Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “You’re not suggesting . . .”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. It would be better to have everyone prepared, that’s all.” Little Nick Nookshaft’s eyes held oh, so wide, lips in a small circle.

  I did not descend all at once upon Lew’s understanding what this meant—much less what it was they’d been playing him for all this time—but it didn’t take that long either. Somehow, having managed to get through a nice stretch over here in England free of gunplay, unexpected knife deployment, blows from saps, fists, or handy items of furniture, he had grown foolishly to expect that throwdowns and death maybe were not going to figure quite as prominently in case-resolution as they once had, back there in the old days in the U.S. How civilized, how English he thought he’d become, while the T.W.I.T., it was now growing clear to him, had just gone on, with it mattering nary a bedbug’s ass if he wore a cowboy hat or a City bowler, or what English vowel sounds or hidden social codings he might’ve learned, for when the hole cards were all turned up at last, here he was, nothing more than their hired gunslinger from the States, on ice, held ready for some terrible hour.

  But one thing about London, hurt pride didn’t hurt for long, because there was always another insult just around the corner waiting to be launched. Much more intriguing right now was the Cohen’s utter lack of surprise about the news that Werfner was in town. It could have been some deep talent of the Cohen’s for putting on a poker face, but then again, suppose . . .

  Lew sought out the two N’s, who had been eating raspberries marinated in ether, and now, giggling, found themselves unable to keep from singing, and repeating da capo, a tune from the third act of Waltzing in Whitechapel, which Nigel accompanied with ukulele chords, thus—

  Oh, Sing-

  -ing Bird,

  Of Spital-fields—

  How lonely i’-all-feels,

  Wiv-out your mel

  o-dee! When shall my

  Brick Lane bunt-ing

  Chirp-again,

  To my throbbing-brain,

  Her dear refrain,

  Soft-leee? Al-

  though it’s spring

  In Stepney, so-we’re-told,

  Here in my

  Heart-it’s-cold

  As any-win-

  try sea—until my

  Singing Bird of

  Spit-alfields,

  Perched on her lit-tle heels,

  Comes trip-ping back,

  To meee!

  —(My dar-ling),

  [D.C.]

  During a pause for breath, Lew ventured, “You boys have studied with Professor Renfrew, right?”

  “Yes, at Kings,” Neville said.

  “And Professor Werfner, whom we ran into at the theatre last night—wasn’t he just a dead ringer for Renfrew?”

  “His hair was different,” Nigel mused.

  “Clothing a bit more distressed as well, I thought,” added Neville.

  “But Neville, you’re the one that said, ‘Oh I say Nigel, whyever is Professor Renfrew talking in that droll German accent?’ And you said, ‘But Neville it can’t be old Renfrew you know, not with those frightful shoes,’ and you—”

  But Lew just then was seeing something extraordinary, something he would never have dreamed possible with these two—they were exchanging signals, not exactly warnings but cues of hand and eye, the way actors in a vaudeville skit might—they were impersonating British idiots. And in that luminous and tarnished instant, he also understood, far too late in the ball game, that Renfrew and Werfner were one and the same person, had been all along, that this person somehow had the paranormal power to be in at least two places at the same time, maintaining day-to-day lives at two different universities—and that everybody at the T.W.I.T. had known all about this, known forever, most likely—everybody except for Lew. Why hadn’t anybody told him? What else could they be using him for, that required keeping him that blindly in the dark? He should have felt more riled about it but guessed it was no more disrespect than normal, for London.

  Once he was willing to accept the two professors as a single person, Lew felt curiously released, as if from a servitude he had never fully understood the terms of anyway. Well. Take his money and call him Knucklehead. So it was simple as that.

  He spent the rest of the day upstairs among the T.W.I.T. library stacks, trying to reduce his ignorance some. There turned out to be several shelves of books and manuscripts, some in languages he didn’t even recognize, let alone read, on the strange and useful talent of being two places or more at once, known in the Psychical field for about fifty years as “bilocation.” North Asian shamans in particular seemed to be noted for it. The practice had begun to filter into ancient Greece around the seventh century B.C., and become a feature of Orphic, and presently Pythagorean, religions. It was not a matter of possession by spirits, demons, or in fact any outside forces, but rather a journey the shaman took from within—observing a structure, from what Lew could gather, much like dreaming, in which one version of you remains behind, all but paralyzed except for basic activities like snoring and farting and rolling over, while another goes calmly off to worlds unexpected, to fulfill obligations proper to each of them, using daytime motor skills often extended into such areas as flying, passing through walls, performing athletic miracles of speed and strength. . . . And this traveling double was no weightless spook—others could see it solid and plain enough, in fact too plain, many reporting how figure and ground were kept separate by an edge, overdefined and glimmering, between two distinct kinds of light. . . .

  At some point Dr. Otto Ghloix, a visiting alienist from Switzerland whom Lew recognized from the T.W.I.T. mess-hall, stuck his head around a corner, and they fell into conversation.

  “This person Renfrew/Werfner appears afflicted,” it presently seemed to Dr. Ghloix, “by a deep and fatal contradiction—deeper than consciously he can appreciate, and as a result the conflict has no other place to go but outward, ejected into the outside world, there to be carried out as what technically we call Schicksal—Destiny—with the world around him now obliged to suffer the disjunction in himself which he cannot, must not, admit . . . so pretending to be two ‘rivals’ representing the interests of two ‘separate nations’ which are much more likely secular expressions of a rupture within a single damaged soul.

  “And after all, who better than a fallen geographer to be acting this out, to occupy Number XV, The Devil—someone who might have answered the higher calling, learned the secret geographies of the beyul, or hidden lands, and brought the rest of us in our raggedness and dust, our folly and ignorance, to far Shambhala, and rebirth in the Pure Land? What crime more reprehensible than to betray that sacred obligation for the shoddy rewards to be had from Whitehall or the Wilhelmstraße?”

  “I guess what’s bothering me right at the moment,” said Lew, “is how much coöperation he’s had—I guess I say ‘he’—from folks here at the T.W.I.T.”

  “Because no one told you what they knew.”

  “Well wouldn’t you take it a little, I don’t know, personally?”

  “You may not need to, it is after all quite common in these occult orders to find laity and priesthood, hierarchies of acquaintance with the Mysteries, secret initiation at each step, the assumption that one learns what one has to only when it is time to. No one decides this, it is simply the dynamic imperative operating from within the Knowledge itself.”

  “Oh.” Lew was able to keep a straight face, nod, and silently roll himself a cigarette, which he lit up in the deepening dusk from the coal of Dr. Ghloix’s Corona. “Simplifies things, in a way,” he supposed, through an exhalation of Turkish smoke. “Considering the time I might have gone on wasting with detective stuff. Trying to get their two stories to jibe—eyewitness accounts, ticket stubs, surveillance reports, hell, if any of it ever came to court, well there’d go the whole concept of an alibi, wouldn’t it?”

  After the Doc had taken his leave, and dark had fallen, and Lew had lit a small Welsb
ach unit on the table, and the dinner gong, hushed by distance, had sounded, who should appear but the Grand, soon to be Associate, Cohen, bringing a tray with a tall glass of parsnip juice and some vegetarian analogue of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie cooling on a china plate. “We missed you at supper.”

  “Guess I lost track of the time. Thanks.”

  “There’s to be a poetry reading in here tonight, Indian bloke, mystical stuff, quite a smash with the sisters, perhaps you’d help me light off the old P.L.” by which he meant the Plafond Lumineux, a modern mixed arrangement of gas-mantles and electric incandescent bulbs arching across the entire library ceiling and covered by a pale translucent canopy of some proprietary celluloid which smoothed these sources, when at last they had all been lit, into a depthless dome of light somehow much brighter than their sum.

  The Cohen glanced at the table where Lew had been reading and taking notes. “Bilocation, eh? Fascinating topic. Rather up your street I imagine, stepping back and forth over thresholds sort of thing.”

  “Maybe I’ll go in the shaman business, find some nice li’l igloo, hang out my shingle.”

  Cohen Nookshaft’s expression was not unsympathetic. “You’d have to get cracking, learn a systematic approach. Years of study—if it was what you wanted.”

  “If it was what I wanted.”

  They stood and watched the ceiling, its smooth and steady radiance. “Quite pleasant, isn’t it,” said the Cohen. “Of course it helps to have some allegiance to light.”

  “How’s that?”

  As if imparting a secret Lew could not help thinking he had somehow, without knowing how, become ready to hear, the Cohen said, “We are light, you see, all of light—we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the safety-match at the high city window, the stars and nebulæ in full midnight glory, the rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on the costermonger’s barrow. . . . When we lost our æthereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to”—grabbing each side of his face and wobbling it back and forth—“this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light. The first step in our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire that rarefaction, that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes through the Æther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction. . . .” He paused at the door. “Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey. Do have something to eat, there’s a good chap.”

  ONLY THING TO do really was to try and take Renfrew by surprise. On the way up to Cambridge once again, English country, green and misty, booming past, brick courses inside the little tunnels spinning by in helical purity, the smell of fens, the distant reach of water-sky reflecting the German Sea, for the first time in a good while Lew felt the desolate stomach-spasms of exile, and found himself longing for Chicago, and an early evening in autumn, with or without an appointment to be kept later in the evening, just about to walk into Kinsley’s at suppertime, where there’d be a steak waiting with his name on it.

  And then he was running back over the years since Troth had left him, and wondering how much had really happened to him and how much to some other version of Lew Basnight, bilocated off somewhere he could gain no clear sense of. He drifted into one of those minute-and-a-half-long mid-afternoon dozes, whose subject seemed to be the little vest-pocket .25-caliber FN Browning he was packing, nice unit, strictly for self-defense, not the kind of piece you’d go out gunning for anybody with. . . . He woke as a voice, maybe his own, whispered, “Not to mention a good suicide weapon . . .”

  Whoa there now, Detective Basnight. It was routine to have these, what were known in the business as Grumpy Thoughts now and then, and he guessed he’d known socially or worked alongside of more than enough Pinks and finks who’d ended up clocking out before shift’s end, and who’s to say how far Lew might have taken his own contrition at working as long as he had on the wrong side, for the wrong people—though at least he had tumbled early, almost from the start, to how little he really wanted the rewards his colleagues were in it for, the motorcars, lakefront galas, introductions to desirable women or useful statesmen, in an era where “detective” was universally understood code for anti-Union thug . . . somewhere else was the bilocational version of himself, the other, Sherlock Holmes type of sleuth, fighting criminal masterminds hardly distinct from the sorts of tycoons who hired “detectives” to rat on Union activities.

  Could be all those Catholics he’d run into in this line of work, Irish and Polish in Chicago, Mexicans in Colorado and so forth, had it right all along, and there was nothing in the day’s echoing cycle but penance, even if you’d never committed a sin, to live in the world was to do penance—actually, as his teacher Drave had pointed out back during that winter in Chicago, another argument for reincarnation—“Being unable to remember sins from a previous life won’t excuse you from doing penance in this one. To believe in the reality of penance is almost to have proof of rebirth.”

  HE FOUND RENFREW in a hectic mood, as close to desperation as Lew could recall. The Professor’s shoes did not match, he seemed to be drinking cold tea out of a flower vase, and his hair was at least as neglected as Werfner’s the other night. Lew thought about passing a few pointed Jack the Ripper remarks, just to get the fellow going, but reckoned that Renfrew by now either knew Lew was onto the real story or he was more likely past caring, and in any case it would be a distraction from the business at hand, which Lew had yet to get any inkling of. Renfrew had meantime pulled down a gigantic ten-miles-to-the-inch wall map of the Balkans, in several rarely encountered colors which just failed to be rose, amethyst, orpiment, and cerulean.

  “Best procedure when considering the Balkans,” instructed Renfrew, “is not to look at components singly—one begins to run about the room screaming after a while—but all together, everything in a single timeless snapshot, the way master chess players are said to regard the board.

  “The railroads seem to be the key. If one keeps looking at the map while walking slowly backward across the room, at a certain precise distance the structural principle leaps into visibility—how the different lines connect, how they do not, where varying interests may want them to connect, all of this defining patterns of flow, not only actual but also invisible, potential, and such rates of change as how quickly one’s relevant masses can be moved to a given frontier . . . and beyond that the teleology at work, as the rail system grows toward a certain shape, a destiny— My God I’m starting to sound like Werfner.

  “Poor fellow. This time he has taken a long walk down Queer Street I fear, far beyond the last stop of any known rail line which can bring him back. He has been working on his own long-range solution to the Macedonian Question, kept secret among the secrets of the Wilhelmstraße but brought only recently to my attention. His plan,” one hand poised as if holding an invisible fescue, “is—insanely—to install all across the Peninsula, from a little east of Sofia, here, roughly along the Balkan Range and the Sredna Gora, coincident with the upper border of the former Eastern Roumelia, and continuing on, at last to the Black Sea—das Interdikt, as he calls it, two hundred miles long, invisible, waiting for certain unconsidered footfalls and, once triggered, irreversible—pitiless. . . .” He fell silent, as if some agency had been attending and as silently instructed him to go no further.

  “And this Interdikt concern again, what was it, exactly?” Lew had the sudden certitude that right now in Göttingen some bilocational Lew was asking Werfner the same question, whose answer neither of him wanted to hear but were helpless not to ask. And that in both places both Lew Basnights would be getting the same offended narrow stare.

  His recent lack of sleep evident, Renfrew sighed pointedly. “It’s long been
under study at Charlottenburg, I can assure you of that.”

  “Thanks, Professor, that clears it up. Well! If there’s nothing more, I guess I’ll go find a pub and do some deep analysis on this. Care to join me?”

  “It’s to do with our Gentleman Bomber,” blurted Renfrew, “oh, the Gentleman B. is indeed very much in this now, which makes his immediate detection and apprehension that much more necessary you see.”

  Lew, who didn’t see, paused at the door, one eyebrow up encouragingly.

  “He has been reported in the Cambridge vicinity,” said Renfrew, almost importunate. “On the lurk round Fenner’s, as if he were reconnoitering.”

  “And when’s the next cricket match there?”

  “Tomorrow, with I.Z.”

  “All right, say he’s fixing to toss one of those suffocation specials of his—what’s that got to do with this Interdikt scheme of your”—he might have hesitated—“colleague, Dr. Werfner?”

  No reply, only weaving now a bit insomniac facing his multicolored map, having moved so close to it that his nose was only an inch—ten miles—above the terrain.

  “Poison gas? Werfner plans to use it somehow as part of this Interdikt?”

  “I’m not at liberty, actually.” Whispering.

  “But the Gentleman Bomber might be more forthcoming, if somebody could just detain him long enough to ask, is that it? Well. I’ll see if I can’t round up some more crew for tomorrow, and maybe we’ll just get lucky with this galoot.”

  Lew went over to Fenner’s cricket ground, through the owl-light, some rain threatening, just to have a look. There was always the possibility, frankly attractive, that Renfrew had gone off his head at last, owing to the stress of international events. It would certainly make Lew’s life easier. But wait now—who was this, standing on the cinder path, in the corruption of late-afternoon light, the world all at once evacuated, as if in response to a civic warning everyone but Lew had heard?