CoL49 (5) Cammed Out

[Robin Landseadel]

Though Oedipa herself seems out of the furrow—her late-night search  
for evidence of the Trystero leads her to paths she was never intended  
to travel on—arrows will point back [once again] to San Narciso.  
Oedipa is on her own track now, as she witnesses ". . .a drifting,  
dreamy cloud of delinquents in summer-weight gang jackets with the  
post horn stitched on in thread that looked pure silver in what  
moonlight there was. . .", posthorns everywhere, transistor radios  
playing songs in the lower stretches of the top 200, a dedicated loser  
at poker who averages a 99.375 return, a boy who is planning to  
negotiate with the dolphins—but not without kissing mom goodbye, with  
plenty of tongue:

	Decorating each alienation, each species of withdrawal, as
	cufflink, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always
	the post horn. She grew so to expect it that perhaps she did not
	see it quite as often as she later was to remember seeing it. A
	couple-three times would really have been enough. Or too
	much.
	PC 100

It could be a "trip" or a dream, but Oedipa's midnight ramblings  
ultimately lead her to a desperate old man with a posthorn tattoo on  
the back of his left hand. He wants Oedipa to drop a letter to his  
wife in Fresno into one of the W.A.S.T.E. system's collection boxes,  
he's too old, to weak, too far out of the path to mail it himself:

	Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city's
	waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich
	soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered? What
	voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed
	among the wallpaper's stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate
	in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must
	fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming,
	secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a
	mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat,
	helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated
	wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost? She
	was overcome all at once by a need to touch him, as if she
	could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it.
	Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the
	last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held
	him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into
	the morning. She felt wetness against her breast and saw that
	he was crying again. He hardly breathed but tears came as if
	being pumped. "I can't help," she whispered, rocking him, "I
	can't help." It was already too many miles to Fresno.
	PC 102

Those looking for signs of the author's catholicism may well find it  
here, with Oedipa and the old man forming a pieta, a mother holding  
her sacrificed child. The Catholic symbolism goes further as two other  
men [probably having wandered over from Kafka's Trial] take the man  
back to his room:

	In the little room were another suit, a couple of religious tracts, a
	rug, a chair. A picture of a saint, changing well-water to oil for
	Jerusalem's Easter lamps.
	PC 103

It's a picture of Saint Narcissus.