Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  In the depths of the calcite now, without waiting too long at all, he saw, or later would say he thought he saw, Sloat Fresno, and exactly where Sloat had to be. No comparable message about Deuce, however. A couple years later, when he ran into Ewball again and told him about this, Ewball would frown, in a slightly mischievous way. “Shouldn’t it’ve been a little, don’t know, more spiritual than that? Deep wisdom, ancient truth, light from beyond, all that comes of it is one more cantina shooting? Pretty durn bleak for some magical crystal, ain’t it?”

  “What the Indian said was, ‘s that his and the women’s lives got saved, no matter who it was did the savin—this case you, compinche—and that this wasn’t a real piece of spar so much as the idea of two twin halves, of balancing out lives and deaths.”

  “So you still got two more deaths comin, one’d be Deuce, and if I could put in a word, the other should be old Huerta, ‘cause that sumbitch is still out there makin ever’body’s life miserable.”

  “HUNGRY?” said El Espinero.

  Frank looked around and as usual saw nothing edible for a couple hundred miles’ radius.

  “See that rabbit?”

  “No.”

  El Espinero took from his pack and hefted a sun-bleached stick with an elegant warp to it, peered into the distance, and threw it. “Now do you see it?”

  “There it is. How’d you do that?”

  “You have fallen into the habit of seeing dead things better than live ones. Shabótshi all do. You need practice in seeing.”

  After they ate, Frank passed around the last of his smokes. The women went off to smoke in private. El Espinero reached in his belongings and came out with some kind of vegetarian snack. “Eat this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Hikuli.”

  It looked like what up north they called globe cactus. According to El Espinero, the plant was still alive. Frank couldn’t recall ever eating something while it was alive.

  “What’s it for?”

  “Medicine. Cure.”

  “For what?”

  “For this,” said El Espinero, with an economical slide of his hand indicating all the visible circumference of the cruel llano.

  It didn’t kick in for a while, but when it did, Frank was taken out of himself, not just out of his body by way of some spectacular vomiting but out of whatever else he thought he was, out of his mind, his country and family, out of his soul.

  At some point he found himself in the air, hand in hand with young Estrella, flying quite swiftly, at low altitude, over the starlit country. Her hair streaming straight out behind her. Frank, who had never flown before, kept wanting to turn right or left and go explore arroyos filled with a liquid, quivering darkness, and tall cactuses and dramas of predatory pursuit and so forth that now and then seemed also to be glowing in these peculiar colors, but the girl, who had flown often, knew where they had to go, and he understood after a while that she was guiding him, so relaxed and flew along with her.

  Later, on the ground, in fact, strangely, under it, he found himself wandering a stone labyrinth from one cave to another, oppressed by a growing sense of danger—each time he chose a branch, thinking it would lead him out to open air, it only took him deeper, and soon he was at the edge of panic. “Do not,” said the girl, carefully, calming him somehow with an inexplicable clarity of touch, “do not be afraid. They want you to be afraid, but you do not have to give them what they want. You have the power not to be afraid. Find it, and when you do, try to remember where it is.” While continuing to be the Tarahumare girl Estrella, she had also at the same time become Estrella Briggs.

  They came to a cave in which it was raining, calmly but steadily. Inside this one cave, she explained, falling steadily for thousands of years, was all the rain that should have been falling on the southwestern desert—vaporous and gray, not from any spring within the mountain, or from clouds outside directly overhead, but as a result of the original sin, crime, or mistake that had produced the desert itself. . . .

  “Think not,” Frank objected. “The desert is something that has evolved over geological time. Not somebody’s personal punishment.”

  “Back before the beginning of all that, when they were designing the world—”

  “‘They.’”

  “‘They.’ The idea was that water should be everywhere, free to everybody. It was life. Then a few got greedy.” She went on to tell Frank how the desert was made, to serve as their penance. And so to balance it, somewhere, hidden in the uncounted miles of wasteland, would be this one cave, dense with water forever falling. If any wanted to search for it, why, of course they were welcome, though the odds were they’d wander forever without finding it. Tales you heard of haunted silver and gold mines half the time were really about this one hidden cave of rainwater, precious beyond price, but the old desert madfolk believed they had to tell it in a kind of code, that others would be listening, that saying anything out loud would cause the place to grow that much more remote, dangerous to approach. . . .

  At no point in this did Frank think he was dreaming, probably because he seldom remembered dreams, or paid attention to them even if he did. And though this all had the alert immediacy of daytime Mexico in its ongoing dispute with its history, it would someday be relegated as well to the register of experiences he had been unable to find any use for.

  They returned to the desert camp among whirling colors including magenta, low-brilliancy turquoise, and a peculiarly pale, wriggling violet, appearing not only around contours but smudged and bleeding inside them as well, affording glimpses now and then of some solitary band of figures alone on the prairie toward sunset, the untouched depths of it windsweeping away for hundreds of miles, of air even of this purity beginning in this last light from its own glaciating thickness to blur the distant mountains toward a sketchwork suggestive of other worlds, mythic cities at the horizon. . . .

  FRANK KNEW that El Espinero’s wife was neither mute nor shy, having heard a number of animated conversations in, he guessed, the Tarahumare language among the three of them, but she never spoke a word to Frank, only looked at him with great sympathy and directness, as if there was something so obvious he ought to be seeing, which she wanted to tell him about but for some reason, some imperative of the spirit, could not. He was certain beyond words that she was the invisible beating heart of whatever had brought the family south into danger from the Mexican army, but none of them were about to share the reason with Frank.

  They reached an almost invisible fork, and the Tarahumare party turned west, bound up into the Sierra Madre.

  Frank smiled at Estrella. “Hope you find the right hombre.”

  “Just as happy it wasn’t you,” she said. “You are a good man, but kind of disgusting, with all that hair growing out of your face, and you always smell like coffee.” When they parted, El Espinero gave him a necklace made out of skypale translucent seeds Frank recognized as Tears of Job. “Won’t keep you safe, but you’ll be healthier. Good for your breathing.”

  “Oh, by the way, that hikuli? got any more of that?”

  El Espinero pointed, laughing, at a cactus near Frank’s foot, and he and the women rode away laughing, for quite some time, actually, till they were over the ridgeline and out of earshot. Apologizing to the cactus as the brujo had instructed him, Frank removed it live from its home earth and stashed it in his saddlebag. In days to come, he would take it out for a nibble, or sometimes only to look at and wait for instructions. But he was never to have quite the same certitude again as he had felt flying with Estrella/Estrella over the teeming high desert or braving the stone grimness below it.

  He worked his way north among the tall cactuses and greasewood, staying just out of sight of the railroad, until one day he became aware that the mountains had become geometrical impersonations of themselves, impossibly pointed and forbidding, no easier to accept than this out-of-scale plain he’d been riding through. What was there to do out here but run and pursue? What else made
sense? Stand still, under this vast of a sky? Dry out, grow still as the brush, as a cactus, keep slowing down until entering some mineral condition. . . .

  It came to pass that one day Frank rode in out of some irrigated cotton fields at the edge of the Bolsón de Mapimí, down the daylit single street of a little pueblo whose name he would soon forget, walked into a particular cantina as if he’d been a regular for years (adobe walls, perpetual 4:00 A.M. gloom, abiding fumes of pulque in the room, no Budweiser Little Big Horn panoramas here, no, instead some crumbling mural of the ancient Aztec foundation story of the eagle and the serpent, here perversely showing the snake coiled around the eagle and just about to dispatch it, and posed presentably among that old-time scenery, watching the struggle, a number of attractive señoritas with nineteenth-century hairdos and the painter’s idea of Aztec outfits—the walls otherwise undecorated, missing paint in chips and scars from long-ago gunplay or thrown furniture), and found there right in front of him, sitting slouched and puffy-faced and as if waiting, the no-longer-elusive Sloat Fresno, quick as that, with his pistol already somehow in his hand, giving Frank time only to find his own and begin firing cold, no chance to rouse up any of those family emotions, none of that—old Sloat, who maybe never even recognized him, failing as it turned out even to get off his shot—blown over backward, one of the chair legs breaking under his already dead weight so he was sent into half a spin, throwing a dark slash of blood that trailed in the air and feathered in a crescent slap, unheard in the noise of the shots, across the ancient soiling of the pulquería floor. Fín. A prolonged and shallow-breathing stillness of burnt powder, smoke rising, ears humming, black Mexican eyeballs seemingly bent upon the newly inducted member of the dead, though everybody would recognize Frank if they saw him again, in case anybody came around to ask in the proper way.

  Frank, whose thoughts had immediately turned to the possibility of Deuce Kindred close by and sighting him in, called out louder than necessary to nobody in particular, as if trying to see how jumpy folks might be, ”¿Y el otro?”

  “Él se fué, jefe.” A local elder, holding a clay jarrito, starting the day early.

  “¿Y cuándo vuelva?”

  More of a facial shrug than a smile. “Nunca me dijo nada, mi jefe.”

  And no telling these days really who that otro might be, Deuce or whoever. As this did nothing to settle Frank’s nerves, he remained in a state of coiled attention, reluctant to buy himself a drink or even to stash the damn pistol, which now seemed wired to his palm. From up and down the street, saloon bums were appearing, and discussing with onlookers what to do about Sloat’s remains, several parties having already shown interest in the contents of his pockets, though Frank, it was understood, got first pickings.

  “Si el caballero quisiera algún recuerdo . . .”

  Yeahp, if he wanted a souvenir of this—pistoleros of the region being known to take body parts, scalps, ears, penises sometimes, to advert to through the golden years of their retirement, bring out, inspect, show off.

  Ah, shit.

  This had been so quick, even, you could say, easy. You could. He would soon begin to understand how it all might turn, was already, well before he had the godforsaken little town at his back, turning, to regret.

  In New York for a few weeks of ground-leave, the boys had set up camp in Central Park. From time to time, messages arrived from Hierarchy via the usual pigeons and spiritualists, rocks through windows, blindfolded couriers reciting from memory, undersea cable, overland telegraph wire, lately the syntonic wireless, and signed, when at all, only with a carefully cryptic number—that being as nigh as any of them had ever approached, or ever would, to whatever pyramid of offices might be towering in the mists above. With an obvious lack of desire to meet the boys in person, their employers remained unknown to them, and contracts which they didn’t even get to sign were simply distributed, unannounced and often it seemed blindly, from on high. “Well we are their proletariat, ain’t we,” snarled Darby, “the fools that do their ‘dirty work’ for next to nothing? and if they’re too good for our work, then they’re sure’s ‘heck’ too good for us.”

  One midnight, with the usual absence of ceremony, a street-Arab in a stiff hat and a variety of tattoos appeared and with an ingratiating leer handed over a grease-stained envelope. “Here you go, my good lad,” Lindsay dropping a silver coin into the messenger’s hand.

  “‘Ey! Whut’s ‘is? some koindt of a sailboat pitchuhv on it! whuh country’s dis from, I eeask yiz?”

  “Allow me to read it for you. It says, ‘Columbian Exposition Chicago 1893.’ And here, upon the obverse, you will be reassured to find, ‘Columbian Half-Dollar.’ In fact they first sold for a dollar apiece.”

  “So yiz paid double f’ sumt’in’s only good in Chicago ten yeeuhz ago. Swell. All I need’s d’ toime machine, I’m in business, ain’t I?” The urchin, flipping the coin dexterously from hand to hand, shrugged and prepared to take his leave.

  His remark, however, had produced an all-but-paralyzed silence among the Chums, quite out of proportion to what had seemed only an ungrateful quip, for reasons none of them, if pressed, could have articulated. He was halfway across a nearby ornamental bridge before Chick Counterfly recovered enough to call out. “I say, hold up a moment!”

  “T’ings to do,” the youth replied. “Make it snappy.”

  “You said ‘time machine.’ What did you mean by that?”

  “Nuttin.” But his feet told a different story.

  “We must talk about this further. Where can we find you?”

  “Evvrands to vrun vroight now. So I’ll be back.” Before Chick could protest, the impertinent nuncio had vanished into the sylvan surroundings.

  “He was passing a remark, believe me, I know a remark when I hear one,” glowered Darby Suckling, later during the plenary meeting that followed Evening Quarters. The contentious lad, having recently become Ship’s Legal Officer, was eager these days to explore, and when possible to abuse, his prerogatives. “We should find a judge, get a writ, and make the kid spill everything he knows.”

  “More likely,” guessed Lindsay, “Mr. H. G. Wells’s speculative jeu d’esprit on the subject has been adulterated to profitable effect by the ‘dime novels’ of which our visitor, assuming he reads, is no doubt an habitué.”

  “Yet this,” Randolph gesturing with the single sheet the youth had delivered, “was signed by the Chums of Chance Upper Command. About whom, in fact, there have persisted for years rumors of a highly secretive programme, related in some way to time-travel. This fellow may, for all we know, be a steady but perhaps not altogether, for his part, contented employee of theirs, and his curious remark thus some coded invitation to pursue the topic with him.”

  “If his preference in beverages proves as inexpensive as his reading habits,” reckoned Lindsay, who was Unit Treasurer, “there might be enough in our purchase-of-information fund for one small glass of beer.”

  “Eehhnnyyhh, just draw another voucher on th’ National Imprest,” airily sneered Darby. “The Big Boys’ll rubber-stamp it as usual, and maybe help us find out what they don’t want us to know.” He would recall these words in days to come with a certain bitterness, the little band by then having embarked on a journey of fateful discovery which each in his own way would come to wish he had not set out upon.

  True to his word, the messenger, one “Plug” Loafsley, returned next day with lengthy and detailed instructions for getting to his personal headquarters, the Lollipop Lounge, which turned out to be a child bordello in the Tenderloin, one of several that Plug ran as part of a squalid empire also including newsboys’ opium dens and Sunday-school numbers rackets. Lindsay Noseworth, hearing this, of course “hit the roof.” “We must immediately terminate all connection with the little monster. No less than our moral survival is at risk here.”

  “In a spirit of scientific inquiry,” proposed Chick Counterfly soothingly, “I have no objection myself—distasteful though it prove�
�to meeting with young Loafsley, in whatever iniquitous sty he may be pleased to call his office.”

  “And maybe I’d better tag along as a chaperon,” suggested Darby Suckling. Were glances of complicity exchanged? Accounts vary. Howbeit, later that evening, the two shipmates, disguised in matching ensembles sportively checked in indigo and custard yellow, topped off with pearl-gray bowlers, were proceeding into the Tenderloin, following the directions young Loafsley had provided them, finding themselves, before long, deeper in that dark topography of Vice than either had suspected possible—until arriving, near midnight, in a thickening waterfront fog, before a corroded iron door, guarded by what would have been a small boy, except for his height of seven and a half feet, with a bodily aspect in proportion, if not indeed tending toward the stout. Something glandular, it would seem.

  Rearranging a dicer the size of a washtub at a more authoritative angle, “Gents, dey calls me Tiny, wha’ kin I do fuh yiz?”

  “Try not to step on us,” muttered Darby.

  “Appointment with Plug,” said Chick mollifyingly.

  “Yaw dem Chumbs of Chantce!” cried the oversize “bouncer.” “Hey, a real honuh to meet yiz, I reads all y’ stuff, it’s really swell—maybe all except fuh dat Nosewoit’ kid, I ain’t so sure about him.”

  “We’ll tell him,” said Darby.

  The moment they stepped inside, they were hit by a strong polyaromatic gust, as if exhaled from the corrupted lungs of Depravity herself, which included alcohol fumes, tobacco and hemp-smoke, a spectrum of inexpensive scent in which opopanax and vervain figured prominently, with darker suggestions of bodily ejecta, overheated metal alloys, and recently-burnt gunpowder. A small house band, anchored by a contrabass saxophone and also including slide cornet, mandola, and “tin pan” piano, were tirelessly “ragging” someplace inside a protective manifold of smoke. Everywhere in the murk glided pre-pubescent houris, more and less lightly attired, dancing solo, or with customers, or with one another, drawing from Darby appreciative when not in fact hypnotized gazes.