Vineland

by Thomas Pynchon

  Up on the screen Rex was crying, “It should have been you, Frenesi, fuckin’ whore, where are you?” Just behind the light harsh in his face and continuing to pour unwavering, Frenesi was silent. Prairie imagined her standing with nothing but the light between her and Rex and his hatred while he hung, tightening in pain all over, holding the gun but no longer in possession of it. He walked over to Weed’s body, went down on one knee, laid the gun beside him. That’s when Frenesi killed the light, that’s how the shot ended, in a close-up of one of Rex’s gleaming eyeballs, with the light she was holding reflected on it round and bright, and in the back-scatter—if Prairie only looked closely enough she would have to see her—Frenesi herself, dark on dark, face in wide-angle distortion, with an expression that might, Prairie admitted, prove unbearable.

  The footage following was from up on the campus, the last hours of the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll. There wouldn’t be any single assault, Attica-style, but instead a scattered nightlong propagation of human chaos, random shooting, tear gas from above, buildings and cars set ablaze, everyone a possible enemy, too much of it in the dark after the electric power, along with the water, got cut off. There was smog but no moon or starlight. Out on a trailer parked in back of the Film Arts building, however, was a Mole-Richardson Series 700 generator, in more or less running order, although once he had some light to work by, Sledge couldn’t help reaching into the engine, tweaking the idle and timing and shit. Strangers began to come cautiously in from the darkness. Miles in the distance, from faraway Anaheim Stadium, came the sounds of a Blue Cheer concert. To the 24fps crew it felt like the day after the end of the world, seeing what was there to be taken from the generously funded Film Arts Department, legendary Eclairs whose mere hourly rental would have meant weeks of scuffling, Miller heads, Fastaxes for slow motion, Norwood Binary light meters, at last the high-ticket production of their dreams, and it had to be in this trapped and futureless night.

  They lit it on up, with lamps and luminaires, using the fastest film they had, a cache of 7242 from the Film Arts fridge, and a wide-open aperture so there wasn’t the depth to it Ditzah would have liked, yet there she, DL, and Prairie sat prehypnotic before the shots of helicopters descending, kids dancing all tuned to the same station on the radio, a ratlike swarm of approaching troops in camouflage and blackface suddenly caught in the beams of arc lamps they proceeded to shoot out as Howie had prophesied, with the camera never pulling back, but standing against whatever came its way and often moving out into it. “She could get herself killed,” Prairie cried.

  “Yep,” said Ditzah and DL together.

  By morning there were scores of injuries, hundreds of arrests, no reported deaths but a handful of persons unaccounted for. In those days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its own civilians and then lie about it. So the mystery abided, frozen in time, somewhere beyond youthful absences surely bound to be temporary, yet short of planned atrocity. Taken one by one, after all, given the dropout data and the migratory preferences of the time, each case could be accounted for without appealing to anything more sinister than a desire for safety. At his news conference, Brock Vond referred to it humorously as “rapture.” Fawning, gazing upward at the zipper of his fly, the media toadies present wondered aloud where, in his opinion, if it was OK to ask, Mr. Vond, sir, the missing students might have gotten to. Brock replied, “Why, underground, of course. That’s our assumption in this, from all we know about them—that they’ve gone underground.” Somebody from the radical press must have infiltrated. “You mean they’re on the run? Are there warrants out? How come none are listed as federal fugitives?” The reporter was led away by a brace of plainclothes heavies as Brock Vond genially repeated, highlights dancing merrily on his lenses and frames, “Underground, hm? Rapture below. Yes, the gentleman in the suit and tie?”

  Earlier, while the newshounds had all been across campus at the main gate, preoccupied with getting shots of coed cuties in miniskirts being handled by troopers in full battle gear in which leather recurred as a motif, none had noticed the small convoy of field-gray trucks, locked shut, unmarked, that had left out the back way without even pausing for the security at the checkpoint. Threading a complex array of ramps, transition lanes, and suspiciously tidy country roads, the trucks eventually pulled up onto the little-known and only confidentially traveled FEER, or Federal Emergency Evacuation Route, which followed the crestline of the Coast Range north in a tenebrous cool light, beneath camouflage netting and weatherproof plastic sheet. It was a dim tunnel that went for hundreds of miles, conceived in the early sixties as a disposable freeway that would only be used, to full capacity, once.

  The convoy’s destination lay hours to the north, in a wet and secluded valley that had been the site of an old Air Force fog-dispersal experiment and later, before the apocalyptic grandeur of Kennedy-era strategic “thinking” found itself bogged, nukeless, in the quotidian horrors of Vietnam, intended as a holding area able to house up to half a million urban evacuees in the event of, well, say, some urban evacuation. A few dozen housing units, like model homes at the edge of newly subdivided acreage, had been put up just to give visitors a feel for the concept—all standard-issue Corps of Engineers jobs, some of them apartments meant for families, as the word was understood back then, some barracks for detached men, women, boys, and girls whose families might still be “temporarily unaccounted for.” There was a mess hall, toilet and shower facilities, pool and Ping-Pong tables, a movie projector, softball diamond, basketball court. Water ran everywhere, redwoods and Sitka spruce went towering in ragged silhouette up to the ridgetops and over, and behind them, most of the year, gray regiments of cloud marched in from the coast.

  DL in the meantime had come straggling back to Berkeley, to the workshop off San Pablo, with Howie and Sledge, either loyal to the end or just in shock, walking slack for her, and found they were just about all that was left of 24fps. DL by then was so crazy that half the time she didn’t know who was there and who wasn’t. This along with a chiming, way inside her ears, and a light that glowed at the edges of everything, both clearly signals to stand by, message follows.

  It took them a while just to find out where Frenesi had gone. There’d been reports in from people who’d seen her taken off in the convoy, some of whom had tried to follow, only to come each time to a peculiar network of transition roads where no matter which combinations they used they were unable to gain access. But they had heard and glimpsed, somewhere in the terrain above them, the old FEER freeway, defects here and there in its camouflage, gray columns and guardrails, ruins from Camelot. Maps were available up and down the street, few agreeing, none getting too specific about what was inside the ragged polygon at the end of the classified freeway, labeled only “National Security Reservation.”

  DL and the boys took the flagship of the 24fps motor pool, a ’57 Chevy Nomad with a four-wheel-drive option, raised up a couple of feet and equipped with big high-flotation tires, crash bars, and winches fore and aft. About the time they got onto the Richmond–San Rafael bridge, rain began to fall, and they hit San Rafael at prematurely dark and vaporous rush hour, all eight or ten lanes full of exhaust plumes drooping like tails of some listless herd. DL was driving, her bright hair confined in a loosely knit olive snood, plowing on ahead through the wet shift’s-end dusk, sitting upright in serene metered fury, holding centered and in focus the image of the enemy, Brock Vond, and of the woman he had kidnapped—for Frenesi could not have gone willingly, no, this asshole of a cop had wanted her, so he’d decided he’d just take her and assumed nobody would do anything about it. Well, Brock, excuse me, Captain, but guess what.

  Street estimates in Berkeley about the population of the camp in the mountains ran on the order of ten to a hundred, depending how the different sources felt seeing their nightmares about the Nixon regime coming true. Howie and Sledge were skeptical about proceeding this way on other peop
le’s guesswork. They peered at the maps, each with that enigmatic blank in the middle, like the outline of a state in a geography test, belonging to something called “the U.S.,” but not the one they knew. “It’s a hundred miles around, DL. If they see us coming, they have all the time in the world to take her and stash her someplace else.”

  “They won’t see me.” If Frenesi’s realm was light, DL’s was the dark. Most of those in 24fps had seen, or not seen, her pass without effort through areas infested with cops and cop weapons, rescuing along the way brothers and sisters and the vehicles they’d ridden in in, and come out the other side asking what’s for lunch, with the blazing beacon of her hair, which the Man was never quite able to see, no more messed up than when she’d gone in. Sledge and Howie both believed in her invisibility, the same way in those days it was possible to believe in acid, or the imminence of revolution, or the disciplines, passive and active, of the East.

  The sturdily enhanced Nomad, beginning now to run into some grades, rushed along in the rain, while the guys navigated, blinking little pocket flashes on and off, seeking a route of ascent to the Third, or Mesopotamian, Freeway implied by the other two that ran the lowlands to east and west. Through suburbs and pasture and forest they sped—from concrete to blacktop to macadam, at last to a gullied and boulder-strewn glacis, or defensive slope, behind a chain-link fence that they winched up enough of to get through. After locking the wheels and switching over to 4WD, “Hang on,” advised DL, and away they began to roar, smoke, and climb, pops from the terrain sending everybody bouncing and banging their heads on the roof of the rig, the landscape out the windows seesawing violently around. Once or twice they nearly went over, but at last the Nomad scraped through a breach in the guardrail and gained the deserted old highway.

  Every hundred feet or so, just off the shoulder, was a slender pole holding a medallion about the size of a party-size pizza, with a face on it, not something generalized to represent, say, the Ordinary American, but a particular human face, looking directly at the viewer with a strangely personal expression, as if just about to speak. Inscribed at the base of each pole, in some weathered metal gray as an old zinc wartime penny, was the story that went with the face.

  “Virgil (‘Sparky’) Ploce, 1923–1959, American Martyr in the Crusade Against Communism. Lt. Col. Ploce was the first American of many who have attempted to clear from the face of our hemisphere that stubborn zit known as Fidel Castro. Undercover, posing as an ultrazealous Cuban Communist, ‘Sparky’ soon charmed his way into the bearded dictator’s confidence. His plan was to have offered to Castro, and then lit for him, a giant Cuban cigar that actually contained an ingenious bomb of ‘Sparky’s’ own design, made of plastic explosive, detonator, and a length of primer cord. Unfortunately for freedom-loving people everywhere, an accumulation of manufacturing errors had caused the head and the tuck of the cigar to appear virtually identical, so that when the fuzz-faced Latin tyrant bit off the wrong end and pulled out the primer cord with his teeth, security guards were immediately alert to the danger. Overseers of a typical Red Slave State, they apprehended and executed Lt. Col. Ploce on the spot.” The face above this was young, clean-shaven, and short-haired, and seemed to be smirking.

  As they discovered when they got moving and one by one new stone-colored medallions appeared through the rain, in their headlight beams, each of these folks’ images had been given eyes designed to follow whoever was driving past, so the Nomad’s progress was observed, perhaps appraised, by silent miles of oversize faces, set a little higher than the average passenger vehicle stood. Had they been meant somehow for the long jammed and crawling hours of flight from the City, something inspirational to look at, to assure them all in a way not immediately clear it is not the end, or there is still hope . . . ? was it only some travel game for the kids, to keep them occupied, to pass the time till the sudden light from behind, the unbearable sight in the mirror?

  They arrived at the fence, about where the maps said it would be, well before dawn, during the hour of the rat, when the body sleeps deepest even if awake, still following the same cycle, most vulnerable. DL slipped into a black jumpsuit and ski mask. A cold wind blew down off a ridge someplace, bringing the smell of trees. Howie and Sledge gave her the old 24fps kissoff, “Be groovy or B movie,” one minute watching the highlights spun off her pale eyeballs, the next trying to see where she’d gone.

  Later, of course, doing the bookkeeping on this caper, filling in logs after the fact, she could appreciate how broadly she’d violated the teachings of her sensei. She had not become the egoless agent of somebody else’s will, but was acting instead out of her own selfish passions. If the motive itself was tainted, then the acts, no matter how successful or beautifully executed, were false, untrue to her calling, to herself, and someday there would be a payback, long before which she would understand that by far the better course would have been to leave Frenesi where she was.

  She followed the fence till she saw lights, the bleary all-night cyan blue flooding over everything, revealing a wide-open field of fire between the gate and the nearest barracks, about a hundred yards inside it. She moved quickly toward the sentry, keeping her eyes on his own, which were aimed downward, reading to pass the dark watch, till she was too close for it to matter anymore. It was one of Inoshiro Sensei’s proprietary whammies, based on a well-known ninja invisibility technique known as Kasumi, or The Mist. By wiggling her fingers precisely in his face, she selectively blinded him to her presence—he could go on with his life, but without DL in it. She was already inside, away along the fence, becoming its harsh woven shadow, watching for patrols, scanning the distant barracks, nocking and setting herself, archer and arrow, her passage through the turquoise glare untimed, unthought. In the building’s penumbra, not even breathing hard, so elegantly that you couldn’t say jimmied, she more like Jamesed the side door lock with a needle of antique ivory the sensei had given her long ago, and slipped within, into night’s last act, where dozens of sleepers, alone and paired, lay on the wood floor on thin government mattresses, snoring, snuffling, calling out, flailing around, and, what DL was looking for, wide awake—a face lit by reflection off the floor, one she then remembered from Berkeley, from the old Death to the Pig Nihilist Film Kollective. “Just happened to be passin’ through, lookin’ for Frenesi was all.”

  He hesitated, not long but long enough. “You here to bring her out?”

  “Want to come along, you’re sure welcome.”

  “Oh thanks anyway, it’s no worse in here than where I was.”

  “But you’re a political prisoner.”

  He smiled out one side of his mouth. “I firebombed a car with a bunch of FBI in it—they all got out OK, I figured, hey, groovy, I total the car, they stay alive, so long dudes, have a nice violence-free life—only they must’ve saw it different.”

  “You showed disrespect.”

  “If I split with you now, they’ll put me on the Ten Most Wanted, have me back inside in a day—not worth it.”

  “Nice seein’ you again, brother, and now it’s time for a little rewind and erase on ya, nothing personal. . . .” In the green and blue shadows she repeated the procedure she’d used on the gate guard. Directed then by soft whispers, perhaps not themselves voices of the waking, from pallet to pallet among the sleepers, she came at last to a dim figure lying prone, her hands beneath her, pressing, squirming, sighing, wearing only a blue chambray work shirt with half the buttons missing, streaked dark with her sweat. DL, who already knew it wasn’t Frenesi, went to one knee beside her, the girl crying out, shrinking away from the black apparition, hands across her breasts. “I’d love to,” DL smiling behind her mask, “but I’m in sort of a hurry, maybe you could just tell me where she is.”

  The girl gazed, lips apart, wet fingers at her throat. “They took her to the Office.” It was nearby, in the camp’s administrative center. Hard to get into? You bet. The girl, un
der DL’s coaxing, told her what she could, relaxing, dropping her hands to her lap.

  Again DL violated procedure. Taking the small face in her hand, “And the reason you’re in her bed finger-fucking yourself is that you love her, have I got that correct?”

  Her wrists and arms growing tense, her averted face darkening with blood, “I can’t stand it without her . . . think I’m dying.” She sought DL’s eyes in the ultramarine night.

  DL went on ahead before the girl could react, leaned in, lifting the mask, and kissed her open mouth, soon enough feeling the unhappy little tongue come fluttering forward. DL let her have a quick nonlethal taste of the Kunoichi Death Kiss, which is ordinarily the setup for a needle swiftly thrust into the brainstem of the kissee but was here meant only in malicious play, to stun her victim into rethinking her situation. . . . Spanish guitars ringing in her mind, DL slipped the girl’s shirt off and with a black-gloved finger traced a big letter Z—above, between, below her breasts. “Hasta la próxima, querida mia,” and over the señorita’s balcony she did vanish, emerging, as a matter of fact, right between two sentries making their rounds, unseen, unheard, though perhaps, who could be sure, not unscented.

  The administration building was all concrete and local river rock, in a Corps of Engineers style not noted for whimsy, raised up on a long sweep of steps at least as high as it was, with rows of white columns suggesting national architecture and deathless temple, intended to reassure, to discourage too many questions, to turn to use whatever residue of nation-love might be hidden among the tens of thousands of traumatized nuclear refugees it had been designed to impress. DL prowled its perimeter till she found a marshal on watch and before he even saw her got rid of his weapon and punched into a sequence of his trigger points the subroutine Yukai na, or Fun, a low-order limbic pleasure cycle that would loop over and over as long as the officer behaved himself. They strolled into the facility smooth as Daffy and Bugs and got on the elevator down to a subterranean complex known as the Office. It was as if they descended into the rodent hour itself, no way to tell how fast they were falling. DL felt herself counterpopping her ears and had to nudge the marshal, whose whole body by now was a shit-eating grin, to remind him to do the same.