The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Is that him?” a voice asked behind her, up the stairs. “The sailor?”

  “He has a tattoo on his hand.”

  “Can you bring him up OK? That’s him.” She turned and saw an even older man, shorter, wearing a tall Homburg hat and smiling at them. “I’d help you but I got a little arthritis.”

  “Does he have to come up?” she said. “Up there?”

  “Where else, lady?”

  She didn’t know. She let go of him for a moment, reluctant as if he were her own child, and he looked up at her. “Come on,” she said. He reached out the tattooed hand and she took that, and that was how they went the rest of the way up that flight, and then the two more: hand in hand, very slowly for the man with arthritis.

  “He disappeared last night,” he told her. “Said he was going looking for his old lady. It’s a thing he does, off and on.” They entered a warren of rooms and corridors, lit by 10-watt bulbs, separated by beaverboard partitions. The old man followed them stiffly. At last he said, “Here.”

  In the little room were another suit, a couple of religious tracts, a rug, a chair. A picture of a saint, changing well-water to oil for Jerusalem’s Easter lamps. Another bulb, dead. The bed. The mattress, waiting. She ran through then a scene she might play. She might find the landlord of this place, and bring him to court, and buy the sailor a new suit at Roos/Atkins, and shirt, and shoes, and give him the bus fare to Fresno after all. But with a sigh he had released her hand, while she was so lost in the fantasy that she hadn’t felt it go away, as if he’d known the best moment to let go.

  “Just mail the letter,” he said, “the stamp is on it.” She looked and saw the familiar carmine 8¢ airmail, with a jet flying by the Capitol dome. But at the top of the dome stood a tiny figure in deep black, with its arms outstretched. Oedipa wasn’t sure what exactly was supposed to be on top of the Capitol, but knew it wasn’t anything like that.

  “Please,” the sailor said. “Go on now. You don’t want to stay here.” She looked in her purse, found a ten and a single, gave him the ten. “I’ll spend it on booze,” he said.

  “Remember your friends,” said the arthritic, watching the ten.

  “Bitch,” said the sailor. “Why didn’t you wait till he was gone?”

  Oedipa watched him make adjustments so he’d fit easier against the mattress. That stuffed memory. Register A . . .

  “Give me a cigarette, Ramírez,” the sailor said. “I know you got one.”

  Would it be today? “Ramírez,” she cried. The arthritic looked around on his rusty neck. “He’s going to die,” she said.

  “Who isn’t?” said Ramírez.

  She remembered John Nefastis, talking about his Machine, and massive destructions of information. So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking’s funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned. She stared at it in wonder. It was as if she had just discovered the irreversible process. It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT’s. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among “uhs” and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; “dt,” God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him. She gave him goodbye, walked downstairs and then on, in the direction he’d told her. For an hour she prowled among the sunless, concrete underpinnings of the freeway, finding drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts, hookers, walking psychotic, no secret mailbox. But at last in the shadows she did come on a can with a swinging trapezoidal top, the kind you throw trash in: old and green, nearly four feet high. On the swinging part were hand-painted the initials W.A.S.T.E. She had to look closely to see the periods between the letters.

  Oedipa settled back in the shadow of a column. She may have dozed off. She woke to see a kid dropping a bundle of letters into the can. She went over and dropped in the sailor’s letter to Fresno; then hid again and waited. Toward midday a rangy young wino showed up with a sack; unlocked a panel at the side of the box and took out all the letters. Oedipa gave him half a block’s start, then began to tail him. Congratulating herself on having thought to wear flats, at least. The carrier led her across Market then over toward City Hall. In a street close enough to the drab, stone openness of the Civic Center to be infected by its gray, he rendezvoused with another carrier, and they exchanged sacks. Oedipa decided to stick with the one she’d been following. She tailed him all the way back down the littered, shifty, loud length of Market and over on First Street to the trans-bay bus terminal, where he bought a ticket for Oakland. So did Oedipa.

  They rode over the bridge and into the great, empty glare of the Oakland afternoon. The landscape lost all variety. The carrier got off in a neighborhood Oedipa couldn’t identify. She followed him for hours along streets whose names she never knew, across arterials that even with the afternoon’s lull nearly murdered her, into slums and out, up long hillsides jammed solid with two- or three-bedroom houses, all their windows giving blankly back only the sun. One by one his sack of letters emptied. At length he climbed on a Berkeley bus. Oedipa followed. Halfway up Telegraph the carrier got off and led her down the street to a pseudo-Mexican apartment house. Not once had he looked behind him. John Nefastis lived here. She was back where she’d started, and could not believe 24 hours had passed. Should it have been more or less?

  Back in the hotel she found the lobby full of deaf-mute delegates in party hats, copied in crepe paper after the fur Chinese communist jobs made popular during the Korean conflict. They were every one of them drunk, and a few of the men grabbed her, thinking to bring her along to a party in the grand ballroom. She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm, but was too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted horrible. They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner’s lead, limp in the young mu
te’s clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner. Jesús Arrabal would have called it an anarchist miracle. Oedipa, with no name for it, was only demoralized. She curtsied and fled.

  Next day, after twelve hours of sleep and no dreams to speak of, Oedipa checked out of the hotel and drove down the peninsula to Kinneret. She had decided on route, with time to think about the day preceding, to go see Dr Hilarius her shrink, and tell him all. She might well be in the cold and sweatless meathooks of a psychosis. With her own eyes she had verified a WASTE system: seen two WASTE postmen, a WASTE mailbox, WASTE stamps, WASTE cancellations. And the image of the muted post horn all but saturating the Bay Area. Yet she wanted it all to be fantasy—some clear result of her several wounds, needs, dark doubles. She wanted Hilarius to tell her she was some kind of a nut and needed a rest, and that there was no Trystero. She also wanted to know why the chance of its being real should menace her so.

  She pulled into the drive at Hilarius’s clinic a little after sunset. The light in his office didn’t seem to be on. Eucalyptus branches blew in a great stream of air that flowed downhill, sucked to the evening sea. Halfway along the flagstone path, she was startled by an insect whirring loudly past her ear, followed at once by the sound of a gunshot. That was no insect, thought Oedipa, at which point, hearing another shot, she made the connection. In the fading light she was a clear target; the only way to go was toward the clinic. She dashed up to the glass doors, found them locked, the lobby inside dark. Oedipa picked up a rock next to a flower bed and heaved it at one of the doors. It bounced off. She was looking around for another rock when a white shape appeared inside, fluttering up to the door and unlocking it for her. It was Helga Blamm, Hilarius’s sometime assistant.

  “Hurry,” she chattered, as Oedipa slipped inside. The woman was close to hysterical.

  “What’s happening?” Oedipa said.

  “He’s gone crazy. I tried to call the police, but he took a chair and smashed the switchboard with it.”

  “Dr Hilarius?”

  “He thinks someone’s after him.” Tear streaks had meandered down over the nurse’s cheekbones. “He’s locked himself in the office with that rifle.” A Gewehr 43, from the war, Oedipa recalled, that he kept as a souvenir.

  “He shot at me. Do you think anybody will report it?”

  “Well he’s shot at half a dozen people,” replied Nurse Blamm, leading Oedipa down a corridor to her office. “Somebody better report it.” Oedipa noticed that the window opened on a safe line of retreat.

  “You could’ve run,” she said.

  Blamm, running hot water from a washbasin tap into cups and stirring in instant coffee, looked up, quizzical. “He might need somebody.”

  “Who’s supposed to be after him?”

  “Three men with submachine guns, he said. Terrorists, fanatics, that was all I got. He started breaking up the PBX.” She gave Oedipa a hostile look. “Too many nutty broads, that’s what did it. Kinneret is full of nothing but. He couldn’t cope.”

  “I’ve been away for a while,” Oedipa said. “Maybe I could find out what it is. Maybe I’d be less of a threat for him.”

  Blamm burned her mouth on the coffee. “Start telling him your troubles and he’ll probably shoot you.”

  In front of his door, which she could never remember having seen closed, Oedipa stood hipshot awhile, questioning her own sanity. Why hadn’t she split out through Blamm’s window and read about the rest of it in the paper?

  “Who is it?” Hilarius screamed, having picked up her breathing, or something.

  “Mrs. Maas.”

  “May Speer and his ministry of cretins rot eternally in hell. Do you realize that half these rounds are duds?”

  “May I come in? Could we talk?”

  “I’m sure you’d all like that,” Hilarius said.

  “I’m unarmed. You can frisk me.”

  “While you karate-chop me in the spine, no thank you.”

  “Why are you resisting every suggestion I make?”

  “Listen,” Hilarius said after awhile, “have I seemed to you a good enough Freudian? Have I ever deviated seriously?”

  “You made faces now and then,” said Oedipa, “but that’s minor.”

  His response was a long, bitter laugh. Oedipa waited. “I tried,” the shrink behind the door said, “to submit myself to that man, to the ghost of that cantankerous Jew. Tried to cultivate a faith in the literal truth of everything he wrote, even the idiocies and contradictions. It was the least I could have done, nicht wahr? A kind of penance.

  “And part of me must have really wanted to believe—like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror—that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?”

  She could not, having no idea what Hilarius had done before showing up in Kinneret. Far away she now heard sirens, the electronic kind the local cops used, that sounded like a slide-whistle being played over a P.A. system. With linear obstinacy they grew louder.

  “Yes, I hear them,” Hilarius said. “Do you think anyone can protect me from these fanatics? They walk through walls. They replicate: you flee them, turn a corner, and there they are, coming for you again.”

  “Do me a favor?” Oedipa said. “Don’t shoot at the cops, they’re on your side.”

  “Your Israeli has access to every uniform known,” Hilarius said. “I can’t guarantee the safety of the ‘police.’ You couldn’t guarantee where they’d take me if I surrendered, could you.”

  She heard him pacing around his office. Unearthly siren-sounds converged on them from all over the night. “There is a face,” Hilarius said, “that I can make. One you haven’t seen; no one in this country has. I have only made it once in my life, and perhaps today in central Europe there still lives, in whatever vegetable ruin, the young man who saw it. He would be, now, about your age. Hopelessly insane. His name was Zvi. Will you tell the ‘police,’ or whatever they are calling themselves tonight, that I can make that face again? That it has an effective radius of a hundred yards and drives anyone unlucky enough to see it down forever into the darkened oubliette, among the terrible shapes, and secures the hatch irrevocably above them? Thank you.”

  The sirens had reached the front of the clinic. She heard car doors slamming, cops yelling, suddenly a great smash as they broke in. The office door opened then. Hilarius grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her inside, locked the door again.

  “So now I’m a hostage,” Oedipa said.

  “Oh,” said Hilarius, “it’s you.”

  “Well who did you think you’d been—”

  “Discussing my case with? Another. There is me, there are the others. You know, with the LSD, we’re finding, the distinction begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges. But I never took the drug, I chose to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I know who I am and who the others are. Perhaps that is why you also refused to participate, Mrs. Maas?” He held the rifle at sling arms and beamed at her. “Well, then. You were supposed to deliver a message to me, I assume. From them. What were you supposed to say?”

  Oedipa shrugged. “Face up to your social responsibilities,” she suggested. “Accept the reality principle. You’re outnumbered and they have superior firepower.”

  “Ah, outnumbered. We were outnumbered there too.” He watched her with a coy look.

  “Where?”

  “Where I made that face. Where I did my internship.”

  She knew then approximate
ly what he was talking about, but to narrow it said, “Where,” again.

  “Buchenwald,” replied Hilarius. Cops began hammering on the office door.

  “He has a gun,” Oedipa called, “and I’m in here.”

  “Who are you, lady?” She told him. “How do you spell that first name?” He also took down her address, age, phone number, next of kin, husband’s occupation, for the news media. Hilarius all the while was rummaging in his desk for more ammo. “Can you talk him out of it?” the cop wanted to know. “TV folks would like to get some footage through the window. Could you keep him occupied?”

  “Hang tough,” Oedipa advised, “we’ll see.”

  “Nice act you all have there,” nodded Hilarius.

  “You think,” said Oedipa, “then, that they’re trying to bring you back to Israel, to stand trial, like they did Eichmann?” The shrink kept nodding. “Why? What did you do at Buchenwald?”

  “I worked,” Hilarius told her, “on experimentally-induced insanity. A catatonic Jew was as good as a dead one. Liberal SS circles felt it would be more humane.” So they had gone at their subjects with metronomes, serpents, Brechtian vignettes at midnight, surgical removal of certain glands, magic-lantern hallucinations, new drugs, threats recited over hidden loudspeakers, hypnotism, clocks that ran backward, and faces. Hilarius had been put in charge of faces. “The Allied liberators,” he reminisced, “arrived, unfortunately, before we could gather enough data. Apart from the spectacular successes, like Zvi, there wasn’t much we could point to in a statistical way.” He smiled at the expression on her face. “Yes, you hate me. But didn’t I try to atone? If I’d been a real Nazi I’d have chosen Jung, nicht wahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew. Freud’s vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower-arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms. At Auschwitz the ovens would be converted over to petit fours and wedding cakes, and the V-2 missiles to public housing for the elves. I tried to believe it all. I slept three hours a night trying not to dream, and spent the other 21 at the forcible acquisition of faith. And yet my penance hasn’t been enough. They’ve come like angels of death to get me, despite all I tried to do.”