The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Why,” Driblette said at last, “is everybody so interested in texts?”

  “Who else?” Too quickly. Maybe he had only been talking in general.

  Driblette’s head wagged back and forth. “Don’t drag me into your scholarly disputes,” adding “whoever you all are,” with a familiar smile. Oedipa realized then, cold corpse-fingers of grue on her skin, that it was exactly the same look he’d coached his cast to give each other whenever the subject of the Trystero assassins came up. The knowing look you get in your dreams from a certain unpleasant figure. She decided to ask about this look.

  “Was it written in as a stage direction? All those people, so obviously in on something. Or was that one of your touches?”

  “That was my own,” Driblette told her, “that, and actually bringing the three assassins onstage in the fourth act. Wharfinger didn’t show them at all, you know.”

  “Why did you? Had you heard about them somewhere else?”

  “You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but—” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head—“in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also.”

  But she couldn’t let it quite go. “What made you feel differently than Wharfinger did about this, this Trystero.” At the word, Driblette’s face abruptly vanished, back into the steam. As if switched off. Oedipa hadn’t wanted to say the word. He had managed to create around it the same aura of ritual reluctance here, offstage, as he had on.

  “If I were to dissolve in here,” speculated the voice out of the drifting steam, “be washed down the drain into the Pacific, what you saw tonight would vanish too. You, that part of you so concerned, God knows how, with that little world, would also vanish. The only residue in fact would be things Wharfinger didn’t lie about. Perhaps Squamuglia and Faggio, if they ever existed. Perhaps the Thurn and Taxis mail system. Stamp collectors tell me it did exist. Perhaps the other, also. The Adversary. But they would be traces, fossils. Dead, mineral, without value or potential.

  “You could fall in love with me, you can talk to my shrink, you can hide a tape recorder in my bedroom, see what I talk about from wherever I am when I sleep. You want to do that? You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes. You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth. Wharfinger supplied words and a yarn. I gave them life. That’s it.” He fell silent. The shower splashed.

  “Driblette?” Oedipa called, after awhile.

  His face appeared briefly. “We could do that.” He wasn’t smiling. His eyes waited, at the centers of their webs.

  “I’ll call,” said Oedipa. She left, and was all the way outside before thinking, I went in there to ask about bones and instead we talked about the Trystero thing. She stood in a nearly deserted parking lot, watching the headlights of Metzger’s car come at her, and wondered how accidental it had been.

  Metzger had been listening to the car radio. She got in and rode with him for two miles before realizing that the whimsies of nighttime reception were bringing them KCUF down from Kinneret, and that the disk jockey talking was her husband, Mucho.

  4

  Though she saw Mike Fallopian again, and did trace the text of The Courier’s Tragedy a certain distance, these follow-ups were no more disquieting than other revelations which now seemed to come crowding in exponentially, as if the more she collected the more would come to her, until everything she saw, smelled, dreamed, remembered, would somehow come to be woven into The Tristero.

  For one thing, she read over the will more closely. If it was really Pierce’s attempt to leave an organized something behind after his own annihilation, then it was part of her duty, wasn’t it, to bestow life on what had persisted, to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the center of the planetarium, to bring the estate into pulsing stelliferous Meaning, all in a soaring dome around her? If only so much didn’t stand in her way: her deep ignorance of law, of investment, of real estate, ultimately of the dead man himself. The bond the probate court had had her post was perhaps their evaluation in dollars of how much did stand in her way. Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world? If not project then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among constellations and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross. Anything might help.

  It was some such feeling that got her up early one morning to go to a Yoyodyne stockholders’ meeting. There was nothing she could do at it, yet she felt it might redeem her a little from inertia. They gave her a round white visitor’s badge at one of the gates, and she parked in an enormous lot next to a quonset building painted pink and about a hundred yards long. This was the Yoyodyne Cafeteria, and scene of her meeting. For two hours Oedipa sat on a long bench between old men who might have been twins and whose hands, alternately (as if their owners were asleep and the moled, freckled hands out roaming dream-landscapes) kept falling onto her thighs. Around them all, Negroes carried gunboats of mashed potatoes, spinach, shrimp, zucchini, pot roast, to the long, glittering steam tables, preparing to feed a noontide invasion of Yoyodyne workers. The routine business took an hour; for another hour the shareholders and proxies and company officers held a Yoyodyne songfest. To the tune of Cornell’s alma mater, they sang:

  Hymn

  High above the L. A. freeways,

  And the traffic’s whine,

  Stands the well-known Galactronics

  Branch of Yoyodyne.

  To the end, we swear undying

  Loyalty to you,

  Pink pavilions bravely shining,

  Palm trees tall and true.

  Being led in this by the president of the company, Mr. Clayton (“Bloody”) Chiclitz himself; and to the tune of “Aura Lee”:

  Glee

  Bendix guides the warheads in,

  Avco builds them nice.

  Douglas, North American,

  Grumman get their slice.

  Martin launches off a pad,

  Lockheed from a sub;

  We can’t get the R&D

  On a Piper Cub.

  Convair boosts the satellite

  Into orbits round;

  Boeing builds the Minuteman,

  We stay on the ground.

  Yoyodyne, Yoyodyne,

  Contracts flee thee yet.

  DOD has shafted thee,

  Out of spite, I’ll bet.

  And dozens of other old favorites whose lyrics she couldn’t remember. The singers were then formed into platoon-sized groups for a quick tour of the plant.

  Somehow Oedipa got lost. One minute she was gazing at a mockup of a space capsule, safely surrounded by old, somnolent men; the next, alone in a great, fluorescent murmur of office activity. As far as she could see in any direction it was white or pastel: men’s shirts, papers, drawing boards. All she could think of was to put on her shades for all this light, and wait for somebody to rescue her. But nobody noticed. She began to wander aisles among light blue desks, turning a corner now and then. Heads came up at the sound of her heels, engineers stared until she’d passed, but nobody spoke to her. Five or ten minutes went by this way, panic growing inside her head: there seemed no way out of the area. Then, by accident (Dr. Hilarius, if
asked, would accuse her of using subliminal cues in the environment to guide her to a particular person) or howsoever, she came on one Stanley Koteks, who wore wire-rim bifocals, sandals, argyle socks, and at first glance seemed too young to be working here. As it turned out he wasn’t working, only doodling with a fat felt pencil this sign:

  “Hello there,” Oedipa said, arrested by this coincidence. On a whim, she added, “Kirby sent me,” this having been the name on the latrine wall. It was supposed to sound conspiratorial, but came out silly.

  “Hi,” said Stanley Koteks, deftly sliding the big envelope he’d been doodling on into an open drawer he then closed. Catching sight of her badge, “You’re lost, huh?”

  She knew blunt questions like, what does that symbol mean? would get her nowhere. She said, “I’m a tourist, actually. A stockholder.”

  “Stockholder.” He gave her the once-over, hooked with his foot a swivel chair from the next desk and rolled it over for her. “Sit down. Can you really influence policy, or make suggestions they won’t just file in the garbage?”

  “Yes,” lied Oedipa, to see where it would take them.

  “See,” Koteks said, “if you can get them to drop their clause on patents. That, lady, is my ax to grind.”

  “Patents,” Oedipa said. Koteks explained how every engineer, in signing the Yoyodyne contract, also signed away the patent rights to any inventions he might come up with.

  “This stifles your really creative engineer,” Koteks said, adding bitterly, “wherever he may be.”

  “I didn’t think people invented any more,” said Oedipa, sensing this would goad him. “I mean, who’s there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn’t it all teamwork now?” Bloody Chiclitz, in his welcoming speech this morning, had stressed teamwork.

  “Teamwork,” Koteks snarled, “is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.”

  “Goodness,” said Oedipa, “are you allowed to talk like that?”

  Koteks looked to both sides, then rolled his chair closer. “You know the Nefastis Machine?” Oedipa only widened her eyes. “Well this was invented by John Nefastis, who’s up at Berkeley now. John’s somebody who still invents things. Here. I have a copy of the patent.” From a drawer he produced a Xeroxed wad of papers, showing a box with a sketch of a bearded Victorian on its outside, and coming out of the top two pistons attached to a crankshaft and flywheel.

  “Who’s that with the beard?” asked Oedipa. James Clerk Maxwell, explained Koteks, a famous Scotch scientist who had once postulated a tiny intelligence, known as Maxwell’s Demon. The Demon could sit in a box among air molecules that were moving at all different random speeds, and sort out the fast molecules from the slow ones. Fast molecules have more energy than slow ones. Concentrate enough of them in one place and you have a region of high temperature. You can then use the difference in temperature between this hot region of the box and any cooler region, to drive a heat engine. Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion.

  “Sorting isn’t work?” Oedipa said. “Tell them down at the post office, you’ll find yourself in a mailbag headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you.”

  “It’s mental work,” Koteks said, “But not work in the thermodynamic sense.” He went on to tell how the Nefastis Machine contained an honest-to-God Maxwell’s Demon. All you had to do was stare at the photo of Clerk Maxwell, and concentrate on which cylinder, right or left, you wanted the Demon to raise the temperature in. The air would expand and push a piston. The familiar Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge photo, showing Maxwell in right profile, seemed to work best.

  Oedipa, behind her shades, looked around carefully, trying not to move her head. Nobody paid any attention to them: the air-conditioning hummed on, IBM typewriters chiggered away, swivel chairs squeaked, fat reference manuals were slammed shut, rattling blueprints folded and refolded, while high overhead the long silent fluorescent bulbs glared merrily; all with Yoyodyne was normal. Except right here, where Oedipa Maas, with a thousand other people to choose from, had had to walk uncoerced into the presence of madness.

  “Not everybody can work it, of course,” Koteks, having warmed to his subject, was telling her. “Only people with the gift. ‘Sensitives,’ John calls them.”

  Oedipa rested her shades on her nose and batted her eyelashes, figuring to coquette her way off this conversational hook: “Would I make a good sensitive, do think?”

  “You really want to try it? You could write to him. He only knows a few sensitives. He’d let you try.”

  Oedipa took out her little memo book and opened to the symbol she’d copied and the words Shall I project a world? “Box 573,” said Koteks.

  “In Berkeley.”

  “No,” his voice gone funny, so that she looked up, too sharply, by which time, carried by a certain momentum of thought, he’d also said, “In San Francisco; there’s none—” and by then knew he’d made a mistake. “He’s living somewhere along Telegraph,” he muttered. “I gave you the wrong address.”

  She took a chance: “Then the WASTE address isn’t good any more.” But she’d pronounced it like a word, waste. His face congealed, a mask of distrust. “It’s W.A.S.T.E., lady,” he told her, “an acronym, not ‘waste,’ and we had best not go into it any further.”

  “I saw it in a ladies’ john,” she confessed. But Stanley Koteks was no longer about to be sweettalked.

  “Forget it,” he advised; opened a book and proceeded to ignore her.

  She in her turn, clearly, was not about to forget it. The envelope she’d seen Koteks doodling what she’d begun to think of as the “WASTE symbol” on had come, she bet, from John Nefastis. Or somebody like him. Her suspicions got embellished by, of all people, Mike Fallopian of the Peter Pinguid Society.

  “Sure this Koteks is part of some underground,” he told her a few days later, “an underground of the unbalanced, possibly, but then how can you blame them for being maybe a little bitter? Look what’s happening to them. In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor—Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grew up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some ‘project’ or ‘task force’ or ‘team’ and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent—only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook. What’s it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a nightmare like that? Of course they stick together, they keep in touch. They can always tell when they come on another of their kind. Maybe it only happens once every five years, but still, immediately, they know.”

  Metzger, who’d come along to The Scope that evening, wanted to argue. “You’re so right-wing you’re left-wing,” he protested. “How can you be against a corporation that wants a worker to waive his patent rights. That sounds like the surplus value theory to me, fella, and you sound like a Marxist.” As they got drunker this typical Southern California dialogue degenerated further. Oedipa sat alone and gloomy. She’d decided to come tonight to The Scope not only because of the encounter with Stanley Koteks, but also because of other revelations; because it seemed that a pattern was beginning to emerge, having to do with the mail and how it was delivered.

  There had been the bronze historical marker on the other side of the lake at Fangoso Lagoons. On this site, it read, in 1853, a dozen Wells, Fargo men battled gallantly with a band of masked marauders in mysterious black uniforms. We owe this description to a post rider, the only witness to the massacre, who died
shortly after. The only other clue was a cross, traced by one of the victims in the dust. To this day the identities of the slayers remain shrouded in mystery.

  A cross? Or the initial T? The same stuttered by Niccolò in The Courier’s Tragedy. Oedipa pondered this. She called Randolph Driblette from a pay booth, to see it he’d known about this Wells, Fargo incident; if that was why he’d chosen to dress his bravos all in black. The phone buzzed on and on, into hollowness. She hung up and headed for Zapf’s Used Books. Zapf himself came forward out of a wan cone of 15-watt illumination to help her find the paperback Driblette had mentioned, Jacobean Revenge Plays.

  “It’s been very much in demand,” Zapf told her. The skull on the cover watched them, through the dim light.

  Did he only mean Driblette? She opened her mouth to ask, but didn’t. It was to be the first of many demurs.

  Back at Echo Courts, Metzger in L.A. for the day on other business, she turned immediately to the single mention of the word Trystero. Opposite the line she read, in pencil, Cf. variant, 1687 ed. Put there maybe by some student. In a way, it cheered her. Another reading of that line might help light further the dark face of the word. According to a short preface, the text had been taken from a folio edition, undated. Oddly, the preface was unsigned. She checked the copyright page and found that the original hardcover had been a textbook, Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger, published by The Lectern Press, Berkeley, California, back in 1957. She poured herself half a tumbler of Jack Daniels (the Paranoids having left them a fresh bottle the evening before) and called the L.A. library. They checked, but didn’t have the hardcover. They could look it up on inter-library loan for her. “Wait,” she said, having just got an idea, “the publisher’s up in Berkeley. Maybe I’ll try them directly.” Thinking also that she could visit John Nefastis.

  She had caught sight of the historical marker only because she’d gone back, deliberately, to Lake Inverarity one day, owing to this, what you might have to call, growing obsession, with “bringing something of herself”—even if that something was just her presence—to the scatter of business interests that had survived Inverarity. She would give them order, she would create constellations; next day she drove out to Vesperhaven House, a home for senior citizens that Inverarity had put up around the time Yoyodyne came to San Narciso. In its front recreation room she found sunlight coming in it seemed through every window; an old man nodding in front of a dim Leon Schlesinger cartoon show on the tube; and a black fly browsing along the pink, dandruffy arroyo of the neat part in the old man’s hair. A fat nurse ran in with a can of bug spray and yelled at the fly to take off so she could kill it. The cagy fly stayed where it was. “You’re bothering Mr Thoth,” she yelled at the little fellow. Mr Thoth jerked awake, jarring loose the fly, which made a desperate scramble for the door. The nurse pursued, spraying poison.