Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Now I just heard she’s surfaced again.”

  “I thought she was . . .”

  “One of the victims, yeahp so’d everybody. You think your husband might’ve heard anything?”

  “That’s him pullin in the drive right now, you can ask him.”

  Deuce stomped in, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, holding himself in that certain way the little bantamweight fellows have. Lew could see some kind of a shoulder holster with most likely a company-issued Bulldog in it. “Well! what’ve you two been up to?” beaming more than glaring in Lew’s direction. Lew had become a connoisseur of jealous husbands, and this was as close to plain indifferent as he’d seen lately.

  “You remember your old sweetie Encarnación,” Lake over her shoulder, heading out of the room.

  “Nice tits, got strangled out in Santa Monica,” Deuce rooting in the ice-box, “still dead ’s far as I know.”

  “See, that’s the thing—” Lew began.

  “Who told you to bother us?” Deuce popping a beer-bottle cap for emphasis.

  “Just routine. Long list of names.”

  “So you’re a dick.”

  “All day.”

  “I ain’t sure I even fucked her, them Mexican spitfires, too much work, don’t you think?”

  “So it was like you’d only see her at a distance once in a while? Mass of writhing bodies kind of thing?”

  “There you go.”

  “Mind if I ask,” Lew nodding in what he hoped was not an offensive way at the firearm under Deuce’s jacket, which he had not removed, “what line of work you’re in, Mr. Kindred?”

  “Security, same ’s yourself.” Lew kept his eyebrows amiably elevated till Deuce added, “Up at Consequential Pictures.”

  “Interesting work, I’ll bet.”

  “Be pleasant enough if it wasn’t for crazy Anarchists trying to start unions every time a man’s back is turned.”

  “Sure can’t have that.”

  “They want unions up in Frisco it’s no sweat off our balls,” said Deuce, “but down here, ever since ’em mick bastards bombed the Times, it’s been open shop, and we aim to keep it that way.”

  “Standards to maintain.”

  “You got it.”

  “Purity.”

  Drawing from Deuce a displeased squint. “You havin a little fun here, Mr. Basnight? If you’re lookin for real sport, get out there in the darkness of night with ’em dago dynamiters all around you. See if that’s up your alley.”

  “Get a lot of them in the picture business, do you?”

  “Don’t like ’at tone of voice, mister.”

  “Only one I got. Maybe what you really want to do is direct?”

  Mistake. There was Deuce out with his pistol, damn little five-shot and all the chambers Lew could see were full. He’d had a long day, but from the rage in Deuce’s face it might not be going to last much longer.

  “Yeahp and the scenario goes, he forced his way into my home, officer, made advances to my wife, all I did was act in self-defense.”

  “Well now Mr. Kindred if I did anything to—”

  “Mr. B.? Everything O.K.?”

  “What in the hay-ull?” Deuce rolling off of his seat and under the table. It was Shalimar, and she had remembered to bring the tommy gun.

  “Just likes to check up on me,” Lew said, “hasn’t shot at anybody for, oh for a week anyway.”

  “Now, dearest, there was that one only yesterday out in Culver City.”

  “Oh but snookums, she was running so fast you missed her by a mile.”

  “I’ll just let you two, um . . .” Deuce crawling away out onto the patio.

  ALL HE’D DROPPED IN FOR really was a beer and a quick shave, and soon enough he was off again, to whatever his smooth-faced evening held. Lake didn’t know anymore. She had a baloney sandwich for supper and tried to get something on the radio and then went to the window and sat and waited for the light to drain away over the vast basin hammered all day into a heated quiescence much like her own. She had stopped believing quite so much in cause and effect, having begun to find that what most people took for some continuous reality, one morning paper to the next, had never existed. Often these days she couldn’t tell if something was a dream into which she had drifted, or one from which she had just awakened and might not return to. So through the terrible cloudlessness of the long afternoons she passed among dreams, and placed her wagers at the Universal Dream Casino as to which of them should bring her through, and which lead her irreversibly astray.

  On the other hand Deuce, when he was in the house, tended to scream a lot. At first Lake took it all literally if not personally, then for years she ignored it, and finally it had occurred to her that in his own way, Deuce must be trying to awaken from his life.

  One night he passed from one dream he’d never remember into the middle of another which had been going on all night, a dark swirl of opium haunts, leering foreigners, girls in abbreviated underwear, jazz music full of jangling Chinese fourths. Something exhausting and bloody he came up to close as he dared, and then it was like it was posted. He knew if he went any further he’d be destroyed.

  He thought about “getting up” and trying to find somebody to explain what was going on. But he had to be careful because he didn’t know if he was still dreaming. There was a woman lying next to him who seemed to be dead. He was alone with a corpse, and understood that he had to’ve been involved, somehow, even if it was only having failed to prevent what had happened to her. There was blood everywhere, some of it was still wet.

  Each time he forced himself to turn and look at her face to see if he knew her, he got distracted. He could hear voices, an inquiry already under way, somewhere in the dwelling, a cylindrical piece of modern Hollywood architecture maybe fifty foot across, three or four stories high, wood floor, a staircase spiraling up the inside of the round stone wall, all the way up, into the dust and shadows where the roof should’ve been except instead there was a big skylight, with the early light coming through it a dusty rose color.

  At first the investigators, some dedicated cadre of Californian youth, only wanted to ask him “a few questions.” They never identified themselves by name, or said who they were working for, didn’t wear uniforms or carry badges or commissions, but there was no doubting their sincerity. Behind their unshakable politeness Deuce could see they had him figured for the guilty party—hell, so did he. But, not about to run him in just yet, they took their time, followed this routine of their own, this procedure. Without saying it in so many words, they let him know that the body he’d woken up next to wasn’t the only one.

  “I’m a deputized officer,” he kept trying to tell them, but his tongue and vocal cords froze and when he went looking for his deputy’s star he couldn’t find it.

  Every time one of them smiled at him he went cold with fear. They shone with a sinister brilliance, like the high-amperage arc lamps in the studios, while from somewhere invisible, running them, outside the edges of the dream, flowed perhaps unlimited power.

  As the questioning got more and more complicated, it was no longer about the crime, the penalty, regrets Deuce might feel, sympathy for the victims—it had come down to his own need to keep his connection with the crime, still unnamed, from ever being revealed. Is how bad it must have been. But there was no way he could ask them for that. And for all he knew the whole town was in on it already. Waiting.

  Where were the L.A. police? He listened, hope fading, for sirens, unmuffled motorcycles. Sooner or later a real engine sound in the street would bring this deliverance, and he would find himself released into the pallid shadows and indifferent custody of the day.

  LAKE HAS DREAMED more than once of a journey north, always to the same subarctic city and a chill eternal rain. By long-standing custom, young girls of the town borrow babies from mothers, in order to play at birth and parenthood. Their own fertility is so profound that sometimes thinking about a penis is all it takes to get pregnant. So
they play their ever-autumnal days away pretending family life. The mothers get some free time, the babies love it.

  Running through the town is a great icy river. Sometimes it freezes solid, sometimes it is crowded with miniature icebergs rushing along at terrifying speed among waves often high as those of the sea. There is an uncertainty prevailing here between the worlds above and below the surface of the water. A party of explorers are heading upriver and Lake, joining them, must leave behind a lover or husband, perhaps Deuce, with another woman, for whom he might easily leave her for good. . . . When it comes time to return, it’s no longer possible to go back the way they came, and they must detour, day after day, through a great frozen swamp, each moment that passes increasing the chances that he will no longer be in town, that this time he has left her for another . . . there is no one to confide in, the rest of the party are indifferent, they have the details of their mission to preoccupy them . . . sleekly aloof in some foul-weather gear of black oiled tincloth, incapable of sympathy or indeed any human recognition, they ignore her . . . at last she manages to return to the city, and he is still there. The rivalry has all been illusion, they are lovers as ever. . . . Hallelujah.

  She wakes briefly. Rain or wind, a sudden light, Deuce in from what he never speaks about, some business, she thinks, up in the hills. . . . The depth of the hour resumes, the darkness and the wind once again moving the branches of the pepper tree in the yard as she slips back again to the northern journey, the gray town now fearful over a child found trapped beneath the ice . . . somehow there are no tools or machinery to break through, the ice must be laboriously melted away with rock salt, brought out onto the frozen surface by convoys of dogsleds . . . day and night the work goes on, the child clearly visible through the melting ice, face up, blurred and waiting, serenely accusatory . . . at last lifted free, though perhaps it is too late now, for she seems very still . . . medical specialists go to work, vigils are set up outside her home . . . churches are filled with townspeople in prayer.

  Lake is brought back from a wordless, timeless distraction, perhaps a dream within the dream, forever unrecoverable, into resurrection—the pealing city, the joyous population, shafts of light the color of chrome steel descending on the streets, a gliding view from a high angle, mindfully interrupted for a scene in which the child is reunited with her parents, then resumed to accompany a hymn for choir and orchestra, at first in a minor mode but soon expanding to a major refrain, half a dozen perfect notes, remaining with Lake as she surfaced into the first oblique application of sunlight across the flatlands, an announcement of intention, of weight slowly to increase beyond endurance . . .

  Deuce hadn’t come in all night. Whatever she expected, or didn’t expect from the day, he would not hear it from her. Once she thought they had chosen, together, to resist all penance at the hands of others. To reserve to themselves alone what lay ahead, the dark exceptional fate. Instead she was alone with the sort of recurring dream a long-suffering movie heroine would expect to wake from to find herself pregnant at last.

  A DAY OR TWO LATER, Lew went up to Carefree Court. The hour was advanced, the light failing, the air heated by the Santa Ana wind. Palm trees rattled briskly, and the rats in their nests up there hung on for dear life. Lew approached through a twilit courtyard lined with tile-roofed bungalows, stucco archways, and the green of shrubbery deepening as the light went. He could hear sounds of glassware and conversation.

  From the swimming pool came sounds of liquid recreation—feminine squeals, deep single-reed utterances from high and low diving-boards. The festivities here this evening were not limited to any one bungalow. Lew chose the nearest, went through the formality of ringing the doorbell, but after waiting a while just walked in, and nobody noticed.

  It was a gathering impossible at first to read, even for an old L.A. hand like Lew—society ladies in flapper-rejected outfits from Hamburger’s basement, real flappers in extras’ costumes—Hebrew headdresses, belly-dancing outfits, bare feet and sandals—in from shooting some biblical extravaganza, sugar daddies tattered and unshaven as street beggars, freeloaders in be-spoke suits and sunglasses though the sun had set, Negroes and Filipinos, Mexicans and hillbillies, faces Lew recognized from mug shots, faces that might also have recognized him from tickets long cold he didn’t want to be reminded of, and here they were eating enchiladas and hot dogs, drinking orange juice and tequila, smoking cork-tip cigarettes, screaming in each others’ faces, displaying scars and tattoos, recalling aloud felonies imagined or planned but seldom committed, cursing Republicans, cursing police federal state and local, cursing the larger corporate trusts, and Lew slowly began to get a handle, for weren’t these just the folks that once long ago he’d spent his life chasing, them and their cousins city and country? through brush and up creekbeds and down frozen slaughterhouse alleyways caked with the fat and blood of generations of cattle, worn out his shoes pair after pair until finally seeing the great point, and recognizing in the same instant the ongoing crime that had been his own life—and for achieving this self-clarity, at that time and place a mortal sin, got himself just as unambiguously dynamited.

  He gradually understood that what everybody here had in common was having survived some cataclysm none of them spoke about directly—a bombing, a massacre perhaps at the behest of the U.S. government. . . . “No it wasn’t Haymarket.”

  “It wasn’t Ludlow. It wasn’t the Palmer raids.”

  “It was and it wasn’t.” General merriment.

  In the center of the turbulence was an elderly gent with a snow-white beard and great snarled eyebrows under a wide-brim black hat he had never been seen to take off by anyone in the room. The light rested on him in an unaccustomed way, as if he were somewhere else, lending his image to the gathering. He reminded Lew of the Tarot card of the hermit with the lantern, an ancient wise-man personage who from time to time had stood near the path Lew thought his life was taking, stood and gazed, and so spooked Lew that he’d done all he could to avoid even a friendly hello. As it turned out he was Virgil Maraca, Jardine’s father.

  “Sometimes,” Virgil was saying, “I like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their long-term evil purposes. . . .”

  “And what good’s that gonna do?” somebody objected. “Just more old-timer’s dreaming. Enough of that around. What we need to start doin’s go out and kill them, one by one, painfully as possible.”

  “No argument. Easier for you to contemplate, o’ course.”

  “Startin with the Times bomb . . . you’ll never convince me Gray Otis himself didn’t set it, paid off the McNamaras to take the fall, and Brother Darrow to change the plea. It was all a scheme to destroy union labor in the southern part of this state. Since that fateful December of 1911, the picture business, land development, oil, citrus, every great fortune down here’s been either founded or maintained on the basis of starvation wages.”

  “But twenty employees of the paper were killed in that explosion.”

  “Twenty or two thousand, what did old Otis care? long as he got this eternal scab’s paradise here in return?”

  Lew kept a close but sociable eye on Jardine Maraca, passing so smoothly among the guests, smiling, drinking California Champagne from a juice glass, here to visit her father at this reunion of outlaws . . . yet somehow more than everyday déjà vu, the old two-places-at-once condition, kicking up again, he couldn’t be sure if he was remembering this now or, worse, foreseeing her in some way, so that he had to worry about the possibility that not only might Jardine Maraca be dead but also that it had not happened yet. . . . He crept closer. She smelled like cigarette smoke. Sweet Caporals. Intensely, abruptly, she reminded him of Troth, his ex-wife from so long ago.

  She looked up, into his eyes, as if issuing a dare. As if, in this unaging and temperate corner of the land, where everything was permitted, she nevertheless would be forbidden.

  “I’m supposed to be
trying to find you.”

  “For . . .” If she knew the name, she was reluctant to say it aloud.

  “Tony Tsangarakis. The old gang down at the Vertex Club—they’re worrying about you.”

  “You must be smarter than that. How long ago ’d you talk to Tony?”

  “Haven’t, yet. But a Negro gentleman named LeStreet—”

  “Ah . . .” Her face just for an instant might have emptied of hope. But then back came the old publicity-still glaze.

  “Chester and Encarnación were married once, for a couple of weeks. It’s not that he’s a suspect. But he has that history yet to paradiddle his way out of. So as a resource he ain’t the first one you’d look to necessarily.”

  “Well, what can I do to help you out?”

  “All taken care of, sorry to say.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Encarnación only came back for a little while,” Jardine said, “just long enough to testify about who it was. A little runt of a studio cop named Deuce Kindred. Police just picked him up for a whole string of orgy-type homicides. One girl, long ago, maybe somebody at the studio could’ve bought his way out, in return for unquestioning future obedience, but this’ll mean a death sentence. Our law-enforcement heroes in L.A. being as bent as any, but only for the lesser felonies.”

  “You’ll be needing a ride out of town at least.”

  They arranged a time and place but Jardine already had other plans. As the papers told it later, she went out to the airfield at Glendale and stole a barnstormer’s Curtis JN and took off, flying low—people at a local fair-ground remembered seeing her pass overhead, later she was reported following the interurban tracks east, approaching in a carefree spirit electrical power masts, city rooflines, smokestacks, and other dangerous objects, each time zooming skyward at the last moment. She vanished over the desert, creating a powerful shaped silence.

  THE NEXT TIME Lew went out to see Merle at the beach, he brought a photograph of Troth, an old silver-gelatin studio portrait. He’d been keeping it in an old alchemy primer, so it had stayed in pretty good shape over the years. Not knowing how to ask, or even what he should ask for.