The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Oh, yeah,” Metzger said, “this is where we have trouble in the Narrows. It’s a bitch because of the Kephez minefields, but Jerry has also recently hung this net, this gigantic net, woven out of cable 2½ inches thick.”

  Oedipa refilled her wine glass. They lay now, staring at the screen, flanks just lightly touching. There came from the TV set a terrific explosion. “Mines!” cried Metzger, covering his head and rolling away from her. “Daddy,” blubbered the Metzger in the tube, “I’m scared.” The inside of the midget sub was chaotic, the dog galloping to and fro scattering saliva that mingled with the spray from a leak in the bulkhead, which the father was now plugging with his shirt. “One thing we can do,” announced the father, “go to the bottom, try to get under the net.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Metzger. “They’d built a gate in it, so German U-boats could get through to attack the British fleet. All our E class subs simply used that gate.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Wasn’t I there?”

  “But,” began Oedipa, then saw how they were suddenly out of wine.

  “Aha,” said Metzger, from an inside coat pocket producing a bottle of tequila.

  “No lemons?” she asked, with movie-gaiety. “No salt?”

  “A tourist thing. Did Inverarity use lemons when you were there?”

  “How did you know we were there?” She watched him fill her glass, growing more anti-Metzger as the level rose.

  “He wrote it off that year as a business expense. I did his tax stuff.”

  “A cash nexus,” brooded Oedipa, “you and Perry Mason, two of a kind, it’s all you know about, you shysters.”

  “But our beauty lies,” explained Metzger, “in this extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who became a lawyer. They’ve done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor. The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can’t fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly.”

  “You’re in trouble,” Oedipa told him, staring at the tube, conscious of his thigh, warm through his suit and her slacks. Presently:

  “The Turks are up there with searchlights,” he said, pouring more tequila, watching the little submarine fill up, “patrol boats, and machine guns. You want to bet on what’ll happen?”

  “Of course not,” said Oedipa, “the movie’s made.” He only smiled back. “One of your endless repetitions.”

  “But you still don’t know,” Metzger said. “You haven’t seen it.” Into the commercial break now roared a deafening ad for Beaconsfield Cigarettes, whose attractiveness lay in their filter’s use of bone charcoal, the very best kind.

  “Bones of what?” wondered Oedipa.

  “Inverarity knew. He owned 51% of the filter process.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Someday. Right now it’s your last chance to place your bet. Are they going to get out of it, or not?”

  She felt drunk. It occurred to her, for no reason, that the plucky trio might not get out after all. She had no way to tell how long the movie had to run. She looked at her watch, but it had stopped. “This is absurd,” she said, “of course they’ll get out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “All those movies had happy endings.”

  “All?”

  “Most.”

  “That cuts down the probability,” he told her, smug.

  She squinted at him through her glass. “Then give me odds.”

  “Odds would give it away.”

  “So,” she yelled, maybe a bit rattled, “I bet a bottle of something. Tequila, all right? That you didn’t make it.” Feeling the words had been conned out of her.

  “That I didn’t make it.” He pondered. “Another bottle tonight would put you to sleep,” he decided. “No.”

  “What do you want to bet, then?” She knew. Stubborn, they watched each other’s eyes for what seemed five minutes. She heard commercials chasing one another into and out of the speaker of the TV. She grew more and more angry, perhaps juiced, perhaps only impatient for the movie to come back on.

  “Fine then,” she gave in at last, trying for a brittle voice, “it’s a bet. Whatever you’d like. That you don’t make it. That you all turn to carrion for the fish at the bottom of the Dardanelles, your daddy, your doggie, and you.”

  “Fair enough,” drawled Metzger, taking her hand as if to shake on the bet and kissing its palm instead, sending the dry end of his tongue to graze briefly among her fate’s furrows, the changeless salt hatchings of her identity. She wondered then if this were really happening in the same way as, say, her first time in bed with Pierce, the dead man. But then the movie came back.

  The father was huddled in a shellhole on the steep cliffs of the Anzac beachhead, Turkish shrapnel flying all over the place. Neither Baby Igor nor Murray the dog were in evidence. “Now what the hell,” said Oedipa.

  “Golly,” Metzger said, “they must have got the reels screwed up.”

  “Is this before or after?” she asked, reaching for the tequila bottle, a move that put her left breast in the region of Metzger’s nose. The irrepressibly comic Metzger made crosseyes before replying,

  “That would be telling.”

  “Come on.” She nudged his nose with the padded tip of her bra cup and poured booze. “Or the bet’s off.”

  “Nope,” Metzger said.

  “At least tell me if that’s his old regiment, there.”

  “Go ahead,” said Metzger, “ask questions. But for each answer, you’ll have to take something off. We’ll call it Strip Botticelli.”

  Oedipa had a marvellous idea: “Fine,” she told him, “but first I’ll just slip into the bathroom for a second. Close your eyes, turn around, don’t peek.” On the screen the “River Clyde,” a collier carrying 2000 men, beached at Sedd-el-Bahr in an unearthly silence. “This is it, men,” a phony British accent was heard to whisper. Suddenly a host of Turkish rifles on shore opened up all together, and the massacre began.

  “I know this part,” Metzger told her, his eyes squeezed shut, head away from the set. “For fifty yards out the sea was red with blood. They don’t show that.” Oedipa skipped into the bathroom, which happened also to have a walk-in closet, quickly undressed and began putting on as much as she could of the clothing she’d brought with her: six pairs of panties in assorted colors, girdle, three pairs of nylons, three brassieres, two pairs stretch slacks, four half-slips, one black sheath, two summer dresses, half dozen A-line skirts, three sweaters, two blouses, quilted wrapper, baby blue peignoir and old Orlon muu-muu. Bracelets then, scatterpins, earrings, a pendant. It all seemed to take hours to put on and she could hardly walk when she was finished. She made the mistake of looking at herself in the full-length mirror, saw a beach ball with feet, and laughed so violently she fell over, taking a can of hair spray on the sink with her. The can hit the floor, something broke, and with a great outsurge of pressure the stuff commenced atomizing, propelling the can swiftly about the bathroom. Metzger rushed in to find Oedipa rolling around, trying to get back on her feet, amid a great sticky miasma of fragrant lacquer. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he said in his Baby Igor voice. The can, hissing malignantly, bounced off the toilet and whizzed by Metzger’s right ear, missing by maybe a quarter of an inch. Metzger hit the deck and cowered with Oedipa as the can continued its high-speed caroming; from the other room came a slow, deep crescendo of naval bombardment, machine-gun, howitzer and small-arms fire, screams and chopped-off prayers of dying infantry. S
he looked up past his eyelids, into the staring ceiling light, her field of vision cut across by wild, flashing overflights of the can, whose pressure seemed inexhaustible. She was scared but nowhere near sober. The can knew where it was going, she sensed, or something fast enough, God or a digital machine, might have computed in advance the complex web of its travel; but she wasn’t fast enough, and knew only that it might hit them at any moment, at whatever clip it was doing, a hundred miles an hour. “Metzger,” she moaned, and sank her teeth into his upper arm, through the sharkskin. Everything smelled like hair spray. The can collided with a mirror and bounced away, leaving a silvery, reticulated bloom of glass to hang a second before it all fell jingling into the sink; zoomed over to the enclosed shower, where it crashed into and totally destroyed a panel of frosted glass; thence around the three tile walls, up to the ceiling, past the light, over the two prostrate bodies, amid its own whoosh and the buzzing, distorted uproar from the TV set. She could imagine no end to it; yet presently the can did give up in midflight and fall to the floor, about a foot from Oedipa’s nose. She lay watching it.

  “Blimey,” somebody remarked. “Coo.” Oedipa took her teeth out of Metzger, looked around and saw in the doorway Miles, the kid with the bangs and mohair suit, now multiplied by four. It seemed to be the group he’d mentioned, the Paranoids. She couldn’t tell them apart, three of them were carrying electric guitars, they all had their mouth open. There also appeared a number of girls’ faces, gazing through armpits and around angles of knees. “That’s kinky,” said one of the girls.

  “Are you from London?” another wanted to know: “Is that a London thing you’re doing?” Hair spray hung like fog, glass twinkled all over the floor.

  “Lord love a duck,” summarized a boy holding a passkey, and Oedipa decided this was Miles. Deferent, he began to narrate for their entertainment a surfer orgy he had been to the week before, involving a five-gallon can of kidney suet, a small automobile with a sun roof, and a trained seal.

  “I’m sure this pales by comparison,” said Oedipa, who’d succeeded in rolling over, “so why don’t you all just, you know, go outside. And sing. None of this works without mood music. Serenade us.”

  “Maybe later,” invited one of the other Paranoids shyly, “you could join us in the pool.”

  “Depends how hot it gets in here, gang,” winked jolly Oedipa. The kids filed out, after plugging extension cords into all available outlets in the other room and leading them in a bundle out a window.

  Metzger helped her stagger to her feet. “Anyone for Strip Botticelli?” In the other room the TV was blaring a commercial for a Turkish bath in downtown San Narciso, wherever downtown was, called Hogan’s Seraglio. “Inverarity owned that too,” Metzger said. “Did you know that?”

  “Sadist,” Oedipa yelled, “say it once more, I’ll wrap the TV tube around your head.”

  “You’re really mad,” he smiled.

  She wasn’t, really. She said, “What the hell didn’t he own?”

  Metzger cocked an eyebrow at her. “You tell me.”

  If she was going to she got no chance, for outside, all in a shuddering deluge of thick guitar chords, the Paranoids had broken into song. Their drummer had set up precariously on the diving board, the others were invisible. Metzger came up behind her with some idea of cupping his hands around her breasts, but couldn’t immediately find them because of all the clothes. They stood at the window and heard the Paranoids singing.

  Serenade

  As I lie and watch the moon

  On the lonely sea,

  Watch it tug the lonely tide

  Like a comforter over me,

  The still and faceless moon

  Fills the beach tonight

  With only a ghost of day,

  All shadow gray, and moonbeam white.

  And you lie alone tonight,

  As alone as I;

  Lonely girl in your lonely flat, well, that’s where it’s at,

  So hush your lonely cry.

  How can I come to you, put out the moon, send back the tide?

  The night has gone so gray, I’d lose the way, and it’s dark inside.

  No, I must lie alone,

  Till it comes for me;

  Till it takes the sky, the sand, the moon, and the lonely sea.

  And the lonely sea . . . etc.[FADE OUT.]

  “Now then,” Oedipa shivered brightly.

  “First question,” Metzger reminded her. From the TV set the St Bernard was barking. Oedipa looked and saw Baby Igor, disguised as a Turkish beggar lad, skulking with the dog around a set she took to be Constantinople.

  “Another early reel,” she said hopefully.

  “I can’t allow that question,” Metzger said. On the doorsill the Paranoids, as we leave milk to propitiate the leprechaun, had set a fifth of Jack Daniels.

  “Oboy,” said Oedipa. She poured a drink. “Did Baby Igor get to Constantinople in the good submarine ‘Justine’?”

  “No,” said Metzger. Oedipa took off an earring.

  “Did he get there in, what did you call them, in an E Class submarine.”

  “No,” said Metzger. Oedipa took off another earring.

  “Did he get there overland, maybe through Asia Minor?”

  “Maybe,” said Metzger. Oedipa took off another earring.

  “Another earring?” said Metzger.

  “If I answer that, will you take something off?”

  “I’ll do it without an answer,” roared Metzger, shucking out of his coat. Oedipa refilled her glass, Metzger had another snort from the bottle. Oedipa then sat five minutes watching the tube, forgetting she was supposed to ask questions. Metzger took his trousers off, earnestly. The father seemed to be up before a court-martial, now.

  “So,” she said, “an early reel. This is where he gets cashiered, ha, ha.”

  “Maybe it’s a flashback,” Metzger said. “Or maybe he gets it twice.” Oedipa removed a bracelet. So it went: the succession of film fragments on the tube, the progressive removal of clothing that seemed to bring her no nearer nudity, the boozing, the tireless shivaree of voices and guitars from out by the pool. Now and then a commercial would come in, each time Metzger would say, “Inverarity’s,” or “Big block of shares,” and later settled for nodding and smiling. Oedipa would scowl back, growing more and more certain, while a headache began to flower behind her eyes, that they among all possible combinations of new lovers had found a way to make time itself slow down. Things grew less and less clear. At some point she went into the bathroom, tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn’t. She had a moment of nearly pure terror. Then remembered that the mirror had broken and fallen in the sink. “Seven years’ bad luck,” she said aloud. “I’ll be 35.” She shut the door behind her and took the occasion to blunder, almost absently, into another slip and skirt, as well as a long-leg girdle and a couple pairs of knee socks. It struck her that if the sun ever came up Metzger would disappear. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to. She came back in to find Metzger wearing only a pair of boxer shorts and fast asleep with a hardon and his head under the couch. She noticed also a fat stomach the suit had hidden. On the screen New Zealanders and Turks were impaling one another on bayonets. With a cry Oedipa rushed to him, fell on him, began kissing him to wake him up. His radiant eyes flew open, pierced her, as if she could feel the sharpness somewhere vague between her breasts. She sank with an enormous sigh that carried all rigidity like a mythical fluid from her, down next to him; so weak she couldn’t help him undress her; it took him 20 minutes, rolling, arranging her this way and that, as if she thought, he were some scaled-up, short-haired, poker-faced little girl with a Barbie doll. She may have fallen asleep once or twice. She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she’d come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where
the camera’s already moving. Outside a fugue of guitars had begun, and she counted each electronic voice as it came in, till she reached six or so and recalled only three of the Paranoids played guitars; so others must be plugging in.

  Which indeed they were. Her climax and Metzger’s, when it came, coincided with every light in the place, including the TV tube, suddenly going out, dead, black. It was a curious experience. The Paranoids had blown a fuse. When the lights came on again, and she and Metzger lay twined amid a wall-to-wall scatter of clothing and spilled bourbon, the TV tube revealed the father, dog and Baby Igor trapped inside the darkening “Justine,” as the water level inexorably rose. The dog was first to drown, in a great crowd of bubbles. The camera came in for a close-up of Baby Igor crying, one hand on the control board. Something short-circuited then and the grounded Baby Igor was electrocuted, thrashing back and forth and screaming horribly. Through one of those Hollywood distortions in probability, the father was spared electrocution so he could make a farewell speech, apologizing to Baby Igor and the dog for getting them into this and regretting that they wouldn’t be meeting in heaven: “Your little eyes have seen your daddy for the last time. You are for salvation; I am for the Pit.” At the end his suffering eyes filled the screen, the sound of incoming water grew deafening, up swelled that strange ‘30’s movie music with the massive sax section, in faded the legend THE END.

  Oedipa had leaped to her feet and run across to the other wall to turn and glare at Metzger. “They didn’t make it!” she yelled. “You bastard, I won.”

  “You won me,” Metzger smiled.

  “What did Inverarity tell you about me,” she asked finally.