Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “This is beginning to sound like a sea story,” opined an American stoker named O. I. C. Bodine, who lounged against a bulkhead drinking some horrible fermented potato mash as prelude to going off watch and into sleep. “Four shafts, see. Even the Mauretania’s happy with three. Not a civilian arrangement here. These are cruising turbines. Uh-oh, here comes Gerhardt—Zu befehl, Herr Hauptheitzer!”

  The Chief Stoker exploded into a spectacular exhibition of cursing. “Easily upset,” confided O.I.C. “Terrible mouth on the man. Just now thought he saw the telegraph look like it was about to move. Imagine what he’s like when it does move. But we should always look for the good in everybody.”

  “So he’s a decent sort at heart.”

  “Hell no, try pulling liberty with him. He’s even worse ashore.”

  All of a sudden, it was like the entire Black Gang was having a violent paroxysm. The telegraph from the bridge started tolling like all the cathedrals of Hell on a particularly important feast day. Cruising turbines were lit off, oil and steam pressures began to rise, the Oberhauptheitzer, having produced from somewhere a Mannlicher eight-shot pistol, brandished it at the steam-pressure gauges in high irritation, as if to shoot them if they did not provide the correct readings. Cries of “Dampf mehr!” were heard from several directions. Kit looked around for the nearest ladder to the open air, but all had become many-tongued confusion. He found his head seized by a gigantic bituminous hand, which propelled him rapidly through the fierce spasms of light and the ungodly steel clangor toward the bunkers at the side of the ship, out of which men were loading coal on to skids to be dragged to the boiler furnaces.

  “Sure,” Kit muttered, “all you had to do was ask.” For what seemed hours then, he made the same trip back and forth, gradually losing his shirt and singlet, being insulted in languages he did not speak but understood. Everything ached. He thought he might have lost part of his hearing.

  All hell likewise had broken loose topside. As if syntonic wireless messages, traveling through the Æther, might be subject to influences we remain at present ignorant of, or perhaps, owing to the unnaturally shaky quality of present-day “reality,” the receivers in the ship’s Marconi room were picking up traffic from somewhere else not quite “in” the world, more like from a continuum lateral to it . . . around midafternoon the Stupendica had received a message in cipher, to the effect that British and German battle groups were engaged off the Moroccan coast, and that a state of general European war should be presumed in effect.

  Anxious voices out of megaphones hitherto unnoticed began calling the crew to general quarters. Hydraulics engaged, as entire decks began ponderously to slide, fold, and rotate, and passengers found themselves, often lethally, in the way of this booming and shrieking steel metamorphosis. Bells, gongs, bos’n’s pipes, steam sirens added to the cacophony. Stewards threw off their white livery to reveal dark blue Austro-Hungarian naval uniforms, and started shouting orders at the civilians who moments ago had been ordering them around, and who now mostly were wandering the passageways disoriented and increasingly fearful. “Right full rudder!” the Captain cried, and throughout the gigantic vessel, as the helm responded and the ship began to heel sharply over, approaching ever closer to her design maximum of nine degrees, hundreds of small inconveniences commenced, as bottles of perfume went sliding off the tops of vanity tables, wineglasses in the dining saloon tipped over and soaked the table linen, dance partners who would rather have kept an appropriate distance lurched into one another, causing foot injuries and couture damage, assorted objects in the crew’s spaces fell from channel bars serving as shelves next to upper bunks in a shower of pipes, tobacco-pouches, playingcards, pocket flasks, vulgar souvenirs of exotic ports of call, descending now and then onto officers’ heads—“All ahead full!” as forgotten coffee cups reappeared only to shatter on the steel decks, forgotten sandwiches and pastries to which entropy had been typically unkind made themselves known amid multilingual expressions of distaste, clouds of dust and soot descended from overheads throughout the vessel, and the roach population, newborns, nymphs, and grizzled oldtimers alike, imagining some global calamity, ran where they might at the highest speeds available to them given the general uproar.

  Dally was sent rolling out of her bunk and onto the deck, as, a second later, was Bria, landing right on top of her, exclaiming, “Porca miseria! What’s this, then?”

  Cici came running in. “It must be Pop, going crazy again!”

  “Yeah, blame it on the magician,” remarked the elder Zombini, draped in the doorway, “it’s the old Liner-to-Battleship Effect. Everybody all right in here?”

  Strangely, it was Kit Dally was worrying about.

  After running madly round and round in the same tight circle at top speed a number of times, the vessel, as if getting a grip on itself, finally slowed down, easing back to vertical and steadying on to a new course southeast by east. From the giant magnetic compass mounted in the dining saloon for the entertainment of the passengers, the change of heading soon became generally known. “Where the heck are we going, then?” Pocket atlases came out of pockets. “Let’s see, if we made that turn about here . . .” The nearest land ahead of them appeared to be Morocco.

  IN THE ENGINEERING SPACES, things slowly drifted back to normal, whatever that meant down here. The telegraph moderated its demands for speed, everybody was told at last to secure from general quarters, port and starboard shifts resumed. Peacetime again.

  When the insults had migrated on to other targets and Kit had reached a sort of invisibility, “Well, this has all been mighty educational,” he announced, “and I guess I’ll be getting back up to my stateroom now, thanks for everything, and you especially, Chief Oberhauptheitzer, there. . . .”

  “No, mister, no no—he does not understand—there are no staterooms, it is no longer the Stupendica up there. That admirable vessel has sailed on to its destiny. Abovedecks now you will find only His Majesty’s dreadnought, Emperor Maximilian. It is true that for a while the two ships did share a common engine room. A ‘deeper level’ where dualities are resolved. A Chinese sort of situation, nicht wahr?”

  Kit at first took this all for some sort of Black Gang jollification, and snuck up the ladders as soon as he could to have a look. Marine sentries with Mannlichers stood at the hatchway. “I’m a passenger,” Kit protested. “I’m from America.”

  “I’ve heard of it. I’m from Graz myself. Get back below.”

  He tried other ladders, other hatches. He climbed ventilator shafts and concealed himself in the laundry, but none of it was good for more than five minutes in a grim, gray military world stripped of civilian amenities—no women, flower arrangements, dance orchestras, haute cuisine—though he was grateful for a lungful or two of fresh air. “No, no, bilge-crab, not for the likes of you. Back to the lower depths with you, now.”

  Kit was given a bunk in the crew’s quarters, which were squeezed into the cusp of the bow, and O. I. C. Bodine came around to make sure he was getting along all right. He became the Phantom of the Lower Decks, learning where to hide when anybody appeared from topside, working regular stoker shifts otherwise.

  For a Teutonic of executive rank, the Captain of this vessel appeared unusually indecisive, changing his mind every few minutes. For days S.M.S. Emperor Maximilian haunted the coast, running north, then south again, back and forth, increasingly desperate, as if trying to find the epic sea-battle the Captain continued to believe was in progress. . . . Although the first port of call had been advertised as Tangier—at the moment, according to scuttlebutt, under the control of local warlord Mulai Ahmed er-Raisuli—the Captain had decided instead to put in far to the south, at Agadir, Queen of the Iron Coast.

  Kit discovered the reason for this when he noticed a stack of used plates and dishes from the first-class dining salon outside one of the empty coal bunkers. Curious, he stuck his head in and to his surprise discovered a group of hidden people who’d been living here all along, and most of
whom spoke German. It seemed they were destined for plantation on the Atlantic coast of Morocco as “colonists” whose presence there would then justify German interest in the area. For reasons of diplomacy they were being kept sequestered down here in the engine spaces, and known only to the Captain, among whose orders had been encrypted a couple of clauses concerning their disposition as shadow-colonials on call, homesteading though the area was not promising for husbandry, the coast being as much at the mercy of the wind as its hinterland was at that of the tribesmen of Sus, who did not take kindly to Europeans in their midst. The coast was in fact closed to all foreign trade by edict of the young sultan Abdel Aziz, despite France, Spain, and England having made a deal allowing France the right of “peaceful penetration” elsewhere in Morocco.

  Out there like a dream, out past the gray, unrelenting march of the rollers, the colonists would come to imagine they could see at the horizon, even smell on the wind, the fabled Canaries, which would soon embody their only hope of deliverance. Many would go crazy and set out in small boats or even swim west, never to be heard from again.

  “What happened? We went to sleep in Lübeck and woke up here.”

  “I’m headed for Göttingen,” Kit said, “if there’s any message I can take for you, I’d be happy to.”

  “How good can your chances be of getting there if you’re hiding down here like us?”

  “Temporary setback,” Kit mumbled.

  TOWN-DWELLERS, Susi tradesfolk, Berbers from up the valley, merchants in with caravans from the mountains and the desert beyond left off the minutiae of day’s business to stand along the beach and gaze, uncertain of their peril. Few here had ever seen a vessel bigger than a fishing boat, except for passing shapes farther out to sea, unreadable as to size. Tree-climbing goats up in the branches of argan trees paused in their browsing after the olivelike fruit to regard the metal visitation. Gnaoua musicians invoked the mlouk gnaoui, calling upon the doorkeeper of the Seigneurs Noirs to open the door of good and evil. Everyone agreed that the ship must have come from someplace very far away—to suppose it had originated with one of “The Great Powers” did little to clarify the question, as the phrase, here on this isolated coast, must embrace possibilities beyond secular geography.

  The brilliant white walls of the town presented themselves to the tall predator drifting arrogant and unadorned in out of the daily uneventfulness, casting sharp-edged shadows through a haze of combustion from both its own stacks and fires set hastily ashore, whether in friendliness or fear was uncertain. . . .

  And as if reincarnated from some intermediate or Bardo state, one night of no moon the civilian passengers, including Kit, slipped one by one from an opening in the side of the Emperor Maximilian originally intended for the launching of midget submarines and were rowed secretly ashore, after which the dreadnought put to sea again. Kit, not convinced he had a future in the Habsburg navy, had decided to debark here, and quickly found a room between the port and the Mogador road and begun hanging around a waterfront bar, the Tawil Balak.

  “In town here we’re pretty cosmopolitan,” said Rahman the barkeep, “but you don’t want to be going too far up the valley.” One night some fisherman showed up off a steam trawler operating independently out of Ostend, the Fomalhaut, which a couple of crew members had jumped in Tangier. “We’re shorthanded,” the skipper told Kit. “You’re hired.”

  The rest of the evening passed in a fog. Kit remembered getting into a discussion of the Two-Stupendica problem with Moïsés, a resident Jewish mystic. “Not unusual for these parts, actually. Jonah is the classic case. Recall that he was traveling to Tarshish, whose port, five hundred miles north of here, we call Cádiz today, one of whose alternate names is Agadir. But tradition in this Agadir is that Jonah came ashore just to the south of here, at Massa. There is a mosque commemorating the event.”

  “Two Agadirs,” said Kit, puzzled. “He went out into the Atlantic? He landed both places at once, five hundred miles apart?”

  “As if the Straits of Gibraltar acted as some metaphysical junction point between the worlds. In those days to pass through that narrow aperture into the vast, uncertain field of Ocean was to leave behind the known world, and perhaps its conventions about being in only one place at a time. . . . Once passed through, did the ship take two tacks at once? Did the wind blow two ways? Or was it the giant fish that possessed the power of bilocation? Two fishes, two Jonahs, two Agadirs?”

  “This smoke in here I’ve been breathing,” said Kit, “this wouldn’t be . . . um, hasheesh?”

  “Never heard of the substance,” the holy person seeming offended.

  It was dark in the establishment. As if there were less need for ordinary sources of light, a single lamp was burning evil-smelling sheep fat. Up in the Kashbah, people were singing themselves into trances. Somewhere out in the street, the Gnaoua musicians were playing lutes and keeping time with metal hand percussion, and they were invisible to all but those for whom they played.

  THEY HAD LEFT the Bay of Agadir, rounding Ighir Ufrani as the sunlight was just touching the tops of the mountains, and set a course northeastward toward the English Channel, steaming just out of sight of the coast. Except for some local Moroccan fish, Mogador herring and alimzah and tasargelt, the catches as they moved north became bad to indifferent, which the rest of the crew blamed on Kit’s presence, until suddenly one morning out in the Bay of Biscay the Fomalhaut blundered somehow into a giant school of fish of several kinds, so immoderately abundant as to put serious stress on the warps and winches. “It had to happen someday,” the skipper supposed. “Bloody Jonah in reverse, is what it is. Look at this.” Indeed several sorts of fish seemed to be present in the dynamic silver glittering that spilled into the pounds and prodigally across the deck and over the side again each time the cod-ends of the nets were untied. Kit was put to work sorting the catch, trusted at first only to tell edible fish from scruff, but soon developing a sense of nuance among turbot and brill, cod and hake, sole, plaice, and bream.

  As soon as the starboard trawl was empty, they shot the port one again. There seemed no end to this continent-size school they had steamed into. Kit now found himself getting looks even stranger than before.

  It went on for a day and a night until there was no more room on board, not even for a single sardine, and they came wallowing in to Ostend, into the Staketsel and down the channel, gunwales all but awash. There were fish in the lazarettes and rope lockers, fish spilled out the portholes and came flopping out of charts as they were unrolled on the chart table, hours later, crewmen were finding fish in their pockets, not to mention—“Ah, pardon, mon chou, that’s not what you think it is—”

  MEANWHILE, leaving its military double to wander the mists, the Stupendica continued its civilian journey.

  Bria tried to cheer Dally up. “Hey, you know what they say about shipboard romances.”

  “Is that what it was?”

  “You’d know better’n me, you’re the adventuress.”

  “How about his friend?”

  “Ol’ Rooty-Toot? I asked already, he said they got separated down in the engine room and nobody’s seen Kit since.”

  How crazy did she have to get about this? Dally went searching all through the Stupendica, from moon deck to lower orlop, asking passengers, stewards, stokers, deck hands, officers if they’d seen Kit. No luck. At dinner she confronted the Captain.

  “He may have debarked at Agadir, but I’ll send a wireless message,” the Captain promised.

  Sure. All she hoped at this point was that the damn fickle Yalie hadn’t gone over the side. She sought out the least populated spaces on the ship and lay in a deck chair glaring off at the waves, which helpfully turned dark, deliberate, steep-sided, whitecapped, while the sky clouded over and presently a storm swept upon them from off the starboard bow.

  At Gibraltar the ship seemed to pause, as if waiting for clearance. She dreamed that passengers had been allowed to go ashore for a little while, and tha
t she watched from some night eyrie, up in the stormy heights, directly above the merciless black “Atlantic.” Where had that confounded Kit disappeared to? Briefly she had a clear image of him somewhere far below, at the base of the steep rock face, seeming to push a small, imperfect boat out into the gray magnitudes, about to embark on some impossible journey. . . .

  The Stupendica moved along, keeping close to the Mediterranean coastline, passing port after port, houses and foliage spilling down pale cliffs, inhabitants busy with their lives in the steeply-pitched streets of each town, little lateen-riggers venturing out to circle like moths.

  Erlys kept a considerate distance, not about to start in hammering on this romantic setback of Dally’s, especially since neither seemed to have a very clear idea of how important it might be. Dally had expected Bria would be the first one to put her through this, except that somehow, quietly and with no effort her mother could see, Bria had gone cakewalking quite beyond any sound advice she might once have offered, playing not only Root Tubsmith but a good part of the fourth-class passenger list like fish in an ornamental pond.

  As if she had exited her life briefly and been given the ability to travel on a parallel course, “close” enough to watch herself doing it, Dally discovered an alternate way to travel by land, port to port, faster than the ship was moving. . . . She sped, it seemed slightly above ground level, through the fragrant late-summer twilight, parallel to the course of the ship . . . perhaps, now and then, over a break in the dunes and scrub and low concrete walls, catching a glimpse of the Stupendica, under way, passing along the eternal coast, dogged and slow, all details, folds, and projections muted gray as a fly’s body seen through its wings . . . as night came falling and the ship, outraced, crept on behind. . . . She would return to her deck chair out of breath, sweating, exhilarated for no reason, as if she had just escaped some organized threat to her safety.