Read Online Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon - Free Book Online Page A

told that one of the
bellmen must conduct him to his room. He couldn’t be expected to find it on his
own.
    “But I didn’t bring anything, no
luggage, not even money—which reminds me, how will I be paying for this?”
    “Arrangements are in place, sir.
Please go with Hershel now, and try to remember the way, for he won’t want to
show it to you again.”
    Hershel was large for one of his
calling, looking less like a uniformed jockey than an expugilist. The two of
them scarcely fit into the tiny electric elevator, which turned out to be more
frightening than the worst carnival ide Lew had ever been on. The blue arcing
from loosely dangling wires, whose woven insulation was frayed and thick with
greasy dust, filled the little space with a strong smell of ozone. Hershel had
his own notions of elevator etiquette, trying to start conversations about
national politics, labor unrest, even religious controversy, any of which it
might take an ascent of hours, into lofty regions no highiron pioneer had yet
dared, even to begin to discuss. More than once they were obliged to step out
into refusefilled corridors, negotiate iron ladders, cross dangerous catwalks
not visible from the streets, only to reboard the fiendish conveyance at
another of its stops, at times traveling not even vertically, until at last
reaching a floor with a room somehow cantilevered out in the wind, autumnal
today and unremitting, off Lake Michigan.
    When the door swung open, Lew noted a
bed, a chair, a table, a resonant absence of other furnishing which in
different circumstances he would have called sorrowful, but which here he was
able, in the instant, to recognize as perfect.
    “Hershel, I don’t know how I’m
supposed to tip you.”
    Hershel holding out a banknote,
“Reverse tip. Bring me a bottle of Old Gideon and some ice. If there’s any
change, keep it. Learn frugality. Begin to see the arrangement?”
    “Service?”
    “That, maybe some conjuring too. You
disappear like an elf into the woodwork, the more professionally the better,
and when you reappear, you’ve got the hooch, not to mention the ice, see.”
    “Where will you be?”
    “I’m a bellhop, Mr. Basnight, not a
guest. There ain’t that many places a guest can be, though a bellhop can be
just about anywhere in the establishment.”
    Finding bourbon for Hershel was a
breeze, they sold it here out of every streetdoor from drygoods shops to
dentist’s offices, and they all waved away Hershel’s greenback, being strangely
happy for Lew just to start a tab. By the time he tracked down the bellhop
again, the ice had all melted. Somehow this got back to Drave, who, deeply though
perhaps unhealthily amused, struck Lew repeatedly with a “remembrance stick.”
Taking this as acceptance, Lew continued to perform chores assigned him, some
commonplace, others strange beyond easy reckoning, transacted in languages he
didn’t always understand, until he began to feel some approach, out at the
fringe of his awareness, like a streetcar in the city distance, and some
fateful, perhaps dangerous, invitation to climb aboard and be taken off to
parts unknown . . . .
    Through the winter, though it seemed
like any Chicago winter, that is a subzerodegrees version of Hell, Lew lived as
economically as possible, watching his bank account dwindle toward nothing,
haunted both sleeping and waking by unusually vivid reveries of Troth, all
stricken with a tenderness he had never noticed in their actual life together.
Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown
Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly
immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just
about to explode into open flames.
    Now and then, unannounced, Drave
showed up to review Lew’s progress.
    “First of all,” he advised, “I can’t
speak for God, but your wife is not going to forgive you. She’s never coming
back. If that’s what you