Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “‘Problem’? It should be an unhappy ending?” Bria puzzled. “Like those bloody horror shows they put on over there in Paris, France?”

  “Not exactly. You already know about this stuff here.” Bringing out a small, near-perfect crystal of Iceland spar. “Doubles the image, the two overlap, with the right sort of light, the right lenses, you can separate them in stages, a little further each time, step by step till in fact it becomes possible to saw somebody in half optically, and instead of two different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking around, who are identical in every way, capisci?”

  “Not really. But . . .”

  “What.” Maybe a little defensive.

  “Is it a happy ending. Do they go back to being one person again?”

  He stared at his shoes, and Bria understood that she was maybe the only one in the house he could’ve counted on to ask this question.

  “No, and that’s been kind of a running problem here. Nobody can figure out—”

  “Oh, Pop.”

  “—how to reverse it. I’ve been everywhere, asked everybody, college professors, people in the business, even Harry Houdini himself, no dice. Meanwhile . . .”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, how many?”

  “Maybe . . . two or three?”

  “Porca miseria, so that’s four or six, right? You realize you could get sued for that?”

  “It was an optical problem, I thought it would be completely reversible. But according to Professor Vanderjuice up at Yale, I forgot the element of time, it didn’t happen all at once, so there was this short couple of seconds where time went on, irreversible processes of one kind and another, this sort of gap opened up a little, and that was enough to make it impossible to get back to exactly where we’d been.”

  “And here I thought you were perfect. Imagine my disappointment. So these subjects of yours are out there leading double lives. They can’t be too happy with that.”

  “Lawyers, heckling at shows, threats of violence. The usual.”

  “What do we do?”

  “There’s only one place in the world that makes these units. The Isle of Mirrors in that Lagoon over in Venice, might be only the name of some holding company by now, but they still do produce and market the finest conjuror’s mirrors in the world. Somebody there is bound to have an idea.”

  “And we just happen to be booked in to the Teatro Malibran in Venice in a couple of weeks.”

  Yes, Luca Zombini had come home today with the surprising news that the act was booked to tour Europe, and the whole family, Dally included, were due to sail over on the liner S.S. Stupendica, only two weeks from now! As if a valve in a distant part of the basement had just been opened, the whole apartment was suddenly turbulent with preparation for the journey.

  When Dally had a minute to speak to Erlys between chores, “Are you folks sure you need me along?”

  “Dahlia.” Stopped just dead in her tracks, a dustrag about to fall from her fingers.

  “I mean walking in like I did—”

  “No . . . no, we were, fact is, I guess, counting on you. Dally, sakes, you only just got here—and, well, what about the Chinese Gong Effect . . .?”

  “Oh, Bria can do that in her sleep.”

  “Don’t know if you’d want to stay on here, we’ll be subletting to those East Rumelian acrobats, it might not be ideal company for you.”

  “I’ll manage, someplace. Katie, somebody.”

  “Dahlia, now look at me.” Easier not to have to, but the girl obliged. “I know you never meant to stay on. It would’ve been too much to hope for. Either one of us.”

  A small shrug. “Never was that sure you’d even let me in.”

  “But you’re in the door, and maybe you’re, who knows, supposed to be with us? somehow . . .?”

  A silence, grave and unnatural, had crept over the lengthy apartment, as if to suggest, without a Zombini in earshot, that this would be the perfect moment to come out in a fierce and long-held whisper, “I was only a little baby—how could you just leave like that?”

  A kind of smile, almost thankful. “Wondering when that’d come up.”

  “I’m not here lookin for anything.”

  “Of course not.” Was that a New York snap creeping into her voice? “Well. How much did Merle tell you?”

  “Nothing bad against you. Only that you left us.”

  “Bad enough, I’d say.”

  “He knew I had to come back here. He never stopped me.”

  “But no message for me. No ‘the past is past,’ nothing like that.”

  “If there was anything like that, I never heard about it. Maybe . . .” She looked up at Erlys, unsure.

  “Maybe he thought you should hear the story from me.”

  “Well? It means he trusts you to tell me the truth.”

  Erlys remembered they were still standing at opposite corners of a bedsheet. Graceful as ballroom stepping, they moved toward each other, completed the fold, redoubled the sheet, glided apart. “I’m not sure how good a time this is to be getting into it all. . . .”

  Dally shrugged. “When’ll it be better?”

  “All right.” A last look around hoping for a smaller Zombini, any Zombini, to come in and delay this—”When Merle and I met, I was already pregnant with you. So . . .”

  There. Dally found herself unexpectedly sitting on the davenport. Dust rose, cushions wheezed, and underskirts sighed around her. Two or three possibilities for snappy remarks drifted across her mind. “All right, then,” her mouth unaccountably dry, “my real father—where is he?”

  “Dahlia,” nodding vigorously, as if not to relax into any easy distance, “he passed away. Just a little before you were born. Streetcar accident in Cleveland. Quick as that. His name was Bert Snidell. All that red hair of yours is from him. His family basically threw me out. Merle gave us a home. And your ‘real’ father, well that is Merle, more than the other would ever’ve been. That’s any help.”

  Not much. “Do you think this is what I want to hear? A home? Some home. You sure skipped soon as you could, why not just leave me at the damn city dump on your way out of town?” Where’d that come from? Not exactly from nowhere, but from farther away than anything she’d felt up to now. . . .

  But wouldn’t you know it, before she could work up much more of a head of steam, the subgods of theatrical timing that seemed to rule this house decided about then to put into the situation after all, and here came Nunzi and Cici in matching white sharkskin suits, practicing Hindoo shuffles and French drops, cheerfully oblivious to the fury and consternation in the room, and full of the latest news about the sailing. And there Dally and Erlys would have to leave things for a while. In fact, the chore level being what it was, till they were on board the Stupendica and well out to sea.

  The one time Mayva and Stray met, it was by pure accident, over in Durango.

  “You two ain’t married, by any chance?”

  “Funny you should ask,” Reef began, but Stray spoke right up.

  “Not lately, M’z Traverse.”

  Mayva laughed and took her hand. “I’d like to tell you what a bargain you’d be gettin but I might need some time on that.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t blame much of it on you,” said Stray, “good upbringin can only go so far.”

  “There was some Briggses in Ouray County, that wouldn’t be your people, would it? Worked at the Camp Bird, maybe?”

  “Think there might’ve been cousins on my Aunt Adelina’s side over by Lake City for a while. . . .” And Reef turned around just in time to see the two of them disappear into some yardage place, jabbering away like a couple of birds on a rooftop.

  Next day Reef and Stray were on the Denver & Rio Grande headed eventually for Arizona, together at first, soon to be separate. Her friend Archie Dipple had a plan, not as desperately insane as some, to go out and round up the camel herd imported years ago into Virginia City,
Nevada, to pack out salt, later delivered into Arizona for the usual ore-related duties, eventually deemed unprofitable and set loose, by now reverted to the wild state, spread out over thousands of square miles of Sonoran Desert, where due to not-well-understood factors of Nature they were said to’ve reproduced with astonishing speed—”Even at let’s say a half-dollar a head, it’ll be enough to retire on and go live forever as far back east as you want—up in that Ritz Hotel, kids in cylindrical hats bringing you whatever you desire day or night—” Reef need act as no more than bunco-steerer, all the research chores and assumptions of risk to be borne by Archie as principal party, “thankless tasks, all of them, but no risk, no reward, ain’t that how it goes?”

  “Ever thus in the world of affairs,” Reef agreed, trying to look just quizzical enough to suggest the perils of extravagance, yet not enough to offer provocation—these double-domes being in Reef’s experience never quite as retiring as they looked, some of them damned touchy, as a matter of fact.

  Whereas Reef’s “friends,” business and personal, were mostly no strangers to trouble, nor that complicated to understand, Stray’s, apt to keep more to the shadows, tended to be practitioners of obliquity—as it quite often came down to, varieties of pimp. Advance men, middlemen, if you liked, and not all men, of course. These “friends” of hers, on the whole, kept getting Reef into way more trouble than any of his “friends” had so far got her. And heaven forfend it should ever’ve been as simple as pursuit by the law, or escape into a safer jurisdiction, no, these strange faces bobbing up out of her past were determined to bring him in as a partner on various schemes of enterprise, few of them hopeful.

  During all the confabulating, she would usually be there watching, standing by the railing up in some gambling-saloon loft, or gazing in through the etched-glass paneling of an office door, as if only in girlish curiosity as to how these two separate figures in her life might be hitting it off, though she was ready enough to claim a commission, usually around 5 percent, on any of these deals that actually yielded a crop. Macking for a mack, so to speak.

  That was how for years, all through that quarter of the continent, they had fought, fled, beckoned, resumed. . . . If you took a map and tried to follow them over it, zigzagging town to town, back and forth, it might not have been that easy to account for, even if you recalled how wild, how much better than “wild” it’d been not all that many years ago, out here, even with the workdays that had you longing for the comforts of territorial prison, yes hard as that, when whatever was going to become yours—your land, your stock, your family, your name, no matter, however much or little you had, you earned it, with never no second thoughts as to just killing somebody, if it even looked like they might want to take it. Maybe a dog catching their scent coming down the wind, or the way some trailhand might be wearing his waterproof, that could be enough—didn’t matter, with everything brand new and the soldiering so hard, waking up each day never knowing how you’d end it, cashing ’em in being usually never too distant from your thoughts, when any ailment, or animal wild or broke, or a bullet from any direction might be enough to propel you into the beyond . . . why clearly every lick of work you could get in would have that same mortal fear invested into it—Karl Marx and them, well and good, but that’s what folk had for Capital, back in early times out here—not tools on credit, nor seed money courtesy of some banker, just their own common fund of fear that came with no more than a look across the day arising. It put a shade onto things that parlor life would just never touch, so whenever she or Reef pulled up and got out, when it wasn’t, mind, simple getting away in a hurry, it was that one of them had heard about a place, some place, one more next-to-last place, that hadn’t been taken in yet, where you could go live for a time on the edge of that old day-to-day question, at least till the Saturday nights got quiet enough to hear the bell of the town clock ring you the hours before some Sunday it’d be too dreary to want to sober up for. . . . So in time you had this population of kind of roving ambassadors from places like that that were still free, who wherever they came to rest would be a little sovereign piece of that faraway territory, and they’d have sanctuary about the size of their shadow.

  First thing Reef looked for in a new place was the sporting crowd. Though he said it gave him no pleasure to take what he called “sheep to the shed,” Stray did see him maybe once or twice consent to anyway, usually around the time he or she’d be getting ready to leave town. “Give us enough for a couple of hours in the dining car,” as he often put it, “don’t we owe ourselves that at least?” Wherever they headed for had to be someplace where you didn’t know from one card to the next who’d be likely to pull out a pistol or a dirk. Where you didn’t yet keep such implements away in the drawer of some Chicago-built office desk, but always close to your person.

  Did he ever say what? Say, “Please?” No, it was more like, “All the boys’ll be up in Butte now”—big sigh—”drinking them Sean O’Farrells without me,” or “Thought I’d go subdue the wild burro once more by the banks of Uncompahgre,” with Stray always welcome to come along and so forth. But weren’t there just as often reasons of her own not to? Times she just didn’t want to go through that old walk to the depot to see him off, add them little few sniffles of hers to the weeping already on that platform, no thank you, no.

  They had lived down in horse barns, army “A” tents with the old blood-stains onto them, city hotels with canopy beds, woke up in back rooms of deadfalls where the bars had toothmarks end to end. Sometimes it smelled like dust and animals, sometimes like machine oil getting overheated, not too much of the garden flowers or home cooking. But nowadays they were living in a nice little cabin up above the Uncompahgre. Jesse lay at ease among feather pillows and borrowed grandmothers’ quilting in a dynamite crate—perfect for a baby because there were no nails to be sticking him, nails being known to attract electricity, of which there was plenty up on this stormy mountainside, so it was all wood pegs and glue holding the baby’s box together. Watching Jesse, Stray had a look on her face, a smile more than ready for the stoveglow of the old partnership to pick up again, as if about to say, “Well, looks like here’s where we stop riding the rails for a little,” except that Reef would more than likely reply, “Why, sweetheart, you can see he’s just itchin to get some wind in his face, ain’t you Slick,” picking the baby up and cowboy-dancing him facedown through the air fast enough for his fine hair to blow back off his brow, “He’s a road baby, ain’t you Jesse, just a road baby!” So his parents kept silent, even with this undeniable miracle in the room, each thinking their own miles-apart personal thoughts.

  IT HAD NEVER BEEN Reef’s intention to be part of any outlaw dynasty. “Thought I was entitled to a regular human life like everybody else,” was how he put it. It gave him some difficult days, for he was never to forgive whatever it had been dealt him the hand he got. All set to do the one thing, and without warning it was taken away, and there was the other thing had to be done instead, whether he wanted to or didn’t, there it was. . . .

  Pretending to be out there with his rounder-type antics worked pretty good for a time, just enough to keep Stray annoyed, not enough to bring her out after him, or worse, try to hire somebody to do it for her.

  But finally one day, less than a year into it, he tried something a little too close to home, and she came around a bend in the trail on her way to visit with her sister Willow, and there was Reef running some fuse—nothing major, a stick or two, just enough to blow a junction box belonging to a generating plant that supplied one of the workings up by Ophir—just a stupid grin, and his thumb up his ass. She sat there, with Jesse in a papoose rig peeking around from behind her, with her arms folded, waiting for something, which he figured out after a while was an explanation from him. And then, like it or not, he’d have to be straight with her.

  “And when was it again you were gonna share this with me? When they’ve got the noose all around your neck?”

  He pretended to
lose his temper. “No damn business of yours, Stray.”

  “My dear, it’s me.”

  “I know, that’s the problem.”

  “This must be how a Kid talks to his Woman.”

  It wasn’t only the pursuit, all the death-packing law, Pinkerton and public, at his back, plus the unknown and invisible others he hadn’t found out about yet, none of those so much as the sworn opponent unreachably within, never to be appeased, believing unconditionally, poor fish, in the class war to come, commonwealth of toil that is to be, as the song went, “I smell it in the wind,” he liked to mutter to himself, “I’m like a damn Christer and his deliverance with that. Brethren, the day is coming. Clear and no denying it.”

  Most of the time anyhow. Sometimes he was just after the explosion, it was like telling them in a voice too loud to ignore to fuck off. And sometimes it was so he wouldn’t feel nagging at him the unfinished business with Deuce and Sloat, wherever they were these days. If Capital’s own books showed a balance in clear favor of damnation, if these plutes were undeniably evil hombres, then how much more so were those who took care of their problems for them, in no matter what ignorance of why, not all of their faces on the wanted bills, in that darkly textured style that was more about the kind of remembering, the unholy longing going on out here, than of any real-life badman likeness. . . .

  YES, well Stray and him, they could talk about it. Some. Say they could, and they couldn’t.

  It wasn’t just Webb he had to look after anymore. The San Juan range was a battleground now, Union miners, scabs, militia, owners’ hired guns, all shooting at each other and now and then hitting somebody for a one-way passage into that dark country where they all collected. They wanted his attention, them and the ones who’d died at the other places, the Coeur d’Alene, Cripple Creek, even back east at Homestead, points in between, all kept making themselves known. They were Reef’s dead now, all right, and did they make a grand opera of coming around to remind him. Damn. He could no more run out on them than on some houseful of little orphan children put into his care unexpectedly. These dead, these white riders of the borderline, nervelessly at work already as agents on behalf of invisible forces over there, could still, like children, keep an innocence all their own—the innocence of the early afterlife, of tenderfeet needing protection from the insults of that unmarked otherworld trail so unforgiving. They trusted him so—as if he knew any better than they did—to see them along . . . trusted the bond between them, and he could no more subvert their faith than question his own. . . .