The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl. She drove savagely along the freeway,

“There’s a certain harassed style,” she said, “you get to recognize. I thought only kids caused it. I guess not.”

“What I saw out at the Tank Theatre wasn’t pornographic?” “Randy Driblette’s production? No, I thought it was typically virtuous.” He looked sadly past her toward a stretch of sky. “He was a peculiarly moral man.

They are stripping from me, she said subvocally—feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss—they are stripping away, one by one, my men. My shrink, pursued by Israelis, has gone mad; my husband, on LSD, gropes like a child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the elaborate candy house of himself and away, hopelessly away, from what has passed, I was hoping forever, for love; my one extra-marital fella has eloped with a depraved 15-year-old; my best guide back to the Trystero has taken a Brody. Where am I?

The Disinherited, and fashioned a livery of black for his followers, black to symbolize the only thing that truly belonged to them in their exile: the night.

Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I’ve got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him?

signs of decay in the system had appeared. Private local posts had encroached so far on the Imperial licenses that the two cities shut down their Thurn and Taxis offices.

‘The salvation of Europe,’ Konrad says, ‘depends on communication, right? We

When they were out of earshot he swiveled on her a look sympathetic, annoyed, perhaps also a little erotic. “How’s your quest?”

Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or you are hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against you, so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books, constant surveillance of your movements, planting of post horn images all over San Francisco, bribing of librarians, hiring of professional actors and Pierce Inverarity only knows what-all besides, all financed out of the estate in a way either too secret or too involved for your

For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.

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

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

Pierce Inverarity was really dead.

There was the true continuity, San Narciso had no boundaries. No one knew yet how to draw them. She had dedicated herself, weeks ago, to making sense of what Inverarity had left behind, never suspecting that the legacy was America.

Though he had never talked business with her, she had known it to be a fraction of him that couldn’t come out even, would carry forever beyond any decimal place she might name; her love, such as it had been, remaining incommensurate with his need to possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines, personal antagonisms, growth rates into being. “Keep it bouncing,” he’d told her once, “that’s all the secret, keep it bouncing.”