Authors: Thomas Pynchon
At a farmhouse in a river valley far south of Rostock, he comes in to shelter out
of the midday rain, falls asleep in a rocking-chair on the porch, and dreams about
Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, his friend from long ago. He has come back, after all and
against the odds. It’s somewhere out in the country, English country, quilted in darkened
green and amazingly bright straw-yellow, of very old standing rocks on high places,
of early indenture to death and taxes, of country girls who walk out at night to stand
naked on the tor and sing. Members of Tantivy’s family and many friends have come,
all in a mood of quiet celebrating, because of Tantivy’s return. Everybody understands
it’s only a visit: that he will be “here” only in a conditional way. At some point
it will fall apart, from thinking about it too much. There is a space of lawn cleared
for dancing, with a village band and many of the women dressed in white. After a spell
of confusion about the day’s schedule of events, the meeting takes place—it seems
to be underground, not exactly a grave or crypt, nothing sinister, crowded with relatives
and friends around Tantivy who looks so
real
, so untouched by time, very clear and full of color . . . “Why, Slothrop.”
“Oh—where’ve you
been
, gate?”
“‘Here.’”
“‘“Here”’?”
“Yes, like that, you’ve got it—once or twice removed like that, but I walked in the
same streets as you, read the same news, was narrowed to the same spectrum of colors. . . .”
“Then didn’t you—”
“
I
didn’t
do
anything. There was a change.”
The colors in here—stone facing, flowers worn by guests, the strange chalices on the
tables— carry an underbreath of blood spilled and turned black, of gentle carbonizing
in the blank parts of the cities at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon . . . it makes
crisper the outlines of Tantivy’s suit, rather a gigolo suit of unspeakably foreign
cut, certainly nothing he ever would have thought of wearing. . . .
“I guess we don’t have much time . . . I know this is shitty, and really selfish but
I’m so alone now, and . . . I heard that just after it happens, sometimes, you’ll
sort of hang around for a while, sort of look after a friend who’s ‘here.’ . . .”
“Sometimes.” He is smiling: but his serenity and distance are the stretch of an impotent
cry past Slothrop’s reach.
“Are you looking after me?”
“No, Slothrop. Not you. . . .”
Slothrop sits in the old weathered rocker looking out at a rolling line of hills and
the sun just come down out of the last of the rain-clouds, turning the wet fields
and the haycocks to gold. Who passed by and saw him sleeping, his face white and troubled
nodded on the breast of his muddy uniform?
As he moves on he finds these farms haunted, but amiably. The oakwork creaks in the
night, honest and wooden. Unmilked cows low painfully in distant fields, others come
in and get drunk on fermented silage, barging around into the fences and piles of
hay where Slothrop dreams, uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them. Up on the rooftops
the black and white storks, long throats curved to the sky, heads upside down and
looking backwards, clatter their beaks in greeting and love. Rabbits come scurrying
at night to eat whatever’s good in the yards. Trees, now—Slothrop’s intensely alert
to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them,
studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is
a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it,
not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop’s family actually made its money
killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to
pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. “That’s really
insane.” He shakes his head. “There’s insanity in my family.” He looks up. The trees
are still. They know he’s there. They probably also know what he’s thinking. “I’m
sorry,” he tells them. “I can’t do anything about those people, they’re all out of
my reach. What can I do?” A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, “Next
time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that
isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That’s what you can do.”
Partial List of Wishes on Evening Stars for This Period:
Let me find that chicken coop the old lady told me about.
Let Tantivy really be alive.
Let this fucking zit on my back go away.
Let me go to Hollywood when this is over so that Rita Hayworth can see me and fall
in love with me.
Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up.
Let that discharge be waiting for me in Cuxhaven.
Let Bianca be all right, a-and—
Let me be able to take a shit soon.
Let that only be a meteor falling.
Let these boots hold out at least to Lübeck.
Let that Ludwig find his lemming and be happy and leave me in peace.
Well, Ludwig. Slothrop finds him one morning by the shore of some blue anonymous lake,
a surprisingly fat kid of eight or nine, gazing into the water, crying, shuddering
all over in rippling fat-waves. His lemming’s name is Ursula, and she has run away
from home. Ludwig’s been chasing her all the way north from Pritzwalk. He’s pretty
sure she’s heading for the Baltic, but he’s afraid she’ll mistake one of these inland
lakes for the sea, and jump into that instead—
“
One lemming
, kid?”
“I’ve had her for two years,” he sobs, “she’s been fine, she’s never tried to— I don’t
know. Something just came over her.”
“Quit fooling. Lemmings never do anything alone. They need a crowd. It gets contagious.
You see, Ludwig, they overbreed, it goes in cycles, when there are too many of them
they panic and run off looking for food. I learned that in college, so I know what
I’m talking about. Harvard. Maybe that Ursula’s just out after a boy friend or something.”
“She would have let me know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Russians aren’t sorry about anything.”
“I’m not a Russian.”
“Is that why you took off all your insignia?”
They look at each other. “Uh, well, you need a hand finding that lemming?”
This Ludwig, now, may not be completely Right in the Head. He is apt to drag Slothrop
up out of sleep in the middle of the night, waking half the DP encampment, spooking
the dogs and babies, absolutely sure that Ursula is out there, just beyond the circle
of the fire, looking in at him, seeing him but not the way she used to. He leads Slothrop
into detachments of Soviet tankers, into heaps of ruins high-crested as the sea, that
collapse around and, given a chance, on top of you the minute you step in, also into
sucking marshes where the reeds pull away in your fingers when you try to grab them,
and the smell is of protein disaster. This is either maniac faith, or something a
little darker: it does dawn on Slothrop at last that if there’s any impulse to suicide
around here it ain’t Ursula’s, it’s that
Ludwig’s
—why, the lemming may not even exist!
Still . . . hasn’t Slothrop, once or twice, seen something? scooting along ahead down
gray narrow streets lined with token saplings in one or another of these Prussian
garrison-towns, places whose whole industry and meaning was soldiering, their barracks
and stone walls deserted now—or-or crouching by the edge of some little lake, watching
clouds, white sails of gaff-riggers against the other shore so green, foggy, and far
away, getting secret instruction from waters whose movements in lemming-time are oceanic,
irresistible, and slow enough, solid-looking enough at least to walk out on safely. . . .
“That’s what Jesus meant,” whispers the ghost of Slothrop’s first American ancestor
William, “venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of
view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle.
The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle,
whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on
the table.”
“Wait
a minute. You people didn’t
have
jigsaw puzzles.”
“Aw, shit.”
William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off from Boston, heading west in true
Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of the Winthrop machine, convinced he
could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn’t been officially
ordained. The ramparts of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not
William. He just started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans in. After
they settled in Berkshire, he and his son John got a pig operation going—used to drive
hogs right back down the great escarpment, back over the long pike to Boston, drive
them just like sheep or cows. By the time they got to market those hogs were so skinny
it was hardly worth it, but William wasn’t really in it so much for the money as just
for the trip itself. He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance encounters of the
day—Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people—and most of all just being with those
pigs. They were good company. Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own
Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding
comfort in the mud on a hot day—pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything
Boston wasn’t, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter
and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must’ve been like for William. Of
course he took it as a parable—knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of
the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes
and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in crosscountry movement. It was a little
early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the air. William
must’ve been waiting for the one pig that wouldn’t die, that would validate all the
ones who’d had to, all his Gadarene swine who’d rushed into extinction like lemmings,
possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying . . . possessed
by innocence they couldn’t lose . . . by faith in William as another variety of pig,
at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life. . . .
He wrote a long tract about it presently, called
On Preterition.
It had to be published in England, and is among the first books to’ve been not only
banned but also ceremonially burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to hear about all the
Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued
holiness for these “second Sheep,” without whom there’d be no elect. You can bet the
Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what
Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation
has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel
for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well,
if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have
to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows.
He must’ve had connections. They did finally 86 him out of Massachusetts Bay Colony—he
thought about Rhode Island for a while but decided he wasn’t that keen on antinomians
either. So finally he sailed back to Old England, not in disgrace so much as despondency,
and that’s where he died, among memories of the blue hills, green maizefields, get-togethers
over hemp and tobacco with the Indians, young women in upper rooms with their aprons
lifted, pretty faces, hair spilling on the wood floors while underneath in the stables
horses kicked and drunks hollered, the starts in the very early mornings when the
backs of his herd glowed like pearl, the long, stony and surprising road to Boston,
the rain on the Connecticut River, the snuffling good-nights of a hundred pigs among
the new stars and long grass still warm from the sun, settling down to sleep. . . .
Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she
jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate
and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy
in the name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route
back—maybe that anarchist he met in Zürich was right, maybe for a little while all
the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared,
depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from
which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck
it up. . . . Such are the vistas of thought that open up in Slothrop’s head as he
tags along after Ludwig. Is he drifting, or being led? The only control in the picture
right now is the damned lemming. If she exists. The kid shows Slothrop photos he’s
packing in his wallet: Ursula, eyes bright and shy, peeking out from under a pile
of cabbage leaves . . . Ursula in a cage decked with a giant ribbon and swastika’d
seal, first prize in a Hitler Youth pet show . . . Ursula and the family cat, watching
each other carefully across a tiled stretch of floor . . . Ursula, front paws dangling
and eyes drowsy, hanging out the pocket of Ludwig’s Nazi cub-scout uniform. Some part
of her is always blurred, too quick for the shutter. Even knowing when she was a baby
what they’d be in for someday, still Ludwig has always loved her. He may be thinking
that love can stop it from happening.
Slothrop will never find out. He loses the fat young lunatic in a village near the
sea. Girls in full skirts and flowered kerchiefs are out in the woods gathering mushrooms,
and red squirrels flash through the beeches. Streets curve on into town, foreshortening
too fast—it’s wideangle, smalltown space here. Lamps are clustered up on the poles.
Street cobbles are heavy and sand-colored. Drayhorses stand in the sun flourishing
their tails.