Shadow Ticket

by Thomas Pynchon

Doesn’t quite slam the door, but there is some emphasis to the way it shuts.

A big ape with a light touch. The light touch fools women into thinking he’s sensitive, which he isn’t.

“Der Führer,” gently, “is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him ‘that intelligent young German Fascist.’ ”

But if a human soul can be defined as a structure of memories, if to ‘read’ an object is somehow to gain access to what it remembers, then how can we begrudge it a soul?”

“Just so long as you ain’t another one of these metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation. Get to reading too much crime fiction in the magazines, start thinking it’s all about who done it. What really happened. Hidden history. Oh, yeah. Seeing all the cards at the end of a hand. For some, that kinda thing gets religious mighty quick.”

By the time it was over she’d eaten six cubic feet of popcorn and was using his tie to wipe the butter off her fingers with.

A Statue of Liberty made of Jell-O. Where do you start eating it? The head? The torch?

The magazine selection in the outer waiting area at Godwin Zipf includes Popular Litigation, Modern Psychopathy, and Steamy Detective, deep in whose cover story it’s not till Boynt reaches and shakes him does Hicks realize he’s been immersed for a while.

“Does cheese, considered as a living entity, also possess consciousness?”

“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 beings?”

Radio-Cheez was designed to stay fresh forever, in or out of the icebox, thanks to a secret, indeed obsessionally proprietary, radioactive ingredient.

The year 1930 happened to be the 1776 of the cheese business.

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.

KA-BOOM. And then some.

“How’s the amnesia, forgotten anything interesting lately?”

It was like Prohibition all over again, only different.

“In your investigations you cannot have failed to notice how often fathers and daughters are run by strange emotions, which, although occasionally dangerous, do continue to guarantee job security for us all.”

Explaining that his client the Count belongs to a secret community of lampadophiles, or persons sexually attracted to lamps. “You may not have run across it that much in the States.”

“Well…depending what you mean by ‘really’…”

Sometimes in Hungary, and this is sworn to by any number of tourists and travelers, you can step into a revolving door in front of a native Hungarian, who will nevertheless then step out into the street ahead of you, as if you somehow have percolated through each other, actually occupying the same space, no memory, no expectation, simply the coercive sweep of the moving door drawing you along, molecules for an instant all intermingling, simmering together like, like soup…and how intimate is that?

“Yeah but…wait, now, you’re saying Death has a, a penis?”

Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety, still snoozy and safe, brat smoke from a lunch wagon grill, some kid practicing accordion through an open window, first snow coming into town off the prairie, barrooms where the smell of beer is generations deep, women in round little hats.

Don’t expect a philosophical cop.

“The future of flirtation…here they call it Gesichtsröhre, or ‘Face-Tube.’ ”

“Semi-vasectomy where they tie off one testicle so it starts producing male hormones instead of sperm cells.

“Russia remains the world’s largest untapped reservoir of pre-Christian faith…magical and shamanic arts…Dialectical materialism will never succeed with a people who regard the material sphere as essentially spiritual…Objects with souls…Bolshevism only a passing phase…ephemeral cannot begin to describe…As

Yuri, now in what he thinks of as government work, sports a prison tattoo of Marx, Engels, and Lenin across his chest, needled in years ago in the semireligious belief that no Soviet firing squad would ever damage imagery this sacred.

“Knowing that idiot F., now he’ll send us to Brazil in pursuit.”

“Wait, now you’re talking about—vampires?” “Unavoidably. Common as beetles out here, but these days, to be honest, they’re mostly for distraction, allowing other forces to pursue deeper schemes…If

“Oh and this is Erzsébet, we’re eating her for Christmas.”

Everything the Al Capone of Cheez was Al Capone of is now in your hands, you’re the Alcaponissima.”

“You’re telling me there are death squads going around with a list of targets while friendly submarines meantime are also cruising around benevolently picking them up before any harm can be done. This is crazy.”

“Maybe they’ll keep finding new ways to be innocent.”