Inherent Vice

by Thomas Pynchon

  For the last few weeks now, St. Flip of Lawndale, for whom Jesus Christ was not only personal savior but surfing consultant as well, who rode an old-school redwood plank running just under ten feet with an inlaid mother-of-pearl cross on top and two plastic skegs of a violent pink color on the bottom, had been hitching rides from a friend with a little fiberglass runabout far out into the Outside, to surf what he swore was the gnarliest break in the world, with waves bigger than Waimea, bigger than Maverick’s up the coast at Half Moon Bay or Todos Santos in Baja. Stewardii on transpacific flights making their final approaches to LAX reported seeing him below, surfing where no surf should’ve been, a figure in white baggy trunks, whiter than the prevailing light could really account for. . . . In the evenings with the sunset behind him, he would ascend again to the secular groove of honky-tonk Gordita Beach and grab a beer and silently hang out and smile at people when he had to, and wait for first light to return.

  Back in his beach pad there was a velvet painting of Jesus riding goofyfoot on a rough-hewn board with outriggers, meant to suggest a crucifix, through surf seldom observed on the Sea of Galilee, though this hardly presented a challenge to Flip’s faith. What was “walking on water,” if it wasn’t Bible talk for surfing? In Australia once, a local surfer, holding the biggest can of beer Flip had ever seen, had even sold him a fragment of the True Board.

  As usual among the early customers at Wavos, there were differing opinions about what, if anything, the Saint had been surfing. Some argued for freak geography—an uncharted seamount or outer reef—others for a weird once-in-a-lifetime weather event, or maybe, like, a volcano, or a tidal wave, someplace far away out in the North Pacific, whose swells by the time they reached the Saint would have grown suitably gnarlacious.

  Doc, also up early, sat drinking Wavos coffee, which was rumored to have double-cross whites ground up in it, and listening to the increasingly hectic conversation, and mostly observing the Saint, who was waiting for his morning ride out to the break. Over the years Doc had known a surfer or two who’d found and ridden other breaks located far from shore that nobody else had the equipment either under their feet or in their hearts to ride, who’d gone alone every dawn, often for years, shadows cast out over the water, to be taken, unphotographed and unrecorded, on rides of five minutes and longer through seething tunnels of solar bluegreen, the true and unendurable color of daylight. Doc had noticed that after a while these folks would no longer be quite where their friends expected to find them. Long-standing tabs at frond-roofed beer bars had to be forgiven, shoreside honeys were left to gaze mournfully at the horizons and eventually to take up with civilians from over the berm, claims adjusters, vice principals, security guards, and so forth, even though rent on the abandoned surfer pads still got paid somehow and mysterious lights kept appearing through the windows long after the honky-tonks had closed for the night, and the people who thought they’d actually seen these absent surfers later admitted they might have been hallucinating after all.

  Doc had the Saint figured for one of those advanced spirits. His guess was that Flip rode the freak waves he’d found not so much out of insanity or desire for martyrdom as in a true stone indifference, the deep focus of a religious ecstatic who’s been tapped by God to be wiped out in atonement for the rest of us. And that one day Flip, like the others, would be someplace else, vanished even from GNASH, the Global Network of Anecdotal Surfer Horseshit, and these same people here would be sitting in Wavos arguing about where he was.

  Flip’s friend with the outboard showed up after a while, and amid a clamor of anti-powerboat remarks the two split down the hill.

  “Well, he’s crazy,” summarized Flaco the Bad.

  “I think they just go out and drink beer and fall asleep and come back when it gets dark,” opined Zigzag Twong, who had switched last year to a shorter board and more forgiving waves.

  Ensenada Slim shook his head gravely. “There’s too many stories about that break. Times it’s there, times it ain’t. Almost like something’s down below, guarding it. The olden-day surfers called it Death’s Doorsill. You don’t just wipe out, it grabs you—most often from behind just as you’re heading for what you think is safe water, or reading some obviously fatal shit totally the wrong way—and it pulls you down so deep you never come back up in time to take another breath, and just as you get lunched forever, so the old tales go, you hear a cosmic insane Surfaris laugh, echoing across the sky.”

  Everybody in Wavos including the Saint proceeded to cackle “Hoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo—Wipeout!” more or less in unison, and Zigzag and Flaco started arguing about the two different “Wipeout” singles, and which label, Dot or Decca, featured the laugh and which didn’t.

  Sortilège, who had been silent till now, chewing on the end of one braid and directing huge enigmatic lamps from one theoretician to another, finally piped up. “A patch of breaking surf right in the middle of what’s supposed to be deep ocean? A bottom where there was no bottom before? Well really, think about it, all through history, islands in the Pacific Ocean have been rising and sinking, and what if whatever Flip saw out there is something that sank long ago and is rising now slowly to the surface again?”

  “Some island?”

  “Oh, an island at least.”

  By this point in California history, enough hippie metaphysics had oozed in among surfing folk that even the regulars here at Wavos, some of them, seeing where this was headed, began to shift their feet and look around for other things to do.

  “Lemuria again,” muttered Flaco.

  “Problem with Lemuria?” inquired Sortilège sweetly.

  “The Atlantis of the Pacific.”

  “That’s the one, Flaco.”

  “And now you say this lost continent, is it’s rising to the surface again?”

  Her eyes narrowing with what, in a less composed person, could’ve been taken for annoyance, “Not so strange really, there’s always been predictions that someday Lemuria would reemerge, and what better time than now, with Neptune moving at last out of the Scorpio deathtrip, a water sign by the way, and rising into the Sagittarian light of the higher mind?”

  “So shouldn’t somebody be calling National Geographic or something?”

  “Surfer magazine?”

  “That’s it, boys, I’ve had my barney quota for the week.”

  “I’ll walk you,” Doc said.

  They moseyed south down the alleys of Gordita Beach, in the slow seep of dawn and the wintertime smell of crude oil and saltwater. After a while Doc said, “Ask you something?”

  “You heard Shasta split the country, and now you need to talk to somebody.”

  “Readin my thoughts again, babe.”

  “Read mine then, you know who to see as well as I do. Vehi Fairfield is the closest thing to a real oracle we’re ever gonna see in this neck of the woods.”

  “Maybe you’re prejudiced ’cause he’s your teacher. Maybe you’d like to place a small wager it’s only all that acid talking.”

  “Throwing your money away, no wonder you can’t keep your IOUs straight.”

  “Never had that problem when you were working at the office.”

  “And would I ever consider coming back, no, not without benefits including dental and chiropractic, and you know that’s way beyond your budget.”

  “I could offer freak-out insurance maybe.”

  “Already have that, it’s called shikantaza, you ought to try it.”

  “What I get for fallin in love outside my religion.”

  “Which’d be what, Colombian Orthodox?”

  Her boyfriend Spike was out on the porch with a cup of coffee. “Hey, Doc. Everybody’s up early today.”

  “She’s tryin to talk me into seeing her guru.”

  “Don’t look at me, man. You know she’s always right.”

  For a while
after he got back from Vietnam, Spike had been keenly paranoid about going anyplace he might run into hippies, believing all longhairs to be antiwar bombthrowers who could read his vibrations and tell immediately where he’d been and hate him for it, and try to work some sinister hippie mischief against him. The first time Doc met Spike, he found him a little frantically trying to assimilate into the freak culture, which sure hadn’t been there when he left and had made returning to the U.S. like landing on another planet full of hostile alien life-forms. “Trippy, man! How about that Abbie Hoffman! Let’s roll us a couple of numbers and hang out and listen to some Electric Prunes!”

  Doc could see that Spike would be fine as soon as he calmed down. “Sortilège says you were over in Vietnam, huh?”

  “Yeah, I’m one them baby killers.” He had his face angled down, but he was looking Doc in the eyes.

  “Tell the truth, I admire anybody’s had the balls,” Doc said.

  “Hey, I just went in every day and worked on helicopters. Me and Charlie, no worries, we spent a lot of time in town together hanging out smoking that righteous native weed, listening to rock ’n’ roll on the Armed Forces Radio. Every once in a while, they’d wave you over and go, look, you gonna sleep on the base tonight? you’d say, yeah, why? and they’d say, don’t sleep on the base tonight. Saved my ass a couple times like that. Their country, they want it, fine with me. Long as I can just work on my bike without nobody hassling me.”

  Doc shrugged. “Seems fair. Is that yours outside, that Moto Guzzi?”

  “Yeah, picked it up from some road maniac from Barstow who just rode the shit out of it, so putting it back in shape is taking up a few weekends. That and old Sortilège, they’re keeping me cheerful.”

  “It’s really nice to see you guys together.”

  Spike looked over at the corner of the room, thought a minute, said carefully, “We go back some, I was a year ahead of her at Mira Costa, we dated a couple times, then when I was over there we started writing, next thing anybody knew I was going, well, maybe I won’t re-up after all.”

  “Must’ve been around the time I had that matrimonial in Inglewood where the b.f. tried to piss on me through a keyhole I was lookin in. Leej will never let me forget that, she was still working for me then, I remember thinking that something cool must have been happening in her life.”

  As time passed, Spike was able slowly to learn to relax into the social yoga positions defining life at the beach. The Moto Guzzi brought its share of admirers to hang out and smoke dope and drink beer on the cement apron in front of the garage where Spike worked on it, and he found one or two veterans back from the ’Nam who wanted more or less the same unhassled civilian afterlife he did, especially Farley Branch, who’d been in the Signal Corps and managed to boost some equipment nobody wanted, including an old Bell & Howell 16-mm movie camera from WWII, army green, spring-wound, indestructible, and only a little bigger than the roll of film it used. They would take off on their bikes from time to time looking for targets of opportunity, both discovering after a while a common interest in respect for the natural environment, having seen too much of it napalmed, polluted, defoliated till the laterite beneath was sun-baked solid and useless. Farley had already collected dozens of reels’ worth of Stateside environmental abuse, especially Channel View Estates, which reminded him strangely of jungle clearings he had known. According to Spike, Farley had been out there the same day as Doc, shooting footage of the vigilante raid, and was waiting now to get it back from the lab.

  Spike himself had been growing obsessed with the El Segundo oil refinery and tanks just up the coast. Even when the wind here cooperated, Gordita was still like living on a houseboat anchored in a tar pit. Everything smelled like crude. Oil spilled from tankers washed up on the beach, black, thick, gooey. Anybody who walked on the beach got it on the bottoms of their feet. There were two schools of thought—Denis, for example, liked to let it just accumulate till it was thick as huarache soles, thereby saving him the price of a pair of sandals. Others, more fastidious, incorporated regular foot-cleaning into their day, like shaving or brushing their teeth.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Spike said the first time Sortilège found him on the porch with a table knife, scraping off the soles of his feet. “I love it here in Gordita, mostly ’cause it’s your hometown and you love it, but now and then there’s just some . . . little . . . fucking detail . . .”

  “They’re destroying the planet,” she agreed. “The good news is that like any living creature, Earth has an immune system too, and sooner or later she’s going to start rejecting agents of disease like the oil industry. And hopefully before we end up like Atlantis and Lemuria.”

  It was the belief of her teacher Vehi Fairfield that both empires had sunk into the sea because Earth couldn’t accept the levels of toxicity they’d reached.

  “Vehi’s okay,” Spike told Doc now, “though he sure does a awful lot of acid.”

  “It helps him see,” explained Sortilège.

  Vehi wasn’t just “into” LSD—acid was the medium he swam and occasionally surfed in. He got it delivered, possibly by special pipeline, from Laguna Canyon, direct from the labs of the post-Owsley psychedelic mafia believed in those days to be operating back in there. In the course of systematic daily tripping, he had found a spirit guide named Kamukea, a Lemuro-Hawaiian demigod from the dawn of Pacific history, who centuries ago had been a sacred functionary of the lost continent now lying beneath the Pacific Ocean.

  “And if anybody can put you in touch with Shasta Fay,” Sortilège said, “it’s Vehi.”

  “Come on, Leej, you know I had some weird history with him—”

  “Well, he thinks you’ve been trying to avoid him, and he can’t understood why.”

  “Simple. Rule number one of the Dopers’ Code? Never, ever put nobody—”

  “But he told you that was acid.”

  “No, he told me it was ‘Burgomeister Special Edition.’”

  “Well that’s what that means, Special Edition, it’s a phrase he uses.”

  “You know that, he knows that. . . .” By which point they were out on the esplanade, en route to Vehi’s place.

  Voluntary or whatever, the trip Vehi’d put him on with that magic beer can was one Doc kept hoping he’d forget about with time. But didn’t.

  It had all begun, apparently, some 3 billion years ago, on a planet in a binary star system quite a good distance from Earth. Doc’s name then was something like Xqq, and because of the two suns and the way they rose and set, he worked some very complicated shifts, cleaning up after a labful of scientist-priests who invented things in a gigantic facility which had formerly been a mountain of pure osmium. One day he heard some commotion down a semiforbidden corridor and went to have a look. Ordinarily sedate and studious personnel were running around in uncontrolled glee. “We did it!” they kept screaming. One of them grabbed Doc, or actually Xqq. “Here he is! The perfect subject!” Before he knew it he was signing releases, and being costumed in what he would soon learn was a classic hippie outfit of the planet Earth, and led over to a peculiarly shimmering chamber in which a mosaic of Looney Tunes motifs was repeating obsessively away in several dimensions at once in vividly audible yet unnamable spectral frequencies. . . . The lab people were explaining to him meanwhile that they’d just invented intergalactic time travel and that he was about to be sent across the universe and maybe 3 billion years into the future. “Oh, and one other thing,” just before throwing the final switch, “the universe? it’s been, like, expanding? So when you get there, everything else will be the same weight, but bigger? with all the molecules further apart? except for you—you’ll be the same size and density. Meaning you’ll be about a foot shorter than everybody else, but much more compact. Like, solid?”

  “Can I walk through walls?” Xqq wanted to know, but by then space and time as he knew it, not to me
ntion sound, light, and brain waves, were all undergoing these unprecedented changes, and next thing he knew he was standing on the corner of Dunecrest and Gordita Beach Boulevard, and watching what seemed to be an endless procession of young women in bikinis, some of whom were smiling at him and offering thin cylindrical objects whose oxidation products were apparently meant to be inhaled. . . .

  As it turned out, he was able to go through drywall construction with little discomfort, although, not having X-ray vision, he did run into some disagreeable moments with wall studs and eventually curtailed the practice. His new hyperdensity also allowed him sometimes to deflect simple weapons directed at him with hostile intent, though bullets were another story, and he also learned to avoid those when possible. Slowly the Gordita Beach of his trip merged with the everyday version, and he began to assume that things were back to normal, except for when, now and then, he’d forget and lean against a wall and suddenly find himself halfway through it and trying to apologize to somebody on the other side.

  “Well,” Sortilège supposed, “many of us do get uncomfortable when we discover some secret aspect to our personality. But it’s not like you ended up three feet tall with the density of lead.”