“Little before your time.”
“It’s all data. Ones and zeros. All recoverable. Eternally present.”
“Groovy.”
The coffee wasn’t bad considering its robotic origins. Sparky tried to show Doc a little code. “Oh hey,” Doc remembered then, “this network of yours, does it include hospitals? Like if somebody went in an emergency room, could you find out their status?”
“Depends where.”
“Vegas?”
“Maybe something by way of the University of Utah, let me look.” There was a flurry of plastic percussion and green space-alien glyphs on the screen, and after a while Sparky said, “Got Sunrise here, and Desert Springs.”
“She’d either be under Beaverton or Fortnight. Pretty recent, I think.”
Sparky typed some more and nodded. “Okay, Sunrise Hospital shows a Trillium Fortnight, home address in L.A., admitted with a concussion, cuts, and bruises. . . . In for observation and treatment two . . . three nights, released in the custody of her parents . . . looks like last Tuesday.”
“That’s her.” He looked over Sparky’s shoulder at the screen. “What do you know, that is her. Well. Thanks, man.”
“You all right?” Seeming impatient now to be back to work.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. You look a little weird, and most people your age call me ‘kid.’”
“I’m headin over to Zucky’s, can I bring you somethin back?”
“Don’t really get hungry till after midnight, then I usually just call up Pizza Man.”
“Okay. Tell Fritz I owe him money. And would you mind if I look in here once in a while if I try not to be too much of a pain in the ass?”
“Sure. Help you set up your own system if you want. It’s the wave of the future, ain’t it.”
“Tubular, dude.”
At Zucky’s, Doc sat at the counter and ordered coffee and a full-size chocolate cream pie, and for a while went through the exercise of actually cutting forty-five-degree slices and putting them on a plate and eating them one by one with a fork, but finally he just picked up what was left with his hands and went ahead and finished it that way.
Magda came over to have a look. “Like some pie with that?”
“You’re workin nights now,” Doc observed.
“Always been more of a night person. Where’s that Fritz, I haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Out in the desert someplace, is what I heard.”
“Looks like you’ve been copping some rays yourself.”
“I know this guy has a boat, we went out on it the other day?”
“Catch anything?”
“Drank beer mostly.”
“Sounds like my husband. They figured one time they’d go to Tahiti, ended up at Terminal Island.”
Doc lit an after-dinner cigarette. “Long as they all got back safe.”
“Can’t remember. You have some whipped cream on your ear there.”
DOC GOT ON the Santa Monica Freeway, and about the time he was making the transition to the San Diego southbound, the fog began its nightly roll inland. He pushed his hair off of his face, turned up the radio volume, lit a Kool, sank back in a cruising slouch, and watched everything slowly disappear, the trees and shrubbery along the median, the yellow school-bus pool at Palms, the lights in the hills, the signs above the freeway that told you where you were, the planes descending to the airport. The third dimension grew less and less reliable—a row of four taillights ahead could either belong to two separate cars in adjoining lanes a safe distance away, or be a pair of double lights on the same vehicle, right up your nose, no way to tell. At first the fog blew in in separate sheets, but soon everything grew thick and uniform till all Doc could see were his headlight beams, like eyestalks of an extraterrestrial, aimed into the hushed whiteness ahead, and the lights on his dashboard, where the speedometer was the only way to tell how fast he was going.
He crept along till he finally found another car to settle in behind. After a while in his rearview mirror he saw somebody else fall in behind him. He was in a convoy of unknown size, each car keeping the one ahead in taillight range, like a caravan in a desert of perception, gathered awhile for safety in getting across a patch of blindness. It was one of the few things he’d ever seen anybody in this town, except hippies, do for free.
Doc wondered how many people he knew had been caught out tonight in this fog, and how many were indoors fogbound in front of the tube or in bed just falling asleep. Someday—he figured Sparky would confirm it—there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog.
He cut in the Vibrasonic. KQAS was playing Fapardokly’s triple-tongue highway classic “Super Market,” ordinarily ideal for driving through L.A.—though with traffic conditions tonight Doc might have to settle for every other beat—and then there were some Elephant’s Memory bootleg tapes, and the Spaniels’ cover of “Stranger in Love,” and “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, which Doc realized after a while he’d been singing along with. He looked at the gas gauge and saw there was still better than half a tank, plus fumes. He had a container of coffee from Zucky’s and almost a full pack of smokes.
Now and then somebody signaled a right turn and cautiously left the line to feel their way toward an exit ramp. The bigger exit signs overhead were completely invisible, but sometimes it was possible to see one of the smaller ones down at road level, right where the exit lane began to peel away. So it always had to be one of those last-possible-minute decisions.
Doc figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit he’d take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets. He knew that at Rosecrans the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia, he’d lose the fog, unless it was spreading tonight, and settled in regionwide. Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he’d have to just keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego, and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody. Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait. For whatever would happen. For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.
• • •
For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit penguin.com/pynchon
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
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