- Oedipa decides to drive up to Berkeley. She wants to learn how Richard Wharfinger knew about Trystero, and she wants to find out how John Nefastis picks up his mail.
- On the way, Oedipa wonders if she should stop at home in Kinneret and see Mucho, but she misses the exit.
- When she arrives at her hotel in Berkeley, she finds that they are putting up the California Chapter of the American Deaf-Mute Assembly, and the receptionist mistakenly starts making sign language at her.
- In the room where she stays, there is a reproduction of the Remedios Varo painting ("Bordando el Manto Terrestre," which haunted her at the end of Chapter One).
- Oedipa dreams of making love to Mucho on a beach, and wakes up the next morning disturbed and exhausted.
- The next day, she goes to Lectern Press. They do not have the textbook on site so they send her to their warehouse.
- There, she discovers that the line in which she is interested is different than it was in the play: "No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow/ Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo" (5.4).
- She looks at the footnote, which notes that there are three different editions of the text—the Quarto, Folio, and Whitechapel editions.
- In the Folio, there is a piece of lead obscuring the back of the line. The Whitechapel line finishes, "This tryst or odious awry, O Niccolo," which, the scholar notices, doesn't really make sense.
- One scholar suggests that the Whitechapel line is a pun on "This trystero dies irae...," (Latin for "Day of Wrath"), but the textbook's editor doesn't know what "trystero" might mean and notes that the Whitechapel edition is fragmentary anyway and contains many other corruptions.
- What Oedipa is most perplexed by is that the line in the Zapf's edition is supposed to be an exact replica of the textbook, so where did they come up with their "Trystero" line?
- She notes that the editor is a Cal professor named Emory Bortz, and she tries to go see him only to find that he now works in San Narciso.
- As Oedipa wanders around the Berkeley campus, she compares it to her own college days in the mid-1950s, a much calmer and more conservative time.
- Before going back to San Narciso, Oedipa goes to see John Nefastis at his house on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. She explains that Koteks told her Nefastis could tell her if she is a "sensitive."
- Nefastis shows her his Machine. He begins an elaborate explanation of the concept of "entropy," and how it functions in the two different fields of thermodynamics and information theory (5.17).
- He tells her that these two only come together in the concept of Maxwell's Demon, and that communication is the key to the problem. The Demon only makes sense if it is able to collect information about all the billions of molecules in the boxes and sort them out.
- Nefastis goes to watch cartoons and leaves Oedipa to stare at a picture of James Clerk Maxwell and see if she is a "sensitive" that can receive the "Demon's message" and psychically open and close the gates to sort the molecules (5.24).
- Oedipa hallucinates that Maxwell is smiling at her but can't tell if she is opening and closing the gates. She thinks, "Nefastis a nut, forget it, a sincere nut. The true sensitive is the one that can share in the man's hallucinations" (5.26).
- When she can't do it, she almost breaks down crying.
- Nefastis comes in to comfort her and proposes that they have sex while watching the news on China, "that profusion of life" (5.31).
- Oedipa screams and flees. When she comes to, she is in traffic on the Bay Bridge in the San Francisco haze.
- She thinks that, just as Maxwell's Demon is a metaphor that came to hold Nefastis's world together, Tristero has become her own personal Maxwell's Demon: the metaphor around which everything revolves.
- Oedipa reflects on all she knows about Tristero: it opposed Thurn and Taxis in Europe; its symbol is the muted post horn; before 1853 it opposed Pony Express and Wells Fargo and attacked their couriers; and it still seems to be functioning in California today "for those of unorthodox sexual persuasion" (5.37).
- Oedipa think that all of this might just be a case of nerves, "a little something for her shrink to fix" (5.38).
- She decides to wander aimlessly around San Francisco and just think about nothing.
- Shortly into her wandering, however, she is swept up by a group of tourists. One of them—Arnold Snarb—pins a nametag on her, and then she is swept into a gay bar called The Greek Way.
- Inside, she meets a man wearing a badge with the Trystero horn on it.
- She tries to get some information out of him, but when she has no luck she just tells him everything that is going on and what the symbol means to her.
- He tells her that he has heard of "Kirby"—whoever put the message in the women's restroom stall—but he doesn't know about the rest of it.
- He tells her that in his case the symbol actually stands for "Inamorati Anonymous," a group to help people kick the addiction to love, "the worst addiction of all" (5.64).
- The man tells a very elaborate story about their founder, a Yoyodyne executive who was "automated out of a job" by the latest IBM computer (5.71).
- The founder was going to kill himself like the Buddhist monk in Vietnam by dousing himself in gasoline, but just before he did his wife came home with the efficiency expert who had him replaced.
- When they find him, the efficiency expert marvels, "Nearly three weeks it takes him to decide. You now how long it would've taken the IBM 7094? Twelve micro-seconds. No wonder you've been replaced" (5.71). (For your information, if you find this hilarious you have a very dark sense of humor. Our prescription: more Thomas Pynchon.)
- The ex-executive laughs so hard that he decides not to kill himself.
- When he washes off all the gasoline, he finds that the stamps on the letters have gone white and that beneath them there is the watermark of a muted post horn (the letters were from failed suicides in response to a classified the executive took out in the LA Times asking if someone in his position had any reason left to live... like we said, an elaborate story).
- The ex-executive decides that his mistake was love, and he founds Inamorati Anonymous and makes the muted post horn its symbol.
- Back in the Greek Way, the Inamorati Anonymous member wanders away from Oedipa to the bathroom and never returns.
- Oedipa wanders around San Francisco and sees the symbol everywhere. She sees it in an herbalist's window in Chinatown and sketched on the sidewalk by a children's game.
- At one point, she thinks a man in a dark suit is watching her and, in a fit of paranoia, hops on a bus and starts riding aimlessly.
- She falls in and out of sleep on the bus, and later will have trouble determining what was real that night and what was dreamed. (Kind of like Mr. Thoth and his dream about his grandfather. From here on out, it gets increasingly hard to tell when Oedipa is hallucinating and when she sees something real.)
- Oedipa wonders if perhaps she is meant to remember all of these symbols, and if so what all of the repetition without any corresponding clarity is supposed to mean, where it is supposed to lead her.
- She happens across some children in Golden Gate Park who are playing jump rope on a Trystero symbol, and their chant seems to be a pun on "Trystero" and "Thurn and Taxis." She can't tell if it's a hallucination and resolves not to believe in them.
- Afterward, Oedipa wanders into a Mexican restaurant and meets Jesús Arrabal, who she met when she was with Pierce in Mazatlán.
- Arrabal had been part of a Mexican anarchist group allied with Zapata, and now he is in exile outside San Francisco.
- Arrabal met Oedipa and Pierce on the beach one day and chatted with Pierce.
- Pierce played the arrogant white American so perfectly that Arrabal thought him the perfect incarnation of his enemy.
- Oedipa wonders if this affirmation of his cause is what caused Jesús not to wander away from the radical anarchist group into the mainstream.
- As Oedipa continues to wander, she sees the post horn everywhere: on an anarcho-syndicalist paper Jesús received; on the gang jackets of a group of delinquents doing drugs; underneath the acronym DEATH scrawled on a bus, which stands for "Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn"; in the bulletin board of a laundromat; being sketched on the breath-fogged window of a metro by a young Mexican girl; in the balance-book of a poker player at the airport; beneath an advertisement for a sadistic group called ACDC, or Alameda County Death Cult, in one of the latrines.
- In the airport, a boy determined to sneak into aquariums and communicate with dolphins—which will succeed man as the dominant species—makes out with his mother. She insists that he correspond by WASTE, otherwise the government will read their mail.
- Oedipa continues to wander, seeing various creatures of the night and the WASTE symbol everywhere.
- She thinks that she is like a private eye, except that the "night's profusion of post horns, this malignant, deliberate, replication... were immobilizing her" (5.101).
- It suddenly seemed as if all of the various underground groups were using the WASTE mail system in a calculated withdrawal from the life of the American Republic (or at least its government mail service).
- Oedipa wanders down to the Embarcadero, where she finds an old sailor with delirium tremens, who wants to send a letter to his wife in Fresno.
- He asks Oedipa to mail the letter for him using the WASTE system, and he tells her there is a mailbox under the freeway. The muted post horn is tattooed on his hand.
- Oedipa takes him up to his rooming house, where she leaves him with an even older man named Ramirez. When she gives the man with DT money, the other man asks for some of it.
- Looking at the stamp, Oedipa sees a dark figure on top of the Capitol building with its arms outstretched and she wonders what it stands for.
- Oedipa thinks of the old man's death as being like that irreversible process that will erase all of her revelations, and then free-associates that DT also stands for dt.—in calculus, a time differential "in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was" (5.124).
- Oedipa heads to the freeway, and underneath she finds what appears to be a trashcan with W.A.S.T.E. initialed on top.
- She waits until the postman comes to collect the mail and then follows him through his San Francisco route, on a bus to Oakland, and eventually right back to John Nefastis's house.
- "She was back where she's started, and could not believe 24 hours had passed. Should it have been more or less?" (5.126)
- Back at the hotel, Oedipa finds a deaf-mute ball going on. A handsome deaf man scoops her up and begins dancing with her.
- Since none of them can hear, each dances to whatever melody is in his head, and Oedipa cannot understand how there are no collisions. The fact terrifies her, and as soon as the dance is finished, she curtsies and flees.
- Oedipa sleeps for twelve hours, and the next day she drives down to Kinneret (Note: Wasn't her car in North Beach? Is this a slip-up, or does it imply that the entire night in San Francisco was hallucinated from her hotel room?).
- Oedipa is determined to see Dr. Hilarius and has decided that she wants him to tell her that the whole Trystero system is part of her imagination, and that she is crazy.
- When she gets there, however, someone starts firing at her with a Gewehr 43 rifle as she approaches the office from its lawn.
- The secretary opens the door of Hilarius's office and lets her in. She tells Oedipa that Hilarius has gone insane; he is convinced someone is after him.
- Oedipa speaks to Hilarius through the door to try to calm him down.
- When Hilarius hears the police coming, he pulls Oedipa into the room with him, taking her as a hostage.
- He keeps alluding to how strange it is that he was a loyal Freudian, and says that there was a boy in central Europe named Zvi whom he drove insane with one of his faces (remember Hilarius's unusual method of making faces at his patients).
- Hilarius thinks Oedipa is a police agent, and asks what she is supposed to tell him.
- She thinks and says, "Face up to your social responsibilities. Accept the reality principle. You're outnumbered and they have superior firepower" (5.166).
- The TV people come and take down Oedipa's information through the door. They try to get some good footage of Hilarius through the windows.
- Meanwhile, Hilarius explains to Oedipa that he was a Nazi at Buchenwald and that he took part in experimentally induced insanity, Zvi being only one of his victims. Now he is afraid that he will have to go back to Israel to stand trial.
- He later decided to practice Freudian psychology as a type of penance (because Freud was a Jew, and Jung—the other most famous psychoanalyst of the early twentieth century—was a Gentile).
- Hilarius is attracted to Freud's work because it suggests that the unconscious is a dark room that will be revealed to be benign when the lights are turned on. He thinks that all the atrocities that he witnessed will likewise prove benign when the light is turned on them.
- Hilarius wanders over to a file cabinet and leaves his gun. Oedipa picks it up and points it at him.
- She says that she came to have him talk her out of a fantasy, but Hilarius tells her that she must cherish it because that's all she has left.
- Oedipa invites the police in, and Hilarius begins to cry when he realizes that she won't shoot him.
- Oedipa wanders outside and finds the KCUF van among all the other media cars there. Mucho is inside.
- Oedipa hops in. Mucho asks how she feels about these terrible events, and she says "Terrible," and he responds, "Wonderful" (5.189-190).
- Oedipa accompanies Mucho back to the studio, where the program director, Caesar Funch, tells her that Mucho just isn't the same anymore.
- Funch says that Mucho is losing his identity, "Day by day, Wendell is less himself and more generic" (5.202).
- Oedipa dismisses the thought.
- That night, however, she and Mucho go to a pizzeria and a bar in Kinneret. Mucho tells her he knows about her affair with Metzger but doesn't make a big deal of it.
- Mucho begins explaining how he has developed the ability to break down a piece of music in his head so that he can hear all the different tracks individually.
- As he goes on, Oedipa realizes that Funch is right—something is wrong with Mucho.
- Mucho reveals that Hilarius opened up his experiment on hallucinogenic drugs to the husbands of his patients, and that he has been taking LSD.
- He tells her that he is no longer disturbed by his time as a used car salesman. He realizes it was all related to a sign in the lot that read National Automobile Dealers' Association, or N.A.D.A.
- Mucho imagined "this creaking metal sign that said nada, nada against the blue sky" (5.322). ("Nada" means "nothing" in Spanish.)
- It used to terrify him.
- Oedipa realized that when she left him before she left him for the last time.
- She tells Mucho that she is going back to San Narciso despite the fact that the cops want her to stay in Kinneret.
- Mucho walks away, whistling a complicated twelve-tone rhythm, and Oedipa realizes she meant to ask him about the letter he sent her (the Potsmaster letter that presumably came from Trystero).
- "But by then it was too late to make any difference" (5.330).