at Bleecker Street. There was some apricot-pink light left in the sky, and a southeast wind bringing up the aroma of roasting coffee from South Street, and they could hear river traffic. It was Saturday night in Kipperville. Bearded youths ran by, chasing girls in Turkey red print dresses. Jugglers on unicycles performed tricks along the sidewalk. Negroes accosted strollers, exhibiting small vials of white powder and hopefully inquiring faces. Street vendors sold corn on the cob and broiled squabs on toast. Children hollered behind the open windows of tenements. Uptown slummers bound for places like Maria’s on MacDougal chatted brightly and asked one another, “Do you know where we’re going?”

  R. Wilshire Vibe lived in an Italianate town house whose builder had found himself helpless before the impulse to add Beaux-Arts detailing. It was on the north side of the street, with Ginkgo trees in front, a pergola, and a mews running behind.

  A butler or two bowed them in the door, and they ascended into a ballroom dominated by a huge gas chandelier, blindingly bright, directly beneath which was placed a sort of circular couch in wine-colored plush skirted with gold tasseling and provided with satin cushions in matching shades, accommodating eight to sixteen non-dancers each facing radially outward, referred to not altogether in jocularity as an anti-wallflower device, for those willing to sit out dances here were obliged uncomfortably to occupy the great salon’s dead center while the spectacle wheeled around them on a floor whose smoothness had been finely calibrated by repeated applications of cornmeal and pumice—the walls themselves, actually, being reserved for R.W.’s art collection, which required a tolerant eye and on occasion an educated stomach broadly indifferent to manifestations of the queasy.

  Palm trees grew everywhere, arecas, palmettos, Chinese fan-palms, ranging from squat greenhouse specimens in wicker-covered pots to twelve-foot foyer varieties to stately coconut and date trees rooted somewhere far below and soaring to these ballroom altitudes through openings expressly made for them in the intervening floors and ceilings, creating a sort of jungle where exotic forms of life glided, stalked, and occasionally slithered, demimondaines with darkened eyelids, men with shoulder-length hair, circus artistes, soubrettes in drastically non-demure costumes offering trays of Perrier Jouët, society ladies with orange Tiffany orchid brooches vivid as flames at their bosoms, Wall-Street renegades who congregated near the gigantic bathrooms, where it was said R. Wilshire had installed ticker-tape machines in every water-closet.

  A small orchestra on a stage at one end of the great room played selections from various R. Wilshire Vibe productions. Miss Oomie Vamplet sang “Oh, When You Talk That Talk,” which she had made famous in her role as Kate Chase Sprague in Roscoe Conkling.

  Having been deserted by Katie for somebody in a cheap suit representing himself as a talent agent who wouldn’t have fooled your grandma, Dally wandered out through some French doors. From the roof garden, past soiled masses of gray and brown shadow, past the gaslit windows and streetlamps in unrecognized vigil below the elevated tracks, far uptown the illuminated city ascended against a deep indigo sky as if night up there had somehow neglected to fall, sparing it in its golden dream of lighted façades.

  The young man was leaning on a parapet gazing at the city. She had noticed him the minute she came in, taller than the milling of partygoers around him, but nowhere near “grown,” turned out almost too quietly, as if to advertise his inexperience. Maybe it was just all the smoke in the place, but his features seemed to her, even this close up, untouched—maybe never to be—by what she thought she knew already of the harshness of the world. Made her think of kids she had played with, an hour at a time, in towns passed through long ago, and the unforgiving innocence of newsboys among the evening throngs announcing grand thefts, fires, murders, and wars with voices pure as this customer’s own had to be—no, not tough enough, not nearly, for what he would have to look in the face, sooner or later, rich kid or whatever, though she doubted this, she knew by now what these society boys were like, it was the Bowery Boy style with required changes of class detail, is all it was.

  He turned now and smiled, a little preoccupied, maybe, and she became abruptly aware of this juvenile rag Katie had all but forced her into buying, with its high neckline and yards of stupid barn-dance flouncing . . . and in Congo violet! with plaid trimming! Aaahhh! What was she thinking? Or not thinking. It had been that near-supernatural moment in Smokefoot’s, she guessed, that maternal spectre in violet and gray that had sent her judgment so out of kilter. She couldn’t even remember now what the dress had cost.

  He had opened a cigarette case and was offering her one. This had never happened before, and she had no idea what to do. “You don’t mind if I . . .”

  “I don’t mind,” she said, or something sophisticated like that.

  From inside came a drumroll, cymbal tap, and short arrangement of “Funiculì, Funiculà,” as the lights were now mysteriously dimmed to a cool interior dusk.

  “Shall we, then?” gesturing for her to go in first. When she looked around, though, he’d disappeared.

  Gee, that was fast.

  Up by the bandstand, a good-looking older man in the usual magician’s outfit, holding a glass of wine, tapped his wand against it, declaring, “It is difficult to drink semiprecious stone, but in a stone world, drinking anything else is an expensive luxury.” He inverted the glass and out tumbled a handful of amethysts and garnets. When he turned the glass right side up again it had wine in it, which he proceeded to drink.

  She felt an unaccustomed pressure against her leg and looked down. “Nice outfit,” commented an oily voice which seemed to, and in fact did, proceed from the region of Dally’s elbow, belonging to one Chinchito, a jumped-up circus midget currently appearing on the Bowery stage, whose value at these gatherings, according to Katie, had to do with a sexual appetite, not to mention organ, quite out of proportion to his stature. “How about getting lost,” Dally suggested, although in tones not entirely free of fascination. Chinchito took this with a suavity earned over years of summary dismissal. “Don’ know whatcher missin, Red,” he winked, strolling away and soon obscured by the crowd.

  Not the end of Dally’s difficulties, however. She was next approached by a smooth gent with blindingly pomaded gray hair and a gigantic emerald ring on his pinky, who pressed upon her cup after cup of a strange incandescent liquid from a punch bowl until she was seeing nickelodeon shows in the wallpaper.

  “I’ve watched you devotedly down in Chinatown. Try never to miss a performance. You make such an appealing captive,” and before she knew it, he seemed to have taken one of her wrists and begun to slip onto it half of a pair of exquisite silver manacles.

  “I think not,” said a calm voice from somewhere, and Dally found herself being steered toward an elaborate box labeled CABINET OF MYSTERY by a tall figure in a cape who turned out to be the magician’s assistant.

  “Here, quickly. In here.” Dally was not the swooning type but this would have done the job all right, because just before the door closed, the air seemed to grow clear and she recognized the very same woman she had seen in Smokefoot’s store yesterday, now wearing dancer’s tights and a velvet cape with spangles a-jitter all over it. And sneaking in by way of Dally’s nose, something else, beyond time, before memory or her first baby words, the snoot-subverting fragrance of lilies of the valley.

  She might’ve had time enough to mumble, “Well my, my, and whatever has become of my brain?” when, owing to some kind of a Mickey Finn in the punch—if Katie was right about this Vibe crowd, there had to’ve been—Dally did not so much pass out as experience a strange eclipse of time, at the far end of which she became aware of a door she ought to’ve seen all the time and yet only now was able to reach for and open. She stepped out into the Lower West Side, right in front of her rooming house in fact, and there sat Katie on the stoop in her scarlet turnout, smoking a Sweet Caporal. It was not long after dawn. The magicians who had res
cued her were nowhere in sight, no more than their Cabinet of Mystery, which Dally thought to turn and look for but which had itself disappeared.

  “You all right?” Katie yawning and stretching. “I won’t ask if you had a good time, but I know I did.”

  “This is pretty strange, ‘cause just a minute ago—”

  “No need to explain, he was sure an appealing young specimen.”

  “Who?”

  “I told you that gown would work magic. What do you mean ‘who’? you don’t have to be coy with me.”

  “Katie.” She sat down next to her friend, in a great rustle of taffeta. “I can’t remember a blessed thing.”

  “Not even the name of that magic act, I’ll bet.” With such an exceptional tone of regret that Dally, puzzled, reached to pat her shoulder before remembering her tall deliveress in the spangled cloak.

  “You’ll go away now,” Katie puffing forlornly, “and maybe for good.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Oh, Dahlia. You knew all along.”

  “It’s peculiar. I did. But I didn’t know I did. Not till she”—shaking her head in some wonder—“came for me?”

  THE ZOMBINI RESIDENCE, which Dally recognized from her now-battered copy of Dishforth’s Illustrated Weekly, was an extensive “French flat” in a recently-erected building on upper Broadway, which Luca had chosen for its resemblance to the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy, and referred to as a grattacielo or skyscraper, rising as it did twelve high-ceilinged stories. The rooms seemed to run on for blocks, stuffed with automata human and animal assembled and in pieces, disappearing-cabinets, tables that would float in midair and other trick furniture, Davenport figures with dark-rimmed eyes in sinister faces, lengths of perfect black velvet and multicolored silk brocade a-riot with Oriental scenes, mirrors, crystals, pneumatic pumps and valves, electromagnets, speaking-trumpets, bottles that never ran empty and candles that lighted themselves, player pianos, Zoetropic projectors, knives, swords, revolvers and cannons, a coopful of white doves up on the roof . . .

  “What you might call a magician’s house,” said Bria, who had been showing her around. Straight from some matinée, in her red spangled knifethrower’s costume, she managed to look like a nun not above some mischief, as much of it in fact as a situation might require. She kept directing unsymmetrical grins in Dally’s direction, which Dally took to mean something but couldn’t decode.

  In general, she found her newly-met stepbrothers and sisters a well-informed and considerate bunch of children, except when they were being horribly impossible to live with. The older ones worked onstage with their parents, went to school, had part-time jobs downtown, and were as apt to be down on the floor assaulting the carpet with one another’s heads as sitting together peacefully on a Sunday morning, one in the lap of another, reading Little Nemo in the Journal. Among their more disgusting habits was drinking the water from the melted icebox ice. The really little ones, Dominic, Lucia, and Concetta, the baby, lived in a cheerful clutter of dolls and doll furniture, rolling chime toys, drums, cannons and picture blocks, cheerful majolica cuspidors, and empty Fletcher’s Castoria bottles.

  Dally wasn’t in the house ten minutes before Nunzi and Cici accosted her.

  “You need change for a quarter?” Cici said.

  “Sure.”

  “Two dimes and a nickel O.K.?”

  She saw Nunzi rolling his eyes, and when she looked in her hand, sure enough, Cici, the coin specialist in the family, had palmed and switched the dimes for three-cent pieces, adding to what was already a small fortune.

  “Pretty good,” said Dally, “but take a look at that quarter.”

  “Wait a minute, where is it? I just—”

  “Heh, heh, heh,” Dally rolling the coin side to side over the backs of her fingers, doing a couple-three passes, and producing it finally out of Cici’s nose.

  “Hey—how about the Indian Rope Trick,” announced Nunzi, producing from his pocket a length of rope and a giant pair of scissors, while he and Cici hummed in harmony the familiar theme from La Forza del Destino, looping the rope in a complicated way, cutting it into several pieces, waving a silk cloth, and restoring the whole rope in one piece, good as new.

  Recognizing this as a standard effect, “That’s a pip, all right,” said Dally, “but wait, I thought the Indian Rope Trick was where you climb straight up a long piece of free-standing rope till you disappear into thin air.”

  “No,” said Cici, “that’s the ‘Indian Rope Trick,’ this is the Indian-Rope trick, see, we bought the rope down the Bowery, off of a Indian guy? so it’s a Indian Rope, see—”

  “She gets it, cretino,” his brother slapping him across the head.

  Concetta came crawling in, spotted Cici and looked up at him, her eyes hugely shining and expectant. “Ah, the lit-tle Concertina!” cried Cici, picking up his sister and pretending to play her like a squeeze box, singing one of his vast repertoire of Luigi Denza songs, the baby meantime squealing along and making no real effort to escape.

  DALLY HAD IMAGINED once that if she ever found Erlys again, she’d just forget how to breathe or something. But having been gathered into the family chaos with little or no fuss, soon, like some amiable stranger, she was only looking for chances to scrutinize them both—Erlys when it didn’t seem she was looking, and then herself in one of the mirrors that stood or hung everywhere in these rooms—for signs of similarity.

  Even without theatrical shoes on, Erlys was taller than Luca Zombini, and kept her fair hair in a Psyche knot, out of which the less governable tresses continued, with the day, to escape. Dally, reckoning that the way a woman, in her continuum of Tidiness, deals with hair-irregularity can provide a clue to some other self she might be keeping less available, found, somewhat to her relief, that Erlys more often than not would go entire waking days without bother from the stray undulations, though she was known to blow away as needed the more persistent strands that got in her line of vision.

  Erlys was everywhere, passing through the far-flung rooms, all but invisibly taking care of chores, smiling, speaking little, though the children seemed to know, and respect, her wishes more than their father’s. Dahlia allowed herself to wonder if this wasn’t one more “effect,” with some reasonably twin assistant having long ago been switched for the real Erlys, who had earlier stepped over into the Cabinet of Ultimate Illusion, known also as New York City, and found there true disappearance, the kind the toughest audiences will believe in. In this curiously unbounded apartment, the only audience seemed to be Dahlia. Something, something like the silvering of a mirror, remained between them. If Dally wanted to throw herself into those arms in their carefully kept sleeves, she would not be pushed away, she was at least that sure, but past that, where all that ought to matter lay, she saw only a black-velvet absence of signs. Was she being played for a sucker? Were these people not related at all, but just some Bowery acting troupe between engagements pretending to be a family? Who’d be the best one around here to bring it up with?

  Not Bria. Not even when she started working as Bria’s knife-throwing dummy would Dally give that much trust away to her. She noted the girl’s look of indifference when her father addressed her as “bella,” though that never kept him from saying it. He was clearly enraptured with all of his children, from the most obvious future criminal to the most radiant saint.

  “Don’t mistake me for one of these Neapolitan spaghetti-benders,” Nunzi in a fair impression of his father, “I come from Friuli, in the north. We are an Alpine people.”

  “Goat-fuckers,” clarified Cici. “They eat donkey salami up there, it’s like Austria, with gestures.”

  Luca Zombini liked to explain the business, at various times, to those of his children he deluded himself were eager to learn, even someday carry on, the act. “Those who sneer at us, and sneer at themselves for paying to let us fool them, what they never see is the yearning. If it was religious, a yearning after God—no one would dream of disrespecting that
. But because this is a yearning only after miracle, only to contradict the given world, they hold it in contempt.

  “Remember, God didn’t say, ‘I’m gonna make light now,’ he said, ‘Let there be light.’ His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to.”

  He unrolled an expanse of absolute fluid blackness. “Magician-grade velvet, perfect absorber of light. Imported from Italy. Very expensive. Dyed, sheared, and brushed by hand many, many times. Finished with a secret method of applying platinum black. Factory inspections are merciless. Same as mirrors, only opposite. The perfect mirror must send back everything, same amount of light, same colors exactly—but perfect velvet must let nothing escape, must hold on to every last little drop of light that falls on it. Because if the smallest amount of light you can think of bounces off one single thread, the whole act—affondato, vero? It’s all about the light, you control the light, you control the effect, capisci?”

  “Gotcha, Pop.”

  “Cici, a little respect here, someday I’m gonna make you disappear.”

  “Now!” cried two or three young Zombinis, jumping on the upholstery. “Right now!”

  Luca had long been interested in modern science and the resources it made available to conjurors, among these the Nicol prism and the illusionary uses of double refraction. “Anybody can saw their assistant in half,” he said. “It’s one of the oldest effects in the business. The problem is, she always gets reassembled, there’s always a happy ending.”