Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  “What for?”

  “For one of you to say ‘asshole,’” said Penny.

  Flying to Oklahoma was like taking a shuttle to another planet. After a lunch hour of sex, they lay among plastic room-service litter in front of the Tube, which had just announced that the powerboat racing out by the dam at Lake Overholser had been suspended. Voices accompanied by weather maps kept breaking in with updates on a number of storm cells moving out in the landscape, surrounding the city. Ghostly predigital radar images appeared, of gray mother storms giving birth from their right-hand sides to little hook-shaped echoes that grew, and detached, to glide off on their own as murderous young tornadoes. Weather commentators tried to maintain the tradition of wackiness the job is known for, but could not keep out of the proceedings an element of surrender, as if before some first hard intelligence of the advent of an agent of rapture. Outside, from a remote camera, the sky was the underside of a beast, countless gray-black udder shapes crawling in in front of a squall line, behind it something distantly roaring, dangling immense stings veined with lightning, sweeping, destroying. . . . She felt electrically excited—more than his cock, just then, she needed his embrace. Fat chance. He’d been watching it all like a commercial, as if the Beast opposite the city were a coming attraction he had grown overfamiliar with.

  What he seemed to want was to talk business. He had drafted, sent up, and was about to have authorized a plan to destabilize and subvert PR3 with funding from one of the DOJ discretionary lines. “It’s a laboratory setup,” Brock argued, “a Marxist ministate, product of mass uprising, we don’t want it there and we also don’t want to invade—how then to proceed?” His idea was to make enough money available to set them all fighting over who’d get it. It would also, as Brock pitched it, have value as a scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole country might cost.

  She lay with her hair all messed up, lipstick smeared, arms and legs in a loose sprawl, nipples erect and, to the infrared-sensitive eye, glowing steadily. A peal of thunder from outside fell close enough to send a shuddering fine ache all across her skin. She wanted so to hold him. She had entered a brief time-out in the struggle, from which, if she’d chosen to, she also could have seen most, maybe all the way to the end, of what she could lose for this—OK, there he was, full-length, the whole package—for what? The fucking? Anything else?

  On the screen, the weather crew had fallen queerly silent. At first Frenesi wondered if the sound had gone out, but then one of them laughed nervously and the others joined in. It would happen again before suddenly, unannounced, a preacher with a hand mike, in front of a great luminous cross, appeared on the screen in stylishly long sideburns and a leisure suit of some lurid brick-colored synthetic. “Looks like we’re in the hands of Jesus again,” he announced. “Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus, and he’ll be talking to you all, on a nationwide hookup, instead of this old ignoramus from the piney woods. No friends, I’m no expert, wouldn’t know a suction vortex if it walked up and said bless you brother—ah but I do know how the men of science measure tornadoes, and that’s on what they call the Fujita Intensity Scale. But folks, maybe today that name should be Fu-Jesus. . . .”

  “Mind if I, uh—” Frenesi reaching and turning off the set.

  “Your mathematician doesn’t go in for that sort of thing?”

  Frenesi put her ears back, and white triangles appeared at the corners of her eyeballs.

  “Or does he? Maybe he’s one of these servants of the Lord, with a holy mission to defy Caesar?”

  “Think I covered that on one of those forms of yours.”

  “I read it,” almost breathless, looking like a boy, “I watched all the film footage, too, but I never saw anything about his spirit. That’s what I’d like to hear about sometime. I want his spirit, hm? I’m happy to leave his body to you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Brock, he might be just your type.”

  He took off his glasses, smiled at her in a way she’d learned to be wary of. “Actually he is, and I’m sorry you had to find out this way. Remember last time, when I told you not to bathe, hm? because I knew you’d be seeing him that night, knew he’d go down on you—didn’t he? ate your pussy, hm? of course I know, because he told me. You were coming in his face and he was tasting me all the time.”

  Brock’s homophobic sense of humor? She tried to remember if that was how it had happened, and couldn’t . . . and what did he mean about “wanting” Weed’s spirit?

  “You’re the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that’s all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places.”

  She was too young then to understand what he thought he was offering her, a secret about power in the world. That’s what he thought it was. Brock was young then too. She only took it as some parable about his feelings for her, one she didn’t exactly understand but covered for with the wide invincible gaze practiced by many sixties children, meaning nearly anything at all, useful in a lot of situations, including ignorance.

  Somebody had left a promotional magnum of Grand Cru de Muskogee Demi-Sec, made from a Concord grape variety imported from Arkansas, in a wastebasket full of ice. It had a nearly opaque, deeply purple color bordering on the ultraviolet and a body comparable to that of maple syrup, through which its bubbles, though multitudinous, were obliged to rise slowly and, alas, invisibly. But Brock, an aspiring gentleman, did the gallant thing and managed to choke down his share, even managing to toast Weed once or twice. She gave him the little-girl photofloods, 4800° of daylight blue, and whispered, “It’s why you kill each other, isn’t it?”

  “Who?”

  “Men. Because you can’t love each other.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Missed the point again—you never get beyond that hippie shit, do you.”

  “Point I didn’t miss,” she finished the thought, “is you prefer to do it by forcing things into each other’s bodies.”

  “I hope that’s a mischievous look.”

  “Don’t get many of them, do you?”

  “It’s Atman who’s been putting you on this ‘trip,’ you’re getting too old to be such a smartass on your own.”

  She smiled and raised her glass. “You got it, just a ‘medium,’ goes in these four holes, comes out this one. Hey, and let’s not forget nostrils, huh?”

  They lounged around the room, on and off the waterbed, becoming more grapey than drunk, and Brock just wouldn’t give the Weed situation a rest. Outside, beyond the dense rubberized drapes, now a solid black rectangle rim-lit with a least glimmer of failed daylight, was the storm, the Event. Just when she thought they were nestled safe in the center of America—here were sounds in the air they couldn’t have imagined, roars too deep for any Air Force jets from Tinker, some nonliquid clattering on the roof that could only be insects of a plague. Frenesi went to the window and pulled enough of one drape aside to have a look. At the sight of the black rolling clouds she caught her breath—she’d never seen a sky like this on Earth, not even with the help of LSD. With no warning, everything would pulse hugely with light, and the undersides and edges of the great clouds be hit with electric blue and now and then, all creviced in black, a terrible final red. In the last light out the window, near enough to see, a funnel cloud, its tip not yet touching the earth, swung slowly, deliberating, as if selecting a target below. She pulled the drapes open to allow a swordshape of outside patio light, which had just come on, to fall across the bed, where Brock lay with his forearm over his eyes and his socks on. “You can figure it out, can’t you?” he cried over the booming death-drone outside, “you have a smart-assed angle on everything else, why can’t you see this one? Your boyfriend is in the way. In our way.” Just quiet enough to register as deferent, sincere.
<
br />   “Real easy, then—just take me off the case. Chances are he won’t even notice.”

  “Anyone can deliver me his body,” called Brock Vond across the room, “if that was all I wanted, you’d’ve been off it long ago.”

  There, as her mother used to sing, he said it again.

  “Remember handing me all that shit in your office till I agreed to send in a written report? You said then there wouldn’t be anything more.”

  “But you’re right there literally in bed with him—perfect placement. He’s the key to it all, the key log, pull him and you break up the structure,” and the logs would disengage, singly and in groups, and continue on their way down the river to the sawmill, to get sawed into lumber, to be built into more America—Weed was the only one innocent enough, without hidden plans, with no ambitions beyond surmounting what the day brought each time around, he just went lurching on happily into his new identity as a man of action, embracing it as only an abstract thinker would, with the heedless enthusiasm of some junior doper discovering a new psychedelic, enjoying the unqualified trust of all who came inside his radius. With him gone and the others scrambling after the greenbacks in Brock’s safe, PR3 would fall apart.

  “Never thought you’d try to hustle me like this, Brock.”

  “I didn’t think you’d ever get into it with Atman, either,” his voice just for the moment stressless, unprotected. “Plans change, I guess. . . .”

  She understood as clearly as she could allow herself to what Brock wanted her to do, understood at last, dismally, that she might even do it—not for him, unhappy fucker, but because she had lost just too much control, time was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock’s stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often never in on the secret, are always, at every age, children. She came and lay next to him, but not touching. The storm held the city down like prey, trying repeatedly to sting it into paralysis. She lay on one elbow, unable to stop gazing at Brock, pretending to herself that it made some difference to him whether or not she and Weed were fucking . . . just as she had to pretend that Brock was not “really” what he looked like to everybody else—namely, the worst kind of self-obsessed collegiate dickhead, projected on into adult format—but that someplace, lost, stupefied, needing her intercession, was the “real” Brock, the endearing adolescent who would allow her to lead him stumbling out into light she imagined as sun plus sky, with an 85 filter in, returning him to the man he should have grown into . . . it could’ve been about the only way she knew to use the word love anymore, its trivializing in those days already well begun, its magic fading, the subject of all that rock and roll, the simple resource we once thought would save us. Yet if there was anything left to believe, she must have in the power even of that weightless, daylit commodity of the sixties to redeem even Brock, amiably, stupidly brutal, fascist Brock.

  At some point he must have gone drifting off to sleep, and she hadn’t noticed. She watched over him, hers for a while, allowing herself to shudder with, even surrender to, her need for his bodily presence, his beauty, the fear at the base of her spine, the prurient ache in her hands . . . at last, so swept and helpless, she leaned in to whisper to him her heart’s overflow, and saw in the half-light that what she’d thought were closed eyelids had been open all the time. He’d been watching her. She let out a short jolted scream. Brock started laughing.

  AS a resident of the everyday world, Weed Atman may have had his points, but as a Thanatoid he rated consistently low on most scales, including those that measured dedication and community spirit. Even his first of many interviews with Takeshi and DL, continuing off and on over the years, had been enough to establish a detachment of attitude, a set of barriers neither found they could cross. We are assured by the Bardo Thödol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, that the soul newly in transition often doesn’t like to admit—indeed will deny quite vehemently—that it’s really dead, having slipped so effortlessly into the new dispensation that it finds no difference between the weirdness of life and the weirdness of death, an enhancing factor in Takeshi’s opinion being television, which with its history of picking away at the topic with doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself. If mediated lives, he figured, why not mediated deaths?

  At first Weed went around feeling like a political defector. People pretending to be amateur students of the sixties kept showing up to fish for information and annoy him with entry-level chitchat. He was often obliged to be at functions not to his taste, wearing tuxedos it was impossible for the average Thanatoid to rent anyhow, owing to the usual complexities in the credit situation. Weed soon found he’d been 86’d from every tux outlet in Hollywood and on south, so he headed the other way, up over the passes and out the long desert arterials, out past the seed and feed houses and country music bars and Mexican joints with Happy Hours featuring 99¢ margaritas out of a hose, under the smog, the dribbling rain, the toxic lens of sky, to where folks, he hoped, were more trusting if less picky about what they wore, and where in fact formal dress, by some subterranean fashion law, turned out to be much less conventional. Soon he began showing up at Thanatoid service-organization affairs in ensembles of vivid chartreuse, teal, or fuchsia, the ties and cummerbunds hand-painted with matching motifs like tropical fruit, naked women, or bass lures. For tonight’s tenth annual get-together, Thanatoid Roast ’84, Weed sported a stretch tux in an oversize aqua and gold houndstooth check, with lime-green athletic shoes. Each year the community chose to honor a Thanatoid old-timer whose karma had kept up a suitably steady rhythm of crime and countercrime over the generations, with facts only grown more complicated, many original wrongs forgotten or defectively remembered, no resolution of even a trivial problem anywhere in sight. Thanatoids didn’t exactly “enjoy” these long, resentful tales of injustice modulating, like a ballpark organ riff, to further injustice—but they honored them. Figures like tonight’s Roastee were their Emmy winners, their Hall-of-Famers and role models—their own.

  What an evening. They told obscure but rib-tickling Thanatoid jokes. They twitted one another for taking inordinate lengths of Earth time to clean up relatively penny-ante karmic business. Thanatoid wives bravely did their part to complicate further already tangled marriage histories by flirting with waiters, buspersons, and even other Thanatoids. Everyone drank and smoked furiously, and the menu featured the usual low-end fare, heavy on sugar, starch, salt, ambiguous about where the meat had come from, including which animal, accompanied by bushels of french fries and barrels of shakes. Dessert was a horrible pale chunky pudding. There was sparkling wine, to be sure, but all clues to its origin had been blacked out with felt-tip marker at some unknown stage in its perhaps not even entirely legal journey. As more of this was drunk, Thanatoids grew less shy about lurching up to the mike and reciting insult testimonials to the Roastee, or making with the quips.

  “What do you call a Thanatoid with ‘Sir’ in front of his name? Knight of the Living Dead! How many Thanatoids’s it take to screw in a light bulb? None—it gets too hot in there! What does a Thanatoid do on Halloween? Puts a fruit bowl on his head, two straws up his nose, and goes as a Zombie!”

  The 1984 Thanatoid Roast was being held up north, at an old Thanatoid hangout, the Blackstream Hotel, which dated from the times of the early timber barons, hidden far from highways, up among long redwood mountainslopes where shadows came early and brought easy suspicion of another order of things . . . believed, through some unseen but potent geometry, to warp like radio signals at sundown the two worlds, to draw them closer, nearly together, out of register only by the thinnest of shadows. In the century since the place was built, tales of twilight happenings had accumulated, rooms, corridors, and wings taken on reputations for
sightings, exorcisms, returns. Pilgrims enjoying a broad range of legitimacy had been around, so had Leonard Nimoy’s “In Search Of” people and Jack Palance’s “Believe It or Not,” and deals, as you could always count on hearing, were in the works.

  “And someday,” the joker at the mike was saying, “maybe they’ll even put Thanatoid Roasts on television, as a yearly comedy special, yeah, big names, network coverage—‘course we won’t live to see it. . . .” The drummer gave him a couple of bass thumps and some slow mashed sizzling from the high-hat. Providing the music tonight was a local pickup group, including, on bass, Van Meter, who’d heard about it down at the Lost Nugget, would have tried to talk his running mate Zoyd into coming along and playing keyboard, except that nobody had seen Zoyd around for most of the week, and Van Meter didn’t know if he should be getting worried yet or not. Zoyd had been staying with planters he knew up by Holytail, beyond the coastal ranges and the yearlong fogs, in a valley where growing conditions were ideal—about the last refuge for pot growers in North California. Access, at least by road, wasn’t easy—because of the Great Slide of ’64, you had to double back and forth along both sides of the river and take ferries, which weren’t always running, and bridges said to be haunted. Zoyd had found a community living on borrowed time, as everyone watched the scope of the CAMP crop-destruction effort growing without limit, season after season—as more state and federal agencies came on board, as the grand jury in Eureka subpoenaed more and more citizens, as friendly deputies and secure towns one by one were neutralized, taken back under government control—all wondering when it would be the turn of Holytail.

  The Vineland County sheriff, Willis Chunko, a squinty-eyed, irascible old media hand who showed up every autumn, as sure a precursor of the season as the Jerry Lewis telethon, posing on the evening news next to towering stacks of baled-up marijuana plants or advancing on some field shooting a flamethrower from the hip, had featured Holytail on his shit list for years, but the area was extraordinarily tough for him to penetrate. “It’s Sherwood Forest up there,” he would complain to the cameras, “they hide up in the trees, you never see ’em.” No matter how Willis chose to arrive, Holytailers always had plenty of advance warning. The network of observers extended down to Vineland, with some lurking right outside the Sheriff’s Department itself with rolls of quarters, ready to call in, others hooked up by CB radio in roving patrols on all surface routes, or scanning the sky from ridges and mountaintops with binoculars and converted fishing-boat radars.