The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and /or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the half-light of that afternoon’s vanity mirror. Either way, they’ll call it paranoia. They.

Your gynecologist has no test for what she was pregnant with.

The Tristero “forgeries” were to be sold, as lot 49.

Oedipa went back to Echo Courts to drink bourbon until the sun went down and it was as dark as it would ever get.

“I was in the little boys’ room,” he said. “The men’s room was full.”

She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.

That America coded in Inverarity’s testament, whose was that?

For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only was she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.

Next day, with the courage you find you have when there is nothing more to lose, she got in touch with C. Morris Schrift, and inquired after his mysterious client.