Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Payin’ attention to what you were doing,” Prairie guessed.

  So much so that it wasn’t till later that DL remembered the contact lenses, which had been repossessed almost as soon as the deed was done. The more she considered, the more thickly came the birds of creepiness to perch on her shoulders. She never found out for sure, but had come to believe that the lenses had been taken from the eyes of a dead person. That furthermore she had been intended to witness her own act of murder through the correction to just this person’s eyesight. Likely a hooker, DL speculated, who’d been caught holding out, who’d spent her whole short life off the books, whose name, even names she’d used professionally, nobody remembered anymore. As lost now as she could get.

  But whose countersight DL was looking through that hour as she straddled the naked man on the bed, found his penis and slipped it in, breathing with precision, conscious only of the human alarm points spread below, defenseless, along those dark meridians. No longer needing anyone’s eyes, she went in by other sensors, direct to the point, opposing his chi flow, spiraling her own in with the correct handedness. Takeshi never felt it. It wasn’t till he climaxed moments later and started screaming in street Japanese that DL, de-transcending, realized something might be amiss. She hung over the side of the bed, groping at her eyes, Takeshi with a softoff sliding out and away in some confusion. When he saw her face again, he was amazed at the sudden green paleness of her irises, as if something had drained away. She clenched her lids, blinked.

  “Oh—God—oh, no—” faster than he could follow, she had rolled off the bed and taken a fighting stance with the door to her right.

  “Hey, beautiful,” Takeshi up on one elbow, “if it was something I did—”

  “Who are you? No—never mind—” She turned and fled out the door, in her high-sixties outfit, observed as she went by any number of cameras, population now returning to the corridors, plausible copies, for DL, of known enemy faces, bearing old wrongs, old scores to settle, converging here around her sloppy, amateur attempt at homicide. . . .

  Ralph Wayvone, who’d been patched in as a courtesy from the Imperial, followed DL’s progress out to the street on his own monitor, as well as Takeshi’s slow bewildered dressing and departure. “Better put somebody on that Japanese guy. Maybe we can help.”

  “Want me go get her?” inquired Two-Ton Carmine Torpidini.

  Ralph appeared to think about it. “Let her go, we can always find her again . . . she’ll know how much she owes us now.”

  The phone rang, Carmine took it. “Says that somebody tipped off our boy. So he must have sent in a stuntman.”

  Ralph kept watching the screen, watching her go, those long, beautifully-in-shape legs, that slowed-down martial-arts lope, finally with an extravagant “Mmwahh!” blowing her a kiss as she vanished. “So long, babe. I was hopin’ you’d be the one. If you couldint nail him, who can?”

  “He’s too lucky,” Carmine philosophized. “But he’s livin’ on borrowed time, ’cause a lucky streak don’t last forever.”

  “Fuckin’ Vond,” Ralph Wayvone sighed, “he’s the Roadrunner.”

  DL flew back to California, homing brainlessly in once again on the Kunoichi Retreat, where she’d been coming since her adolescence, then leaving, then coming back again, building a long-term love-hate affair with the Attentive staff, Sister Rochelle in particular. But this time Rochelle could see how awful she looked, and only assigned her to a cell and suggested gently that they talk the next day.

  It would have given DL time to try and look quietly, frontally, at what she’d done. No use. She cried, failed to sleep, masturbated, snuck down to the kitchen and ate, snuck into the Regression Room and watched old movies on the Tube, smoking cigarette butts out of the public ashtrays till the birds woke up. By the time she dragged in to see the Senior Attentive, she was a sleepless wreck. The older woman reached, smoothed hair away from DL’s sweating forehead. “I’ve done something so—” DL sat trembling, couldn’t find a word.

  “Why tell me?”

  “What? Who else can I tell that’ll understand?”

  “Just what I wanted today, just when the cash flow’s starting to turn around, just as I’m finding my life’s true meaning as a businessperson, I might’ve known it, in you waltz and suddenly I’ve got to be Father Flanagan.” She shook her head, pursed her lips like a nun, but sat and heard out DL’s confession. Finally, “OK, couple questions. Are you sure you didn’t, at the last instant, pull back?”

  “I’m—not sure, no—”

  “Paying attention,” darkly,” ’s the whole point, DL-san.” The body transaction had been complex, referential, calling in not only chi flow and the time of day but also memory, conscience, passion, inhibition—all converging to the one lethal instant. The Senior Attentive gazed evenly at the bent nape, the averted face. “Just from your life pattern already, here’s what I think. Living as always let’s say at a certain distance from the reality of others, you descended—”

  “I was taken!”

  “— you were brought—down again into the corrupted world, and instead of paying attention, taking the time, getting prepared, you had to be a reckless bitch and go rushing through the outward forms, so of course you blew it, what’d you expect?”

  And that was when DL remembered Inoshiro Sensei’s remarks about those who never get to be warriors, who on impulse go in, fuck up, and have to live with it for the rest of their lives. He had known—he had seen it in her, some latency for a bungled execution at a critical moment, somewhere in her destiny—but how could he ever have warned her? DL realized she had been nodding solemnly for a while. “What I need to know,” she whispered at last, “is, can it be reversed.”

  “Your life? Forget it. The Vibrating Palm, well yes and no. It depends on many variables, not least being how quickly it’ll get seen to.”

  “But . . .” but what was she saying? “but I was just down there. . . .”

  “Since you were here with us last, we’ve built up a good medical unit—couple of licensed DOM’s on the staff now, some new therapy machines—and while we don’t see that many Ninja Death Touch cases, your victim has a better chance the sooner you can get him up here.”

  “But how’ll I ever find him again? I didn’t think I’d—I wanted—” but DL thought better of it.

  But Rochelle said, “Let’s have it.”

  “I hoped there might be . . . ,” a small failing voice, “some way I could stay?”

  Out the window, screened by eucalyptus trees, could be seen once-white walls overgrown with ivy, a distant bight of freeway tucked into the unfolding spill of land toward “down there”—while up here the wind blew among the smooth gold and green hills, it seemed endlessly. Here was the deep quiescent hour, the bottom dead center of the day. The women sat in the Ninjette Coffee Mess and watched the caustics of sunlight flutter on the insides of their cups.

  “If there were ninjitsu jury boards,” Rochelle suggested, “you’d get your card pulled for what you say you did. Maybe this is the time, sister, that you’ll finally start pulling your weight. We’ve always believed in your sincerity, but it can’t get you much further—when do we ever see you concentrate, where’s the attention span? Blithely driving off down the road in some little low-rent touring machine, showing up again in something from an assistant buyers’ sale at Zody’s beggin’ to be taken back, on again off again over the years, no continuity, no persistence, no . . . fucking . . . attention. All we see’s somebody running because if she stops running she’ll fall, and nothing beyond.”

  “I thought you’d take me in no matter what I’d done.”

  “And if I wanted you to leave us forever, I’d just say ‘Leave,’ wouldn’t I?”

  “And I’d have to leave.” For the first time in the interview the sun-haired girl raised her eyes to those of the motionless Hea
dmistress—a compound look, flirtatious while at the same time pushing away, clearly desperate at, any thought of having to go find Takeshi again. “But if I bring him back up—”

  Sister Rochelle rolled her eyes in mock surrender. “We should reward you by letting you stay forever? Oh, child. Thirty-year-old, hardcase, cold and beautiful child.”

  It was as much blessing as DL was likely to get. She asked for and was granted a few days to prepare. And had got to where she could stay away from other people’s smokes, keep her hands off her pussy, and hypnotize herself to sleep when who should appear at the gate but Takeshi, looking for her, saving everybody the trouble.

  Not that he hadn’t been through some difficulties of his own, of course, beginning back in Tokyo with the swamp of primal fear he’d been fighting through since finding out what had happened, which hadn’t taken him long. The morning after his adventure at Haru no Depaato he tried to call Minoru at his office in the antiterrorist subministry, but all he got was a lengthy runaround, including suggestions that the person no longer existed in the form Takeshi had known. After a while, no matter what extension he called, he was immediately put on hold and left there.

  Takeshi went around all that day and the next feeling like a toxic dump. Symptoms of everything, particularly thoracic and abdominal ones, lanced through him. He quit ordering from room service because the sight of food now nauseated him. The final hammerstroke came when he got his suit back from the cleaners, the suit he’d worn to and from his encounter with DL, and found it full of holes, each five to ten centimeters across, in the front of the jacket and at the top of the pants, the edges ragged and black, as if burned and rotted through at the same time. He called the dorai kuriiningu, who were apologetic but unhelpful.

  “Used perchloroethylene—like we do on everything! I was amazed—when all those holes started!”

  “Started? Started what?”

  “To get bigger! Only took a few seconds! Never saw anything like it!”

  Sweating and aching, deeply apprehensive, Takeshi made an emergency appointment with one of the staff croakers at Wawazume Life & Non-Life, remembering to bring the afflicted suit with him. Dr. Oruni laid it out on an examining table and sent some automated scanning device over it while he and Takeshi watched a video screen in the next room, displaying the data in graph and print form. “These are all alarm points,” the doctor showing with a cursor the pattern of holes. “Some strange, corrosive energy—very negative! Have you been in a fight?”

  Takeshi remembered what he’d been trying all day not to—the American girl—the way she’d stared, the terror and failure in her face just before she turned and fled. He told the doctor about their rendezvous in the Haru no Depaato while he ran Takeshi through an abbreviated physical, grunting darkly at everything he seemed to find. Nothing really showed up, though, till the urine scan. Doc Oruni pulled a bottle of Suntory Scotch out of a small refrigerator, found two paper cups, poured them 90% full, put his feet up on his desk, and dolefully surrendered to mystery. “There’s no cancer, no cystitis, no stones. Proteins, ketones, all that—it’s normal! But something very weird is happening to your bladder! It’s like trauma, only—much slower!”

  “We—can’t be more specific?”

  “Why, do you—think you can find this somewhere in some—actuarial table? And once you see the odds, and learn the name, it’ll go away?”

  “It—doesn’t happen often, ne?”

  “I’ve never seen it—only read articles, heard talk around the clubhouse—anecdotes. If you like, I’ll send you to somebody who can give you details. . . .”

  “Just whatever you can tell me, then?”

  “Ever heard of the Vibrating Palm?”

  “Yeah—been in there once or twice!”

  “Not a bar, Fumimota-san. An assassination technique—with a built-in time delay! Invented centuries ago by the Malayan Chinese, adapted by our own ninja and yakuza. Today a number of systems are taught—same effect!”

  “She did that to me?” Effect? “But I didn’t feel anything.”

  “Dewa—there’s your good news! Allegedly, the lighter the touch—the longer you’ve got to live!”

  “Well—how long?”

  The doc chuckled for a while. “How light?”

  Takeshi rode the elevator down alone, fully taken over, through the descent, by the fear of death. Now he could feel each of his suffering alarm points, count different struggling pulses, imagine his chi flow, in turbulence—blocked, darkly reversed, stained, lost—slowly destroying his insides. Any time he went to piss now would be an occasion for terror.

  “My own sleaziness—has done me in!” It was too late even for remorse over the years squandered in barely maintaining what he now saw as a foolish, emotionally diseased life. He came reeling out of the elevator under the combined influence of speed, Scotch, and some new tranquilizer nobody knew anything about but which the detail man had left a huge barrel of samples of in the waiting room, with a sign urging passersby to take as many as they wished, so what some might have called his glibness no doubt had its origins in the realm of the chemical.

  Back at the hotel he found a ticket to SFX tonight on the red-eye, with a note from Two-Ton Carmine expressing sympathy for his recent inconvenience and the hope that once in San Francisco he would communicate with the enclosed phone number. What difference did it make? Takeshi shrugged. He packed a carry-on bag with two weeks’ supply of amphetamines, a change of underwear, and an extra shirt and grabbed the hotel bus out to Narita.

  The hours on the airplane were among the worst of his life. He drank steadily and, when he remembered to, popped green time-release capsules of dextroamphetamine plus amobarbital. He took some time to read through the stuffer for the tranquilizers he’d picked up at the doc’s. Oh, ho, ho! Look at all these contraindications! Every variety of shit that was seething around already in his system, as a matter of fact, was prohibited. “Well!” out loud, “that being the case—” he ordered another drink and swallowed some more tranquilizers. His seatmate, a serious-looking gaijin businessman with a hand-held computer game that had up till now claimed his attention, looked over at Takeshi and then continued staring for a while. “You aren’t committing suicide, are you?”

  Takeshi grinned energetically. “Suicide? Nah! Uh-uh, buddy, just—trying to relax! I mean—don’t you just hate flying? Huh? when you start thinking—about all the possibilities. . . .”

  The young man, even though in a window seat, did his best to edge away. Takeshi went on, “Here, you want to try one of these? Huh? they—they’re really good. Evoex, ever heard of them? Something new!”

  “There’s a hidden camera somewhere, right? This is a commercial?” The question rang almost prayerfully in these surroundings, the moonlit childhood-picture-book clouds out the rounded toy windows, the lambent fall of electric light on faces and documents, the affectless music in the earphones, the possibly otherworldly origins of Takeshi’s madness. . . .

  “You’d be—real interested in this!” Takeshi began, “maybe even—tell me what you think I should do—because frankly, I’m at my wit’s end!” proceeding then to rattle out the whole story, sparing no medical detail. The suit-wearing juvenile was more than willing to listen to anything, as long as it delayed the moment, easily imagined, when Takeshi would produce a weapon and begin to run amok in the aisles.

  When Takeshi paused at last, the American tried to be sympathetic. “What can you expect? A woman.”

  “No, no! Somebody thought I was—somebody else.”

  “Hmm. Maybe you thought she was somebody else.”

  Takeshi grew instantly paranoid, assuming, for some reason, that the young man was talking about his ex-wife, the film actress Michiko Yomama, currently starring as a light-comical obstetrician in the television series “Babies of Wackiness,” a Japanese import currently and inex
plicably blowing away all its U.S. ratings competition. If there was any connection between that homicidal hooker in the Haru no Depaato and Michiko, with her fragile smiles and gifts of disappearance, Takeshi couldn’t see it. They’d been married, as a matter of fact, during a classical sixties acid trip, in which it became beyond clear to them both that in some other world they had been well acquainted. In this one, however, they only seemed programmed for unhappiness. One would find the other across a room and both would gaze awhile, sick with betrayal, remembering the deep and beautiful certainty beyond words, wondering why they should only have had a glimpse and where it might be now. After a few years, he moved out of the house. She moved to Los Angeles. The kids by now were safely established in different corporations. Takeshi and Michiko still kept up a slender sympathetic link—now and then, passing through L.A., he dropped in. “No,” he replied to his seatmate’s speculation, “at the time—I was only thinking about the fucking!”

  The other man tightened his lips, frowning. “Mm-hmm.” He returned to his computer game, something called “Nukey,” which included elements of sex and detonation, though the cheapness of its early sound chips reduced orgasm to a thin rising whine, broken into segments as if for breath, and made the presumably nuclear explosions, no more than symbolized here by feeble bursts of white noise, even less satisfying.

  By the time he landed at San Francisco International, Takeshi had been up for three days, during which he had also not bathed or shaved. He looked at his face-stubble in a men’s-room mirror. As long as I don’t sleep, he decided, I won’t shave. He paused at the sink, swaying a little. That must mean, he pursued the thought, that as soon as I fall asleep, I’ll start shaving! Noticing a number of curious looks, he glided out again into the airport lobby, a centimeter or two above the actual floor surface, remembering just in time to zip his fly.

  At the phone number in Carmine’s note turned out to be Carmine himself. “Hey, Fumimota-san!”