The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

  “How’s it going?” the cop inquired.

  “Just marv,” said Oedipa. “I’ll let you know if it’s hopeless.” Then she saw that Hilarius had left the Gewehr on his desk and was across the room ostensibly trying to open a file cabinet. She picked the rifle up, pointed it at him, and said, “I ought to kill you.” She knew he had wanted her to get the weapon.

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been sent to do?” He crossed and uncrossed his eyes at her; stuck out his tongue tentatively.

  “I came,” she said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”

  “Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

  “Come on in,” Oedipa yelled.

  Tears sprang to Hilarius’s eyes. “You aren’t going to shoot?”

  The cop tried the door. “It’s locked, hey,” he said.

  “Bust it down,” roared Oedipa, “and Hitler Hilarius here will foot the bill.”

  Outside, as a number of nervous patrolmen approached Hilarius, holding up strait jackets and billy clubs they would not need, and as three rival ambulances backed snarling up onto the lawn, jockeying for position, causing Helga Blamm between sobs to call the drivers filthy names, Oedipa spotted among searchlights and staring crowds a KCUF mobile unit, with her husband Mucho inside it, spieling into a microphone. She moseyed over past snapping flashbulbs and stuck her head in the window. “Hi.”

  Mucho pressed his cough button a moment, but only smiled. It seemed odd. How could they hear a smile? Oedipa got in, trying not to make noise. Mucho thrust the mike in front of her, mumbling, “You’re on, just be yourself.” Then in his earnest broadcasting voice, “How do you feel about this terrible thing?”

  “Terrible,” said Oedipa.

  “Wonderful,” said Mucho. He had her go on to give listeners a summary of what’d happened in the office. “Thank you, Mrs Edna Mosh,” he wrapped up, “for your eyewitness account of this dramatic siege at the Hilarius Psychiatric Clinic. This is KCUF Mobile Two, sending it back now to ‘Rabbit’ Warren, at the studio.” He cut his power. Something was not quite right.

  “Edna Mosh?” Oedipa said.

  “It’ll come out the right way,” Mucho said. “I was allowing for the distortion on these rigs, and then when they put it on tape.”

  “Where are they taking him?”

  “Community hospital, I guess,” Mucho said, “for observation. I wonder what they can observe.”

  “Israelis,” Oedipa said, “coming in the windows. If there aren’t any, he’s crazy.” Cops came over and they chatted awhile. They told her to stay around Kinneret in case there was legal action. At length she returned to her rented car and followed Mucho back to the studio. Tonight he had the one-to-six shift on the air.

  In the hallway outside the loud ratcheting teletype room, Mucho upstairs in the office typing out his story, Oedipa encountered the program director, Caesar Funch. “Sure glad you’re back,” he greeted her, clearly at a loss for her first name.

  “Oh?” said Oedipa, “and why is that.”

  “Frankly,” confided Funch, “since you left, Wendell hasn’t been himself.”

  “And who,” said Oedipa, working herself into a rage because Funch was right, “pray, has he been, Ringo Starr?” Funch cowered. “Chubby Checker?” she pursued him toward the lobby, “the Righteous Brothers? And why tell me?”

  “All of the above,” said Funch, seeking to hide his head, “Mrs Maas.”

  “Oh, call me Edna. What do you mean?”

  “Behind his back,” Funch was whining, “they’re calling him the Brothers N. He’s losing his identity, Edna, how else can I put it? Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic. He enters a staff meeting and the room is suddenly full of people, you know? He’s a walking assembly of man.”

  “It’s your imagination,” Oedipa said. “You’ve been smoking those cigarettes without the printing on them again.”

  “You’ll see. Don’t mock me. We have to stick together. Who else worries about him?”

  She sat alone then on a bench outside Studio A, listening to Mucho’s colleague Rabbit Warren spin records. Mucho came downstairs carrying his copy, a serenity about him she’d never seen. He used to hunch his shoulders and have a rapid eyeblink rate, and both now were gone. “Wait,” he smiled, and dwindled down the hall. She scrutinized him from behind, trying to see iridescences, auras.

  They had some time before he was on. They drove downtown to a pizzeria and bar, and faced each other through the fluted gold lens of a beer pitcher.

  “How are you getting on with Metzger?” he said.

  “There’s nothing,” she said.

  “Not any more, at least,” said Mucho. “I could tell that when you were talking into the mike.”

  “That’s pretty good,” Oedipa said. She couldn’t figure the expression on his face.

  “It’s extraordinary,” said Mucho, “everything’s been—wait. Listen.” She heard nothing unusual. “There are seventeen violins on that cut,” Mucho said, “and one of them—I can’t tell where he was because it’s monaural here, damn.” It dawned on her that he was talking about the Muzak. It has been seeping in, in its subliminal, unidentifiable way since they’d entered the place, all strings, reeds, muted brass.

  “What is it,” she said, feeling anxious.

  “His E string,” Mucho said, “it’s a few cycles sharp. He can’t be a studio musician. Do you think somebody could do the dinosaur bone bit with that one string, Oed? With just his set of notes on that cut. Figure out what his ear is like, and then the musculature of his hands and arms, and eventually the entire man. God, wouldn’t that be wonderful.”

  “Why should you want to?”

  “He was real. That wasn’t synthetic. They could dispense with live musicians if they wanted. Put together all the right overtones at the right power levels so it’d come out like a violin. Like I . . .” he hesitated before breaking into a radiant smile, “you’ll think I’m crazy, Oed. But I can do the same thing in reverse. Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “It’s like I have a separate channel for each one,” Mucho said, excited, “and if I need more I just expand. Add on what I need. I don’t know how it works, but lately I can do it with people talking too. Say ‘rich, chocolaty goodness.’ “

  “Rich, chocolaty, goodness,” said Oedipa.

  “Yes,” said Mucho, and fell silent.

  “Well, what?” Oedipa asked after a couple minutes, with an edge to her voice.

  “I noticed it the other night hearing Rabbit do a commercial. No matter who’s talking, the different power spectra are the same, give or take a small percentage. So you and Rabbit have something in common now. More than that. Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you’d have this big, God, maybe a couple hundred million chorus saying ‘rich, chocolaty goodness’ together, and it would all be the same voice.”

  “Mucho,” she said, impatient but also flirting with a wild suspicion. “Is this what Funch means when he says you’re coming on like a whole roomful of people?”

  “That’s what I am,” said Mucho, “right. Everybody is.” He gazed at he
r, perhaps having had his vision of consensus as others do orgasms, face now smooth, amiable, at peace. She didn’t know him. Panic started to climb out of a dark region in her head. “Whenever I put the headset on now,” he’d continued, “I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, sizes, ages, shapes, distances from death, but she loves. And the ‘you’ is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.” His eyes brimming, reflecting the color of beer.

  “Baby,” she said, helpless, knowing of nothing she could do for this, and afraid for him.

  He put a little clear plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then understood. “That’s LSD?” she said. Mucho smiled back. “Where’d you get it?” Knowing.

  “Hilarius. He broadened his program to include husbands.”

  “Look then,” Oedipa said, trying to be businesslike, “how long has it been, that you’ve been on this?”

  He honestly couldn’t remember.

  “But there may be a chance you’re not addicted yet.”

  “Oed,” looking at her puzzled, “you don’t get addicted. It’s not like you’re some hophead. You take it because it’s good. Because you hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could. Because the world is so abundant. No end to it, baby. You’re an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they’re your lives too.” He had this patient, motherly look now. Oedipa wanted to hit him in the mouth. “The songs, it’s not just that they say something, they are something, in the pure sound. Something new. And my dreams have changed.”

  “Oh, goodo.” Flipping her hair a couple times, furious, “No nightmares any more? Fine. So your latest little friend, whoever she is, she really made out. At that age, you know, they need all the sleep they can get.”

  “There’s no girl, Oed. Let me tell you. The bad dream that I used to have all the time, about the car lot, remember that? I could never even tell you about it. But I can now. It doesn’t bother me any more. It was only that sign in the lot, that’s what scared me. In the dream I’d be going about a normal day’s business and suddenly, with no warning, there’d be the sign. We were a member of the National Automobile Dealers’ Association. N.A.D.A. Just this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada, against the blue sky. I used to wake up hollering.”

  She remembered. Now he would never be spooked again, not as long as he had the pills. She could not quite get it into her head that the day she’d left him for San Narciso was the day she’d seen Mucho for the last time. So much of him already had dissipated.

  “Oh, listen,” he was saying, “Oed, dig.” But she couldn’t even tell what the tune was.

  When it was time for him to go back to the station, he nodded toward the pills. “You could have those.”

  She shook her head no.

  “You’re going back to San Narciso?”

  “Tonight, yes.”

  “But the cops.”

  “I’ll be a fugitive.” Later she couldn’t remember if they’d said anything else. At the station they kissed goodbye, all of them. As Mucho walked away he was whistling something complicated, twelve-tone. Oedipa sat with her forehead resting on the steering wheel and remembered that she hadn’t asked him about the Trystero cancellation on his letter. But by then it was too late to make any difference.

  6

  When she got back to Echo Courts, she found Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard arranged around and on the diving board at the end of the swimming pool with all their instruments, so composed and motionless that some photographer, hidden from Oedipa, might have been shooting them for an album illustration.

  “What’s happening?” said Oedipa.

  “Your young man,” replied Miles, “Metzger, really put it to Serge, our counter-tenor. The lad is crackers with grief.”

  “He’s right, missus,” said Serge. “I even wrote a song about it, whose arrangement features none other than me, and it goes like this.”

  Serge’s Song

  What chance has a lonely surfer boy

  For the love of a surfer chick,

  With all these Humbert Humbert cats

  Coming on so big and sick?

  For me, my baby was a woman,

  For him she’s just another nymphet;

  Why did they run around, why did she put me down,

  And get me so upset?

  Well, as long as she’s gone away-yay,

  I’ve had to find somebody new,

  And the older generation

  Has taught me what to do—

  I had a date last night with an eight-year-old,

  And she’s a swinger just like me,

  So you can find us any night up on the football field,

  In back of P.S. 33 (oh, yeah),

  And it’s as groovy as it can be.

  “You’re trying to tell me something,” said Oedipa.

  They gave it to her then in prose. Metzger and Serge’s chick had run off to Nevada, to get married. Serge, on close questioning, admitted the bit about the eight-year-old was so far only imaginary, but that he was hanging diligently around playgrounds and should have some news for them any day. On top of the TV set in her room Metzger had left a note telling her not to worry about the estate, that he’d turned over his executorship to somebody at Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, and they should be in touch with her, and it was all squared with the probate court also. No word to recall that Oedipa and Metzger had ever been more than co-executors.

  Which must mean, thought Oedipa, that that’s all we were. She should have felt more classically scorned, but had other things on her mind. First thing after unpacking she was on the horn to Randolph Driblette, the director. After about ten rings an elderly lady answered. “I’m sorry, we’ve nothing to say.”

  “Well who’s this,” Oedipa said.

  Sigh. “This is his mother. There’ll be a statement at noon tomorrow. Our lawyer will read it.” She hung up. Now what the hell, Oedipa wondered: what had happened to Driblette? She decided to call later. She found Professor Emory Bortz’s number in the book and had better luck. A wife named Grace answered, backed by a group of children. “He’s pouring a patio,” she told Oedipa. “It’s a highly organized joke that’s been going on since about April. He sits in the sun, drinks beer with students, lobs beer bottles at seagulls. You’d better talk to him before it gets that far. Maxine, why don’t you throw that at your brother, he’s more mobile than I am. Did you know Emory’s done a new edition of Wharfinger? It’ll be out——” but the date was obliterated by a great crash, maniacal childish laughter, high-pitched squeals. “Oh, God. Have you ever met an infanticide? Come on over, it may be your only chance.”

  Oedipa showered, put on a sweater, skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a student like twist, went easy on the makeup. Recognizing with a vague sense of dread that it was not a matter of Bortz’s response, or Grace’s, but of The Trystero’s.

  Driving over she passed by Zapf’s Used Books, and was alarmed to find a pile of charred rubble where the bookstore only a week ago had stood. There was still the smell of burnt leather. She stopped and went into the government surplus outlet next door. The owner informed her that Zapf, the damn fool, has set fire to his own store for the insurance. “Any kind of a wind,” snarled this worthy, “it would have taken me with it. They only put up this complex here to last five years anyway. But could Zapf wait? Books.” You had the feeling that it was only his good upbringing kept him from spitting. “You want to sell something used,” he advised Oedipa, “find out what there’s a demand for. This season now it’s your rifles. Fella was in just this forenoon, bought two hundred fo
r his drill team. I could’ve sold him two hundred of the swastika armbands too, only I was short, dammit.”

  “Government surplus swastikas?” Oedipa said.

  “Hell no.” He gave her an insider’s wink. “Got this little factory down outside of San Diego,” he told her, “got a dozen of your niggers, say, they can sure turn them old armbands out. You’d be amazed how that little number’s selling. I took some space in a couple of the girlie magazines, and I had to hire two extra niggers last week just to take care of the mail.”

  “What’s your name?” Oedipa said.

  “Winthrop Tremaine,” replied the spirited entrepreneur, “Winner, for short. Listen, now we’re getting up an arrangement with one of the big ready-to-wear outfits in L.A. to see how SS uniforms go for the fall. We’re working it in with the back-to-school campaign, lot of 37 longs, you know, teenage kid sizes. Next season we may go all the way and get out a modified version for the ladies. How would that strike you?”

  “I’ll let you know,” Oedipa said. “I’ll keep you in mind.” She left, wondering if she should’ve called him something, or tried to hit him with any of a dozen surplus, heavy, blunt objects in easy reach. There had been no witnesses. Why hadn’t she?

  You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl. She drove savagely along the freeway, hunting for Volkswagens. By the time she’d pulled into Bortz’s subdivision, a riparian settlement in the style of Fangoso Lagoons, she was only shaking and a little nauseous in the stomach.