The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

to try to be what Driblette was, the dark machine in the center of the planetarium,

If only so much didn’t stand in her way: her deep ignorance of law, of investment, of real estate, ultimately of the dead man himself.

Under the symbol she’d copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into her memo book, she wrote Shall I project a world? If not project then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among constellations and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross. Anything might help.

As it turned out he wasn’t working, only doodling with a fat felt pencil this sign:

“Hello there,” Oedipa said, arrested by this coincidence. On a whim, she added, “Kirby sent me,” this having been the name on the latrine wall. It was supposed to sound conspiratorial, but came out silly.

“I mean, who’s there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn’t it all teamwork now?”

Maxwell’s Demon.

Since the Demon only sat and sorted, you wouldn’t have put any real work into the system. So you would be violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, getting something for nothing, causing perpetual motion.

“Sorting isn’t work?” Oedipa said. “Tell them down at the post office, you’ll find yourself in a mailbag headed for Fairbanks, Alaska, without even a FRAGILE sticker going for you.”

The envelope she’d seen Koteks doodling what she’d begun to think of as the “WASTE symbol” on had come, she bet, from John Nefastis.

but also because of other revelations; because it seemed that a pattern was beginning to emerge, having to do with the mail and how it was delivered.

gone back, deliberately, to Lake Inverarity one day, owing to this, what you might have to call, growing obsession, with “bringing something of herself”—even if that something was just her presence—to the scatter of business interests that had survived Inverarity.

she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.

the sort that bring governments down.

“I like to watch young stuff,” he explained. “There’s something about a little chick that age.” “So does my husband,” she said. “I understand.”

“Help,” said Oedipa, “you’re not reaching me.” “Entropy is a figure of speech, then,” sighed Nefastis,

Why worry, she worried; Nefastis is a nut, forget it, a sincere nut.

“It’s OK,” he said. “Please don’t cry. Come on in on the couch. The news will be on any minute. We can do it there.” “It?” said Oedipa. “Do it? What?” “Have sexual intercourse,” replied Nefastis. “Maybe there’ll be something about China tonight.

She knew a few things about it: it had opposed the Thurn and Taxis postal system in Europe; its symbol was a muted post horn; sometime before 1853 it had appeared in America and fought the Pony Express and Wells, Fargo, either as outlaws in black, or disguised as Indians; and it survived today, in California, serving as a channel of communication for those of unorthodox sexual persuasion, inventors who believed in the reality of Maxwell’s Demon, possibly her own husband, Mucho Maas (but she’d thrown Mucho’s letter long away, there was no way for Genghis Cohen to check the stamp, so if she wanted to find out for sure she’d have to ask Mucho himself).

“I use the U. S. Mail because I was never taught any different,” she pleaded. “But I’m not your enemy. I don’t want to be.”

sign,” he whispered, “is what it is.”

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed.

She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity’s pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike “clues” were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. In

The dead man, like Maxwell’s Demon, was the linking feature in a coincidence. Without him neither she nor Jesús would be exactly here, exactly now. It was enough, a coded warning. What, tonight, was chance?

But unlike WASTE, somebody had troubled to write in, in pencil: DON’T EVER ANTAGONIZE THE HORN

Catching a TWA flight to Miami was an uncoordinated boy who planned to slip at night into aquariums and open negotiations with the dolphins, who would succeed man. He was kissing his mother passionately goodbye, using his tongue.

But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private.

Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered?

What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?

Would it be today? “Ramírez,” she cried. The arthritic looked around on his rusty neck. “He’s going to die,” she said. “Who isn’t?” said Ramírez.

So when this mattress flared up around the sailor, in his Viking’s funeral: the stored, coded years of uselessness, early death, self-harrowing, the sure decay of hope, the set of all men who had slept on it, whatever their lives had been, would truly cease to be, forever, when the mattress burned.

It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of.

“dt,” God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick.

Next day, after twelve hours of sleep and no dreams to speak of, Oedipa checked out of the hotel and drove down the peninsula to Kinneret.

She wanted Hilarius to tell her she was some kind of a nut and needed a rest, and that there was no Trystero. She also wanted to know why the chance of its being real should menace her so.

“And part of me must have really wanted to believe—like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror—that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in.

You know, with the LSD, we’re finding, the distinction begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges. But I never took the drug, I chose to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I know who I am and who the others are.

“Who are you, lady?” She told him. “How do you spell that first name?” He also took down her address, age, phone number, next of kin, husband’s occupation, for the news media.

If I’d been a real Nazi I’d have chosen Jung, nicht wahr?

slept three hours a night trying not to dream, and spent the other 21 at the forcible acquisition of faith. And yet my penance hasn’t been enough. They’ve come like angels of death to get me, despite all I tried to do.”

“How’s it going?” the cop inquired. “Just marv,” said Oedipa. “I’ll let you know if it’s hopeless.”

“I came,” she said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.” “Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

“How do you feel about this terrible thing?” “Terrible,” said Oedipa. “Wonderful,” said Mucho.

Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig?

At the station they kissed goodbye, all of them.

“You’re trying to tell me something,” said Oedipa. They gave it to her then in prose. Metzger and Serge’s chick had run off to Nevada, to get married. Serge, on close questioning, admitted the bit about the eight-year-old was so far only imaginary, but that he was hanging diligently around playgrounds and should have some news for them any day.

This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.

Charles could ask no end of questions I’m too young to cope with yet.”

If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night.