The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

You’re so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.

“Fair enough,” drawled Metzger, taking her hand as if to shake on the bet and kissing its palm instead, sending the dry end of his tongue to graze briefly among her fate’s furrows, the changeless salt hatchings of her identity.

It kept her from asking him any more questions. Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive.

lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homo-sexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon’s tearing-free and monument to her exile;

fashioned for his 17th-century audiences, so preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, a little poignantly, for that abyss of civil war that had been waiting, cold and deep, only a few years ahead of them.

They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, “This is my body,” the keen-witted Angelo observing that it’s the first time he’s told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying.

In the space of a sip of dandelion wine it came to her that she would never know how many times such a seizure may already have visited, or how to grasp it should it visit again.

unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternate universes it would take.

They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her optimism, and one by one, pinch by precision pinch, they were immobilizing her.