I’ve never been to Mexico City, never saw Tom Pynchon there. He stopped, turned toward me, dry lips smiling, showing very bad teeth. “What the hell are you doing?” I shouted, my fever lunging at him through the room, my body unable to move. The old bellboy of the hotel, last vestige of elegance now gone as seedy as the rest, was picking through my shirts, turning the cuffs to see the maroon monogram. A spidery shadow moved softly on the opposite wall. Perhaps because of the fever, or perhaps because the wind had shifted to some much more malign quarter of the compass, I woke up. Sheets all roiled up, pajamas specked with yellow vomit, half-drunk bottle of mineral water, morphine tablets cheaply bought and badly shot-the one comfort of it all being the certain knowledge that the room was of the sort your mother would, if she knew you were there, come and take you away from. Now the room in the full moon of midnight lay like a tired ghost littered with the signs of a fever unbroken. The message had said to wait, and of course, having come so far, I waited, and of course I had gotten horribly sick. (Thanks to Lawrence Tate for the tip.)įor more on the genesis of this story, see a Q&A with Robert Goolrick. It’s reprinted with Goolrick’s permission. He detailed his efforts in the article below, “Pieces of Pynchon,” which originally appeared in the Octoissue of New Times magazine. In 1978 Robert Goolrick, author of the 2007 memoir The End of the World as We Know It and the new novel A Reliable Wife, attempted to locate Thomas Pynchon.
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