Against the Day, Chapter Twenty: The Mystery of the Syncopated Strangler!

We're with Lew in Los Angeles. He's a big-shot detective now. His time in England is apparently little more than a dream to him. He has three female assistants, Thetis, Shalimar, and Mezzanine (lol@those names), who are all action heroines: "crackerjack drivers, licensed gun owners, and surefooted as burros at the Grand Canyon" (1040). Is this some sort of Charlie's Angels kind of thing? Maybe.

He is approached by a Chester LeStreet--a black man, meaning the second definitely-black, named character in the novel; not super-impressive, I've gotta say--who has work for him: a few years ago there was this Syncopated Strangler case in a nightclub. There's a woman named Jardine Maraca, who was one of the victims' roommate. She had left town, but recently contacted the club to say that the supposed victim, Encarnación, is still alive and that someone's after her. So Lew is desired to look into the case. He gives Lew an address of a motel where she was supposed to be staying.

Lew can't find anything in her room, but he gets the help of a guy named Emilio, who "could gaze into the depths of a toilet bowl the way other scryers might a crystal ball or teacup" (1044). Obviously this is a typically Pynchonian touch, but I have to admit, it seems a little perfunctory here. However, for what it's worth, he does come up with an address for Lew. Hold that thought.

When he gets back to the office, he finds that Merle, freaking out, is trying to contact him, and we get a little info on what Merle's been doing all these years; he finds that "he'd been slowly mutating into a hybrid citrus with no commercial value." I...resemble that remark. I think. He meets Luca Zombini in Santa Monica, who is working on "something called 'special photographic effects.'" (1045) He goes home with him to meet Erlys and the kids; they have a cordial relationship and I guess he becomes an uncle-like figure to them. He alleges that he "didn't want to be anybody's Uncle Merle" (1047), but I think it might be too late.

He and Roswell explain to Lew their invention (where they can put photographs back into motion, to see what people are doing later or did before). They are worried that someone has designs on them, as this could be dangerous for some people: used for finding criminals and whatnot. This may be paranoia on their part. So he's going to look into it, maybe.

But first: to the address he got from Emilio. And who should answer the door but Mrs. Deuce Kindred herself. Yep, the extremely erstwhile Lake Traverse. And this immediately leads to, well, it's Pynchon, for better or for worse, usually better but here worse, degrading sex:

This one was sure not about to coöperate, struggling all the way and fairly convincingly too, hollering "shameful" this, "brutal" that, "disgusting" eight or ten times, and when they were finished, or Lew was, she wiggled and said, "You ain't fallin asleep back there, I hope."

Seriously, Pynchon, WHY are you like this? For god's sake. After, she tells him about the Hollywood orgies going on, of which Encarnación was allegedly a habituée, as her husband was.

He comes home; he may have his suspicions about his wife and Lew, but he doesn't much care; "Lew had become a connoisseur of jealous husbands, and this was as close to plain indifference as he'd seen lately" (1052). He works as security for a movie company, and Lew reacts in an ironic manner when he complains about "crazy Anarchists trying to start unions every time a man's back is turned" (1053). This pisses Deuce off, and there might be violence except that one of Lew's security-girls shows up with a tommy gun. So.

Okay, brief and not-too-helpful section from Lake's perspective. What are we to make of her? It's hard to say. "Through the terrible cloudlessness of the long afternoons she passed among dreams, and placed her wagers at the Universal Dream Casino as to which of them should bring her through, an which lead her irrevocably astray" (1054). Deuce is also having dreams: murder-related dreams, where the cops are sure he's the guilty party.

More detail about Lake's dreams, and an odd verb-tense choice: "Lake has dreamed more than once of..." Like she's still doing it. "...a journey north, always to the same subarctic city" (1055). Should this be taken as a reference to the ill-fated Iceland expedition? Probably. Maybe. She is leaving Deuce or isn't or he's leaving her or someone else is. There's a child buried under the ice who ends up rescued. And she wakes up, "alone with the sort of recurring dream a long-suffering movie heroine would expect to wake from to find herself pregnant at last" (1057). But, of course, no pregnancy for Lake, because she has Sinned. What a weirdly and unwelcomely Dickensian touch.

My feeling is that Pynchon thinks that because his writing is so good, he can obscure the fact that Lake's plotline is total garbage; the worst thing in the novel by far. But it is, sad to say. The character REALLY gets narratively screwed over. What the hell happened to the humanitarianism he's willing to extend to most of his characters? But Lake: she's the one that betrays their father in what looks like an explicitly misogynist trope; then she has degrading sex, then her life goes on in a grim way and that is fucking ALL. Just so useless. Goddamnit.

At a little get-together, Lew ends up meeting Jardine, and at any rate Deuce--an actual mass murder, it turns out--is seemingly going to get his:

"Encarnación only came back for a little while," Jardine said. "Just long enough to testify about who it was. A little runt of a studio cop named Deuce Kindred. Police picked him up for a whole string of orgy-type homicides. One girl, long ago, maybe somebody at the studio could've bought his way out, in return for unquestioning future obedience, but this'll mean a death sentence. Our law-enforcement heroes in L.A. being as bent as any, but only for the lesser felonies." (1059)

Jardine leaves town. It's really not quite clear to me why she needs to, but so we are told. She hijacks an airplane and "she vanished over the desert, creating a powerful shaped silence" (1059). So that's fun. I suppose.

Lew brings a photograph of his long-gone wife Troth to see if Merle can use it to learn about her. Can he? Maybe. Very unclear. There's talk about forks; about these futures (or pasts, one supposes) not necessarily being the future. This goes along with the idea of time as not being a wholly linear thing, with dimensions existing at angles to one another and futures being doubtful and contingent. "Was that her voice he'd heard? Could she see him from wherever in the mathematical mists she'd journeyed to?" (1061).

Hard to say. The chapter ends with Merle using a photo of a twelve-year-old Dally to try to find out what's going on with her. She's in Paris, and she's using a radio transmitter to...talk to someone, and we see them ambiguously communicating: "A distance grown woman's voice propagating through the night Aether clear as if she was in the room. He gazed at her, shaking his head slowly, and she returned the gaze, smiling, speaking without hurry, as if somehow she could see him, too." (1062) That is rather lovely, I must say.

And yes! "Against the Day" is over! Now all that's left is the final section! OMG!