Through all this meanwhile runs a second plotline – a whodunit, in which Daniel must solve the uncompromisingly earthly question of who murdered his mother, Annalee Pearce, in an alleyway in Livermore, California when he was 14, complete with multiple suspects, false trails, the identity of the killer not revealed till the final pages. The story traverses a map of some moral intricacy, sure-footed as Chandler, providing twists as elegant as Agatha Christie, as all the while Daniel’s education proceeds.
Wild Bill Weber teaches meditation, fishing, waiting. Mott Stocker teaches Dope, its production and enjoyment. Ace safecracker Willie Clinton (yep) instructs the boy in how to get past all kinds of locks and alarms, rendering him thus semi-permeable to certain protected parts of the world, setting him on his path to total dematerialization. For a while Daniel teams up with poker wizard Bad Bobby Sloane, roving the American highways in search of opportunities to risk capital in ways that cannot be officially controlled, climaxing in a legendary Lo-ball confrontation with the cheerfully louche Guido Caramba, in a literary poker passage as classic as it is funny, and in its appreciative devotion to a game where the moral stakes are so high, ranking up there with comparable parts of Kawabata’s The Master of Go.
The shape-shifting genius Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the arts of disguise – another illicit skill, given that it’s already forbidden to impersonate policemen, doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, and who knows what all besides, as if someday all varieties of disguise will be statutory offences, including Impersonating an Ordinary Citizen. At last Daniel comes circling back to Volta, by now also one of his prime suspects in Annalee’s death, who teaches him the final secret of Invisibility. None of your secular Wellsian tricks with refractive indices and blood pigmentation here, but rather the time-honored arts of ceasing to be material.
At last Daniel is ready to set off on the metaphysical Quest all these teachers have been preparing him for, which now swiftly unfolds as an elaborate techno-caper, with a mysterious and otherworldly six-pound Diamond as its target. Too early in those days for keyboard dramas, emergency downloads, and cyber-fugues to relentless countdowns at the corner of the screen, the technology Daniel goes up against is mostly of the analog sort – optical surveillance, strain-gauge sensor grids and thermostatic alarms – his non-digital responses to which include nerve gas, plastique, and invisibility.
He takes the Diamond, and then the Diamond takes him. For it turns out to be a gateway to elsewhere, and Daniel’s life’s tale an account of the incarnation of a god, not the usual sort that ends up bringing aid and comfort to earthly powers, but that favorite of writers, the incorruptible wiseguy known to anthropologists as the Trickster, to working alchemists as Hermes, to card-players everywhere as the Joker. We don’t learn this till the end of the story, by which point, knowing Daniel as we’ve come to, we are free to take it literally as a real transfiguration, or as a metaphor of spiritual enlightenment, or as a description of Daniel’s unusually exalted state of mind as he prepares to cross, forever, the stone junction between Above and Below – by this point, all of these possibilities have become equally true, for we have been along on one of those indispensible literary journeys, taken nearly as far as Daniel – though it is for him to slip along across the last borderline, into what Wittgenstein once supposed cannot be spoken of, and upon which, as Eliphaz Levi advised us – after ‘To know, to will, to dare,’ as the last and greatest of the rules of Magic – we must keep silent.
Thomas Pynchon, 1997
This book is a work of fiction.
FICTION.
Believe otherwise at your own peril.
One: AIR
Unam est vas.
—Maria Prophetissa
Daniel Pearse was born on the rainy dawn of March 15, 1966. He didn’t receive a middle name because his mother, Annalee Faro Pearse, was exhausted from coming up with a first and last – especially the last. As near as she could figure, Daniel’s father might have been any of seven men. Annalee decided on Daniel because it sounded strong, and she knew he’d need to be strong.
At Daniel’s birth, Annalee was a sixteen-year-old ward of the Greenfield Home for Girls, an Iowa custodial institution administered by the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin. She had been placed there by court order after attempting to steal an ounce bar of silver from a jewelry-shop display case. She told the arresting officer she was an orphan of the moon, and told the judge that she didn’t recognize the court’s authority to make decisions about her life. She refused to cooperate beyond giving her name as Annalee Faro Pearse. The judge sentenced her to Greenfield till she was eighteen.
Her second month at Greenfield, Annalee confided her suspected pregnancy to one of her roommates. The next day she was called before Sister Bernadette, a small, severe woman of fifty with an office as meticulously spare as her heart, though not nearly as dour.
‘Sit down,’ Sister Bernadette said. It was a command, not an offer.
Annalee sat down in the straight-back wooden chair in front of the desk.
Sister Bernadette stared at Annalee’s face for half a minute, then shifted the gaze to her belly. A muscle twitched in the Sister’s flaccid cheek. ‘I understand you are pregnant,’ she said evenly.
Annalee shifted her weight on the hard chair. ‘I think so.’
‘You were raped,’ Sister Bernadette almost whispered. ‘The child will be put up for adoption.’
Annalee shook her head. ‘I wasn’t raped. I was fucked by a man I loved. I liked it. I want the baby.’
‘And who is this loving father?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know.’ Sister Bernadette blinked slowly, folding her hands on the desk. ‘Is that because you never got his name, or because there’s too many names to remember?’
Annalee hesitated a moment, then said firmly, ‘Both.’
‘So,’ Sister Bernadette nodded curtly, ‘you’re a slut as well as a thief.’
Blue eyes flashing, Annalee stood up.
‘Sit down, slut,’ Sister Bernadette screamed, slamming the desk top with her open hands as she jumped to her feet. ‘I said sit down!’
Annalee, just under six feet tall and a little over 130 pounds, broke Sister Bernadette’s jaw with her first punch, a roundhouse right with every bit of herself behind it.
Annalee spent three months alone in what the girls called ‘the blocks’ – a row of tiny cinderblock sheds that had been used for smokehouses when Greenfield was a pig farm. Except for the series of ventilation slits high along the roofline. Annalee’s room was windowless. Nor, with just a saggy cot and a toilet prone to clogging, were her quarters particularly well appointed. She received two meals a day, invariably thin soup, stale bread, and a withered apple. Once a week she was allowed a shower, and once monthly a visit to Greenfield’s doctor, a retired physician deep in his dotage whose main diagnostic technique was having patients do jumping-jacks naked in his office.