Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Used to be a nice place for Iowa girls.”

  “Still is. Glad we can agree on somethin.”

  Lew checked out a little 6.35 mm Beretta, just in case.

  “Looks like some aggravation in the works, chief,” said Shalimar. “You need any muscle along?”

  “Nah, just two quick stops to make. But—” He copied the address he’d got from Emilio onto her appointment pad. “In case I don’t call in before quitting time, maybe one of you could drive by and have a look. Bring the tommy gun.”

  MERLE HAD BEEN OUT HERE since before the War, and realized at some point that he’d been slowly mutating into a hybrid citrus with no commercial value. One day shortly before the War began over in Europe, he happened to run into Luca Zombini in an electrical shop in Santa Monica. Luca was working up at one of the studios in something called “special photographic effects,” mostly glass mattes and so forth, and learning all he could about sound recording.

  “Come on over, we’ll cook something. Erlys will want to see you, and you can meet all the kids—except for Bria, she’s back east pursuing an international banking career, not to mention a number of international bankers.”

  Erlys’s hair was a lot shorter, he noticed, right in style as near as he could tell, with curls falling softly over her forehead. “You’re looking about the same as always.”

  “Better quit flirting with me, I’ll have to scream for my husband.”

  “Whoops.”

  Trying not to regard Merle as an aging obsessive who didn’t smile as much as he should, she filled him in on what she knew of Dally, who was living in London and actually wrote from time to time.

  Nunzi came screeching up after a while in a roadster that had seen some determined use, and one by one Merle met the other kids as they drifted in from school.

  “You never got married, Merle?”

  “Damn,” snapping his fingers, “I knew there was somethin I was supposed to do.”

  She looked down at her toes, brightly revealed in beach sandals. Hummingbirds darted in and out of the bougainvillea. “When we—”

  “No, no, no, ’Lys, that would’ve went on to been a disaster. You know that. Front page, banner headlines, ain’t-it-awful follow-ups for years. You got a bargain there with old whatsizname, right place at the right time. Those kids are just aces too, every one. That Nunzi—just get to thinking I know everything there is to know, and . . .” He was smiling, some, finally.

  “They’re starting to give me a little time off these days,” she said. “I get a minute to look in the mirror, it’s like meeting somebody I almost know. But,” he knew what was coming, “I really miss Dahlia.”

  “Yeahp. Same here. Me, she needed to get away right when she did, timing couldn’t be beat, but still—”

  “I don’t know how to thank you Merle, she turned out just so—”

  “Oh hell she’s still only, what, twenty-somethin, got plenty of time yet to git into some extensive evildoin, ’f that’s what she wants.”

  “She’s a star of the London stage.” Erlys brought out a velveteen album with clippings from English newspapers and magazines, theater programs and publicity photos.

  He sat nodding before the images of Miss Dahlia Rideout, surprised she’d kept the name, squeezing his eyes very small, as if in careful scrutiny. “Well, look out, Olga Nethersole,” he said in a low voice. “Back away, Mrs. Fiske.”

  Luca came in with a bag of groceries.

  “Evenin Professor,” Merle with a quick social smile.

  “Somebody’d told me you were coming I’d’ve let you do the cooking,” said Luca.

  “I could peel somethin. Carve it up?”

  “Most of it’s growing out back, come on.” They went out the back door and into a sizable garden, full of long green frying peppers, bush-size basil plants, zucchini running all over the place, artichokes with their feathery tops blowing in a wind in today from the desert, eggplants glowing ultraviolet in the shadows, tomatoes looking like the four-color illustrations of themselves that showed up on lugs down at the market. There was a pomegranate tree, and a fig tree, and a lemon tree, all bearing. Luca found the hose and gave everything an evening spray, with his thumb sending a broad fan of water over the whole plot. They got tomatoes and peppers and oregano and some garlic and brought everything back in a straw basket to the kitchen, where Merle found a knife and set about prepping.

  “Where’s Cici?” Erlys said.

  “Had a late call up at the studio.” Cici it turned out was playing one of the Li’l Jailbirds, characters in a popular series of one-reel comedies about a gang of reform-school escapees who go around doing good deeds, which at first are always misunderstood as criminal acts by the comical policemen who relentlessly pursue the kids. Cici played the part not of an Italian but a Chinese kid named Dou Ya. The Italian kid, Pippo, was played by a Negro. And so forth. Something to do with orthochromatic film. Cici had developed this private “Chinese” style of jabbering which drove everybody in the house crazy. “Cici, it’s a silent movie, you don’t have to—”

  “Just getting in character, Pop!”

  CICI BECAME MERLE’S FAVORITE of all the kids, though over the years he tried to keep his visits to a considerate level. Didn’t want to be anybody’s Uncle Merle, and it wasn’t really as if time was hanging heavy—though work these days had become more a source of danger than income, which is why he and Roswell finally gave in and decided to hire a private eye.

  Never having felt like that he was a citizen of any state in particular, Merle just tended to show up at any state picnic he happened to hear about. No matter which part of the country anybody he met was from, he and his wagon had been through it at least once. Some people even remembered him, or said they did. It was all home.

  He wandered now beneath the sycamores, through the cooking smoke, attending calmly to each mid-American face, shrugging on like some old cardigan a nostalgia not his own but in some murky way of use to him. They’d be drinking birch beer and orange juice, eating stuffed peppers they liked to call “mangoes,” casseroles of baked beans or macaroni and rat cheese, pineapple upside-down cakes, bread just out of ovens at home and covered in checkered towels. Out here at the Grove, they’d be cooking franks, hamburgers, steaks, and sides of beef over wood fires, slopping on barbecue sauce from time to time, tapping beer kegs, playing horseshoes, shouting at their kids, at each other, at nobody, just to be shouting, particularly if it wasn’t raining, which it never seemed to be, and that was one of the big differences for them, no thunder, no cyclones, no hail or snow, the house roofs of Southern California all pitched at shallow angles because there was nothing to shed. . . .

  Lew found Merle discussing potato-salad recipes with a bunch of Iowans. “Gettin up early is built into it, you need to have ’em cooked and marinating in oil, vinegar, and mustard for at least three or four hours before you even start thinkin about mayonnaise and spices and all that,” whereas other philosophies held add-ins like bacon and celery to be of the essence, or sour cream preferable to mayonnaise, and by now it had turned into quite the lively discussion, with everybody who came wandering into earshot eager to put in a few words of comment, otherwise easygoing wives and mothers, thresher-dinner veterans from way back, getting into screaming matches with roadside-diner cooks who handled easily five hundred pounds of potato salad a day for truck drivers who’d forgot more about job-related eating than seasonal farm laborers ever knew to begin with . . . and everybody with an opinion also seemed to have brought along their own tub of potato salad, and each punctuating his or her argument with a huge forkful of a particular recipe, all but forced into the face of some potato-salad heretic—“Here, just try this, tell me these li’l red-skinned potatoes don’t make all the difference.” “Hard-boiled eggs are all right ’s long as you don’t use the whites, just the yolk part, mash it up in with your mayonnaise, not only makes it taste better, it looks better, and if you can find those green peppercorns . . .”
r />   FOR SUCH A CALM-LOOKING FELLOW, Merle sure took some nervous precautions. After a quickly whispered set of instructions, Lew went back to where he’d parked, drove to a lot near the office, switched cars, went back around the other side of the Grove to pick up Roswell, eventually parked near a P.E. stop, where they boarded the electric and rode the rest of the way to the beach.

  Merle and Roswell tried running the situation through for Lew, but it might as well have been Chinese for all he could understand of it. He looked at the rig in question doubtfully.

  Then something occurred to him. “Say I had a, just some ordinary photo of somebody, and wanted to know where they were right now and what they were doing . . .”

  “Sure,” Merle said, “we just dial in the year, date, and time of day we’re interested in, it all speeds up, runs through the time between the picture was taken and now in a matter of seconds.”

  “Then maybe you could help me,” Lew said, bringing out the glossy of Jardine Maraca, “you think it’d work on this?”

  “Let me just take it in the darkroom a second,” Roswell said, “run us a transparent copy, and we’ll see what we can see.”

  What they saw was Jardine, snappily turned out in something shiny and tight, climbing into a Model T and driving east along a recognizable Sunset Boulevard, beneath massive fluted columns with elephants rampant on top and various other gigantic and indeed hallucinatory sets from the movie Intolerance, continued almost all the way downtown, took a left up Figueroa, crossed the river, passed Mount Washington and went on through Highland Park to Eagle Rock, made a couple-three turns Lew was able to keep track of, and stopped at last in front of an iron gate in a wall of arroyo stone, with a sign above it reading Carefree Court. Inside among palms and eucalyptus trees were a dozen bungalows in Mission Revival style grouped around a swimming pool with a fountain in it throwing pulses of water into a blurred gray sky. . . .

  Jardine sat for a while, as if having a long talk with herself, perhaps about some choice she had to make, which was turning out to be harder than she’d thought.

  “AND NOT ONLY can we unfold the future history of these subjects,” “Roswell was saying, “we can also reverse the process, to look into their pasts.”

  “One photograph of a suspicious corpse,” it occurred to Lew, “and you could watch who did the deed, catch them in the act?”

  “You begin to see why certain interests might feel threatened. All those old long-standing mysteries of the past like, say, the Times bombing, all you’d need to do’d be get a shot of First and Broadway where the old building was, run it back to late September 1910 just before the bombing . . .”

  “It’ll go back that far?”

  Roswell and Merle looked at each other.

  “You’ve done it?”

  “It was night,” Merle a little embarrassed. “They could’ve been anybody.”

  “ . . . only maybe tricky part,” said Roswell, “being to find the constant term in the primitive, which differentiation has taken to zero. Usually to look back in the past it’s got to be a negative value. But unless we get it right on the nose, there’s always the chance that those little folks in the pictures will choose different paths than the originals.”

  At which point Lew finally remembered bilocation—how in England long ago he had even found himself now and then going off on these forks in the road. Detours from what he still thought of as his official, supposed-to-be life. Since coming back to the States, however, as if they had been no more than vivid dreams, these side-trips had tapered off and presently stopped altogether, and with nobody to talk to about it, Lew had no choice but to take care of day-to-day business and not spend too much time brooding. But here seemed to be those old bilocational powers emerging now once again, only different. “You mean,” trying to control a tremor in his voice, gesturing more broadly than he meant to at the breathing image of Jardine, still waiting, “you could watch somebody go on to live a completely different life?”

  “Sure, if you wanted to.” Roswell giving him a puzzled look that fell just short of annoyed. “But why?”

  “Now you’ve seen the unit in action,” said Merle, “let us just give you the rundown on why we asked you in. Some funny things’ve been happening around here lately. Gorillas out in the alley just standing, smoking, watching. Telephones ring in the middle of the night but nobody’s ever on the line. Cars cruise past, closed sedans, smoked-glass windows, very slow, and some of the license-plate numbers show up more than once. And then just out in the course of the day’s work, somebody’ll pass along a word or two of caution, or concern, never too loud, never allowin their lips to move.”

  “What it comes down to,” said Roswell Bounce, “is we don’t want to meet the same melancholy fate as Louis Le Prince, who back in the late ’80s had his own system all up and running, basically the same as what the picture business has today, film on reels, sprocket holes, intermittent motion, so forth—one day he climbs on the Paris-Dijon Express and is never heard from again. His wife tries to find out what happened, everybody clams up, seven years later he’s legally dead, one or two pieces of his machinery find their way into museums, some of the patents are already on file, but everything else has mysteriously vanished along with ol’ Louie.”

  “And you think somebody actually—”

  “Oh, sorry—do you think it’s just my P.Q. acting up again? for Pete’s sake Mr. Basnight, you’ve had a long career in gumshoeing, seen your share of the bent and evil, and you must’ve run into some of these studio big shots by now, what do you think?”

  “That first they’d try to steal it—bearing in mind that ‘theft’ as defined in this town often includes the payment of cash, and can even be quite a tidy sum.”

  “But just makin it all disappear,” said Roswell, “might not be enough for them.”

  “What makes you think they’ve found out anything? Are there records on file? Did you see a lawyer about patent applications?”

  “Ha! you ever run into one lawyer you’d trust with a nickel fallen from a blind man’s tambourine, why, grab us a flyin pig while you’re at it, we’ll take ’em both out on tour and make our fortune.”

  “Seems a little risky, ’s all.”

  “Any ideas on how to proceed?”

  “I can post some strong-arm talent outside, but even non-Union like everything else in town, after a while that runs into considerable mazuma—so we should be thinking about longer-term solutions.”

  “But hell, it’s an unlimited scoundrel supply up in ’em studios, every errand boy’s a producer waitin to happen, we’ll never kill ’em all—”

  “I was thinking more of finding you some legal protection.”

  “We need a miracle we’ll wire the Pope,” said Roswell.

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time Lew motored over to the address Emilio had given him. He parked a few doors down from a chalet-style bungalow with a pepper tree in the yard, went up and knocked politely at the front door. And was shocked, or as much as he could be anymore, by the malevolent glamour of the face that so abruptly appeared. Shady side of forty, presentable, but also what he had long come, regretfully, to recognize as haunted. Maybe he ought to’ve turned and ankled it, but instead he took his hat off all the way and inquired, “This the house that’s for rent?”

  “Not so far. Should it be, do you think?”

  Lew pretended to look in his daybook. “You’d be . . .”

  “Mrs. Deuce Kindred.” The door screen cast over her face a strange rectilinear mist, which somehow extended to her voice and which for no reason he could figure, thinking about it later, he took as a sexual signal, proceeding to get an erection out on the front porch here and everything— “Did I come to the wrong place?” He watched her eyes flicker down and up.

  “Easy to find out.”

  “The husband home?”

  “Come on in.” She took a step back and turned, with the beginning of a smile she almost contemptuously would not allow him to see
any further stages of, and led him through the olive light of the little front room toward the kitchen. Oh this was going to be sordid as all hell, he knew the feeling by now. At first he had thought it must be him, and some tough-guy sex appeal, but after a while he understood that out on this coast it was nothing personal, it only happened a lot. She wore her stockings rolled just above the knees, flapper style. She paused short of the sociable yellow sunlight ahead of them, pouring into the kitchen just out of reach, and stood in this dimness still with her backside to him, her head tilted, her nape bare beneath the beauty-parlor bob. Lew came ahead, grasped her skirt hem and pulled it all the way up.

  “Well. Where’d them step-ins get to?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Maybe you want to be down on your hands and knees.”

  “Just try it, you fucking animal.”

  “Oh it’s like that, huh?”

  “You don’t mind.”

  He didn’t. This one was sure not about to coöperate, struggling all the way and fairly convincing too, hollering “shameful” this, “brutal” that, “disgusting” eight or ten times, and when they were finished, or Lew was, she wiggled and said, “You ain’t fallin asleep back there, I hope.” Got up, went on into the kitchen and made coffee. They sat in a little dinette nook, and Lew got around finally to Jardine Maraca and the peculiar reappearance of her roommate Encarnación. . . .

  “You’ve probably heard about these wild parties,” Lake said, “that the movie people have out at the beach or up at their mansions in the hills, it’s in the scandal sheets all the time.”

  “Oh, sure, them Hollywood sex orgies.”

  “I believe it’s a soft g, but that’s the idea. Deuce brought me once or twice, though as he thoughtfully explained, the whole point is not having your wife along. It seems Encarnación was a regular at these affairs until that Syncopated Strangler started tearin up the pea patch, then she disappeared.”