Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon;Dick Hill

Author:Thomas Pynchon;Dick Hill [Hill, Thomas Pynchon;Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: SteamPunk, Fiction, Historical, General, Psychological fiction, Literary, Experimental fiction, Disasters
ISBN: 9780143112563
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

NEXT EVENING KIT, having against his better judgment accompanied Pléiade to her suite, found himself in some perplexity, for at some point in the deep malediction of the hour she had mysteriously vanished. Only a moment before, it seemed to him, she’d been there at the seaward window, poised against the uncertain marine light, carefully mixing absinthe and Champagne to produce a strange foaming louche. Now, with no sensible pas-sage of time, the rooms were resonant with absence. Next to the cheval-glass, Kit noticed a pale dressing-gown, of all-but-insubstantial chiffon, not draped over a chair but standing erect, now and then rippling from otherwise un-sensed passages of air, as if someone were inside of it, perhaps stirred by invisible forces less nameable, its movements, disquietingly, not always matched by those of its tall image in the mirror.

Nothing now, not even the ocean, could be heard in the room, though the windows overlooked the long moon-stung waves. In the moonlight, against gravity, the thing poised there, faceless, armless, attending him, as if, in a moment, it would speak. In the curiously sealed quality of the silence in

the room, they waited thus, the disquieted Vectorist and this wraith of Pléiade Lafrisée. Was it something he drank? Should he start conversing with a negligee?

To the distant pulse of the sea, among the tall-hatted monitory shadows, he made his way back to the hotel to find his bedroll gone through, though that couldn’t have taken more than a minute, and his first thought was of Scars-dale Vibe, or a Vibe agent.

“We saw them,” said Eugénie. “It was the political police. They think you are one of us. Thanks to us, you are now a nihilist outlaw.”

“It’s O.K.,” said Kit, “it’s something I was always planning to get around to anyway. Did any of them bother you folks?”

“We know each other,” said Policarpe. “It’s a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn’t make much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting.”

“In France,” said Denis, “they speak of He Who Must Come. He is not the Messiah. He is not Christ or Napoleon returned. He was not General Boulanger. He is unnameable. Nevertheless one would have to be uncommonly isolated, either mentally or physically, not to feel His approach. And to know what He is bringing. What death and what transfiguration.”

“We wait here, however, not, like the French, for some Napoleon, nothing that human, but kept hostage to the arrival of a certain military Hour, whenever the general staffs decide it has struck.”

“Isn’t Belgium supposed to be neutral?”

“Zeker”—a shrug—“there’s even a Treaty, which makes it a dead cert we’ll be invaded by at least one of the signatories, isn’t that what Treaties of Neutrality are for? Each of the Powers has its plan for us. Von Schlieffen, for instance, wants to send in thirty-two German divisions against our own, let us say, six. Wilhelm has offered Leopold part

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