Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Rare birds,” said Barry Nebulay, “though of course there is Miss Umeki Tsurigane, of the Imperial University of Japan, a former student of Professor Knott when he was there. Astonishing young woman. She’s published as much as anyone in the faith—memoranda, monographs, books—Kimura has I believe translated some of them into English—Ah. And she’s right over there,” nodding at the bar.

  “That one?”

  “Yes. Presentable, wouldn’t you say? You ought to hit it off, she was just in America. Come along, I’ll introduce you.”

  Black trousers, drover’s sombrero . . . black leather trousers, in fact glove leather, “Are you sure some other time wouldn’t be more—”

  “Too late. Miss Tsurigane, Mr. Traverse, of New Haven.”

  Around her slender neck, the beauteous Asian was also wearing a furoshiki printed in a woodland motif of peacock blue, taupe, and Chinese red, folded in a triangle so as to make a cowgirl bandanna, and knocking back boilermakers and their helpers at an astonishing pace. A modest betting pool had already developed over how long she might keep it up before paralysis in some form set in.

  “‘Some Quaternionic Schemata for Representing the Anharmonic Pencil and Related Forms,’” Kit recalled. “I saw the abstract in Comptes Rendus.”

  “Not another Anharmonic Pencilist,” she greeted him, calm and so far lucid. “There is by now quite a cult, I am told. Expecting all sorts of . . . strange things!”

  “Uhm . . .”

  “The Projective Geometry Symposium—you’ll be speaking at it?”

  “Uhm . . .”

  “Will you be speaking at all? Anytime soon?”

  “Here, let me buy you a couple more of those,” offered Barry Nebulay, who then, like some angel of the alcoholic, was off to other good deeds.

  “Yale—you studied there? Kimura-san, who is now at our Naval College—did you ever meet him?”

  “A little before my time, but he is remembered with much respect.”

  “He and his American classmate, De Forest-san, have both gone on to contribute most materially to the field of syntonic wireless communication. Kimura-san’s system—tonight, somewhere, it is on station with the Japanese navy, in service against the Russians. Both of those gentlemen studied Vectors with the eminent Gibbs Sensei. How much of a—coincidence, could that have been?”

  “With the Maxwell Equations at the heart of the matter . . .”

  “Exactly.” She stood and looked up at him, more or less devastatingly, from under the brim of that cowgirl hat. “The festivities in there—would you mind escorting me?”

  “Why, not at all, miss.” The only hitch being that two steps into the Grand Salon, she had slipped away, or he had, and it would be days before they saw each other again. He had two choices, either leave and go sulk someplace or wander around and see what else might be up. Or, actually, only one choice.

  Kit threaded his way out into the Grand Salon, wallpapered in aniline teal and a bright though sour orange, to appearances floral in theme, though few would insist on it, lit by hundreds of modern-looking sconces, each quartershade of Congo ivory scraped thin as paper to let its electric bulb shine through, roisteringly a-seethe tonight with Quaternionnaires from around the globe, all persuasions not to mention apostates therefrom, quasi-Gibbsites and pseudo-Heavisiders and full-bore Grassmanniacs, milling about, more than in the mood for a clambake, eccentrically attired, negligently when not defectively groomed, all, with perhaps no more than the usual quota of barking and drooling, gossiping breathlessly about vacant appointments, compulsive marriages, cretinous colleagues, and real estate both overpriced and otherwise, scribbling on one another’s attire, performing with cigarettes and banknotes feats of vanishing and restoration right up in one another’s faces, drinking Monopole de la Maison, dancing on tabletops, exhausting the patience of wives, vomiting into the pockets of strangers, getting into long, intensely hoarse disputes in fluent Esperanto and Idiom Neutral, the technical discussions being in large part impenetrable, the phatic or sociable chitchat tending to the only slightly less problematic.

  “ . . . Heaviside’s ham-fisted attempt to de-Quaternionize the Maxwell Field Equations—not even they have been safe from assault—”

  “Face it. The Kampf ums Dasein is over, and we have lost.”

  “Does that mean we only imagine now that we exist?”

  “Imaginary axes, imaginary existence.”

  “Ghosts. Ghosts.”

  “Yes, Q-Brother, yours is a particularly depressing case. From the mistakes in your last paper, your own struggle should be called a Kampf oops Dasein.”

  “We are the Jews of mathematics, wandering out here in our diaspora—some destined for the past, others the future, even a few able to set out at unknown angles from the simple line of Time, upon journeys that no one can predict. . . .”

  “Of course we lost. Anarchists always lose out, while the Gibbs-Heaviside Bolsheviks, their eyes ever upon the long-term, grimly pursued their aims, protected inside their belief that they are the inevitable future, the xyz people, the party of a single Established Coördinate System, present everywhere in the Universe, governing absolutely. We were only the ijk lot, drifters who set up their working tents for as long as the problem might demand, then struck camp again and moved on, always ad hoc and local, what do you expect?”

  “Actually Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists thought they know of God’s intention—that space be simple, three-dimensional, and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end, defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the real term, and a scalar as well—simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to war. Nothing they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than they could allow space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly space they had fought over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, to defend.”

  Accompanying these laments was some inappropriately chirpy music, which Kit had now come in earshot of. What appeared to be a music-hall contralto in a species of Poiret gown sat at a piano, accompanied by a small street-ensemble of accordion, glockenspiel, baritone saxophone, and drums, singing, in a bouncy 6/8,

  O,

  the,

  Quizzical, queer Quater-nioneer,

  That creature of i-j-k,

  Why must he smile so cu-riously,

  And creep-about quite that way? from

  Wat-erloo out to Tim-buctoo, just as

  Man-y as you please—

  They’re down, they say, in Tas-man-

  I-ay, and they’re

  Up-there in-the trees!—and should you

  Find one in your parlor at

  The fullness of the moon,

  You’ll avoid a spot of awk-wardness,

  If you sing this lit-tle tune . . . (-2-3-and)

  Once I saw a Quater-nion chap, he was

  Act-ing oh so queer—

  There was some-thing rather green and long he was

  Put-ting in his ear . . .

  Yes it might have been a gherkin,

  If it wasn’t, dear oh dear! that

  Quizzical queer Quater-nion-eer!

  Which the captivated assembly had been tirelessly singing along with, over and over, since the chanteuse had come on shift, its time-signature working some ancient tarantellical magic as well, producing among the company an irresistible desire to dance with wild abandon, whatever that meant around here. Collisions were frequent, often forceful, Kit being able to avoid one only by having recognized, just before contact, a familiar deep voice. There sure enough in full barrel-rolling conviviality was Root Tubsmith.

  “Thought you’d eloped with that redhead!” he greeted Kit.

  “Got drafted into the navy,” Kit said. “I think. Nothing’s been rigorously what you’d call ‘real’ lately. Does seeing you in this condition mean that everything is normal again?”

 
“Of course,” handing him a bottle of no-name wine, “next question.”

  “Wouldn’t have a dinner jacket I could borrow?”

  “Come on along.” They found Root’s quarters, which like Kit he seemed to be sharing with a dozen or so others of the Hamiltonian persuasion. Clothing in a wide selection of colors, sizes, and degrees of formality littered the available floor space. “Take your pick I guess. Closest we’ll see to Anarchism in our lifetime.”

  Back down in the Salon, the noise and centrifugal jollification had picked up markedly.

  “Maniacs,” cried Root, “every one of us! Fifty years ago of course more than today, today the real maniacs have gone into foundations work, set theory, all abstract as possible, like it’s a race to see who can venture out furthest into the borderlands of the nonexistent. Not strictly speaking ‘mania,’ not as we once knew it. The good old days! Grassmann was German and hence automatically among the possessed, Hamilton was burdened with early genius and in the grip of a first love he could never get beyond. Drinking a lot, though who am I to talk, didn’t help. Heaviside was once termed ‘the Walt Whitman of English Physics’—”

  “What . . . excuse me . . . does that mean?”

  “Open question. Some have found in Heaviside a level of passion or maybe just energy, beyond the truculence already prevailing among the different camps in those days.”

  “Well if Heaviside’s the Whitman,” remarked a British attendee nearby in a striking yellow ensemble, “who’s the Tennyson, you see?”

  “Clerk Maxwell, wouldn’t you say?” suggested someone else, as others joined in.

  “Making Hamilton I imagine the Swinburne.”

  “Yes and who’d be Wordsworth then?”

  “Grassmann!”

  “I say, what an amusing game. And Gibbs? The Longfellow?”

  “Is there an Oscar Wilde, by any chance?”

  “Let’s all go to the Casino!” someone invisible screamed. Kit wondered how any of this crowd would get as far as the door, let alone inside it—though, as it turned out, the Quaternion folks all had members’ privileges at the Kursaal, which included the Casino.

  “Intriguing new field opening up,” Root confided on the way in. “Quaternion Probability. Seems that, as a baccarat game proceeds, you can describe each coup as a set of, well you’d call ’em vectors—different lengths, pointing off in different directions—”

  “Something like your hair, Root.”

  “But instead of finding a single resultant,” Root continued, “we’re working here with rates of change, rotations, partial differentials, Curls, Laplacians, in three dimensions and sometimes more—”

  “Root, I got my fishing-boat pay, and that’s about it.”

  “Stick around, my son, and you’ll soon be wallowing in them francs.”

  “Sure. Think I’ll just wander for a bit.”

  Being used to more of a saloon type of atmosphere, Kit found the European manners here oppressive, not a heck of a lot of bluffing, slandering, cheating, or getting into fistfights, it seemed. Where was the fun? Except for a scream now and then whose polarity was hard to read, high emotion had to wait either for later or maybe for some other offstage room set aside for pain, lost souls, and canceled futures, for everything that must not go on out here, for this was a temple of money, wasn’t it, even if that did lead back to its own Unspoken, to figures like Fleetwood Vibe, to rubber and ivory and fever and black African misery whose awful depths were only beginning to appal public sentiment elsewhere in the civilized world.

  Waiters on padded soles passed in and out carrying Champagne, cigars, opiated powders, intra-Casino correspondence sealed in small heavy envelopes. Maquillages became slowly blurred with perspiration and tears, beards disarranged, handkerchiefs soiled not infrequently with blood from bitten lips. Top hats brimmed with banknotes. Heads passing into slumber met baize surfaces in audible percussion. Staccato utterances from wheels, dealing-shoes, dancing-shoes, dice, filled the room and what might otherwise have been an intolerable silence. Electric lamplight kept the scene hard-focused and readable, all proceeding stepwise, by integers, little ambiguity allowed in the spaces between. And somewhere, that unanswerable wave-function the sea.

  Oddly, Kit noticed, the room was also crawling with lopsided makeup jobs, and these weren’t limited to women either—broken symmetries everywhere, as if each, at some forgetful or overconfident moment, had allowed into the mirror-frame something they oughtn’t to see, and there went the whole concoction. When at length he did run into a symmetrical face, it was at a roulette table, and on a type known in these parts as a sphinxe Khnopffienne. The woman poised above the wheel was looking Kit directly in the face, right away ruling out all sorts of introductory chitchat, with a gaze animal, timeless, as if already onto whatever he thought he understood now—or even would come to understand later, should there not arise matters more immediately desperate to attend to—an indifference to most forms of terror, including those which Anarchists of the day were finding it often necessary to self-incorporate. The difficulty lay in the extraordinary pale amber of her irises—far too pale for safety, less a positive shade than a failure on the side of jaundice to achieve the titanium-white that surrounded them. Put another way, he supposed—if eyes as colorless as these were on a dog, you would quickly enough understand that it was no dog looking back at you.

  This presentable enigma regarded him through the smoke of a slender cigar. “You are enjoying a moment’s independence from the rest of that ring you came in here with?”

  Kit grinned. “Suspicious-looking birds, ain’t we? What happens to a man spends all his time sitting indoors and staring at numbers.”

  “You’re those mathematics people out at the Nouvelle Digue? Mon Dieu.”

  “And you must be staying at the Continental?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Judging by that ‘ice’ you’ve got on, ’s what I meant.”

  “This? It’s paste. Of course if you did happen to know the difference—”

  “Heck, I’d forgive you, whichever it was.”

  “Exactly how jewel thieves talk. Now I’m sure I cannot trust you.”

  “Not much point offering my services, then, I guess.”

  “You’re American.”

  “Doesn’t mean I ain’t been up and down some boulevards,” Kit declared. “In and out some hallway doors.”

  “One of these ’cute Yankees.” She presented, as if from the air, a small ivory-colored rectangle bearing a line-drawing in violet of a shaft of daylight, falling through a few panes of glass roof to illuminate a piece of iron arcade girdering and, down in one corner, in a modern sans-serif face, the name Pléiade Lafrisée, with an address in Paris. “My business card.”

  “I won’t ask what your business is, ’cause it’s your business.”

  She shrugged. “Conseilleuse.”

  “I won! I won!” came a deep bellow from across the room.

  “Come on,” Kit motioning her with his head over to a chemin-de-fer table, “show you something. Congratulations, Root. Little excitement, hey?”

  “Ahhh! but I forgot to keep any record of it,” Root Tubsmith’s eyeballs all but whirling in their sockets, chips spilling everywhere, one tucked absent-mindedly behind each of his ears. “Card values, time of day, should’ve logged them, might as well have all been random luck.” He pulled from his pocket a battered slip of paper, covered with formulæ full of upside-down triangles, capital S’s, and small q’s and frowned at it. “Think I’d better adjust some parameters here, room temperature, punter irrationality index, one or two coefficients in the retroversion matrix—”

  “Ma foi.”

  “If you like, mademoiselle,” Kit offered, “we could place a small bet on your behalf. . . .”

  “Leave the details to you gentlemen, being the mathematicians and whatever.”

  “That’s it.”

  Next thing Pléiade knew, she was ahead by about ten thousand francs.r />
  “This is the point where the Casino detectives come over and make me give it all back.”

  “We’re safe,” Root assured her, “they’re looking for the latest thing, Nicol prisms and stroboscopic monocles and wireless telegraph rigs in people’s shoes. But our magic is more ancient, and the big advantage to being so outmoded is that nobody recognizes it when they see it.”

  “So I have—what do you call them? Quaternions to thank.”

  “That might present difficulty—but you can thank us, if you like.”

  “Come, then, I’ll buy you all dinner.”

  The Gentleman’s Code struggling briefly with the possibility of a free meal and losing, most of the party took her up on her offer, and they all headed for the restaurant next to the gaming room.

  Whatever else this cupcake might be up to, she was no piker. For everything the Q’s ordered, she added on more of the same. The wine had names and vintage dates on the labels. At some point after the soup, Pléiade inquired of no one in particular, “Yes but what is a Quaternion?”

  Hilarity at the table was general and prolonged. “What ‘is’ a Quaternion? Ha, hahahaha!” Heels drummed helplessly on the carpet, wine splashed, deep-fried potatoes were thrown to and fro.

  “Cambridge personality Bertie (‘Mad Dog’) Russell observed,” observed Barry Nebulay, “that most of Hegel’s arguments come down to puns on the word ‘is.’ In that sense the thing about a Quaternion ‘is’ is that we’re obliged to encounter it in more than one guise. As a vector quotient. As a way of plotting complex numbers along three axes instead of two. As a list of instructions for turning one vector into another.”

  “And considered subjectively,” added Dr. V. Ganesh Rao of the Calcutta University, “as an act of becoming longer or shorter, while at the same time turning, among axes whose unit vector is not the familiar and comforting ‘one’ but the altogether disquieting square root of minus one. If you were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the ‘real’ world, change your length, enter an ‘imaginary’ reference system, rotate up to three different ways, and return to ‘reality’ a new person. Or vector.”