Against the Day, Chapter One: Cyprian Latewood, Sex Spy!

This stuff is really odd. I can tell you what happens in the chapter easily enough, but it is very hard for me to make sense of why it's happening. I feel like I've been a pretty good reader here, but I feel like there's some context or unspoken subtext that I just missed and now I'm confused. Well, we'll see if things become more sensical later.

Cyprian is in Trieste. He's seeing who's coming and going, "monitoring the docks and the emigrant traffic to America" (697). Okay. He's also having a lot of sex with sailors, seemingly.

But how did he get here? Well, a few years ago in Vienna, he was approached by two Russian procurers, Misha and Grisha, who sound him out for a colonel who wants some extremely discreet play: if anyone finds out, he is dead. Dead!!! Well, this "play" mainly consists of sadistic stuff where he beats Cyprian with a rattan cane--which he, Cyprian, seems to enjoy well enough.

One day he meets his old school chum Ratty McHugh; he wants to tell him what's been happening, but is that a good idea? He ends up suggesting that he's in trouble and asks if Ratty can help, and this is actually making more sense to me now. Clearly I WASN'T such a great reader, because I'd thought this Vienna stuff was taking place in the book's present, and I was wondering, what does any of this have to do with his government work? Very strange. But now, okay, so he just wants to get out of this untenable situation, I guess? Okay, fair enough. Ratty introduces him to "a tall and careworn functionary" named Derrick Theign, who should be able to help him out. There's a lot of surveillance, but Derrick apparently knows what's going on and is able to avoid most of it. Misha and Grisha are neutralized, this mysterious colonel having been arrested. So from there, it's off to Trieste. Right, got it. There's talk of "the sinister Siluro Dirigibile a Lenta Corsa or Low-Speed Steerable Torpedo." Is that what Rocco and Pino were using earlier?

Derrick and Cyprian end up fucking for a bit, but

as the petals of unreflective desire, those narcotic days on the Lagoon, began to curl up, lose aroma, and drop one by one to the unadorned table-top of daily business, Theign half-invented a local operative, "Zanni," to whose fictional crises he then found brief but always welcome opportunities to get out of the house. (708) 

He has this idea that if there's mass mobilization in Europe, there has to be a way for information to spread, and he thinks the best way is through squads of motorcycles, so he's working on "R.U.S.H., that's Rapid Unit for Shadowing and Harassment" (708). That may or may not be relevant later, but I thought I should include it.

Theign calls Cyprian to his office: "See here, Latewood, in all the time we've known each other, we've never yet had a serious talk about death" (709). What a sweet-talker! "All you people with your repertoire of avoidance techniques--denying the passage of time, seeking out ever-younger company, constructing your little airtight environments stuffed with art undying" (709). This stuff about time or denying time is relevant to the novel. It might sound homophobic, but there's a robust body of queer theory about the different relationships of queer people to time. For whatever that may be worth.

Anyway, it's back to Vienna, although the fact is, representatives of sundry European countries "as the politics of the day might demand, all regard[ed] Cyprian as a likely candidate for deception, assault, and elimination. In terrible fact, he was now running for his life" (711). Ooh!