Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “We have a communication from New York. Your Kreditbrief is . . .” he gazed for a long time at an interesting photograph of the Kaiser on an adjoining desk.

  So. “No longer in force,” Kit suggested.

  Brightening, the banker risked a fast look at Kit’s face. “You have heard from them?”

  Had been all along, Kit realized—just wasn’t listening.

  “I am authorized to pay you the balance of the funds as yet undrawn this period.” He had the sum ready in a small pile of mostly fifty-mark notes.

  “Herr Bankdirektor,” Kit held his hand out. “Nice doing business with you. I’m happy we can part company without any embarrassing shows of sentiment.”

  He slipped outside, doubled down a few back alleys, and entered the Bank of Hannover, where on his arrival in Göttingen, perhaps with some hidden talent for precognition, he had set up a small account with his winnings from the tables at Ostend, and insulated, he hoped, from any Vibe arrangements.

  “You seem disturbed,” noted Humfried that evening. “Usually you are so typically American, without a thought in your head.”

  It wasn’t till later, on the way to meet Yashmeen, that Kit was able to let the situation catch up with him some. It seemed now that Scarsdale Vibe had been far too eager to agree to Kit’s plan to attend Göttingen. Whatever the long-term plan had been, here apparently was the payoff. Kit could not see this quite as clearly as he’d have liked, but he had felt it in the bright gazes directed at him in the bank.

  He found Yashmeen up on the third floor of the Auditorienhaus as usual, in the reading room, a chaos of open books converging at her radiantly attentive face. He recognized a bound copy of Riemann’s Habilitationsschrift of 1854 on the foundations of geometry but didn’t see the 1859 paper on primes.

  “What, no ζ-function?”

  She looked up, not at all distracted, as if having known the moment he came in. He wished. “This has been scriptural for me,” she said. “I see now the conjecture was there only as an enticement to bring me ‘in’ a certain distance, to get me ready for the real revelation—his astounding re-imagination of space—more than the usual Achphänomen . . . an angel, too bright to look at directly, lighting one by one the pages I must read. It has made me a very difficult person.”

  “I’ll say.”

  They left the Auditorienhaus and walked through the evening. “Had a piece of news today,” Kit began, when out from behind a bush jumped a demented young man, screaming “Tchetvyortoye Izmereniye! Tchetvyortoye Izmereniye!”

  “Yob tvoyu mat’,” sighed Yashmeen in some exasperation, evading his grasp before Kit could move in. The young man ran off down the street. “I should start carrying a weapon,” she said.

  “What’s that he was hollering?”

  “‘Fourth Dimension!’” she said. “‘Fourth Dimension!’”

  “Oh. Well, guess he came to the right place. Minkowski would sure be the one to see.”

  “They’re all over the place lately. They call themselves ‘Otzovists.’ God-builders. A new subset of heretics, this time against Lenin and his Bolshevists—said to be anti-Materialist, devout readers of Mach and Ouspensky, immoderately focused on something they call ‘the fourth dimension.’ Whether Dr. Minkowski, or in fact any algebraist in the street, would recognize it as such is another matter. But they have been able with little effort to drive the Materialists in Geneva quite mental with it. Lenin himself is said to be writing a gigantic book now, attempting to refute the ‘fourth dimension,’ his position being, from what I can gather, that the Tsar can only be overthrown in three.”

  “Intriguing thought. . . . But what do these folks want with you?”

  “It’s been going on for a while. They don’t say much, usually only stand there looking at me with these haunted stares.”

  “Wait, let me guess. They think you know how to travel in the fourth dimension.”

  She made a sour face. “I knew you’d understand. But it gets worse. The T.W.I.T., it seems, have also come to town. They want me out of Göttingen and back under their wing again. Whether I want to leave or not.”

  “Saw them, wondered who they might be. Your Pythagorean friends.”

  “‘Friends.’”

  “Well, Yash.”

  “At dinner yesterday evening, Madame Eskimoff—perhaps you’ll meet her—said that when spirits walk, beings living in four-dimensional space pass through our own three, and the strange presences that flicker then at the edges of awareness are those very moments of intersection. When we enter, even in ordinary daylight, upon a chain of events we are certain we have lived through before, in every detail, it is possible that we have stepped outside of Time as it commonly passes here, above this galley-slave repetition of days, and have had a glimpse of future, past, and present”—she made a compressive gesture—“all together.”

  “Which would be to interpret the fourth dimension as Time,” said Kit.

  “They call it ‘the already seen.’”

  “That’s what they’re here for? That’s what they think they can use you for?” He thought he saw a connection. “Riemann.”

  “At the heart of it. But, Kit.” She performed that strange preening stretch of the neck that had first captured his attention. “You see, it happens to be true.”

  He reminded himself that the night they first met he had witnessed her disappearance into a solid wall. “All right. Is it something you can control? go in and out of when you want to?”

  “Not always. It started harmlessly enough, when I was much younger, thinking about complex functions for the first time, really. Staring at the wallpaper. One night, at some god-awful hour, I understood that I couldn’t get away with only one plane, I’d need two, one for the argument, one for the function, each with a real axis and an imaginary one, meaning four axes, all perpendicular to one another at the same point of origin, and the more I tried to see that, the crazier ordinary space became, until what you might call i, j, and k, the unit vectors of our given space, had each rotated an unknown number of degrees, about that unimaginable fourth axis, and I thought I had brain fever. I didn’t sleep. I slept too much.”

  “The mathematician’s curse.”

  “Then you . . .”

  “Oh . . .” Kit shrugged. “I think about it, sure, everybody does, but no more than I have to.”

  “I knew you were an idiot.”

  “My curse. Maybe we could swap?”

  “You don’t want mine, Kit.”

  He considered lecturing her on what her real curse was, but thought better of it.

  “The first time I was in your rooms—something like it happened then. I thought I’d found some kind of Schnitte—one of those ‘cuts’ connecting the sheets of Riemann’s multiply-connected spaces—something that would allow access to a different . . . I don’t know, ‘set of conditions’? ‘vector space’? Unreal, but not compellingly so—I was back in ordinary space-time before I knew it, and after a while the memory faded. That’s when it really happened. Up at Rohns Garten, I was sitting at a table with classmates, eating some kind of strange German soup, no forewarning, Batz! here was the room, the view out the window, but as they really were, a three-dimensional section through a space of higher dimensionality, perhaps four, perhaps more. . . . I hope you aren’t about to ask how many. . . .”

  They went in a café where they were unlikely to be interrupted.

  “Teach me how to disappear, Yash.”

  Something in his voice. She narrowed her gaze.

  “They’ve cut off my letters of credit.”

  “Oh, Kit. And here I’ve been banging on—” She reached a hand and placed it on one of his. “I can lend you—”

  “No, nichevo, right now money’s not what I’m worried about so much as staying alive. My Pa always used to say, if it doesn’t work with gold, the next step will be lead. Somehow I’ve gotten to be a threat to them. Maybe they finally made an educated guess about how much I really know. Maybe someth
ing’s happened back in the States, we got lucky and nailed one of them, or they got another one of us. . . .” He held his head briefly. “Just too much I don’t know. Except they don’t have to be nice anymore. And I’m crossed off. Delivered into exile.”

  “I may be in that same predicament, and soon. With trivial changes of sign, of course. No one is saying anything clearly. It’s this damned English practice of talking in code, so everything has to be deciphered. I am guessing that since the revolution in Russia my father’s position has become precarious. And so, perforce, my own. There is also the Anglo-Russian Entente, and the fourth-dimension business, which is after all the current rage in psychical research. Take your pick.” There was more—something she feared. Even Kit, who wasn’t very sensitive, could see that—but she was keeping her own troubled counsel.

  Her eyes were wide again, speculative, and she took a slow breath or two. “Well, you’re free, then.”

  “I’m what?”

  “I thought Americans knew that word.”

  “Believe the word you’re groping for is ‘poor.’”

  “Your arrangements with the Vibe people are canceled?”

  “Null and void.”

  “And you owe them nothing.”

  “Well, they might not agree.”

  “But if another offer were presented . . .”

  “You mean from your T.W.I.T. people?”

  She shrugged prettily, more with her hair than her shoulders. “I could ask.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Shall I, then?”

  “It would depend on the pay, I guess.”

  She laughed, and he thought of the carefree girl so long ago sashaying in through the smoke of that Bierstube. “Oh, you’ll see how they pay!”

  KIT LOOKED, looked away, looked again. Except for the absence of a mustache, there, right in the middle of Göttingen, was the spit of Foley Walker. Hat and all. Kit felt like somebody had just taken a shot at him. Life in Göttingen appeared to proceed on its blade-twinkling way, wheelfolks on brand-new bikes crashing into each other or careering out of control and scattering pedestrians, beer-drinkers quarreling and bowing, preoccupied Zetamaniacs forever on the verge of walking off the edge of the Promenade being rescued by companions, a town he had never loved all at once become a place, now he was obliged, it seemed, to leave it, whose most quotidian detail shone with a clarity almost painful, already a place of exile’s memory and no returning, and here just to make that official was the angel, if not of death at least of deep shit, and nobody else seemed to notice, despite Foley’s telltale fatality for the garish, exhibited here in an outfit no description of whose tastelessness can be comfortably set upon one’s page. . . . Well, actually, it was a three-piece sporting ensemble popular some years back, woven so as to present different colors depending on the angle it was viewed from, these including but not limited to brownish pink, saturated grape, and a certain necrotic yellow.

  Next time Kit looked back, of course there was no Foley now, if that’s what the apparition had been. The fourth dimension, no doubt. Despite Yashmeen’s helpful citation of the Pythagorean akousmaton that goes, “When away from home, never look back, because the Furies are in pursuit” (Iamblichus 14), Kit soon found himself paying close attention to the street and what went on in it, not to mention double-checking doors and windows before he tried to get even an hour or two of sleep, which was becoming a problematical chore. Why hadn’t Foley stepped around, he wondered, just to say hello? Did he think Kit hadn’t seen him?

  But Foley, as if possessed of the master Hausknochen for all Göttingen, was keeping his acts of visitation for the night, and so it came about that with no transition at all, soles and palms aching and pulse thudding, Kit was sitting up staring into the dark at this eidolon, inelegantly turned out contrary to a whole raft of public-decency statutes, which had come monitory and breathing in to violate Kit’s insomnia. “Let me tell you about the minié ball in my head,” Foley began. “And how over the long comfortless years it has changed, I guess a chemical person would say transmuted, not to gold, that would be too much to expect, but to one of these rare metals that are said to be sensitive to electromagnetic waves of one sort and another. Zirconium, silver-bearing galena, one of them. Vibe Corp. digs it out of veins all over the world, including your own native Colorado. That’s how it happened I could hear those voices—through that precisely warped little sphere of metal, because they were all out there, where hardly any of us ever hear them, those waves from far away, traveling forever, through the Æther, the cold and dark. Without enough of the right mineral concentrated there in your brain, you can live your whole life and never hear them. . . .”

  “Don’t mean to interrupt, but how’d you get in here?”

  “You haven’t been listening, Kit—please—now—this is for your own good.”

  “Like stopping my money was.”

  “‘Your’ money? Since when?”

  “We had a deal. Don’t you people honor deals?”

  “Don’t know nothing about honor, I’ll spare you that lecture, but I can tell you about being bought, and sold, and the obligations that come with that.”

  “You’d know.”

  “See, it’s what we thought you knew. Figuring you for a smart kid. We assumed too much.”

  “If Vibe went back on his word, then something changed. What was it, Foley?”

  “You weren’t honest. You knew things, but you didn’t tell us.”

  “I wasn’t honest?” This was getting close to the edge, and Kit felt less than surefooted. He reached for a cigarette and lit up. “What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”

  “Too late. Trouble you for one of them?”

  Kit pushed the pack over. “You come all the way here just to threaten me, Foley?”

  “Mr. Vibe is currently on a tour of Europe, and wanted me to look in.”

  “What for? He cut me out of his life, that would sort of limit any further socializing.”

  “It’s the boss’s scientific curiosity, see, how a subject might react to philanthropy in reverse, where the charity gets taken away, instead of handed out? Would he get angry? sad? desperate? give in to suicidal thoughts?”

  “Tell him I’m happier’n a fly on shit.”

  “Ain’t sure he’ll want to hear that.”

  “Make something up, then. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. What’s a man do for entertainment in this town?”

  When he was sure Foley had gone, Kit found a bottle of beer, opened it, and raised it to his tenebrous face reflected in the window glass. “‘Away from Göttingen, there is no life,’” he quoted the motto on the Rathskeller wall, and a few minutes later his family’s own. “‘Well. Reckon yo tengo que get el fuck out of aquí.’”

  IT DIDN’T SEEM like the weekend had arrived, it didn’t seem like there was much of a calendar in force at all anymore. Nonetheless, as dusk gathered over the town, Kit was rushed upon and seized by a small group of classmates.

  “Zum Mickifest! Komm, komm!”

  Among students of mathematics here, chloral hydrate was the preferred drug. Sooner or later, whatever the problem being struggled with, having obsessed themselves into nightly insomnia, they would start taking knockout drops to get to sleep—Geheimrat Klein himself was a great advocate of the stuff—and next thing they knew, they were habitués, recognizing one another by the side-effects, notably eruptions of red pimples, known as “the dueling scars of chloralomania.” On Saturday nights in Göttingen, there was always sure to be at least one chloral party, or Mickifest.

  It was a peculiar gathering, only intermittently, as you’d say, brisk. People were either talking wildly, often to themselves and without seeming to pause for breath, or lounging draped in pleasurable paralysis across the furniture or, as the evening went along, flat on the floor in deep narcosis.

  “You have the K.O.-Tropfen in the U.S.?” inquired a sweet young thing name of Lottchen.

  “Sure,” said
Kit, “they show up in drinks a lot, usually with criminal intent.”

  “And keep in mind,” Gottlob announced, with lengthy pauses between words, “that the English word ‘pun,’ upside down, is . . . ‘und.’”

  Kit squinted, waiting for him to pursue the thought. Finally, “I’m . . . not real sure I actually . . .”

  “Group-theoretical implications,” Gottlob slowly explained, “to begin with—”

  Somebody started screaming. Very slowly everyone looked around, and then began making their way into the kitchen to see what had happened.

  “He’s dead.”

  “What do you mean, dead?”

  “Dead. Look at him.”

  “No no no,” Günther shaking his head in annoyance, “he does this all the time. Humfried!” screaming in the horizontal mathematician’s ear. “You have poisoned yourself again!” Humfried emitted an alarming rhonchus. “First we shall have to wake him up.” Günther looked around for their host. “Gottlob! Wo ist deine Spritze?” While Gottlob went looking for the syringe which seemed to be a standard accessory at these gatherings, Günther went in the kitchen and found a pot of coffee left to cool against just such a contingency. Humfried had begun to mutter, though not in German—in fact in no language anybody in the room recognized.

  Gottlob brought over a gigantic syringe of some dented and tarnished gray alloy, stamped “Property of the Berlin Zoo” and “Streng reserviert für den Elefanten!” and attached to it a long ebony nozzle.

  “Ah, thank you, Gottlob, now somebody help me roll him over—”

  “This is the part where I leave,” said Lottchen.

  Humfried, his eyes fluttering open wide enough to register the syringe, screamed and attempted to crawl away.

  “Now now, sleepyhead,” chided Günther playfully, “what you need is some nice black coffee to perk you up, but we don’t want you trying to drink it do we, dribbling it all over your shirt, no, so just to make sure it all gets where it’s going—”