Vineland by Thomas Pynchon Page A

ride, high, calm, wild, windless. But increasingly the day, the necessary day, presenting its demands, had claimed him, till there was only one small bitter amusement he refused to let go of. Now and then, when moon, tides, and planetary magnetism were all in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go gliding right to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could, enjoying every squeezed-out minute. A vice, for sure, and one he had confessed only to a handful of people, including, it may have turned out unwisely, their daughter, Prairie, this very morning.
    â€œOh,” sitting over a breakfast of Cap’n Crunch and Diet Pepsi, “you mean you
dreamed
—”
    Zoyd shook his head. “I was awake. But out of my body.”
    She gave him a look that he didn’t, so early in the day, attend to the full risk of, telling him she trusted him not to be running some cruel put-on. They’d been known not to share a sense of humor on many topics, her mom in particular. “You go there and—what? You perch somewhere and look, you keep flying around, how’s it work?”
    â€œIt’s like Mr. Sulu laying in coordinates, only different,” Zoyd explained.
    â€œKnowin’ exactly where you want to go.” He nodded, and she felt some unaccustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy, usually slow-witted fringe element she’d been assigned, on this planet, for a father. What mattered at the moment was that he knew how to visit Frenesi out in the night, and that could only mean he must feel a need for her as intense as Prairie’s own. “Where’s it you go, then? Where is she?”
    â€œKeep tryin’ to find out. Try to read signs, locate landmarks, anything that’ll give a clue, but—well the signs are there on street corners and store windows—but I can’t read them.”
    â€œIt’s some other language?”
    â€œNope, it’s in English, but there’s something between it and my brain that won’t let it through.”
    Prairie made a sound like a game-show buzzer. “
I’m
sorry Mr. Wheeler. . . .” Let down and suspicious, she drifted away again. “Say hi to ’em up on Phantom Creek, OK?”
    He took a left at the row of mailboxes, went strumming over a cattle guard, parked out by the horse barn, and walked in. RC was over in Blue Lake running chores, but Moonpie was around, looking after Lotus, the baby. The crawdads were in an old Victorian bathtub that doubled as a watering trough. Together Zoyd and Moonpie netted them out and weighed them on a seed, feed, and fertilizer scale, and he wrote her a postdated check he’d still have to scramble, this day already so advanced, to cover.
    â€œSomebody at the Nugget the other night,” baby on her arm, giving him now a straight, worried look, “askin’ about you. RC thought he knew him, but wouldn’t tell me anythin’.”
    â€œLatino gent, semi-Elvis haircut?”
    â€œYep. You in some trouble, Zoyd?”
    â€œMoon darlin’, when am I out of it? He mention where he was staying, anything like that?”
    â€œMostly just sat starin’ at the Tube in the bar. Some movie on channel 86. He was talkin’ to the screen after a while, but I don’t think he was loaded or nothin’.”
    â€œRill unhappy dude, is all.”
    â€œWow. Comin’ from you. . . .” Seeing Zoyd’s odd smile, the baby echoed, “Comin’ fum
you!
”
    They transferred the crawdads to tubs of water in the back of the camper, and soon Zoyd was lurching and sloshing back down the road. He noticed Moonpie and Lotus in the rearview mirror, watching him around the curve, till the trees hid them.
    So, fucking Hector again. Zoyd had