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

thought the payoff here was going to be, you need to
reevaluate.”
    The soles of Lew’s feet began to
ache, as if wanting to be taken all the way to the center of the Earth.
    “What if I didn’t care what it took
to bring her back?”
    “Penance? You’ll do that anyway.
You’re not Catholic, Mr. Basnight?”
    “Presbyterian.”
    “Many people believe that there is a
mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more
penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no
connection. All the variables are independent. You do penance not because you
have sinned but because it is your destiny. You are redeemed not through doing
penance but because it happens. Or doesn’t happen.
    “It’s nothing supernatural. Most people
have a wheel riding up on a wire, or some rails in the street, some kind of
guide or groove, to keep them moving in the direction of their destiny. But you
keep bouncing free. Avoiding penance and thereby definition.”
    “Going off my trolley. And you’re
trying to help me get back to the way most people live, ’s that it?”
    “ ‘ Most people, ’ ” not raising his voice, though something in Lew jumped as if
he had, “are dutiful and dumb as oxen. Delirium literally means going out of a
furrow you’ve been plowing. Think of this as a productive sort of delirium.”
    “What do I do with that?”
    “It’s something you don’t want?”
    “Would you?”
    “Not sure. Maybe.”
    ·      ·      ·
    Spring arrived , wheelfolk appeared in the streets
and parks, in gaudy striped socks and longbilled “Scorcher” caps. Winds off the
lake moderated. Parasols and sidelong glances reappeared. Troth was long gone,
remarried it seemed the minute the decree came down, and rumored now to be
living on Lake Shore Drive someplace up north of Oak Street. Some vicepresident
or something.
    One mild and ordinary workmorning in
Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes
inclined nowhere in particular, when he entered, all too briefly, a condition
he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace.
Despite the sorry history of rapid transit in this city, the corporate neglect
and high likelihood of collision, injury, and death, the weekdaymorning
overture blared along as usual. Men went on grooming mustaches with graygloved
fingers. A rolled umbrella dented a bowler hat, words were exchanged. Girl
amanuenses in little Leghorn straw hats and striped shirtwaists with huge
shoulders that took up more room in the car than angels’ wings dreamed with
contrary feelings of what awaited them on upper floors of brandnew steelframe
“skyscrapers.” The horses stepped along in their own time and space. Passengers
snorted, scratched, and read the newspaper, sometimes all at once, while others
imagined that they could get back to some kind of vertical sleep. Lew found
himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams, nor
easily attributable to the smokeinflected sun beginning to light Chicago.
    He understood that things were
exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear.
    He must have descended to the
sidewalk and entered a cigar store. It was that early hour in cigar stores all
over town when boys are fetching in bricks that have been soaking all night in
buckets of water, to be put into the display cases to keep the inventory
humidified. A plump and dapper individual was in buying domestic cheroots. He
watched Lew for a while, just short of staring, before asking, with a nod at
the display, “That box on the bottom shelf—how many coloradoclaros left in
it? Without looking, I mean.”
    “Seventeen,” said Lew without any
hesitation the other man could detect.
    “You know not everybody can do that.”
    “What?”
    “Notice things. What was that just
went by the window?”
    “Shiny black little trap, three
springs, brass fittings, bay gelding about four years old,