Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Anybody who can rise above racist bullshit like that, I guess.” Once deferent, these days Rex was getting bitter about his protégé, who hadn’t turned out at all the way he’d hoped. Though Rex wouldn’t have called it purity, he’d still expected from Weed more thought, less wallowing in the everyday. Rex himself saw the Revolution as a kind of progressive abstinence, in which you began by giving up acid and pot, then tobacco, alcohol, sweets—you kept cutting down on sleep, doing with less, you broke up with lovers, avoided sex, after a while even gave up masturbating—as the enemy’s attention grew more concentrated, you gave up your privacy, freedom of movement, access to money, with the looming promise always of jail and the final forms of abstinence from any life at all free of pain.

  “Kind of pessimistic?” Weed suggested.

  “I don’t see you giving up anything,” Rex answered, and this, to both of them, seemed a clear sign that their fates were diverging. Rex had once owned this Porsche 911, as red as a cherry in a cocktail, his favorite toy creature, his best disguise, his personal confidant, and more, in fact all that a car could be for a man, and it’s fair to say Rex had made a tidy emotional as well as cash investment—indeed, he would not have flinched from the word “relationship.” He called it Bruno. He knew the location of every all-night car wash in the four counties, he’d fallen asleep on his back beneath its ventral coolness, with a plastic tool case for a pillow, and slept right through the night, and he had even, more than once, in scented petroleum dimness, had his throbbing manhood down inside one flared chrome carburetor barrel as the engine idled and with sensitive care he adjusted the pulsing vacuum to meet his own quickening rhythm, as man and machine together rose to peaks of hitherto unimaginable ecstasy. . . .

  Long might the automotive idyll have gone on had the PR3 Exterior Bureau, in its search for allies in the world at large, not initiated talks with the Black Afro-American Division, who all wore shiny black Vietnam boots, black-on-black camo fatigues, and velvet-black berets with off-black wide-point stars on them ChiCom-style just to lounge around in, who showed up by invitation at the clifftop republic and got into an all-day argument with its indigenous, whom they kept referring to as children of the surfing class. They may have been the first black people ever to set foot in Trasero County, certainly the first that many of the PR3 inhabitants had ever seen, so that a good deal of rudimentary history had to be gone over before the discussion even caught up with the present day. As this ground on, Rex grew impatient—he wanted to talk Revolution. But the brothers from BAAD seemed content just to play Trash The Xanthocroid with what, given this crowd, were some pretty easy shots.

  “But we’re fighting the common enemy,” Rex protested. “They’d just as soon kill us as you.”

  The BAAD contingent liked that one, and laughed merrily. “The Man’s gun don’t have no blond option on it, just automatic, semi-automatic, and black,” replied BAAD chief of staff Elliot X.

  “No! When the barricades are in the streets, we’ll be on the same side of them as you!”

  “Except that we don’t have the fuckin’ choice, we got to be there.”

  “That’s it, that’s just it! We’re choosing to stand with you!”

  “Uh, huh.”

  “What’ll I have to do, to convince you guys,” Rex with tears on his face, “that I would really go to the wall, that, shit, I would die for your freedom!”

  There was a lull in the volume. Elliot X said, “What kind of car you drive?”

  “Porsche”—he’d almost said “Bruno”—“nine-eleven, why?”

  “Give it to us.”

  “You say, uh. . . .”

  “Yeah, come on, revolutionary brother!”

  “See you put that Parsh up where your mouth’s at.”

  It is difficult in this era of greed and its ennoblement to recall the naturalness and grace with which Rex, way back then, smiling, simply produced from the depths of his fringe bag the pink slip and keys to the 911 and handed them on up to the podium, where Elliot X, mike in hand, a class act, went to one knee, like a performer to a fan, to receive them. The citizens of PR3 cheered and sang and voted magnanimously to make the Porsche a gift of the community, while the brothers began to negotiate internally about which of them was going to drive it away. Around sundown two delegations, black and white, proceeded to the parking lot for the formal handover. Rex, already well into second thoughts, holding back sobs, silently bade farewell to his old companion, to the desert washes and creek beds and mountain roads, the shopping plazas and green suburban streets they’d seen together. It stood in the last Pacific light, headlamps gazing at Rex reproachfully, no longer even Bruno, since it had been redesignated UHURU, for Ultra High-speed Urban Reconnaissance Unit.

  “It’s OK,” Frenesi offered, “you did the right thing.”

  “I feel like shit.” And what business was it of hers? He had no more illusions about infiltrators than he did about sunshine revolutionaries—or, for that matter, the fate of PR3. But seeing how it was with Weed and Frenesi, he knew there’d be no point in issuing warnings. Once he said, “You’re up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking crusades, retribution, closed ideological minds passing on the Christian Capitalist Faith intact, mentor to protégé, generation to generation, living inside their power, convinced they’re immune to all the history the rest of us have to suffer. They are bad, bad’s they come, but that still doesn’t make us good, not 100%, Weed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Weed standing all the way up.

  Rex was heading for the land of the May Events, and saw no reason not to say, “Weed—bail out.”

  “Yeah, then what?”

  “Math. Discover a theorem.”

  Weed frowned. “Um—I don’t think that’s what you do with theorems.”

  “I thought they sat around, like planets, and . . . well, every now and then somebody just, you know . . . discovered one.”

  “I don’t think so.” They remained then, looking at each other directly, for longer than they ever would again. Neither one could know how few and fortunate would be any who’d be able to meet in years later than these and smile, and relax beneath some single low oak out on an impossible hillside, with sunlight, and the voices of children, “And we actually thought we were having it out over these points of doctrine,” as some fine-looking young teener appears now from nowhere with a picnic spread, as they all sit and eat cracked crab and sourdough bread and drink some chilly gold-green California Chenin Blanc, and laugh, and pour more wine, “really obscure arguments, typewriters rattling through the windows all over campus, all night long, phone lines humming, amazing amounts of energetic youthful running around, and all for what?”

  The pleasant package with the eats looks over. “I was beginning to wonder.”

  “Well, we were being set up all the time, it turned out. The FBI was in there like some little guy in a bar going let’s-you-and-him-fight. Anonymous letters and phone calls, night riders, flat tires, job and landlord trouble, all made to look like it was coming from ol’ what’s his name here and the BLGVN/US.”

  She is aware of her importance here, shaded, safe, saved, a person for them both to pretend to explain things to, as a way of negotiating an agreeable version of history.

  “Yes, old Rex here, he nearly ‘blew me away.’ “

  “Rex!”

  “Afraid so, kid.”

  “Kept saying, ’You get it yet? Huh? You get it?’ I said, ‘Get what?’ He said, ’Oh well maybe you should get it now. Huh? You think now’s a good time for you to get it?’ I could see he was carrying something in his bag—one of those rough-out shoulder bags with all the fringe that guys carried for a while. Something concentrated, heavy, but you couldn’t tell for certain. Could have been a part for his car.”

  “Rock specimens.” The two of them chuckle at the d
istant memory. “Just a pair of innocent hippies, one with a service .38. Hard to say which was the bigger fool.”

  Weed had found himself a classical pigeon, with no exit but the one Rex was standing in and no resources beyond an old Case knife someplace in a box down the back of the crawl space, as he watched the object in Rex’s purse, much as another man in a different context might want to watch the one in his pants, noting subtle rearrangements of pleats and ripples each time he moved, trying to guess length, diameter, and so forth. . . .

  “What are you looking at?” Rex clearly agitated and getting more so.

  “Nothing.”

  “You were looking at my bag. You think my bag is nothing?”

  “You seem upset tonight, Rex, what is it?”

  They both knew that what it was was Frenesi. She was spending more and more time in and out of Rex’s place and hardly any with 24fps. After a series of consultations with others in the unit, DL had suggested to Howie, who admitted he could use a break from the Pisks’ Trasero-heightened surfophobia, that he find a way to keep an eye on Frenesi. He borrowed an old surfboard for a prop and soon was dropping in at Rex’s at least once a day. If Frenesi noticed, she didn’t react. One night, having nodded out in one of the bedrooms in front of a rerun of “The Invaders,” Howie became aware of some strange vibrational episode out in the living room, along with XERB at a volume not high enough to cover voices. He came blinking into the living room and saw Rex and Frenesi sitting close together on the couch, their eyes dark and moist, faces flushed. They’d been laughing, was what had brought Howie up out of a drugged sleep. “Howdy folks.”

  This look on her face he’d seen before, but didn’t know what it meant. “Heard the news about Weed?”

  Howie went on into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and stood gazing inside. “Nope, what happened?”

  The two started laughing again, an amateur, ungainly sound, as if the forces they were letting out were new to them and just about as much as they could handle. “Hey!” cried Rex, “where do you think he is right now?”

  “Home in bed,” Frenesi with a high strangled slurring.

  “All right! We could go do it right now. Huh?”

  “We could make a plan and follow it, no impulses.”

  It? Howie wondered. In the far corner of the freezer he found a chocolate-covered banana from Hermosa Beach, all crystalline with undefrosted snow, and wandered back in. “Are you guys pissed off at Weed or something?”

  The pair on the sofa exchanged a look, and Frenesi said, “Think we should tell him?”

  “Sure,” Rex with more angry laughter. “Who’s old Howie gonna tell?”

  “On second thought—” Howie began.

  Too late. “Weed is an FBI plant,” Frenesi told him. “His job was to lead us all someday up the wrong piece of trail and guess who’d be waiting.”

  “Oh come on, who says?”

  “He does.”

  “Ack.” Howie got instant dry mouth, and the frozen banana turned to sawdust. The glitter-eyed absence of humor in the room drew into its vacuum and down over his cringing soul the cold certainty that they weren’t fooling. “Well look folks, if Weed really told you he’s FBI, then you have to bring in the membership, everybody, call a meeting, get it all out.”

  “Oh, fuck, Howie,” she was suddenly furious, “little kid games.”

  “They’re killing us, man,” Rex earnestly face to face, “locking us in those federal slams, regular and mental, packing us away, this is who he’s been working for all the time. Pretending. Reporting back on us?”

  “But,” Howie losing faith in his argument, “if they’re sneaky enough to plant somebody, they’re also sneaky enough to lie about Weed, aren’t they?”

  “What do you want, Howie,” Frenesi prancing back and forth like a rocker with a microphone, as if redirecting energy that might get her into mischief, “he told me himself, out loud, with his mouth.”

  “But why tell you?”

  Oh, did she shoot him a look then—about the kindest thing it had to say was “Figure it out.”

  Howie, who knew he might cry if this kept on, said, “All a big fuckin’ game, OK—so now he blew his cover, the game’s over.”

  “Uh-uh,” Rex almost leering, “now we’re in sudden-death overtime.”

  Frenesi came and took Howie’s face in her hand, gently, but reserving more vigorous options. “You’ve been living on the same planet as all of us—every night they pick us up, and they beat us, and they fuck us, and sometimes we die. Don’t any of you kiddies understand, we either have 100% no-foolin’-around solidarity or it just doesn’t work. Weed betrayed that, and it was cowardly because it was easy, ’cause he knew we can’t shut anybody out, down the end of that road is fuckin’ fascism, so we take ’em all, the hypocrites and double agents and summertime outlaws and all that fringe residue nobody else’ll touch. That’s what PR3 started out as—so did we for that matter, remember? The All-Nite Shelter. The lighted doorway out in the Amerikan dark where nobody gets refused? Weed remembers.”

  She knew how to pick a lock as straightforward as Howie’s. Embarrassed, he reached for the Tube, popped it on, fastened himself to the screen and began to feed. “What’d I tell you?” cried Rex. “Howie’s cool.”

  “Howie, what do you think, can we put floods in here?”

  “Huh? Have to unplug the stereo, is all. What you got in mind?”

  “Nail him with my Scoopic, get up in his face with a radio mike, no mercy.”

  “It’s takin’ his soul, man,” Howie reminded her.

  “Already taken,” Rex said.

  Frenesi was on her own here, improvising. She knew she was messing with Rex, using him against Weed, wasn’t sure if she wanted to, knew that Brock wanted her to, that had been clear since the day of the tornadoes, but how was she going to sit down, even lie down, and talk any of it over? Who with, anyway? She’d have to tell it, silently, to a DL who would miraculously forgive her, to the Sasha whom years ago it had been possible to tell anything. Make-believe interlocutors, dolls in a dollhouse. Frenesi had thought for a while that her need to talk would build out of control, till she was helpless to hold it in and she ended up as a crazy woman on a bus bench, along an endless flatland boulevard, talking out loud without rest, like an astronomer seeking life out in space, on a brave slender hope that somebody might begin to listen. But in practice she’d only kept getting up one morning after another till at some point she found she’d adapted well enough to what she was becoming. The house in Culito Canyon she was crashing at had a redwood deck with a table and chairs where she could sit out in the early mornings, drink herb tea and make believe—her dangerous vice—that she was on her own, with no legal history, no politics, only an average California chick, invisible, poised at life’s city limits, for whom anything was still possible. Though she was lingering on the sunny side of 25 then, she still felt like some veteran blues singer, with a lifetime of playing toilets, owing money, and surviving violence already behind her, so that these early cool minutes on the deck, when she could find them, with an unseen delirium of birds, sun in the tops of trees, radio music, woodsmoke, and babies squealing from across the canyon, became what she held precious and often lived for. It was the only peace she was seeing in her life, with Brock sending down these increasingly nutzo directives, plus calling up in the middle of the night, to the dismay of housemates, demanding yet another Oklahoma rendezvous, and with Weed, whose fucking each time they met got wilder, less in his control, who with luck might make the Guinness Book someday but was meanwhile not picking up too many points for emotional maturity, harassing her round the clock, screaming at everybody else. As he became more hysterical, Jinx, now daily in his, not to mention Frenesi’s, face, seemed to grow more grimly centered. A close reader of cues others never saw, she knew—it was in her unturning st
are whenever she and Frenesi crossed paths—that Frenesi was close to her husband from motives other than sexual, and there were only a couple of things it could be. Jinx shared her anxieties with DL, who’d been driving up to a dojo in Redondo Beach with her once or twice a week. Despite the difference in their ranks, they found themselves able to work out for hours together and think only fractions of hours had gone by. Most of their communicating was by way of their bodies—when they talked it was strangely roundabout, reluctant. But they both saw, ghostly, denied, protected, another Frenesi, one they were prohibited access to. It hurt more for DL, of course—she might’ve expected it from a lover, but hell, they’d been partners.

  Beginning the night she and Rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on Weed, Frenesi understood that she had taken at least one irreversible step to the side of her life, and that now, as if on some unfamiliar drug, she was walking around next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all. If the step was irreversible, then she ought to be all right now, safe in a world-next-to-the-world that not many would know how to get to, where she could kick back and watch the unfolding drama. No problem anymore with talk of “taking out” Weed Atman, as he’d gone turning into a character in a movie, one who as a bonus happened to fuck like a porno star . . . but even sex was mediated for her now—she did not enter in.

  Once, on a rare sleepover with Weed at a motel in Anaheim, she awoke at a deep hour of the night to hear tiny voices that seemed to come from Weed’s sleeping face, very high-pitched, with East Coast lowlife accents—“Hey, dat was a renege, you don’t get dem points.” “Ya can’t meld dat one, Wilbur, ya buried it.” And “Da bidduh goes double bete, let’s see da cards,” at least that’s what it sounded like—the little voices faded now and then. It wasn’t Weed himself—she could hear his breathing, regular and slow, no matter what the voices happened to be saying. “Hey, Wanda! Bring us anudduh six-pack, huh?” “Come on Wesley, feed da kitty!” What was going on? In the air-conditioned hour without a name, she leaned over his face, trying to see lips moving, ventriloquism. . . . She sniffed. Infinitesimal traces of cigar smoke and spilled beer. Abruptly the voices stopped, then broke panicked into an incoherent twittering—they’d seen her, looming in, and then she saw them, just about to shimmer out of paralysis into flight, one moment sitting by Weed’s nose, curled at his nostrils, enjoying the breeze in and out, and the next all spooked and streaming down the sides of his face, nearly invisible now against the bedclothes—gaaahhh! was that one of them she felt? She rolled out onto the floor, cursing under her breath, put the lights on, and went and inspected every inch of the bed with a ball-peen hammer she happened to have in her purse. Innocent Weed slept on. She found nothing but a colorful smear on the pillow that resolved close up into a scatter of tiny patterned rectangles, each no more than an eighth of an inch long and flimsy—her most careful breath dispersing many of them to invisibility. In the morning they were all gone. It wasn’t till years later, on a lunch hour, somewhere inside the rusticated grandiosity of an Indiana court-house—not too far from Brock Vond’s old hometown, as a matter of fact—trying to find out, as usual, about a stipend check, that she heard, in human frequencies, the same phrases she’d heard that night, and followed the voices to a judge’s chambers, sunny, wood, undusted, where nobody looked up when she put her head in. The game turned out to be pinochle, and she understood then that years ago, in Anaheim, she had seen the famous worms of song, already playing a few preliminary hands on Weed Atman’s snout.