The Crying of Lot 49

by Thomas Pynchon

  But as with Maxwell’s Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

  Beyond its origins, the libraries told her nothing more about Tristero. For all they knew, it had never survived the struggle for Dutch independence. To find the rest, she had to approach from the Thurn and Taxis side. This had its perils. For Emory Bortz it seemed to turn into a species of cute game. He held, for instance, to a mirror-image theory, by which any period of instability for Thurn and Taxis must have its reflection in Tristero’s shadow-state. He applied this to the mystery of why the dread name should have appeared in print only around the middle of the 17th century. How had the author of the pun on “this Trystero dies irae” overcome his reluctance? How had half the Vatican couplet, with its suppression of the “Trystero” line, found its way into the Folio? Whence had the daring of even hinting at a Thurn and Taxis rival come? Bortz maintained there must have been some crisis inside Tristero grave enough to keep them from retaliating. Perhaps the same that kept them from taking the life of Dr Blobb.

  But should Bortz have exfoliated the mere words so lushly, into such unnatural roses, under which, in whose red, scented dusk, dark history slithered unseen? When Leonard II-Francis, Count of Thurn and Taxis, died in 1628, his wife Alexandrine of Rye succeeded him in name as postmaster, though her tenure was never considered official. She retired in 1645. The actual locus of power in the monopoly remained uncertain until 1650, when the next male heir, Lamoral II-Claude-Francis, took over. Meanwhile, in Brussels and Antwerp 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.

  How, Bortz asked, would Tristero have responded? Postulating then some militant faction proclaiming the great moment finally at hand. Advocating a takeover by force, while their enemy was vulnerable. But conservative opinion would care only to continue in opposition, exactly as the Tristero had these seventy years. There might also be, say, a few visionaries: men above the immediacy of their time who could think historically. At least one among them hip enough to foresee the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the Peace of Westphalia, the breakup of the Empire, the coming descent into particularism.

  “He looks like Kirk Douglas,” cried Bortz, “he’s wearing this sword, his name is something gutsy like Konrad. They’re meeting in the back room of a tavern, all these broads in peasant blouses carrying steins around, everybody juiced and yelling, suddenly Konrad jumps up on a table. The crowd hushes, ‘The salvation of Europe,’ Konrad says, ‘depends on communication, right? We face this anarchy of jealous German princes, hundreds of them scheming, counterscheming, infighting, dissipating all of the Empire’s strength in their useless bickering. But whoever could control the lines of communication, among all these princes, would control them. That network someday could unify the Continent. So I propose that we merge with our old enemy Thurn and Taxis——’ Cries of no, never, throw the traitor out, till this barmaid, little starlet, sweet on Konrad, cold-conks with a stein his loudest antagonist. ‘Together,’ Konrad is saying, ‘our two systems could be invincible. We could refuse service on any but an Imperial basis. Nobody could move troops, farm produce, anything, without us. Any prince tries to start his own courier system, we suppress it. We, who have so long been disinherited, could be the heirs of Europe!’ Prolonged cheering.”

  “But they didn’t keep the Empire from falling apart,” Oedipa pointed out.

  “So,” Bortz backing off, “the militants and the conservatives fight to a standstill, Konrad and his little group of visionaries, being nice guys, try to mediate the hassle, by the time they all get squared away again, everybody’s played out, the Empire’s had it, Thurn and Taxis wants no deals.”

  And with the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the fountain-head of Thurn and Taxis legitimacy is lost forever among the other splendid delusions. Possibilities for paranoia become abundant. If Tristero has managed to maintain even partial secrecy, if Thurn and Taxis have no clear idea who their adversary is, or how far its influence extends, then many of them must come to believe in something very like the Scurvhamite’s blind, automatic anti-God. Whatever it is, it has the power to murder their riders, send landslides thundering across their roads, by extension bring into being new local competition and presently even state postal monopolies; disintegrate their Empire. It is their time’s ghost, out to put the Thurn and Taxis ass in a sling.

  But over the next century and a half the paranoia recedes, as they come to discover the secular Tristero. Power, omniscience, implacable malice, attributes of what they’d thought to be a historical principle, a Zeitgeist, are carried over to the now human enemy. So much that, by 1795, it is even suggested that Tristero has staged the entire French Revolution, just for an excuse to issue the Proclamation of 9th Frimaire, An III, ratifying the end of the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly in France and the Lowlands.

  “Suggested by who, though,” said Oedipa. “Did you read that someplace?”

  “Wouldn’t somebody have brought it up?” Bortz said. “Maybe not.”

  She didn’t press the argument. Having begun to feel reluctant about following up anything. She hadn’t asked Genghis Cohen, for example, if his Expert Committee had ever reported back on the stamps he’d sent them. She knew that if she went back to Vesperhaven House to talk again to old Mr Thoth about his grandfather, she would find that he too had died. She knew she ought to write to K. da Chingado, publisher of the unaccountable paperback Courier’s Tragedy, but she didn’t, and never asked Bortz if he had, either. Worst of all, she found herself going often to absurd lengths to avoid talking about Randolph Driblette. Whenever the girl showed up, the one who’d been at the wakes, Oedipa found excuses to leave the gathering. She felt she was betraying Driblette and herself. But left it alone, anxious that her revelation not expand beyond a certain point. Lest, possibly, it grow larger than she and assume her to itself. When Bortz asked her one evening if he could bring in D’Amico, who was at NYU, Oedipa told him no, too fast, too nervous. He didn’t mention it again and neither, of course, did she.

  She did go back to The Scope, though, one night, restless, alone, leery of what she might find. She found Mike Fallopian, a couple weeks into raising a beard, wearing button-down olive shirt, creased fatigue pants minus cuffs and belt loops, two-button fatigue jacket, no hat. He was surrounded by broads, drinking champagne cocktails, and bellowing low songs. When he spotted Oedipa he gave her the wide grin and waved her over.

  “You look,” she said, “wow. Like you’re all on the move. Training rebels up in the mountains.” Hostile looks from the girls twined around what parts of Fallopian were accessible.

  “It’s a revolutionary secret,” he laughed, throwing up his arms and flinging off a couple of camp-followers. “Go on, now, all of you. I want to talk to this one.” When they were out of earshot he swiveled on her a look sympathetic, annoyed, perhaps also a little erotic. “How’s your quest?”

  She gave him a quick status report. He kept quiet while she talked, his expression slowly changing to something she couldn’t recognize. It bothered her. To jog him a little, she said, “I’m surprised you people aren’t using the system too.”

  “Are we an underground?” he came back, mild enough. “Are we rejects?”

  “I didn’t mean——”

  “Maybe we haven’t found them yet,” said Fallopian. “Or maybe they haven’t approached us. Or maybe we are using W.A.S.T.E., only it’s a secret.” Then, as electronic music began to percolate into the room, “But there’s another angle too.” She sensed what he was going to say and began, reflexively, to grind together her back molars. A nervous habit she’d developed in the last few days. “Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody’s putting you on? That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?”

  It had occurred to her. But like the though
t that someday she would have to die, Oedipa had been steadfastly refusing to look at that possibility directly, or in any but the most accidental of lights. “No,” she said, “that’s ridiculous.”

  Fallopian watched her, nothing if not compassionate. “You ought,” quietly, “really, you ought to think about it. Write down what you can’t deny. Your hard intelligence. But then write down what you’ve only speculated, assumed. See what you’ve got. At least that.”

  “Go ahead,” she said, cold, “at least that. What else, after that?”

  He smiled, perhaps now trying to salvage whatever was going soundlessly smash, its net of invisible cracks propagating leisurely though the air between them. “Please don’t be mad.”

  “Verify my sources, I suppose,” Oedipa kept on, pleasantly. “Right?”

  He didn’t say any more.

  She stood up, wondering if her hair was in place, if she looked rejected or hysterical, if they’d been causing a scene. “I knew you’d be different,” she said, “Mike, because everybody’s been changing on me. But it hadn’t gone as far as hating me.”

  “Hating you.” He shook his head and laughed.

  “If you need any armbands or more weapons, do try Winthrop Tremaine, over by the freeway. Tremaine’s Swastika Shoppe. Mention my name.”

  “We’re already in touch, thanks.” She left him, in his modified Cuban ensemble, watching the floor, waiting for his broads to come back.

  Well, what about her sources? She was avoiding the question, yes. One day Genghis Cohen called, sounding excited, and asked her to come see something he’d just got in the mail, the U.S. Mail. It turned out to be an old American stamp, bearing the device of the muted post horn, belly-up badger, and the motto: WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO’S EMPIRE.

  “So that’s what it stands for,” said Oedipa. “Where did you get this?”

  “A friend,” Cohen said, leafing through a battered Scott catalogue, “in San Francisco.” As usual she did not go on to ask for any name or address. “Odd. He said he couldn’t find the stamp listed. But here it is. An addendum, look.” In the front of the book a slip of paper had been pasted in. The stamp, designated 163L1, was reproduced, under the title “Tristero Rapid Post, San Francisco, California,” and should have been inserted between Local listings 139 (the Third Avenue Post Office, of New York) and 140 (Union Post, also of New York). Oedipa, off on a kind of intuitive high, went immediately to the end-paper in back and found the sticker of Zapf’s Used Books.

  “Sure,” Cohen protested. “I drove out there one day to see Mr Metzger, while you were up north. This is the Scott Specialized, you see, for American stamps, a catalogue I don’t generally keep up on. My field being European and colonial. But my curiosity had been aroused, so——”

  “Sure,” Oedipa said. Anybody could paste in an addendum. She drove back to San Narciso to have another look at the list of Inverarity’s assets. Sure enough, the whole shopping center that housed Zapf’s Used Books and Tremaine’s surplus place had been owned by Pierce. Not only that, but the Tank Theater, also.

  OK, Oedipa told herself, stalking around the room, her viscera hollow, waiting on something truly terrible, OK. It’s unavoidable, isn’t it? Every access route to the Tristero could be traced also back to the Inverarity estate. Even Emory Bortz, with his copy of Blobb’s Peregrinations (bought, she had no doubt he’d tell her in the event she asked, also at Zapf’s), taught now at San Narciso College, heavily endowed by the dead man.

  Meaning what? That Bortz, along with Metzger, Cohen, Driblette, Koteks, the tattooed sailor in San Francisco, the W.A.S.T.E. carriers she’d seen—that all of them were Pierce Inverarity’s men? Bought? Or loyal, for free, for fun, to some grandiose practical joke he’d cooked up, all for her embarrassment, or terrorizing, or moral improvement?

  Change your name to Miles, Dean, Serge, and /or Leonard, baby, she advised her reflection in the half-light of that afternoon’s vanity mirror. Either way, they’ll call it paranoia. They. 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 nonlegal mind to know about even though you are co-executor, so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke. Or you are fantasying some such plot, in which case you are a nut, Oedipa, out of your skull.

  Those, now that she was looking at them, she saw to be the alternatives. Those symmetrical four. She didn’t like any of them, but hoped she was mentally ill; that that’s all it was. That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. 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.

  Old fillings in her teeth began to bother her. She would spend nights staring at a ceiling lit by the pink glow of San Narciso’s sky. Other nights she could sleep for eighteen drugged hours and wake, enervated, hardly able to stand. In conferences with the keen, fast-talking old man who was new counsel for the estate, her attention span could often be measured in seconds, and she laughed nervously more than she spoke. Waves of nausea, lasting five to ten minutes, would strike her at random, cause her deep misery, then vanish as if they had never been. There were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains. One day she drove into L.A., picked a doctor at random from the phone book, went to her, told her she thought she was pregnant. They arranged for tests. Oedipa gave her name as Grace Bortz and didn’t show up for her next appointment.

  Genghis Cohen, once so shy, now seemed to come up with new goodies every other day—a listing in an outdated Zumstein catalogue, a friend in the Royal Philatelic Society’s dim memory of some muted post horn spied in the catalogue of an auction held at Dresden in 1923; one day a typescript, sent him by another friend in New York. It was supposed to be a translation of an article from an 1865 issue of the famous Bibliothèque des Timbrophiles of Jean-Baptiste Moens. Reading like another of Bortz’s costume dramas, it told of a great schism in the Tristero ranks during the French Revolution. According to the recently discovered and decrypted journals of the Comte Raoul Antoine de Vouziers, Marquis de Tour et Tassis, one element among the Tristero had never accepted the passing of the Holy Roman Empire, and saw the Revolution as a temporary madness. Feeling obliged, as fellow aristocrats, to help Thurn and Taxis weather its troubles, they put out probes to see if the house was interested at all in being subsidized. This move split The Tristero wide open. At a convention held in Milan, arguments raged for a week, lifelong enmities were created, families divided, blood spilt. At the end of it a resolution to subsidize Thurn and Taxis failed. Many conservatives, taking this as a Millennial judgment against them, ended their association with The Tristero. Thus, the article smugly concluded, did the organization enter the penumbra of historical eclipse. From the battle of Austerlitz until the difficulties of 1848, the Tristero drifted on, deprived of nearly all the noble patronage that had sustained them; now reduced to handling anarchist correspondence; only peripherally engaged—in Germany with the ill-fated Frankfurt Assembly, in Buda-Pesth at the barricades, perhaps even among the watchmakers of the Jura, preparing them for the coming of M. Bakunin. By far the greatest number, however,
fled to America during 1849–50, where they are no doubt at present rendering their services to those who seek to extinguish the flame of Revolution.

  Less excited than she might have been even a week ago, Oedipa showed the piece to Emory Bortz. “All the Tristero refugees from the 1849 reaction arrive in America,” it seemed to him, “full of high hopes. Only what do they find?” Not really asking; it was part of his game. “Trouble.” Around 1845 the U. S. government had carried out a great postal reform, cutting their rates, putting most independent mail routes out of business. By the ’70’s and ’80’s, any independent carrier that tried to compete with the government was immediately squashed. 1849–50 was no time for any immigrating Tristero to get ideas about picking up where they’d left off back in Europe.