Thomas Pynchon - Vineland

HOW did we meet," DL's voice finding some agitated soprano level. "Well! Through Ralph Wayvone, really. I had been spending years and years of my life with these fantasies of taking revenge on Brock Vond. I wanted to kill him one way or another he'd taken away the lives of people I loved, and I saw nothing wrong with killing him. I was that off-center, it afflicted me, wrecked my judgment." At first she'd thought Ralph was some kind of groupie. She'd noticed him, among the spectators, always wearing a suit. He finally approached her in a coffee shop in Eugene, where she had been staring dejectedly, apparently for some time, at a plate with four rubber scampi, rushed in fresh from the joke store down the street and covered as completely as possible with tomato sauce. She became aware of Ralph, looming over her food and glaring at it. "How can you eat that?" "Just what I ask myself. Anything else?" Her visitor sat down across the table, clicked open an armored attache case, and produced a folder with an 8 x 10 of a face she knew, a Fresson-process studio photograph of Brock Vond, looking like he'd just had a buffer run all over him, the high smooth forehead, the cheeks that still hadn't lost all their baby fat, the sleek and pointed ears, small chin, and slim little unbroken nose. This photo was clipped to some stapled pages, where she saw federal seals and stampings. "It's all from the FBI. Perfectly legit." He glanced at some ultrathin expensive wristwatch. "Look you want him... we want him... say yes, both our wishes will come true."

She'd already checked out the cut and surface texture of Ralph's suit. "Well," she inquired, "what's ol' Brock up to these days?"

"Same public servant he always was, only bigger. Much, much bigger. He figures he won his war against the lefties, now he sees his future in the war against drugs. Some dear friends of mine are quite naturally upset."

"And he's too big for them? Please, you've got to be rilly desperate, comin' to me."

"No. You've got the motivation." At her look, "We know your history, it's all on the computer."

She thought of the white armored limo at Inoshiro Sensei's house, long ago. "Then you know how personal this is. If you want real ninja product, that could get in the way.... I assume you're buying skills and not just feelings here?"

"Buy, sure, but how about give? The one thing you truly want, huh? A good crack at a evil man? I know 'cause I see it in your eyes."

She didn't exactly shift her eyes away, didn't react much to this lowlife flirtatiousness, either, but there it was he had her number, and it looked like he'd gotten it from the FBI. What was going on here? Did Ralph have a line into their NCIC computer? If they knew Brock was a target of Ralph's friends, why fail to protect one of their own? Unless of course the unfortunate setupee here was more likely DL herself, attempted assassination of a federal officer, some time in the Bureau of Prisons' mindfucking system perhaps....

Ralph Wayvone, master of telepathic anxieties, tried to be helpful. "They wouldn't need any fancy excuse, Miss Chastain, they just go in, get anybody they want, do the paperwork later what, you ain't figured that one out yet? I'd known you was such a little kid I'd o' brought yiz a Barbie doll."

"Yeah but why me? Thought you folks were more into pistols, dirks, car bombs, 'at sort of thing."

"I have heard," Ralph almost misty-eyed, "there's this touch that you can put on somebody, so lightly they don't feel it then, but a year later they drop dead, right when you happen to be miles away eating ribs with the Chief of Police."

"That would be the Vibrating Palm, or Ninja Death Touch." She went on to explain, in tones carefully free of exasperation, about the procedure, and how serious a matter it was. You didn't, for example, just go around putting it on people you didn't like. It was useless without a long history of training in martial disciplines, took years to master, and when used was a profoundly moral act. But at some point she realized she was also pitching herself to him. So did he. Patting her hand, "You're telling me I don't have to worry."

"In my time, Mr. Wayvone, I was the best."

"I remember," he said, instead of "So they tell me," but she didn't catch it. He'd heard about her in fact years before on the YakMaf grapevine, early dojo rumors, something extraordinary said to be happening at a certain regional elimination meet. So he'd driven across the Mojave all night one night to see her in action. From a dank cement arena her hair had blazed at him like the halo of an angel of mischief. In the Rolodex of Ralph's memory, young DL would be flagged that brightly. He was actually then to follow her for a time, meet to meet through the South and West, along a circuit of grim, early ex-Nam faces, motels always miles from the venue and down the wrong freeway, shoptalk, drinking, possession of weapons, T-shirts featuring skulls, snakes, and dangerous transportation. Ralph never thought of the look on his face as the helpless stare of an older man through a schoolyard fence, but as more the alert beaming of a micromanager. And sometimes he was right. In DL's case, the time he'd invested had yielded him a file he knew he'd make use of one day, and so it had come to pass.

He'd presented DL, however, with a crisis. She knew she'd been slowly poisoning her spirit, drifting further into her obsession with Brock Vond. Here was Ralph, promising resolution and release. What was she complaining about? Only that acts, deeply moral and otherwise, had consequences only the workings of karma. One unfelt touch to the correct piece of Vond anatomy could commit her to a major redirection of her life. There was no question that she'd ever be free of Ralph. A girl did one Death Touch job and right away people started getting ideas. Whatever she chose to do would get her in trouble. She promised to give him her decision at dinner the next evening, and then she got the hell out of town, leaving the last of Ralph's tails near Drain, Oregon, beside a late-model Oldsmobile with steam pouring from beneath its hood.

She had to switch cars again before she got to L.A., then took the bus out to a bank branch on mid-Wilshire where she had once providentially stashed a packet of documents that would now give her a choice among identities, paid cash on Western Avenue for a '66 Plymouth Fury, bought a wig at a place across the street, went into a certain ladies' gas-station toilet on Olympic legendary in the dopers' community, and emerged a different, less noticeable person. The car radio, tuned to KFWB, was playing the Doors' "People Are Strange (When You're a Stranger)" as she injected herself into the slow lane of the eastbound freeway and settled in, hating to let any of it go, Banning, the dinosaurs, the Palm Springs turnoff, Indio, across the Mojave, to be redreamed in colors pale but intense, with unnaturally fine sand blowing in plumes across the sun, baby-blue shadows in the folds of the dunes, a pinkish sky holding on, letting go, redreaming each night stop the less easterly places she'd been in all day, coming slowly unstuck, leaving for the United States, trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.

On inertial navigation, knowing she'd know what she was looking for when she found it, DL didn't stop till the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, which she first beheld around midday in a stunning onslaught of smog and traffic. By this time she was used to the car and its unorthodox push-button shifting, having made the analysis "stick shift penis" and speculating that a push-button automatic might at least appear more clitorally ladylike, or, as DL might've put it, regressive, if there'd been anybody anymore to talk to, which of course there wasn't. She took a little apartment and found a job at a vacuum cleaner parts distributor's, typing and filing.