Shadow Ticket

by Thomas Pynchon

Is, is we could be running the country any day now and you’ll all have to swear loyalty to us because by then we’ll be in the next war fighting for our lives, and maybe that’ll be all you’ve got.”

Since about 1930, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island have been receiving boxes of Jell-O plus a Jell-O mold in the shape of some famous U.S. landmark as part of their welcome-to-the-U.S. package.

Y

“Oriental Attitude, discipline, serenity, call it what you like, wallow as deep in it as you can get, but he’s still in there, Hicks, still the same dirt-stupid gorilla always ready to take short pay for beating up whoever he’s told to. You think you’ve gotten past it, but those we all report to, they know better, they know that once you’re down here with us, you’ll never change, there’ll be no getting rid of that inner torpedo. Whenever they need him, they will know how to call him out to do their bidding.”

fails, go in there and make with the clodhoppers,

Bruno Airmont Dairy Metaphysics Symposium held annually at the Department of Cheese Studies at the UW branch in Sheboygan, this year featuring the deep and perennial question, “Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”

history of food science, a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented, like Doctor Frankenstein or something—” “Cheese—wait, cheese…has feelings, you say? You mean like…emotions?” “Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin. Thousands of secretly devout cheezatarians…” “Secretly?” “Only waiting for our moment. We have to be careful, don’t we…wouldn’t want to go through all that Christians-and-Romans business again, would we?” “Wisconsin is possessed by some vast earth-scented spirit of Bovinity, docile herds of cows

“How the heck do we create a market for dairy products in Japan short of invading and occupying the country outright? Taking away their tea or sake or whatever it is they drink and forcing them to drink milk like normal human

Reports furthermore beginning to come in from grocery stores all across the U.S.A. of Radio-Cheez shelf incidents, getting warmer and warmer till eventually exploding, sending once loyal customers running in blind panic down to nearby rivers to throw in all their as yet unexploded jars of the product, which were then carried away buoyant and glowing downstream, sometimes hundreds, even thousands of miles to coastal harbors and ports before detonating against the hulls of ships at anchor, any found still upstream being promptly labeled enemy mines, with duly sworn sharpshooters

Here began a sort of higher education. Since the end of the War the center of gravity of the Cheese Universe has apparently been shifting, to some observers at alarming

climaxing in the Cheese Corridor Incursion, a

soup kitchens, one-arm joints throughout the upper Midwest, effectively down the hatches of the hungry inside of forty-eight hours.

Dippy Chazz’s usual Wisconsin Old Fashioned shows up, Korbel brandy, 7UP lithiated lemon soda, and, sharing the toothpick with a cherry, a pickled Brussels sprout.

white slave laws and worse, when did you get so adventurous?”

“You’re sure sensitive, for a side of beef.”

whose Ojibwe name means He Who Watches in Secret,

“You tellin me ol’ Daphne—” “No, no, Ojibwe, see, instead of the werewolf, we have the Windigo. Maybe human, maybe not, nobody ever likes to look too close…turns out to have

“Walter Winchell is real?” It isn’t that Hicks enjoys mutually blank staring, though now and then he’ll find himself provoking some, like calling a time-out in a game, hoping to pick up a few meaningful seconds. Which doesn’t seem to be happening here.

Depression-Christmas vaudeville houses less brightly lit, reduced prices matinee and evening, according to industry folklore this being among the worst weeks in show business, and since it’s a week in Milwaukee besides, twice as bad as that, maybe more.

One of many interesting facts about Milwaukee is that along with the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the QWERTY typewriter keyboard layout, it’s also the birthplace of the shoe-store X-ray machine.

The guy with the auger isn’t too happy. “Dammit, you dynamite hounds,” he screams, “this is sinful, don’t you know the Angler’s Creed forbids this kind of thing?” “Missouri Synod Lutheran, myself,” Hicks in a shaky voice he almost doesn’t recognize.

About now a beat cop and old friend of Uncle Lefty’s shows up, “Have to ticket you for crossing against the light back there, Hicks, sorry but it’s a dollar fine.”

Not that he’s any special fan of the single life, understand, and it isn’t their fault if women are as superficial, untrustworthy, and unwilling to stick around when the going gets the least bit tough as he has found them in general to be. “OK,” April considering which of a number of blunt weapons in her handbag to bring out, “but aside from that?” The counterargument, obvious to anybody but a beefbrain like Hicks, being that in times like these to stay at anybody’s side for longer than five minutes could qualify as at least potential lifetime partner

Before the echoes have died away, Lino Trapanese is on the phone. “Case you were wondering,

“It’s a Fascist dictatorship, Professore.” “Don’t tell them around Palermo. What makes you private dicks any different?” “Oh, swell, P.I.s are Fascists now?” “Study your history, gabadost, you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as Mussolini’s boys.”

“That don’t…” then stopping to think about it. “Goon-squad work, stay in it long enough, you should know what happens.”

The Nazis are even less easy to get a story out of. Too many of them would be happy to take credit for a bomb of any size, even those who wouldn’t know one end of a firecracker from the other.

umbatz,

“Midnight in Milwaukee,” and in her glottal attack, for example, on phrases like “Any town but this one,” her voice breaks a little, as if she’s

Jabbo Smith and his Rhythm Aces, one of your local Milwaukee horns, there’s people say he’s

shellac.

“Don’t fall for the rube act,” Connie advises, “this gent is straight out of Chicago, where he dodges more bullets per work shift than all the donuts the lot of ye’s eaten in yer careers.”

“Some tickets are jinxed. Every time the name Daphne Airmont gets typed into one, somebody sooner or later has to go wake up a doctor.”

doing her best, every night for the duration, to give alcohol a bad name—” “Mmm, but

Continuing to bicker, at first charmingly, but then with more of an edge. Are they “fighting,” really, or only pretending to? Depends on how much radio listening you do. Audiences go for this, while at the same time secretly hoping that one day one of the two R’s will go so far as to murder the other, ideally while on the air…

“The nation which cannot produce a plausible SticToPud,” summarizes Alf, “is a nation whose soul is in peril.

Hicks eyes the couple uneasily. Though they might really be no more than innocent retirees out to see the world, there’s also about them an air of international monkey business, maybe even some kind of espionage racket, hard at work. Plus that familiar feeling that at any moment the name of a certain German Political Celebrity is about to come up, which indeed it does, only to sink, to Hicks’s relief, back into the general effervescence.

“The whole idea, then as now, being to keep the bolshies behind the fence.” Alf expects a “Great Simplification” quite soon, “Matters will then all be ever so much easier.

“imagine how enormously simplified romance will become, scarcely time for it, anyway, once is enough, isn’t it, and tralala on to the next.”

“Declined to identify themselves,” Alf recalls, “behaved as if they didn’t have to, no hull number, nothing at the jackstaff, put a shot across our bow, actually,”

and eyes, and “As long as none of it’s happening to you,” the Gumshoe’s Manual advises, “it’s funny—but then, when it does happen to you, you wonder why you ever thought it was funny.”

Call it obsession but it is in fact a duty, an all but sacred obligation to remain faithful to the moment of love at first sight, for who knows how many years to follow, keeping it uncorrupted, not allowing a day to pass without in some way returning to it—The Moment. El Momento, you might say.”

a number of code breakers have recently found themselves at loose ends after the Black Chamber was shut down, on Halloween of 1929, just after the stock market crashed, by Republican bigwig and Secretary of State Henry “Gentlemen Don’t Read Each Other’s Mail” Stimson.

Things will never go back to the way they were, it’ll all just keep getting more, what the Chinese call, ‘interesting.’ ”

certainly a go at the high-velocity fruit machines, though as for emotions and high drama, Hicks has seen more vivacity in old-time Wentworth Avenue opium joints during the graveyard shift.

Hicks and his friends used to hang around Wonewoc hoping to see ghosts or other supernatural visitors, unaccountable lights up on Spook Hill after dark, sounds of warning, of lament, which couldn’t be explained away as owls or the wind. Shapes which did not respond when

spinthromaniac.”

“Free trade—see, back in Milwaukee, freedom, nobody thought much about it, we just figured hey, a free country ain’t it and left it at that. But—” this being about the point Hicks begins to feel warning signs from his feet—“the real thing, what if that’s only when they’re comin after you for somethin? But they haven’t caught you yet. So for a while, as long as you can stay on the run, that’s the only time you’re really free?” “Uh-huh well Stuffy like they say there in the submarine racket, too deep for

Fiume, that’s our home port these days, there’s some swell beer joints, it’s the Milwaukee of the Adriatic.”

dipso

“Oh, who doesn’t love a jewel thief, good-hearted outlaw preying only on greedy plutes who can afford to lose a sparkler or two. Hardly ever collared for it, filed under Annoyance more