More Waste than you can shake a stick at

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Be sure to search within these books: Pynchon v. Stearns

http://tinyurl.com/2ffuo3

So she got up after awhile and left The Greek Way, and entered the city again, 
the infected city. 

And spent the rest of the night finding the image of the Trystero post horn. In 
Chinatown, in the dark window of a herbalist, she thought she saw it on a sign 
among ideographs. But the streetlight was dim. Later, on a sidewalk, she saw two 
of them in chalk, 20 feet apart. Between them a complicated array of boxes, some 
with letters, some with numbers. A kids' game? Places on a. map, dates from a 
secret history? She copied the diagram in her memo book. When she looked up, a 
man, perhaps a man, in a black suit, was standing in a doorway half a block 
away, watching her. She thought she saw a turned-around collar but took no 
chances; headed back the way she'd come, pulse thundering. A bus stopped at the 
next corner, and she ran to catch it. 

She stayed with buses after that, getting off only now and then to walk so she'd 
keep awake. What fragments of dreams came had to do with the post horn. 
Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real 
and dreamed. 

At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that 
she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, 
would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the 
customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been 
before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they 
capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in 
shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. 
Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols 
was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it 
altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that 
possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster 
ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zooany death-wish that can be 
consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its volupt
uous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; 
that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more 
delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes 
is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then 
she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make 
up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish 
the night. CoL49, pgs 94/95