Status Updates From Vente à la criée du lot 49

She could not quite get it into her head that the day she’d left him for San Narciso was the day she’d seen Mucho for the last time. So much of him already had dissipated.

“Oed,” looking at her puzzled, “you don’t get addicted. It’s not like you’re some hophead. You take it because it’s good. Because you hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could. Because the world is so abundant. No end to it, baby. You’re an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they’re your lives too.”

He put a little clear plastic bottle on the table between them. She stared at the pills in it, and then understood. “That’s LSD?” she said. Mucho smiled back. “Where’d you get it?” Knowing.
“Hilarius. He broadened his program to include husbands.”

And the ‘you’ is everybody. And herself. Oedipa, the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.”

“That’s what I am,” said Mucho, “right. Everybody is.” He gazed at her, perhaps having had his vision of consensus as others do orgasms, face now smooth, amiable, at peace. She didn’t know him.

“Is this what Funch means when he says you’re coming on like a whole roomful of people?”

But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide. Then you’d have this big, God, maybe a couple hundred million chorus saying ‘rich, chocolaty goodness’ together, and it would all be the same voice.”

“I noticed it the other night hearing Rabbit do a commercial. No matter who’s talking, the different power spectra are the same, give or take a small percentage. So you and Rabbit have something in common now. More than that. Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig?

“Like I . . .” he hesitated before breaking into a radiant smile, “you’ll think I’m crazy, Oed. But I can do the same thing in reverse. Listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once.”

It dawned on her that he was talking about the Muzak. It has been seeping in, in its subliminal, unidentifiable way since they’d entered the place, all strings, reeds, muted brass.

Mucho came downstairs carrying his copy, a serenity about him she’d never seen. He used to hunch his shoulders and have a rapid eyeblink rate, and both now were gone.

“they’re calling him the Brothers N. He’s losing his identity, Edna, how else can I put it? Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic. He enters a staff meeting and the room is suddenly full of people, you know? He’s a walking assembly of man.”

“for observation. I wonder what they can observe.”
“Israelis,” Oedipa said, “coming in the windows. If there aren’t any, he’s crazy.”

“I came,” she said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”
“Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

She picked the rifle up, pointed it at him, and said, “I ought to kill you.” She knew he had wanted her to get the weapon.
“Isn’t that what you’ve been sent to do?”

“At Auschwitz the ovens would be converted over to petit fours and wedding cakes, and the V-2 missiles to public housing for the elves. I tried to believe it all. I slept three hours a night trying not to dream, and spent the other 21 at the forcible acquisition of faith. And yet my penance hasn’t been enough. They’ve come like angels of death to get me, despite all I tried to do.”

“ “Yes, you hate me. But didn’t I try to atone? If I’d been a real Nazi I’d have chosen Jung, nicht wahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew. Freud’s vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower-arranging”

“You think,” said Oedipa, “then, that they’re trying to bring you back to Israel, to stand trial, like they did Eichmann?” The shrink kept nodding. “Why? What did you do at Buchenwald?”
“I worked,” Hilarius told her, “on experimentally-induced insanity. A catatonic Jew was as good as a dead one. Liberal SS circles felt it would be more humane.”

“Where?”
“Where I made that face. Where I did my internship.”

Buchenwald.

There is me, there are the others. You know, with the LSD, we’re finding, the distinction begins to vanish. Egos lose their sharp edges. But I never took the drug, I chose to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I know who I am and who the others are. Perhaps that is why you also refused to participate, Mrs. Maas?”

He would be, now, about your age. Hopelessly insane. His name was Zvi.

“Your Israeli has access to every uniform known,” Hilarius said. “I can’t guarantee the safety of the ‘police.’ You couldn’t guarantee where they’d take me if I surrendered, could you.”

And part of me must have really wanted to believe that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture.

“Listen,” Hilarius said after awhile, “have I seemed to you a good enough Freudian? Have I ever deviated seriously?”

“He’s gone crazy. I tried to call the police, but he took a chair and smashed the switchboard with it.”
“Dr Hilarius?”
“He thinks someone’s after him.”

Halfway along the flagstone path, she was startled by an insect whirring loudly past her ear, followed at once by the sound of a gunshot. That was no insect, thought Oedipa, at which point, hearing another shot, she made the connection.

She also wanted to know why the chance of its being real should menace her so.