Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  DL’s line should’ve been something like, “Oh, you working for them now?” delivered emphatically, but she only waited quietly in what Prairie would learn was the standard Attentive’s Posture, her eyes lowered, her lip zipped.

  “So will the sheriff break down the gate right away, do you think, or wait till Monday morning? This ain’t The Hunchback of Notre Dame here, and even if she’s not some kind of escapee, there’s the Ninjette Oath you took, clause Eight, you’ll recall, section B? ‘To allow residence to no one who cannot take responsibility for both her input and her output.’ “

  “Like earn what you eat, secure what you shit, been doin’ it for years,” Prairie said, “what else?” Not in the first place the sort of kid to take stuff personally, getting ESP messages that around here it might not even be considered cool, she had been tending to the line of her spine and quietly meeting the woman’s neutral but energetic gaze. “Well then maybe you have some kind of work-study program here, list of courses, price schedule, maybe pick something cheap, be a live-in student, work off the fees?” detaching from their eye contact long enough to look around, as if for chores that needed doing, trying to wish some deal into being.

  The Head Ninjette seemed interested. “Can you cook?”

  “Some. You mean you don’t have a cook?”

  “Worse. A lot of people who think they’re cooks but are clinically deluded. We’re notorious here for having the worst food in the seminar-providing community. And we’re looking at another herd next weekend, and we try different staff combinations, but nothing works. The karmic invariance is, is we’re paying for high discipline in the Sisterhood with a zoo in the kitchen. Come on, you’ll see.”

  Out in the evening, she led Prairie and DL around a few corners and down a long trellised walkway toward the rear of the main building. Suppertime was over and some postprandial critique now vehemently in progress. People huddled, intimidated, by the back entrance, out which came an amazing racket, giant metal mixing bowls gonging and crashing around on the flagstone floors, voices screaming, for background the local 24-hour “New Age” music station, gushing into the environment billows of audio treacle. Inside, something ruined was still smoldering on the back of a stove. Folks stood around next to pots that would need scouring. There lay throughout the deep old kitchen a depressing odor of stale animal fat and disinfectant. The chef who was supposed tonight to have been in charge crouched with his head in an oven, weeping bitterly.

  “Hi guys,” caroled Sister Rochelle, “what y’all doin’?”

  Holding their nightly self-criticism hour, of course, in which everybody got to trash the chef of the day personally for the failure of his or her menu, as well as plan more of the same for tomorrow.

  “I did what I had to,” the chef blubbered, iron and muffled, “I was true to the food.”

  One of the stoveside loungers looked over. “What are you calling ‘food,’ Gerhard? That meal tonight wasn’t food.”

  “What you cook’s stomach trouble with fat on it,” fiercely added a lady holding a meat cleaver, with which she struck a nearby chopping block for emphasis.

  “Even your Jell-O salads have scum on them,” put in a stylish young man in a couturier chef’s toque from Bullock’s Wilshire.

  “Please, enough,” whimpered Gerhard.

  “Total honesty,” people reminded him. This meanspirited exercise, thought to be therapeutic, was part of everyone’s assignment back here to what Gerhard called “indefinite culinary penance.”

  “Isn’t that kidnapping?” Prairie would wonder later.

  No—they had all signed instruments of indenture, releases, had all arrived somewhere in their lives where they needed to sign. They spoke of scullery duty as a decoding of individual patterns of not-eating, seeing thereby beyond dishes, pots, and pans each uniquely soiled, beyond accidents of personality to a level where you are not what you eat but how. . . . At first Prairie had no time to appreciate many of these spiritual dimensions, because she was running her ass off nonstop. The penitents in the kitchen, weird-eyed as colonists on some galactic outpost, greeted her arrival as a major event. As it turned out, none of them could fix anything even they liked to eat. Some here had grown indifferent to food, others actively to hate it. Nevertheless, new recipes were seized on like advanced technology from beyond the local star system. After checking out the vegetable patch, the orchards, the walk-in freezers and pantries of the Retreat, wondering if she was violating some Prime Directive, Prairie taught them Spinach Casserole. And it proved to be just the ticket to get these folks going again as a team.

  “What were you going to serve them?” she couldn’t help asking.

  “Dip,” chirped a Mill Valley real-estate agent.

  “Smores,” chuckled a Milpitas scoutmaster, “with maple syrup.”

  “New England Boiled Dinner,” replied an ex-institutional inmate with a shudder.

  The secret to Spinach Casserole was the UBI, or Universal Binding Ingredient, cream of mushroom soup, whose presence in rows of giant cans there in the ninjette storerooms came as no surprise. Deep in the refrigerators were also to be scavenged many kinds of pieces of cheese, not to mention cases full of the more traditional Velveeta and Cheez Whiz, nor was spinach a problem, with countless blocks of it occupying their own wing of the freezer. So next day the classic recipe was the vegetarian entrée du jour at supper. For the meat eaters, a number of giant baloneys were set to roasting whole on spits, to be turned and attentively basted with a grape-jelly glaze by once-quarrelsome kitchen staff while others made croutons from old bread, bustling about while the spinach thawed, singing along with the radio, which someone had mercifully retuned to a rock and roll station.

  DL popped her head in in the late afternoon and looked around. “Just what I thought—a teenage charismatic.”

  “Not me,” Prairie shrugged, “it’s ’ese recipes.”

  “Um, and those purple things, on the rotisserie?”

  “Just somethin’ out of the TV section. What’s up?”

  “Sister Rochelle wonders if you have a minute.”

  Prairie went along watchfully, at her own tempo, making a point of inspecting a few assembled casseroles as well as checking the baloney spin rate before leaving the kitchen, reminding herself of a cat. Upstairs, in the Ninjette Coffee Lounge, the Head Ninjette, with a mug of coffee in her hand, slowly emerged, as they conversed, from invisibility. It seemed to the girl that this must be a magical gift. She learned later that Rochelle had memorized, in this room, all the shadows and how they changed, the cover, the exact spaces between things . . . had come to know the room so completely that she could impersonate it, in its full transparency and emptiness.

  “Could I learn to do that?”

  “Takes a serious attention span.” A look sideways. “Then the question of why should you want to?” Her voice was even, with a slow hoarseness suggesting alcohol and cigarettes. Prairie also thought she heard some distant country notes that Rochelle was suppressing on purpose, in favor of something more invisible.

  Prairie shrugged. “Seems like it could come in handy.”

  “Common sense and hard work’s all it is. Only the first of many kunoichi disillusionments—right, DL?—is finding that the knowledge won’t come down all at once in any big transcendent moment.”

  “But Zen folks, like where I work, say—”

  “Oh, that happens. But not around here. Here it’s always out at the margins, using the millimeters and little tenths of a second, you understand, scuffling and scraping for everything we get.”

  “So don’t get into it unless you mean it?”

  “Well you ought to see how many gaga little twits we get up here, ’specially your age group, nothing personal, looking for secret powers on the cheap. Thinking we’ll take ’em through the spiritual car wash, soap away all that road dirt, git
’em buffed up all cherry again, come out th’ other end everybody hangin’ around the Orange Julius next door go ‘Wow!’ ’s what they think, like we’ll keep ’em awake all weekend, maybe around dawn on Sunday they’ll start hallucinating, have a mental adventure they can mistake for improvement in their life, and who knows? Or they get us mixed up with nuns or ballet?”

  The girl made a point of looking at her watch, a multicolored plastic model from a Vineland swap meet. “Givin’ those baloneys fifteen minutes a pound, think ’at’s about right?”

  DL smirked. “Not goin’ for it, Rochelle-ane.”

  The Senior Attentive shifted gear. “Prairie, we subscribe to some outside data services here, but we also maintain our own library of computer files, including a good-size one on your mother.”

  Where Prairie had been, “your mother” in that tone of voice usually meant trouble, and she wasn’t sure if this woman, who looked sort of middle-class, knew how it sounded. But Prairie was shaking with the need to find out anything she could, the way some girls she knew got about boys, his family’s name in the phone book, anything. “Would it,” slowly (should she bow?), “be OK if—”

  “How about after supper?”

  “Ohm mah way, as my Grampa the gaffer always sez.” Not a minute too soon, she returned to find a number of casseroles beginning to redline, baloney glazes to decompose. Pretending to be setting an example, Prairie slid over to one of the work counters, wrestled a hot baloney into place, quickly sharpened a knife, and began to carve the object into steaming, purple-rimmed slices, which she arranged attractively on a serving platter, generously spooning more shiny grape liquid over the top, to be carried in and set on one of the mess-hall tables, where eaters would serve themselves—except for the people in assertiveness programs, of course, who sat over at their own table and each got a separate plate with the food already on it.

  From the mess hall next door an ambiguous murmuring, part hunger, part apprehension, had grown in volume. Prairie grabbed a kettle of institutional tomato soup, carried it on in, and for the next couple of hours she also schlepped racks of newly washed cups and dishes in and bused dirty dishes out, cleaned off tabletops, poured coffee, going from one set of chores to another as they arose, sensing partial vacuums and flowing there to fill them, unable to help noticing that people were taking seconds on the Spinach Casserole, and the baloney too. Later she scrubbed out pots and pans and helped put stuff away and swab down the stone floor of the kitchen and scullery. By the time she got upstairs to the Ninjette Terminal Center and found out how to log on, the midsummer sunset had come and gone and the sounds of an evening koto workshop mixed with the good-nights of courtyard birds.

  The file on Frenesi Gates, whose entries had been accumulating over the years, often haphazardly, from far and wide, reminded Prairie of scrapbooks kept by somebody’s eccentric hippie uncle. Some was governmental, legal history with the DMV, letterhead memoranda from the FBI enhanced by Magic Marker, but there were also clippings from “underground” newspapers that had closed down long ago, transcripts of Frenesi’s radio interviews on KPFK, and a lot of cross-references to something called 24 fps, which Prairie recalled as the name of the film collective DL said she and Frenesi had been in together for a while.

  So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest whisper, of her mother’s ghost. She already knew about how literal computers could be—even spaces between characters mattered. She had wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way. Could a ghost think for herself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the still-living, needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of sorrow, loss, justice denied? . . . But to be of any use, to be “real,” a ghost would have to be more than only that kind of elaborate pretending. . . .

  Prairie found that she could also summon to the screen photographs, some personal, some from papers and magazines, images of her mom, most of the time holding a movie camera, at demonstrations, getting arrested, posing with various dimly recognizable Movement figures of the sixties, beaming a significant look at a cop in riot gear beside a chain-link fence someplace while one hand (Prairie would learn her mother’s hands, read each gesture a dozen ways, imagine how they would have moved at other, unphotographed times) appeared to brush with its fingertips the underside of the barrel of his assault rifle. Gross! Her Mom? This girl with the old-fashioned hair and makeup, always wearing either miniskirts or those weird-looking bell-bottoms they had back then? In a few years Prairie would almost be that age, and she had an eerie feeling miniskirts would be back.

  She paused at a shot of DL and Frenesi together. They were walking along on what might have been a college campus. In the distance was a pedestrian overpass, where tiny figures could be seen heading both ways, suggesting, at least for a moment, social tranquillity. The women’s shadows were long, lapping up over curbs, across grass, between the spokes of cyclists. Catching the late or early sun were palm trees, flights of distant steps, a volleyball court, few if any glass windows. Frenesi’s face was turned or turning toward her partner, perhaps her friend, a suspicious or withheld smile seeming to begin. . . . DL was talking. Her lower teeth flashed. It wasn’t politics—Prairie could feel in the bright California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness, the lilt of bodies, the unlined relaxation of faces that didn’t have to be put on for each other, liberated from their authorized versions for a free, everyday breath of air. Yeah, Prairie thought at them, go ahead, you guys. Go ahead. . . .

  “Who was that boy,” DL was asking, or “that ‘dude,’ at the protest rally? With the long hair and love beads, and the joint in his mouth?”

  “You mean in the flowered bell-bottoms and the paisley shirt?”

  “Right on, sister!”

  “Psychedelic!” Slapping hands back and forth. Prairie wondered who’d taken the picture—one of the film collective, the FBI? Before the stained deep crystalline view she fell into a hypnagogic gaze, which the unit promptly sensed, beginning to blink, following this with a sound chip playing the hook from the Everlys’ “Wake Up, Little Susie,” over and over. Prairie remembered that she had to be up before sunrise, to prep for breakfast. As she reached toward the power button, she said good night to the machine.

  “Why good night yourself, gentle User,” it replied, “and may your sleep be in every way untroubled.”

  Back down in the computer library, in storage, quiescent ones and zeros scattered among millions of others, the two women, yet in some definable space, continued on their way across the low-lit campus, persisting, recoverable, friends by the time of this photo for nearly a year, woven together in an intricacy of backs covered, promises made and renegotiated, annoyances put up with, shortcuts worn in, ESP beyond the doubts of either. They would probably have met at some point, though who’d have been willing to bet they’d stick? The turbulence of the times was bringing all kinds of people together into towns like Berkeley, lured, like DL, by promises of action. In those days DL was just cruising up and down 101 looking for girl motorcycle gangs to terrorize, drinking drugstore vodka out of the bottle, hustling guys named Snake for enough double-cross whites to get her to the next population center offering a suitable risk to her safety. The night before she met Frenesi she had chased the entire membership of Tetas y Chetas M.C. northward through the dark farm country around Salinas, vegetables fallen in profusion from the trucks and then squashed and resquashed by traffic all day making the night streaming against her face smell like a giant salad. Finally she ran out of gas and had to let them go. By then she was close enough to Berkeley, and had been hearing enough on the radio, to want to go look in. She couldn’t have said, then or later, what she thought she was looking for.

  What she found was Frenesi, who’d been out with her camera and a bagful of bootlegged ECO stock since dawn, finally ending up on Te
legraph Avenue filming a skirmish line of paramilitary coming up the street in riot gear, carrying small and she hoped only rubber-bullet-firing rifles. Last time she looked she’d been at the front edge of a crowd who were slowly retreating from the campus, trashing what they could as they went. When the film roll ended and she came up out of the safety of her viewfinder, Frenesi was alone, halfway between the people and the police, with no side street handy to go dodging down. Hmm. Shop doors were all secured with chain, windows shuttered over with heavy plywood. Her next step would’ve been just to go ahead and change rolls, get some more footage, but to go rooting around in her bag right now could only be taken as a threat by the boys in khaki, who’d come close enough that even above the lingering nose-wrenching ground note of tear gas she could still begin to smell them, the aftershave, the gunmetal in the sun, the new-issue uniforms whose armpits by now were musky with fear. Oh, I need Superman, she prayed, Tarzan on that vine. The basic stone bowelflash had come and gone about the time DL showed up, all in black including helmet and face shield, riding her esteemed and bad red and silver Czech motorcycle, the Che Zed, overdesigned in every part, up onto which she gathered Frenesi out of danger, camera, miniskirt, equipment bags, and all, and carried her away. Skidding among piles of street debris and paper fires, over crumbled auto glass, trying not to hit anybody lying on the pavement, up onto some sidewalk and around the corner at last and down the long hillside to the Bay flashing in the late sun they escaped, in a snarling dreamrush of speed and scent. With her bare thighs Frenesi gripped the leather hips of her benefactor, finding that she’d also pressed her face against the fragrant leather back—she never thought it might be a woman she hugged this way.

  Biker rapture, for sure. They sat devouring cheeseburgers, fries, and shakes in a waterfront place full of refugees from the fighting up the hill, all their eyes, including ones that had wept, now lighted from the inside—was it only the overhead fluorescents, some trick of sun and water outside? no . . . too many of these fevered lamps not to have origin across the line somewhere, in a world sprung new, not even defined yet, worth the loss of nearly everything in this one. The jukebox played the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish. DL had taken off the helmet and shaken out her hair, which lit up in the approaching orange sunset like a comet. Frenesi, jittery, starving, and gaga all at once, was still trying to figure it out. “Somebody sent you, right?”