Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  They paused at Venice in the fog in the middle of the night to allow for some brief ghostly transaction. Dally woke, peered out the porthole and saw a flotilla of black gondolas, each with a single lantern, each bearing a single cloaked passenger, who all stood solidly gazing ahead into something only they seemed to understand. This is Venice? she remembered thinking, then went back to sleep. In the morning they put in at last to the Stupendica’s, home port, Trieste. Crowds had turned out in the Piazza Grande to welcome her in. Ladies in enormous hats, on the arms of Austro-Hungarian army officers in blue, scarlet, and gold, promenaded along the Riva with all the certitude of dream. A military band played medleys of Verdi, Denza, and local favorite Antonio Smareglia.

  Dally allowed herself to be swept gently ashore in the bustle of debarkation. It felt like she was standing still. She had never even heard of this place. Never mind Kit for the moment—where was she?

  Followed by equivocal stares from the crew of the Fomalhaut, Kit collected his pay at Ostend and stepped wobbling onto the Fishermen’s Quai, boarded the electric tram, and rode as far as the Continental, where for some reason he assumed there’d be a room reserved and waiting. But they had never heard of him. Almost taking it personally, he was about to invoke the Vibe name when he caught a glimpse of himself in one of the gold-framed lobby mirrors, and sanity intervened. Judas priest. He looked like debris washed up on the beach. Smelled that way too, come to think of it. Outside again, he caught another tram, which took him into town along the Boulevard van Iseghem before making a couple of left turns and heading back toward the Basins again. The crowds he saw were all far more street-plausible than he was. At the Quai de l’Empereur, almost where he started from, Kit got off with no better sense of what to do with himself, went in a little estaminet, and sat over in a corner with a twelve-centime glass of beer, reviewing the situation. He had enough money to put up someplace overnight at least, before figuring out how to get to Göttingen.

  His ruminations were broken in upon by a violent dispute over in the corner, among an unkempt, indeed seedy, band of varying ages and nationalities, whose only common language Kit recognized presently as that of the Quaternions, though he couldn’t recall ever seeing so many of that embattled persuasion gathered in one place before. Even stranger than that, he now grew aware that they seemed to recognize him—not that Masonic signs and countersigns were being exchanged, exactly, and yet—

  “Here then, Kellner! a demi of Lambic for that bloke over there with the seaweed on his suit,” called a cheerfully insane party in a battered skimmer that looked like he’d found it on the beach.

  Kit made what he hoped was the universal sign for short funds by pulling out an imaginary pair of trouser pockets and shrugging in apology.

  “Not to worry, this week it’s all on the Trinity maths department, they’re wizards at solving biquaternion equations, but show them an expense account and lucky for us their minds go blank.” He introduced himself as Barry Nebulay, from the University of Dublin, space was made, and Kit joined the polyglot gang.

  All last week and this, Quaternioneers had been converging on Ostend to hold one of their irregularly spaced World Conventions. In the wake of the transatlantic unpleasantness of the ’90s known as the Quaternion Wars—in which Kit was aware that Yale, being the home of Gibbsian Vectors, had figured as a major belligerent—true Quaternionists, if not defeated outright then at best having come to feel irrelevant, could be found these days wandering the world, dispersed, under the yellow skies of Tasmania, out in the American desert, up in the Alpine wastes of Switzerland, gathering furtively in border-town hotels, at luncheons in rented parlors, in hotel lobbies whose surfaces, varying in splendor from French velvet to aboriginal masonry, raised ensembles of echoes—they were eyed suspiciously by waiters who brought in and ladled from oversize alloyed-steel kettles vegetables grown locally whose names did not readily come to mind, or animal parts concealed by opaque sauces—particularly, here in Belgium, forms of mayonnaise—whose color schemes ran to indigoes and aquas, often quite vivid actually . . . yes but what choices, if any, remained? Having been inseparable from the rise of the electromagnetic in human affairs, the Hamiltonian devotees had now, fallen from grace, come to embody, for the established scientific religion, a subversive, indeed heretical, faith for whom proscription and exile were too good.

  The Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue was tucked well back of the Boulevard van Iseghem, far from the seawall it was named for, its appeal being chiefly to the cautious of purse, including the usual assortment of off-season tourists, fugitives, pensioners, abandoned lovers imagining they had found the anterooms of death. In fact, little was what it seemed. The rooms at the hotel were remorselessly appointed with objects of faux bamboo fashioned from pine, painted in exotic colors such as Chinese red, and featuring table-tops of cheap, perhaps synthetic, marble. In an attempt to grasp the propensities of Belgian Art Nouveau in its full modernity, woman/animal hybrid motifs were to be seen incorporated into basin and tub fittings, bed-coverings, drapes, and lampshades.

  Kit looked around. “Pretty fancy.”

  “By this point,” said Barry Nebulay, “no one is keeping very close tabs on who is or is not a registered guest. You would not be the only one dossing here free of charge.” Kit, having decided to try to win enough at the Casino to get to Göttingen, presently found himself sleeping in a corner among piles of Quaternionist debris, along with a shifting population of refugees whose names, if he heard them at all, he quickly forgot.

  Just down the corridor happened to be living a cell of Belgian nihilists—Eugénie, Fatou, Denis, and Policarpe, styling themselves “Young Congo”—persons of unfailing interest to the Garde Civique as well as to those French Second Bureau folks who visited Brussels on a regular basis. Whenever Kit ran into any of these youngsters—which seemed more often than chance would account for—there was always a moment of intense recognition, almost as if he’d once, somehow, actually belonged to the little phalange, until something had happened, something too terrible to remember, at least as momentous as the fate of the Stupendica, whereupon everything, along with memory, had gone falling dizzily away, not only downward but out along other axes of space-time as well. This had been happening a lot to him lately. While it was certainly a relief to have nothing weighing him down for the moment beyond his clothes—and though it was almost possible to convince himself he had escaped the Vibe curse and was now starting life afresh—the weightless condition he was going around in was peculiar enough to turn dangerous at any time. When he got a good look at the Digue, twenty-five feet high and lined with fancy hotels, and the sea just the other side of it, pounding away, higher than the town, he couldn’t help imagining a conscious force, looking for a weak point, destined to overtop the promenade and sweep Ostend to destruction.

  “So the black hordes of the Congo,” meditated Policarpe. “Whom Belgians in their Low Country neuropathy imagine also in unremitting swell, silently rising, ever higher, behind some wall of force and death which no one knows how to make strong enough to keep them from overwhelming everything—”

  “Their unmerited suffering,” Denis suggested, “their moral superiority.”

  “Hardly. They are as savage and degenerate as Europeans. Nor is it a matter of simple numbers, for here in Belgium is the highest population density in the world, and no one can much be taken by surprise in that regard. No, we create this, I think—project it from the co-conscious, from out of the ooze of hallucination being mapped onto continually by the unremitting and unremittable hell of our dominion down there. Each time a member of the Force Publique strikes a rubber worker, or even speaks the simplest insult, the tidal forces intensify, the digue of self-contradiction grows ever weaker.”

  It was like being together back in khâgne. Everyone lay around in a sort of focused inertia, drinking, handing cigarettes back and forth, forgetting with whom, or whether, they were supposed to be romantically obsessed. Denis and Eugénie had studi
ed geography with Reclus at the University of Brussels, Fatou and Policarpe were fleeing warrants issued in Paris, where even the intent to advocate Anarchism was a crime. “Like the Russian nihilists,” Denis explained, “we are metaphysicians at heart. There is a danger of becoming too logical. At the end of the day one can only consult one’s heart.”

  “Don’t mind Denis, he’s a Stirnerite.”

  “Anarcho-individualiste, though you are too much of an imbecile to appreciate this distinction.”

  Though there existed within the phalange a hundred opportunities to draw such distinctions, Africa remained the unspoken, the unpermitted term that kept them solid and resolute. That and the moral obligation, though some might have said obsession, with assassinating Leopold, King of the Belgians.

  “Has anyone noticed,” Denis ventured, “how many assorted figures of power in Europe—Kings, Queens, Grand Dukes, Ministers—have been going down lately beneath the implacable Juggernaut of History? corpses of the powerful toppling in every direction, with a frequency far higher than chance might suggest?”

  “Are you authorized to speak for the gods of Chance?” inquired Eugénie. “Who can say what a ‘normal’ assassination rate is supposed to be?”

  “Yes,” Policarpe put in, “maybe it’s not high enough yet. Considering how scientifically inevitable the act is.”

  The group had taken heart from the example of the fifteen-year-old Anarchist Sipido, who in solidarity with the Boers of South Africa had tried to assassinate the Prince and Princess of Wales in Brussels, at the Gare du Nord. Four shots at close range missed, Sipido and his gang were arrested and later acquitted, and the Prince was now King of England. “And the Brits,” shrugged Policarpe, the realist in the group, “are still treating the Boers like dirt. Sipido should have paid more attention to the tools of our trade. One appreciates the need for concealment, but if one is out after Crown Prince, one needs caliber, not to mention a larger magazine.”

  “Let’s say we placed a bomb, out at the Hippodrome,” proposed Fatou, rouged, hatless, and wearing a skirt shorter than a circus girl’s, though everybody but Kit was pretending not to notice this.

  “Or in the Royal Bathing Hut,” Policarpe said. “Anyone can hire that for twenty francs.”

  “Who’s got twenty francs?”

  “Something in the picric family might do nicely,” Fatou went on, deploying maps and diagrams about the tiny room. “Brugère’s powder, say.”

  “Always been a Designolle’s man myself,” murmured Denis.

  “Or we might hire an American gunslinger,” Eugénie gazing meaningfully at Kit.

  “Heck, mademoiselle, you don’t want to be lettin me near a gun, I’d need steel shoes just to protect my feet.”

  “Come, Kit, you can tell us. How many desperados have you . . . drilled daylight through?”

  “Hard to say, we don’t start countin till it’s over a dozen.”

  At the cusp of the twilight, lamps were lit up and down the streets, against a hovering shadow of beleaguerment by forces semi-visible. . . . Beyond the Digue, waves thudded on the invisible strand. Policarpe had fetched absinthe, sugar, and paraphernalia. He was the phalanx dandy, sporting, after the style of Monsieur Santos-Dumont, a Panama hat to the precise dishevelment of whose brim he devoted the kind of time other young men might to grooming their mustaches. He and his friends were absintheurs and absintheuses, and spent a lot of time sitting around enacting elaborate drinking rituals. The Green Hour often stretched on till midnight.

  “Or, as we like to say, l’heure vertigineuse.”

  Around midnight a pair of voices arguing in Italian were heard outside the door, and the exchange continued for a while. Recently Young Congo had joined forces with a pair of Italian naval renegades, Rocco and Pino, who had stolen from the Whitehead works in Fiume the highly secret plans for a low-speed manned torpedo, which they intended to assemble here in Belgium and go after King Leopold’s royal yacht, the Alberta, with. Rocco, never less than earnest, might only have lacked imagination—while Pino, seeming to express all that is immoderate in the southern Italian temperament, found himself driven regularly to distraction by the mental stolidity of his partner. In theory they made a perfect team for manned-torpedo work, Rocco’s inability to imagine the non-regulation in any form promising—even now and then able—to deflect the exuberant though unprofitable fantasies of Pino.

  The Siluro Dirigibile a Lenta Corsa represented a brief yet romantic chapter in torpedo history. With its targets limited to stationary objects such as ships at anchor, the mathematics of trajectory and aiming were enormously simplified, though the element of personal virtù came to assume signal importance, as the team must first bring their deadly craft undetected past too-often-unfamiliar harbor defenses until it actually touched the hull of its intended victim—whereupon, having initiated a timed fuzing sequence, they must then exfiltrate as fast and far as they could before the charge went off. Working uniform was usually a diver’s suit of Vulcanized rubber for keeping warm during what might prove to be hours in frigid waters, the torpedo traveling mostly just below the surface, as perforce must Rocco and Pino.

  “What a night!” exclaimed Pino. “Garde Civique all over the place.”

  “Top hats and green uniforms every time you turn around,” added Rocco.

  “Still, if you’re not allergic to green quite yet,” Policarpe offering the absinthe bottle.

  “How many ships have you actually . . . blown up, Pino?” Fatou was presently cooing, while Rocco, throwing her fearful glances, was muttering in his partner’s ear.

  “ . . . just the kind of question an Austrian spy might ask—think, Pino, think.”

  “Pino, what’s he saying?” Fatou tapping at one ear whose lobe had been left intriguingly naked of ornament. “Does Rocco think I’m a spy, really?”

  “We have had dealings, you see, with one or two lady spies,” purred Pino, attempting a look of chaste appreciation that fooled nobody, his efforts today toward the suave being further undone by a slept-on thicket of curls, a distressed Royal Italian Navy fatigue uniform stained with wine and motor lubricants, and an unfocused gaze that never came to rest anywhere, least of all upon anybody’s face. “While I am able to take these episodes as part of life and move on, poor Rocco cannot forget. He has put into deep narcosis any number of gatherings, even Gypsies in a mood for all-night festivity, with his obsessions of danger from lady spies.”

  “Macchè, Pino! They . . . they interest me, that’s all. As a category.”

  “Ehi, stu gazz’, categoria.”

  “You are safe with me, Lieutenant,” Fatou assured him. “Any government that hired me to spy would have to be hopeless idiots. . . .”

  “My point exactly!” Rocco staring in righteous density.

  She peered at him, at the just-arisen chance that, like the heedless mezzogiornismo of his companion Pino, this might be Rocco’s way of slyly flirting with her.

  “As usual,” Eugénie had warned her, “you’re too suspicious. You have to learn to listen more to your heart.”

  “My heart.” Fatou shook her head. “My heart knew him for a rogue, long before he got close enough to hear it beating. Of course he’s a bad marriage risk, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

  Eugénie demurely touching her friend’s sleeve. “As it happens, actually, I may . . . hmm . . . fancy . . . Rocco?”

  “Aahh!” Fatou collapsed on the bed, pounding it with her fists and feet. Eugénie waited till she was quite done. “I’m serious.”

  “We can go out dancing together! Have dinner! The theater! Just like boys and girls would do! I know you’re ‘serious,’ Génie—that’s what has me worried!”

  Both young women experienced some distress whenever the Italian duo were obliged to spend time in Bruges, the Venice of the Low Countries, just a short canal journey away, which since the Middle Ages had enjoyed a reputation for its pretty girls. This was not so important, Rocco and Pino both swore repe
atedly, as the need to run frequent midnight exercises with the Torpedo, which was having its internal-combustion engine modified by the staff at Raoul’s Atelier de la Vitesse, most of them Red mechanicians from Ghent. Once everyone was satisfied with the weapon’s performance, Rocco and Pino planned to ride it through these nocturnal ghostways, invisibly, to the seaside and a certain royal rendezvous.

  “They’ve put in a Daimler six-cylinder,” explained Rocco, “with an Austrian military carburetor, still very hush-hush, and a redesigned exhaust manifold, which means we’re already up to a hundred horsepower, and that’s just cruising, guaglion.”

  “Why didn’t you sell the plans to the English?” one of the Ghent machinists had thought to ask. “Why give them away to some stateless collection of Anarchists?”

  Rocco was puzzled. “Steal from one government to sell it to another?” He and Pino looked at each other.

  “Let’s kill him,” Pino suggested brightly. “I killed the last one, Rocco, so it’s your turn.”

  “Why is he running away?” said Rocco.

  “Come back, come back!” cried Pino. “Oh well. They’re all so stolid up here.”

  HOTEL STAFF of a spruceness less rigorous than what they might’ve been held to in daylight hours were maintaining a fine balance between annoyance and bewilderment at the spectacle of these Quaternionist troupers, by now years in retreat from their great struggle for existence, still resolute and insomniac. Were this its afterlife, only some of those wearing the livery of the Grand Hôtel de la Nouvelle Digue could have been classified as ministering angels—the rest being closer to imps of ingenious discomfort.

  “Is this a stag affair, or are there likely to be one or two lady Quaternionists?” Kit inquired, one would have to say plaintively.