More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Was that how he’d died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.
“I think it’s time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow.”
So it was the last of his voices she ever heard.
But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long.
filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else’s life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.
After a half hour in front of her vanity mirror drawing and having to redraw dark lines along her eyelids that each time went ragged or wavered violently before she could take the brush away.
She finally, having nothing she knew of to lose, had taken it.
But it was easier to stay.
He claimed to have once cured a case of hysterical blindness with his number 37, the “Fu-Manchu”
anything. So, insulated, she decided not to make any fuss. “Run away with me,” said Roseman when the coffee came. “Where?” she asked.
but about what remained yet had somehow, before this, stayed away.
she had noticed the absence of an intensity,
all that had then gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower.
seeking hopelessly to fill the void:
Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried.
see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.
Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all.
she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey.
If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
so after telling him to hang up if Dr. Hilarius called and look after the oregano in the garden, which had contracted a strange mold, she went.
if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance.
Nothing was happening.
Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d
so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.
She thought of Mucho, her husband, trying to believe in his job.
neighborhood that was little more than the road’s skinny right-of-way,
She had never known numbers to run so high. It seemed unnatural.
Pierce, she happened to know, had owned a large block of shares, had been somehow involved in negotiating an understanding with the county tax assessor to lure Yoyodyne here in the first place. It was part, he explained,
of being a founding father.
bottled gas works,
Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape—it wasn’t.
What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.
A representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph holding a white blossom towered thirty feet into the air; the sign, lit up despite the sun, said “Echo Courts.”
watching the artificial windstorm overhead toss gauze in five-foot excursions. Remembering her idea about a slow whirlwind, words she couldn’t hear.
Too fat to Frug, That’s what you tell me all the time, When you really try’n’ to put me down, But I’m hip, So close your big fat lip, Yeah, baby, I may be too fat to Frug,
But at least I ain’t too slim to Swim.
We’re new yet. Our manager says we should sing like that. We watch English movies a lot, for the accent.”
“You are a paranoid,” Oedipa said.
“So hey,” he murmured, “after scouring motels all day to find you, I can come in there, can’t I?”
nothing
let her know,
You know what mothers like that turn their male children into.”
“You certainly don’t look,” Oedipa began, then had second thoughts.
“I live inside my looks, and I’m never sure. The possibility haunts me.”
Oedipa thought suddenly, or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, it’s all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot. O Metzger.
“I didn’t know,”
Oedipa drew a sharp breath, Metzger on the chance it might be for him looked over. But she’d only been reminded of her look downhill this noontime.
“But you still don’t know,”
“Bones of what?” wondered Oedipa. “Inverarity knew. He owned 51% of the filter process.” “Tell me.”
She looked at her watch, but it had stopped.
