Free The crying of lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon Page A

uses in its filter. I don't care what Pierce bought from the Cosa Nostra. I don't want to think about them. Or about what happened at Lago di Pieta, or cancer . . ." She looked around for words, feeling helpless.
"What then?" Metzger challenged, getting to his feet, looming. "What?"
"I don't know," she said, a little desperate. "Metzger, don't harass me. Be on my side."
"Against whom?" inquired Metzger, putting on shades.
"I want to see if there's a connection. I'm curious."
    "Yes, you're curious," Metzger said. "I'll wait in the car, OK?"
    Oedipa watched him out of sight, then went looking for dressing rooms; circled the annular corridor outside twice before settling on a door in the shadowy interval between two overhead lights. She walked in on soft, elegant chaos, an impression of emanations, mutually interfering, from the stub-antennas of everybody's exposed nerve endings.
A girl removing fake blood from her face motioned Oedipa on into a region of brightly-lit mirrors. She pushed in, gliding off sweating biceps and momentary curtains of long, swung hair, till at last she stood before Driblette, still wearing his gray Gennaro outfit. "It was great," said Oedipa. "Feel," said Driblette, extending his arm. She felt. Gennaro's costume was gray flannel. "You sweat like hell, but nothing else would really be him, right?"
Oedipa nodded. She couldn't stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn't.
"You came to talk about the play," he said. "Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn't literature, it doesn't mean anything. Wharfinger was no Shakespeare." "Who was he?" she said. "Who was Shakespeare. It was a long time ago." "Could I see a script?" She didn't know what she was looking for, exactly. Driblette motioned her over to a file cabinet next to the one shower.
"I'd better grab a shower," he said, "before the Drop-The-Soap crowd get here. Scripts're in the top drawer."
But they were all purple, Dittoed—worn, torn, stained with coffee. Nothing else in the drawer. "Hey," she yelled into the shower. "Where's the original? What did you make these copies from?"
"A paperback," Driblette yelled back. "Don't ask me the publisher. I found it at Zapf's Used Books over by the freeway. It's an anthology, Jacobean Revenge Plays. There was a skull on the cover."
"Could I borrow it?"
"Somebody took it. Opening night parties. I lose at least half a dozen every time." He stuck his head out of the shower. The rest of his body was wreathed in steam, giving his head an eerie, balloon-like buoyancy. Careful, staring at her with deep amusement, he said, "There was another copy there. Zapf might still have it. Can you find the place?"
Something came to her viscera, danced briefly, and went. "Are you putting me on?" For awhile the furrowed eyes only gazed back.
"Why," Driblette said at last, "is everybody so interested in texts?"
"Who else?" Too quickly. Maybe he had only been talking in general.
    Driblette's head wagged back and forth. "Don't drag me into your scholarly disputes," adding "whoever you all are," with a familiar smile. Oedipa realized then, cold corpse-fingers of grue on her skin, that it was exactly the same look he'd coached his cast to give each other whenever the subject of the Trystero assassins came up. The knowing look you get in your dreams from a certain unpleasant figure. She decided to ask about this look.
"Was it written in as a stage direction? All those people, so obviously in on something. Or was that one of your touches?"
"That was my own," Driblette told her, "that, and actually bringing the three assassins onstage in the fourth act. Wharfinger didn't show them at all, you know."
"Why did you? Had you heard about them somewhere else?"
"You don't understand," getting mad. "You guys, you're like Puritans are about