Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

Doc stood, put out his cigarette in the rest of his FBI coffee. “Tell Penny how groovy it was of her to set up this little get-together, oh, and hey—can I be frank for a minute?” “Of course,” said Agents Flatweed and Borderline. Snapping his fingers, Doc sang himself out the door with four bars of “Fly Me to the Moon,” more or less on pitch,

MEANTIME, PEOPLE WERE seeing Mickey all over the place. In the meat section at Ralph’s in Culver City, shoplifting filet mignons in party-size lots. Out at Santa Anita, in earnest discussion with a person named either Shorty or Speedy. In some accounts, both. In a bar in Los Mochis, watching an old episode of The Invaders dubbed into Spanish, and writing urgent memos to himself. In airport VIP lounges from Heathrow to Honolulu, drinking heedless combinations of grape and grain not seen since the days of Prohibition. At antiwar rallies in the Bay Area, begging a variety of armed authorities to mow him down and end his troubles. Out at Joshua Tree, doing peyote. Ascending into the sky haloed in an all-but-unwatchable radiance toward spacecraft not of earthly origin. So forth. Doc started a file on all these reports, and hoped he wouldn’t forget where he was stashing it.