Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  The calmer Miles got, the more worked up Thorn became. “You boys spend too much time up there. You lose sight of what is really going on in the world you think you understand. Do you know why we set up a permanent base at Candlebrow? Because all investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality. Because we have the answer for that. You think you drift above it all, immune to everything, immortal. Are you that foolish? Do you know where we are right now?”

  “On the road between Ypres and Menin, according to the signs,” said Miles.

  “Ten years from now, for hundreds and thousands of miles around, but especially here—” He appeared to check himself, as if he had been about to blurt a secret.

  Miles was curious, and knew by now where the needles went and which way to rotate them. “Don’t tell me too much, now, I’m a spy, remember? I’ll report this whole conversation to National H.Q.”

  “Damn you, Blundell, damn you all. You have no idea what you’re heading into. This world you take to be ‘the’ world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.”

  “Here,” said Miles, looking up and down the tranquil Menin road.

  “Flanders will be the mass grave of History.”

  “Well.”

  “And that is not the most perverse part of it. They will all embrace death. Passionately.”

  “The Flemish.”

  “The world. On a scale that has never yet been imagined. Not some religious painting in a cathedral, not Bosch, or Brueghel, but this, what you see, the great plain, turned over and harrowed, all that lies below brought to the surface—deliberately flooded, not the sea come to claim its due but the human counterpart to that same utter absence of mercy—for not a village wall will be left standing. League on league of filth, corpses by the uncounted thousands, the breath you took for granted become corrosive and death-giving.”

  “Sure sounds unpleasant,” said Miles.

  “You don’t believe any of this. You should.”

  “Of course I believe you. You’re from the future, aren’t you? Who’d know better?”

  “I think you know what I’m talking about.”

  “We haven’t got the technical know-how,” Miles said, pretending a massive patience. “Remember? We are only skyship-jockeys, we have trouble enough with three dimensions, what would we do with four?”

  “Do you think we chose to come here, to this terrible place? Tourists of disaster, jump in some time machine, oh, how about Pompeii this weekend, Krakatoa perhaps, but then volcanoes are so boring really, eruptions, lava, over in a minute, let’s try something really—”

  “Thorn, you don’t have to—”

  “We have had no choice,” fiercely, having abandoned the measured delivery Miles had come to associate with Trespassers. “No more than ghosts may choose what places they must haunt . . . you children drift in a dream, all is smooth, no interruptions, no discontinuities, but imagine the fabric of Time torn open, and yourselves swept through, with no way back, orphans and exiles who find you will do what you must, however shameful, to get from end to end of each corroded day.”

  Miles, taken by a desolate illumination, reached out his hand, and Thorn, seeing his intention, flinched and backed away, and in the instant Miles understood that there had been no miracle, no brilliant technical coup, in fact no “time travel” at all—that the presence in this world of Thorn and his people had been owing only to some chance blundering upon a shortcut through unknown topographies of Time, enabled somehow by whatever was to happen here, in this part of West Flanders where they stood, by whatever terrible singularity in the smooth flow of Time had opened to them.

  “You are not here,” he whispered in a speculative ecstasy. “Not fully manifest.”

  “I wish I were not here,” cried Ryder Thorn. “I wish I had never seen these Halls of Night, that I were not cursed to return, and return. You have been so easy to fool—most of you anyway—you are such simpletons at the fair, gawking at your Wonders of Science, expecting as your entitlement all the Blessings of Progress, it is your faith, your pathetic balloon-boy faith.”

  Miles and Thorn directed their wheels back toward the sea. As evening descended, Thorn, who honored smaller promises at least, produced his ukulele and played the Chopin E-minor Nocturne, the tenuous notes, as light departed, acquiring substance and depth. They found an inn and ate supper companionably, and returned to Ostend in the owl-light.

  “I could have passed my hand through him,” reported Miles. “As if there’d been some failure of physical translation. . . .”

  “What spiritualists might have called a ‘plasmic hysteresis,’” nodded Chick.

  “There is nothing immortal about them, Chick. They have lied to all of us, including those Chums of Chance in other units who may have been fool enough to work for them, in exchange for ‘eternal youth.’ They cannot provide that. They never could.

  “You remember back at Candlebrow, after you brought me to meet ‘Mr. Ace,’ how disconsolate I was? I could not stop crying for hours, for I knew then—with no evidence, no reasoned proof, I simply knew, the minute I saw him, that it was all false, the promise was nothing but a cruel confidence game.”

  “You ought to have shared that,” Chick said.

  “Overcome as I was, Chick, I knew I would get through it. But you fellows—Lindsay is so frail, really, Darby pretends to be such a weathered old nihilist, but he’s hardly out of boyhood. How could I have been that cruel to any of you? My brothers?”

  “But now I have to tell them.”

  “I was hoping you could find a way.”

  Viktor Mulciber—bespoke suit, pomaded silver hair—though rich enough to afford to send a deputy, showed up at the Kursaal himself in a state of unconcealed eagerness, as if this mysterious Q-weapon were a common firearm and he hoping the seller would allow him a few courtesy shots.

  “I am the one they send for when Basil Zaharoff is busy with a new redhead and can’t be bothered,” he introduced himself. “Everywhere one finds a spectrum of need, from bludgeons and machetes to submarines and poison gases—trains of history not fully run, Chinese tongs, Balkan komitadji, African vigilantes, each with its attendant population of widows-to-be, often in geographies barely sketched in pencil on the back of some envelope or waybill. One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the story—the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples.”

  “Say, I’m in the wrong business!” Root exclaimed cheerfully.

  The arms tycoon beamed as if from a distance. “No you’re not.”

  Trying to get some kind of grasp on the working principles of the suddenly desirable weapon, the amiable death-merchant was conferring in an out-of-the-way estaminet with a handful of Quaternioneers, including Barry Nebulay, Dr. V. Ganesh Rao, today metamorphosed into an American Negro, and Umeki Tsurigane, along with whom Kit had tagged owing to his latelyintensifying fascination with the Nipponese peach.

  “No one seems to know what these waves are,” said Barry Nebulay. “They cannot strictly be termed Hertzian, for they engage the Æther in a different way—for one thing, they seem to be longitudinal as well as transverse. Quaternionists may have a chance someday of understanding them.”

  “And arms dealers, don’t forget,” smiled Mulciber. “It’s said the inventor of this weapon has found a way to get inside the scalar part of a Quaternion, where invisible powers may be had for the taking.”

  “Of the four terms,” nodded Nebulay, “the scalar, or w term, like the baritone in a barbershop quartet or the viola in a string quartet, has always been singled out as the eccentric one. If you considered the three vector terms as dimensions in space, and the scalar term as Time, then any energy encountered inside that term might be taken as due to Time, an intensified form of Time itself.”

  “Time,” expla
ined Dr. Rao, “is the Further Term, you see, transcending and conditioning i, j, and k—the dark visitor from the Exterior, the Destroyer, the fulfiller of the Trinity. It is the merciless clock-beat we all seek to escape, into the pulselessness of salvation. It is all this and more.”

  “A weapon based on Time . . .” mused Viktor Mulciber. “Well, why not? The one force no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life sooner or later. With a Time-weapon you could become the most feared person in history.”

  “I’d rather be loved,” said Root.

  Mulciber shrugged. “You’re young.”

  He wasn’t the only arms rep in town. Somehow the rumor had found the others, in their train compartments, the beds of procurement ministers’ wives, back in the brush up unexplored tributaries, spreading their blankets in any of a thousand desolate clearings on the baked and beaten red laterite where nothing would grow again, displaying to the lesioned and bereft their inventories of wonder—and one by one they made their excuses, and rescheduled their travels, and came to Ostend, as to some international chess tournament.

  But they were too late, because Piet Woevre had had the jump on them all along, and so it happened that on a particular evening in autumn, among the teeming Inner Boulevards of Brussels, a hotbed of the illicit down toward the Gare du Midi, Woevre finally concluded the purchase with Edouard Gevaert, with whom he had done business in the past, though not of quite this nature. They met in a tavern frequented by receivers of stolen goods, had a formal glass of beer, and went out in back to close the deal. All around them the world was for sale or barter. Later Woevre learned that he could have got the article cheaper in Antwerp, but there were too many quarters of Antwerp, particularly around the docks, that he could no longer visit without more precaution than the object was likely to prove worth.

  When he came into actual possession of it, Woevre, who hadn’t been able to imagine it as anything but a weapon, was surprised and a little disappointed to find it so small. He’d been expecting something on the order of a Krupp field-piece, perhaps assembled from several parts, needing cargo wagons to bring it from place to place. Instead here was something in a sleek leather case, shaped exquisitely by northern Italian maskmakers to the exact facets of the shape within, a perfectly tailored black skin, a deployment of light among a careful clutter of angles, a hundred blurry highlights. . . .

  “You’re sure this is it.”

  “I hope I know better than to misrepresent anything to you, Woevre.”

  “But, the enormous energy . . . without a peripheral component, a power supply of some sort, how . . .” As Woevre stood turning the device this way and that in the uncertain light of dusk and streetlamps, Gevaert was unprepared for the yearning he saw in the operative’s face. It was desire so immoderate . . . nothing this somewhat unworldly go-between had ever witnessed before, nothing many people in the world had, the desire for a single weapon able to annihilate the world.

  WHENEVER KIT FOUND himself considering his plans, which he had once not long ago believed to include Göttingen, there was always the interesting question of why he should be lingering in this vaguely glandular shape on the map, beleaguered, paused at the edge of history, less a nation than a prophecy of a fate to be communally suffered, an all but sub-audible ostinato of fear. . . .

  It had not occurred to him until lately that Umeki might be in any way an element in this. They had found excuses to fall more and more into each other’s emotional field, until one fateful afternoon in her room, with rain in autumnal descent at the window, she appeared in a doorway, naked, blood beneath skin fine as silver leaf sonorously all but singing in its desire. Kit, who had imagined himself a fellow of some experience, was poleaxed by the understanding that there was no use in women looking any other way than this. He had the profound sense of having wasted most of the free time in his life up till now. It did not help in this assessment that she was wearing that cowgirl hat of hers. He knew as with the certainty of recalling a former life that he must be on his knees, adoring her flowery pussy with tongue and mouth until she was lost to silence, then, as if he did this every day, still holding her by each buttock exactly there, with her exquisite legs gripping his neck, getting to his feet and carrying her, weightless, clenched, silent, to the bed, and delivering what was left of his brain by then to this miracle, this sorceress from the East.

  KIT CONTINUED to catch sight of Pléiade Lafrisée now and then, out along the Digue, or across the gaming rooms, or up in the stands at the Wellington Hippodrome, usually attending to the whimsical schedule of some visiting sportsman. They all looked rich enough, these customers, but that could always be just flash. Howbeit, Umeki and so forth, it wasn’t as if he was itching exactly to reconnect, he knew how limited was the use he’d been put to by her, and after the unfortunate business in the mayonnaise factory he was only hoping he’d seen her worst. But he did wonder what she was still doing in town.

  One day Kit and Umeki were walking back from the café on the Estacade and ran into Pléiade, in animated conversation with Piet Woevre, coming the other way.

  “Hello, Kit.” She stared a moment through Miss Tsurigane. “Who’s the mousmée?”

  Kit with a reverse nod at Woevre, “Who’s the mouchard?”

  Woevre smiled back with a direct grim sensuality. Kit noticed he was heeled. Well. If anybody knew how to engineer death by mayonnaise, Kit bet it would be this ape. Pléiade had taken Woevre’s arm and was trying to hurry him away.

  “Old flame!” speculated Umeki.

  “Ask Dr. Rao, I think they’ve been keeping company.”

  “Oh, she’s that one.”

  Kit rolled his eyes. “The gossiping never stops with you Quaternion folks, do you all have to swear some oath to always lead an irregular life?”

  “Monotony—it’s something you Vectorists are proud of?”

  October 16, the anniversary of Hamilton’s 1843 discovery of the Quaternions (or, as a disciple might say, theirs of him), by tradition the climactic day of each World Convention, also happened to be the day after the bathing-season at Ostend officially ended. This time Dr. Rao gave the valedictory address. “The moment, of course, is timeless. No beginning, no end, no duration, the light in eternal descent, not the result of conscious thought but fallen onto Hamilton, if not from some Divine source then at least when the watchdogs of Victorian pessimism were sleeping too soundly to sense, much less frighten off, the watchful scavengers of Epiphany.

  “We all know the story. It is a Monday morning in Dublin, Hamilton and his wife, Maria Bayley Hamilton, are walking by the canalside across from Trinity College, where Hamilton is to preside at a council meeting. Maria is chatting pleasantly, Hamilton is nodding now and then and murmuring ‘Yes, dear,’ when suddenly as they approach Brougham Bridge he cries out and pulls a knife from his pocket—Mrs. H. starts violently but regains her composure, it is only a penknife—as Hamilton runs over to the bridge and carves on the stone i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = −1,” the assembly here murmuring along, as to a revered anthem, “and it is in this Pentecostal moment that the Quaternions descend, to take up their earthly residence among the thoughts of men.”

  IN THE FESTIVITIES attending departure, romance, intoxication, and folly were so in command, so many corridor doors opening and closing, so many guests wandering in and out of the wrong rooms, that de Decker’s shop, declaring an official Mischief Opportunity, sent over to the hotel as many operatives as they could spare, among them Piet Woevre, who would rather have been working at night and toward some more sinister end. The minute he caught sight of Woevre, Kit, assuming he was a target of murderous intent, went running off into the hotel’s labyrinth of back stairways and passages. Root Tubsmith, thinking that Kit was trying to avoid paying off a side-bet made several evenings ago in the Casino, gave chase. Umeki, who had understood that she and Kit would be spending the day and night together, immediately assumed there was another woman in the picture, no doubt that Parisian bitch
again, and joined the pursuit. As Pino and Rocco, fearing for the security of their torpedo, ran off in panic, Policarpe, Denis, Eugénie, and Fatou, recognizing any number of familiar faces among the police operatives swarming everywhere, concluded that the long-awaited action against Young Congo had begun, and went jumping out of various low windows and into the shrubbery, then remembering absinthe spoons, cravats, illustrated magazines, and other items it was essential to salvage, crept back into the hotel, turned the wrong corner, opened the wrong door, screamed, ran back outside. This sort of thing went on till well after dark. In those days it was the everyday texture of people’s lives. Stage productions which attempted to record this as truthfully as possible, like dramatic equivalents of genre paintings, became known as “four-door farce,” and its period as the Golden Age.

  Kit roved from one public place to another, riding trams, sitting at cafés, trying to keep to light and population. He saw no signs of citywide emergency, only the Garde Civique about their business well-mannered as ever, and the Quaternioneers he did happen to sight no more insane than usual—yet he couldn’t shake some fearful certainty that he was the object of forces wishing his destruction. He was rescued at last from his compulsive promenade by Pino and Rocco, who accosted him around midnight down by the Minque, or fish auction house. “We’re going back to Bruges,” said Rocco. “Maybe on to Ghent. Too many police around here.”

  “You need a ride?” Pino offered.

  Which was how Kit found himself late at night, later than he ever thought it got, torpedoing away down the canal toward Bruges.

  At some point in their cheerful velocity, the boys seemed to become aware that it was night, and that furthermore there were no navigational lights to be seen out here.

  “I don’t think anybody’s chasing us,” said Rocco.

  “You want to slow down?” Pino said.

  “Are we in a hurry to get to Bruges?”

  “Something up ahead. Better throttle back just in case.”