Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  Abruptly, sweeping into the scene like an opera singer with an aria to unload, here came “Mr. Ace,” as he called himself. Glossy black eyes, presented like weapons in a duel. The gently damaged, irrevocably educated eyes we associate with the visiting dead. When he smiled, or attempted to, it was not reassuring.

  Dispensing with phatic chitchat, he began straightaway to tell the story of his “people.”

  “We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present—your future—a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simple thermodynamic truth that Earth’s resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalist illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth aloud were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day, we were forced to migrate, with little choice but to set forth upon that dark fourth-dimensional Atlantic known as Time.

  “Most who chose the Crossing made it through—some did not. The procedure is still hazardous. The levels of energy required to make that leap against the current, across the forbidden interval, are unavailable here at present, though certain of your great dynamos have begun to approach the necessary power-domain. We have learned to deal with that danger, we train for it. What we did not expect was your own determination to prevent our settlement here.”

  “First I’ve heard,” Chick said at last, as sympathetically as he could.

  “The Fraternity of the Venturesome—”

  “Beg pardon?”

  A strange electrical drone overtook and blurred Mr. Ace’s voice for an instant. “The nzzt Chums-of-Chance? You are not aware that each of your mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own to enter your time-regime?”

  “I assure you, that never—”

  “You are sworn to obedience, of course.” An intense, silent struggle as if not to laugh, as if laughter were an unfamiliar vice whose power to shake him apart Mr. Ace could not afford to risk.

  “All this is sure news to me,” said Chick. “And even if what you say’s true, how could we be of any use to you?”

  His great eyes seemed luminous with pity. “We might ask you to accept a commission from us now and then—though, regrettably, with no more detailed explanation than you currently receive from your own Hierarchy.”

  Chick must have been silent for a while.

  “ZZnrrt compensation . . .”

  “Oh. Sorry?”

  “Mr. Meatman has not suggested the dimensions of our gratitude?”

  “He wasn’t clear. It sounded kind of religious.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Eternal life.”

  “Better. Eternal youth.”

  “Well, by ginger. Sure can’t beat that.”

  Mr. Ace went on to explain—or, maybe not explain but certainly to allege—that scientists of his own time, in the course of their extensive research into time travel, had discovered, as an unintended windfall, how to transform the class of thermochemical reactions once known as “irreversible processes,” notable among them human aging and death, so as actually to reverse them. “Once we acquired the technique, the whole problem became trivial.”

  “Easy for you to say, I guess.”

  “Now it is no more than a form of trade goods, like the beads and mirrors your own newcomers to the American shores once traded with the Indians. A gift of small worth, but tendered with great sincerity.”

  “So this is supposed to be like Squanto and the Pilgrims,” Chick reported to the plenary session called hurriedly next morning. “We help them through their first winter, sort of thing.”

  “And suppose it isn’t that,” said Randolph. “Suppose they’re not pilgrims but raiders, and there’s some particular resource here, that they’ve run out of and want to seize from us, and take back with them?”

  “Food,” said Miles.

  “Women,” suggested Darby.

  “Lower entropy,” speculated Chick. “As a simple function of Time, their entropy level would be higher. Like rich folks taking mineral waters at some likely ‘spa.’”

  “It’s our innocence,” proclaimed Lindsay, in an unaccustomedly distraught voice. “They have descended on our shores to hunt us down, capture our innocence, and take it away with them into futurity.”

  “I was thinking of something a little more tangible,” Randolph frowning in thought. “Negotiable.”

  “Yeeah a-and who says we’re ‘innocent’?” Darby piped up.

  “But imagine them,” Lindsay in stricken tones, as if before some unbearable illumination, “so fallen, so corrupted, that we—even we—seem to them pure as lambs. And their own time so terrible that it’s sent them desperately back—back to us. Back to whatever few pathetic years we still have left, before . . . whatever is to happen . . .”

  “Say, Lindsay.” It was Darby, for the first time in group memory concerned for his Puritanical shipmate.

  After a moment’s paralysis in the discussion, “There is always the possibility,” Chick pointed out, “that they are only bunco artists, confederates of Dr. Zoot—or, even more underhandedly, that this is some theatrical exercise, a sort of Moral Drill, got up by Hierarchy to detect potential rebellion and suppress dissent. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

  “So either way,” said Darby, “we’re totally—”

  “Don’t say it,” Lindsay warned.

  Understanding that he would not be allowed to learn any more from Mr. Ace than whatever story the sinister traveler chose to tell, Chick arrived at their next meeting with Miles, who alone among the crew possessed the clairvoyance the situation required. At his first sight of Mr. Ace, Miles began to cry, heedless and desolate, the tears of a high professional cleric after receiving a direct message from God. . . .Chick looked on in astonishment, for tears among this Unit were virtually unknown.

  “I recognized him, Chick,” said Miles forthrightly, when they had returned to the ship. “From somewhere else. I knew he was real and couldn’t be wished away. He is not what he says he is. Assuredly he does not have our best interests in mind.”

  “Miles, you must tell me. Where have you seen him?”

  “By way of these visual conduits that more and more seem to find me in the course of my day. For some time, it has been possible for me to look in on him and these other trespassers, as through ‘windows’ into their home space. I may have been invisible to them at first, but no longer—they’ve a way now to detect me whenever I observe them . . . and lately, whenever they know I’m watching, I see them pointing something back at me—not exactly a weapon—an enigmatic object . . .

  “It is by way of these ‘windows’ that they cross over, for brief periods, to our own time and space. That is how this ‘Mr. Ace’ comes to us.” Miles shivered. “Did you see how he looked at me? He knew. And he wanted me to feel guilt, out of proportion to the offense, which was after all only peeping. I think that ever since we arrived here at Candlebrow, some ‘Agency’ of theirs has been commissioned expressly to deal with us. Which must make any stranger in our midst, even—especially—the most innocent-looking, immediately suspect.” At the deep alarm in Chick’s face, Miles shook his head, reached out a steadying hand. “Not to worry—we are sound and straight as ever. If there were any ‘double-crosser’ in our midst, Pugnax would know, and soon be feasting on his entrails. As for immediate steps, I’d say make tracks, and the quicker the better.”

  SOON THE CREW began to find evidence of Trespass everywhere, some invisible narrative occupying, where it did not in fact define, the passage of the day. And it was soon evident that at all levels, from local to international, a neuropathy had taken over the Chums of Chance organization. The Trespassers had studied their targets closely, knew of the Chums’ unquestioning faith that none of them, barring misadventure, would ever simply grow old and die, a belief which over the years many had come to confuse with a guarantee. On l
earning that they might be no more exempt than any of the human supernumeraries they had been so carelessly aviating above all these years, some Chums of Chance turned in panic to the corrupt embrace of the Trespassers, ready to deal with Hell itself, to betray anything and anyone if only they could be sent back to when they were young, be allowed to regain the early boys’-book innocence they were so willing now to turn right around and violate on behalf of their insidious benefactors.

  That there existed more than one such traitor soon became widely known, though not their identities. So, with anyone a likely candidate, there arose an unprecedented and widely destructive wave of slander, paranoia, and character assassination, which had continued unabated through the present day. Duels were fought, lawsuits brought, all for nought. The Trespassers went on undeterred with their dark confidence game, though some of their victims would seek, at last, out of conscience or contingency, to break free of the sinister contracts they’d been gulled into signing, even if the price be their immunity to death.

  Other Units of the Chums of Chance meanwhile chose lateral solutions, sidestepping the crisis by passing into metaphorical identities, as law-enforcement squads, strolling theatrical companies, governments-in-exile of imaginary countries they could nonetheless describe in exhaustive, some would say obsessive, detail, including entire languages with rules for syntax and usage—or, in the case of the crew of Inconvenience, immersed at Candlebrow in the mysteries of Time, drift into the brief aberration in their history known as the Marching Academy Harmonica Band.

  As if in a dream, they would come to recall attending Candlebrow U. not as visitors to a summer Conference but as full-time music students, waiting at a railway platform with their belongings and instruments piled nearby, for an interurban that would never come. What did finally glide to a stop beside them was a gleaming, spiffed-up Special with Harmonica Band Marching Academy insignia on it, filled with kids just their age in traveling uniforms of Chinese red and indigo.

  “Sure, come on in, plenty of room.”

  “You’ll take us?”

  “Anybody. Room and board, long as you play harmonica.”

  So, without any fuss, they climbed aboard and before reaching Decatur had learned the rhythm parts to “El Capitán” and “Whistling Rufus,” and rode on down the rails to join the student performers at the world-famous Marching Harmonica Band Academy, where soon they were fitted for uniforms, assigned quarters, and being reprimanded like everybody else for improvising during the more tightly arranged pieces like “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

  The institution had its origins, like Candlebrow, in the intricacies of greed as then being practiced under global capitalism. German harmonica manufacturers, who led the world in production of the instrument, had for some years been dumping their surplus inventory on the American market, with the result that soon every community in the land had some kind of harmonica-based marching society, often numbering in the hundreds, who turned out for every national holiday parade as well as school graduation ceremonies, annual picnics, dedications of local improvements such as streetlighting or sewer lines. It was only a matter of time before this unforeseen outcome of the Law of Supply and Demand was consecrated as the Harmonica Marching Band Academy, a handsome set of Richardsonian Romanesque buildings located in “The Heart of the Mississippi Watershed,” as the advertisements would put it. Each year youths from all over the Republic came to study here, emerging after four years as Master Harmonicists who more often than not would go on to eminence in the profession, some even founding schools of their own.

  One evening early in their first spring semester, Randolph, Lindsay, Darby, Miles, and Chick were in the dormitory with some classmates, taking a break from studying for an examination in modal theory the next day.

  “Never thought it’d be like this,” declared one of the Third-Year Harpmen, eyeglass lenses reflecting the gaslight. “Rather be seeing some real action, get out there into the hullaballoo, just let the durn music go for a while, don’t ya know.”

  A classmate, hands behind his head, lay puffing on an illicit cigarette whose fragrance, not to everyone’s taste, filled the room. “Put in a chit, hoss, they’ll be happy to have you.”

  “Dang perilous times, boys, got to forget about the soft duty, go where we can make ourselves useful—” interrupted by the precipitate entrance of young Mouthorganman Apprentice Bing Spooninger, the Band Mascotte, yelling, “Anybody seen that ‘Zo Meatman? He’s not in his rack, and it’s after curfew and darn near lights-out!”

  Uproar. Heads appearing over the edges of upper bunks. Jumping up and down, running around colliding with each other, looking under furniture, in closets, everywhere for the vanished harpman. The Chums by now understood that this was the “intro” to a musical number, as students broke out and started to play scales on every harmonica within reach, and heavens but there were, well, bell-metal bass harmonicas six feet long—great whopping tubas of harmonicas—ranging down to the tiniest possible two-hole silver and pearl Microharmonicas, with every note in the Universe in between, as at some all-but-imperceptible nod the fellows began sucking and singing—

  That ‘Zo Meat-man’s gone A-WOL.

  Yippy dippy dippy, doo!

  Faster than you can say “Wall”—

  What a nut-ty thing, to do!

  [Comical bass]

  Now, it ain’t that I wouldn’t, ‘cause I can but I won’t,

  And I would if I wasn’t, but I am so I don’t!

  [All] A-a-and,

  That ‘Zo Meatman’s gone A-WOL.

  [Bing as treble soloist] A . . . W . . . O . . . L . . . [Everybody looking on as if totally fascinated with the difficult vocal feat whose successful conclusion would allow them at last, chucklingly, to relax. Singin’,]

  Yippy dippy dippy,

  Flippy zippy zippy,

  Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!

  segueing into a spirited cakewalk allowing opportunities for brief novelty effects, locomotive noises, barnyard animals—the mysteriously missing Alonzo Meatman, for example, having specialized in playing harmonica through his nose, typically getting mucus in number three and four holes and usually a “booger” substantial enough to block number two completely, presenting, and not for the first time either, a draw-note problem to anyone incautious enough to borrow the instrument, the resulting ill-will, in fact, contributing to Alonzo’s long-seething resentment of and lowered tolerance for any unorthodox behavior, leading him more than once, at first furtively but then with growing confidence, to the office of the Harmonica Band Marching Academy Commandant.

  The practice of boys informing on other boys, regarded with horror at more traditional institutions, had at the Marching Harmonica Band Academy come to command a curious respect even from those who were apt to suffer from it most. For a “squealer” such as young Meatman to go missing did not therefore immediately raise the suspicions of foul play it might have at another school. In fact, commonly the “squealer,” being well paid for his spying efforts, enjoyed a considerable popularity with the other boys, especially on furlough weekends. With less pressure on him to create and maintain a second or cover identity, the little weasel had more energy to devote to normal Marching Harmonica Band activities. Exempt as well from the unannounced punishments it was the lot of the squealed-upon to undergo literally at any moment on the old Commandant’s whim, squealers, suffering less anxiety, slept better and led generally healthier lives than their more vulnerable classmates.

  Earlier that day Alonzo had paid his weekly visit to the “Old Man.” Out the window breathed a spring afternoon, a sunny verdigris campus, dipping away to a windbreak of Lombardy poplars all at that distance in a green mist of budding, while before the window-frame bobbed the kindly seamed face of the Commandant, with its closely maintained white mustache and gold teeth which flashed when he smiled—to appearance the slow and amiable smile of the drug habitué, but in fact an all but nihilistic dismissal of whatever the world might present him
—opiatedly explaining meanwhile to the young informant, as he had dozens of times previous, everything, everything—Chromatic Harp Safety, and the particular need to keep those nasal hairs closely trimmed lest one or two be caught between cover and plate and get pulled out, which beyond the pain and humiliation carried as well the risk of brain infection, and where and when the units slept and who stood the different kinds of watches such as Pitch Integrity Guard, protecting through the hours of darkness the famous D-Flat Reverberating Harmonica from the Phantom Filer, known to sneak in with a full set of professional harmonica-reed files to alter notes and create difficulties for soloists upon the instrument, obliging them at times to shift over to sucking the tonic chords and blowing the subdominant ones, producing a vaguely Negroid sound—though the intruder must take care to avoid as well the Provisional Anti-Urination Watch, set up against late-night visits to the latrine, peculiar, indeed pee-culiar, goings-on in there having been recently reported. . . .Out the window behind the Commandant on the Activity Fields could now and then be made out elements of the Harmonica Band engaged in “Physical Education,” though not the usual Rugby Union or Lacrosse, no it was rather some horrible . . . nonregulation Combat-Inside-Ten-Meters, as the musicians, tiny figures in red sweatshirts bearing the golden crest of the Academy, attempted to strangle, kick, or, if suitable rocks happened to be to hand, beat each other, apparently, into unconsciousness if not further . . . bodies had begun, actually, to fall, and screams delayed by distance to float at last up from the green fields and through the Commandant’s window to accompany his long recitation, punctuated with tuneful quotations on his personal gold-plated I.G. Mundharfwerke “Little Giant,” from behind a desktop chaotically littered with books, papers, and (embarrassingly) outright refuse, such as orange peels, peach pits, and cigar stubs, drifted in places to depths of two feet and more, somewhat repelling Meatman, who had after all only come here to “rat” on his classmates, who would soon, bearing their playing-field casualties, come marching back between the magnolia trees, to the sprightly Offenbach air “Halls of Montezoo-HOO-ma!” the tranquil Old Man with syrup-slow ease continuing his digression, fading through the afternoon, into obsessively detailed allegations of odd latrine behavior, evoking in short flashes white porcelain fittings voluptuous of form, not necessarily toilets, though in some way vehicles for the mysterious but as yet unspecified “peeculiar goings-on,” presently allowing the whole picture to be viewed, a rapid swoop down between the ranks of white fixtures, blurring moistly violet at the edges, into the Latrine itself, into dark proximities including—unavoidably—corruption and death, the rows of mirrors facing each other through a haze of secular use, the breath, atomized dentifrice and shaving preparations, ascents of tapwater vapor bearing traces of local minerals, each set of images chaining away for uncounted leagues, everything reflected, headed for the Point at Infinity along a great slow curve. . . .