Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “If they only could be a little calmer in their mind, they sure wouldn’t get into no discussion about their wife’s pussy. But they ’s always too wrapped up, so desperate to talk that it didn’t matter what I thought, they expected me to understand, it must have looked to them like that I did. Each time something would keep me from passin remarks. Maybe I was havin one of those psychic predictions about the day when I’d be joinin them.

  “They always looked so worried. Some of em you couldn’t buy a smile. Sat there under their hatbrims, reachin down, drinkin up one longneck after another from the case we’d all chipped in on and brought aboard at the last trackside saloon we managed to stop at. Or two. Sometimes it’d be almost a kind of party, a convention, Grand Army of the Matrimonial Republic, tellin each other war stories of the lines they’d had to fall back from, sometimes slow enough, sometimes in a blind panic they’d pretend was somethin else, ‘Guess I went a little crazy there,’ or ‘Can’t remember much of that week,’ or ‘I stayed pretty fucked up for a while.’

  “Well and now here we are, not all that many years later, and it’s my turn in the other seat, to bend the ear of the feller sitting next to the window, the one who got on back at the last station, namely, you.”

  “My turn to just sit and listen.”

  “No choice, pardner.”

  Cyprian reached, probably meaning no more than to squeeze Reef’s shoulder, but Reef frowned and ducked away. “Done some shitty things, Cyprian, but that’s the one there’s no forgivin. Way my little boy looked at me, that last time . . . ain’t like he knew anythin was different. That was it. Just a baby. Always went to sleep never once thinking I wouldn’t be there when he woke up. But that one morning I wasn’t.” He and Cyprian had a look, too stressful for either of them to hold for too long. “I don’t even know why I did it anymore. But that’s too easy, ain’t it.”

  “How much of this have you told Yashmeen?”

  “No more’n she tells me about her younger days. Why? You fixin to go run and rat on me now?”

  “Not I, but perhaps you should. Sometime.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “HAPPENS IN JAIL SOMETIMES,” Reef theorized. “Seems like that if you’re looking at much time inside, things just slide into that old triangle of two parents and a kid, without much plannin it out.”

  “But we are not in jail. Are we?”

  “Course not. Don’t even know why I said that.”

  “You’re free to leave anytime,” Yashmeen said. “We all are. That was always the point.”

  “I might’ve felt free to leave once,” Reef said. But he wasn’t about to look anybody in the eye.

  “He doesn’t know why he said that either,” Cyprian put in. Yashmeen’s face, poised between anger and amusement, was not a text either of the young men was willing just then to read.

  What fascinated Cyprian lately about her face was what happened to it when she and Reef were fucking. True to her promise, she had allowed him to watch them now and then. As if Reef had arrived as some agent of transfiguring—not so much because of as against his dogged re-penetrations—her face, which Cyprian had once kept, like a photograph folded securely in everyday memory, as a charm against Balkan misfortune, now, veiled with sweat, grew in passion fiercely exquisite, revealing to him, as if by rays newly discovered, the face of another unsuspected woman. Not possessed so much as evicted, for some unstated use, by forces which had never seen reason to declare themselves.

  Far away in the back-country of his spirit, perhaps in the co-conscious one heard them on about these days in fashionable circles, he felt something begin to shift.

  NOW, AFTER YEARS OF AVOIDANCE, it was Reef’s turn to dream about his father. Something about the situation he was in with Yash and Cyprian must have loosened up a seam, and the dream came and found him. He had thought once that being the Kieselguhr Kid in Webb’s place would take care of all his mortal illusions, and now look at this that he’d come stepping into. Webb, even on the trail back from Jeshimon so long ago, that luminous and strident hallucination—would Webb recognize him now, recognize his politics anymore, his compulsions? In the dream they were no longer in the ghostly canyons of the McElmo but in a city, not Venice but noplace American either, with an unmappable operational endlessness to its streets, the same ancient, disquieting pictures engraved on its walls as back in the McElmo, spelling out a story whose pitiless truth couldn’t be admitted officially by the authorities here because of the danger to the public sanity. . . . It was darker out here than he had any idea of. In the distance Reef caught sight of a procession of miners in their long rubber coats, only one of them, about halfway along, with the candle stub in his hat lit. Like postulants in habits, they proceeded single file down a narrow street like a humid drift lit back or front by the yellow lamp. As Reef came closer he saw that the bearer of the light was Webb.

  “Small victories,” Webb greeted him. “Just to come away with one or two. To praise and to honor the small victories where and however they happen.”

  “Hasn’t been too many of them lately, Pa,” Reef tried to say.

  “Not talking about yours, you numbskull.”

  Understanding that this was Webb’s attempt to pass on another message, like up at the séance in the Alps, Reef saw just for one lucid instant that this was the precise intelligence he needed to get him back to where he had wandered off the trail, so long ago. And then he was awake and trying to remember why it was important.

  THEIR PLAN HAD BEEN to flee up into the Garfagnana and live among their kind, among the wolves, Anarchists, and road agents. Live on bean-and-farro soup and mushrooms and chestnuts simmered in the harsh red wine of the region. Steal chickens, poach a cow now and then. But they got no farther up the valley of the Serchio than Bagni di Lucca, birthplace of European roulette as we have come to know it, gamblers’ instincts prevailed, and all at once everybody was reverting to type. Soon, as if despite their best intentions, they were rolling in francs. Sometimes they could be seen out sauntering under the trees, Reef in sparest black, Borsalino brim shadowing his eyes, lean and attentive, Cyprian billowing in whites and pastels and extravagantly checked hunting caps, Yashmeen between them in a casino toilette of summer-weight crêpe in palest lilac, and packing a parasol which she seemed to be using as an organ of discourse. Sometimes the clouds came piling over the mountains, thickening the light to dark gray, draping sheets of rain across the hillsides. Swallows lined up under eaves and along telegraph wires to wait it out. Then the three remained indoors, fucking, gambling, pretending to lose just enough to stay plausible, bickering, seldom venturing into questions of whatever should become of them.

  What they would find difficult were not so much the grander elements—they had discovered that they all three tended politically to be Anarchists, their view of human destiny was pessimistic with excursions into humor only jail occupants and rodeo riders might recognize—what really made the day-to-day so laborious and apt at any turn to come apart in disaster were rather the small annoyances, which, through some homeopathic principle of the irksome, acted more powerfully the more trivial they were. Cyprian had the habit, of long standing, though until now no one had noticed it really, of commenting ironically on nothing in particular by singing, as if to himself, to the tune of the William Tell Overture,

  Very nice, very nice, very nice-in-deed,

  Very nice, very nice, very nice-in-deed,

  Very nice, very nice, very nice-in-deed, very

  Ni-i-i-ce, very nice-in-deed!

  Reef imagined that adversity had taught him the art of assembling exquisite gourmet meals from whatever ingredients the day put in his path, though the other two were seldom known to share this belief, preferring on more than one occasion to go hungry rather than choke down more than a mouthful of whatever horror of Reef’s might be on the menu. All Reef could offer was consistency. “Say surly topple!” he would scream and there it would be, another evening’s culinary ordeal. “Frenc
h. Means it’s on the table.” The pasta asciutta was always overdone, the soup always had too much salt. He would never learn to make drinkable coffee. It did not help when Cyprian’s response to the worst of these efforts was to sing,

  Yes! yes! it’sveryniceindeed, it’s

  Ver-y, ver-y, nice in-(deedle-eedle-eedle-eedle),

  Nice! nice! yes

  Ver-y nice indeed, yes,

  Ver-y, ver-y, ver-y, nice-in-deed!

  “Cyprian, better watch ’at shit.” There would then be a silence, prolonged until Yashmeen, in her accustomed role of soother and mediatrix, assuming Cyprian was done singing, began, “Well, Reef, this meal, actually, ehrm—”

  Which was Cyprian’s cue to continue,

  Very nice very nice very nice-nice-nice, it’s

  Ver-y, ver-y nice indeed, very

  Nice very—

  At which point Reef would seize a dishful of pasta fazool or overdone taglia-telle and throw it all violently across the table at Cyprian in a great slithering shower. “Startin to goldang annoy me, here?”

  “Look at this, you got it all over my—”

  “Oh, you’re both so childish.”

  “Don’t holler at me, tell the canary there.”

  “Cyprian . . .”

  “Just leave me alone,” Cyprian pouted, removing pasta from his hair, “you’re not my mother, are you.”

  “Luckily for you. I should long ago have given in to impulse, and you would be enjoying a much different state of health.”

  “Go git him, Yash.”

  “And as for you—”

  “You might explain al dente to him, at least.”

  “Missed one right by your ear there.”

  ONE DAY IN MONTE CARLO, who should show up but Reef’s old New Orleans Anarchist bunkmate Wolfe Tone O’Rooney, on his way to Barcelona, which was all about to explode, as it had been doing periodically, with Anarchist unruliness.

  “Just give me a minute to find my elephant gun and a change of socks, and I’ll be right along.”

  “Class-brother,” Wolfe Tone declared, “we need you safe and well. Your fate is not to be in the línea del fuego.”

  “Hey, I’m as good a shot as any of you stumblebums.”

  Wolfe Tone explained then that, terrible as it might turn out to be for the Anarchist cause, Barcelona was only a sideshow. “Governments are about to fuck things up for everybody, make life more unlivable than Brother Bakunin ever imagined. Something truly terrible is in the works.”

  “Out there.” But Reef didn’t argue. Which should’ve surprised him more than it did.

  THEY ACCOMPANIED the Irish Anarchist as far as the French border with Spain, and took an end-of-the-season pass around the French casinos. But along with the mysteries of Desire, Cyprian was now feeling a shift in its terms, an apprehension that something was coming to an end. . . . The sources of Desire were as unknowable as those of the Styx. But no more accountable was absence of desire—why one might choose not to embrace what the world judges, it often seemed unanimously, to lie clearly in one’s interest.

  “You are not the same person,” Yashmeen told him. “Something happened out in Bosnia. I feel . . . that somehow I am coming slowly not to matter as much to you as something else, something unspoken.” She glided away, as if it had cost her strength to say it.

  “But I adore you,” Cyprian whispered, “that can never change.”

  “Once I would have wondered how far you would go to prove it.”

  “As far as you say, Yashmeen.”

  “Once that would have been exactly your answer.” Though she was smiling, her pale brow was inflected with some premonition, some soon-to-be-desolate awakening. “Now I may no longer ask. I may no longer even wonder.”

  It was not the usual lovers’ oh-but-do-you-really? routine. She was struggling with some deep uncertainty. He was on his knees, as always. She had two gloved fingers carefully beneath his chin, obliging him to look directly into her face till she slapped his own away. The classic tableau had not changed. But in the stillness of both now might be detected a tonic readiness to rise or turn away, abandon the scene, as if roles in a drama had been reassigned.

  Reef came into the room in a cloud of cigar smoke, glanced their way, proceeded into a farther chamber. Once he would have taken their tableau as an invitation, and once it would have been.

  One day at Biarritz, drifting in the streets, she heard accordion music from an open doorway. A curious certainty took hold of her, and she looked in. It was a bal musette, nearly empty at that time of day, except for one or two dedicated wine-drinkers and the accordionist, who was playing a sweetly minor-key street waltz. Light came in at some extremely oblique angle to reveal Reef and Cyprian formally in each other’s arms, stepping in rhythm to the music. Reef was teaching Cyprian to dance. Yashmeen thought about making herself known but immediately decided against it. She stood and gazed at the two determined young men, and wished that Noellyn could see it. “If anyone can get that slothful mope out on the floor, Pinky,” she’d remarked more than once, “it’s you.”

  It was around this same time that Yashmeen discovered she was pregnant with Reef’s child—and, as Cyprian would be pleased to imagine, in some auxiliary sense, in ambiguous lamplight and masked fantasy, his own.

  She dreamed, the night she knew for certain, of a hunter arrived at last, a trainer of desert eagles, to unmask against her soul the predatory descent that would seize her, fetch her away, fetch her back, held fast in talons of communion, blood, destiny, to be plucked up off the defective Riemann sphere she had been taking for everything that was, and borne in some nearly vertical angle of ascent into realms of eternal wind, to hover at an altitude that made the Eurasian continent a map of itself, above the glimmering of the rivers, the peaks of snow, the Tian Shan and Lake Baikal and the great inextinguishable taiga.

  Hunter and Dally showed up one day in London, having come by express from Venice, where accostment by Bodeo-packing coglioni was showing no signs of dropping off, the Principessa Spongiatosta seemed eager to pimp Dally to some doubtful parasitic creeper upon the tree of the Italian nobility, and Dally had concluded that Kit Traverse wasn’t coming back from Asia anytime soon, if ever. But before they were through the Alps, she already missed Venice like a refugee.

  Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin was kind enough to help her find a pleasant small bed-sit in Bloomsbury, while Hunter returned to the starched bosom of collateral relations someplace west of Regents Park. Though never especially having wanted Hunter for herself, Ruperta in general could not abide seeing anybody else even pretending to be content. Once satisfied, however, that nothing too passionate was going on between her and Hunter, Ruperta promoted Dally to the status of Minor Annoyance, which was as close to admiration as she ever got, though Dally would never trust ’Pert farther than she could throw a grand piano. Since Venice, and that first finicky handshake outside the Britannia, the two had observed a truce whose purpose seemed to be to maintain Hunter’s fragile peace of mind.

  “But she likes you,” Hunter insisted. “You really ought to let her show you round a bit. She knows everyone.”

  “Little too nervous about you and me,” it seemed to Dally. “Thinks we’re sweethearts or something.”

  “Who, ’Pert? Why she’s the most naïvely trusting person I know.”

  “The woman gets jealous of oatmeal, Hunter.” Dally had recently walked in on Ruperta with her face inches from a bowl of steaming porridge, addressing it in a low, vicious snarl—“Oh, yes, you think she wants you now, but wait till you cool a bit, start to congeal, see how keen she’ll be then—” while her four-year-old niece Clothilda sat patiently nearby with a spoon and a milk jug. Neither seemed in the least embarrassed, not even when Ruperta angled her ear toward the porridge bowl as if it were attempting to explain itself.

  “Well . . . I imagine they were only playing. Some sort of breakfast-table game or something.”

  “DO COME ALONG DARLING,” Ruperta on
e day appearing out of nowhere as usual, “today your life changes, for you’ve ever such a treat in store.”

  Dahlia was immediately on guard, as who wouldn’t be. Ruperta, keeping up a London patter largely unintelligible, witched them into a taximeter cab and next thing Dally knew they were in a sinister sort of tea-room in Chelsea across the table from a voluptuous person in a Fedora and a velvet suit. Dally recognized the overgrown thumbnails of a sculptor.

  “Miss Rideout, this creature is Arturo Naunt.”

  “This one shall be my next angel,” Arturo declared, gazing at Dally with a brightness of eye she thought she had left behind in Italy. “Tell me, my dear, what is it you do.”

  Dally had noticed that these English asked questions the way others made statements, with a drop at the end instead of a lift. “I’m an exile.”

  “From America.”

  “From Venice.”

  “A Venetian angel! Perfetto!”

  Not exactly the sort of angel Dally imagined, however. ’Pert excused herself with the usual depraved smirk, while Dally and Arturo after a moment of mindless exchanges proceeded to Victoria Station. Dally had her trusty Lampo in her reticule, expecting at any moment to have to deal with a chloroformed handkerchief, but the journey to Peckham Rye was uneventful, even, thanks to Arturo’s comprehensive grasp of scandals current in Greater London, entertaining.