- When Oedipa gets back to Echo Courts, she finds the Paranoids lounging out by the pool.
- Serge, the counter-tenor, sings her a song in which he reveals that Metzger ran away with his girlfriend to Nevada to get married.
- Serge is heart-broken, but he tells her that he learned something from Metzger, and that he is now hanging around playgrounds trying to pick up eight-year-olds.
- Oedipa tries calling Driblette again, but his mother picks up and says there will be a statement tomorrow at noon and hangs up. Oedipa is confused.
- Oedipa then finds Professor Emory Bortz's number, and gives him a call.
- She talks to his wife, Grace, who is distracted by her children throwing beer bottles at one another. She invites Oedipa to the house.
- On her way, Oedipa passes Zapf's Used Books, which has burned to the ground. The man in the government surplus outlet next door tells her that Zapf burned it down for the insurance money.
- The man introduces himself as Winthrop Tremaine, and then reveals to her that he has been selling rifles and swastika armbands to a number of people that come into the store.
- He thinks that there is a lot of money in swastikas, and tells her that they are putting together Nazi uniforms in time for back-to-school season.
- Oedipa is repulsed by him, and continues on her way to the Bortz's home.
- When she arrives, Grace is stressed out by her kids and asks if Oedipa has any. When Oedipa says no, Grace is surprised. She thinks that Oedipa looks "harassed," and just assumed she was a mother (6.22).
- Oedipa finds Emory Bortz lying drunkenly outside in a hammock surrounded by graduate students. She tells him that she wants to know about the "historical" Richard Wharfinger (5.23).
- Bortz says that Wharfinger's dead and all that's left are words. Oedipa recites the lines from The Courier's Tragedy that have to do with Trystero.
- Bortz is surprised, and asks how she got into the Vatican library.
- When Oedipa shows him the edition of Jacobean Revenge Plays, Bortz thinks that their copy of his edition is contaminated and that he'll have to take it up with the publisher.
- Bortz explains that the line Oedipa quoted originally comes from a pornographic edition of the text, which is housed in the Vatican.
- Bortz begins talking about Driblette and says that he had a keen understanding of Wharfinger's vision for the play: "Nobody else I ever knew was so close to the author, to the microcosm of the play as it must have surrounded Wharfinger's living mind" (5.34).
- Oedipa notes that he is using the past tense, and one of the graduate students tells her that Driblette recently killed himself by walking into the Pacific in his Gennaro suit.
- At this very moment, Oedipa is sitting at his wake.
- Oedipa is tempted to ask why he killed himself, "But now she kept a silence, waiting, as if to be illuminated" (6.40).
- Oedipa thinks that all of the men around her are going insane and killing themselves. But she is still confused by how the Trystero line appeared in Driblette's play.
- Bortz tells her that the night he went to see it, Driblette left out that couplet altogether. He thinks that Driblette made the right decision since the Vatican edition is "only an obscene parody." (6.49) (Question: Is this a hint that perhaps this is all The Crying of Lot 49 is as well?)
- Oedipa is flabbergasted, since the night she went to see it Driblette included the lines.
- Bortz takes Oedipa inside to show her microfilms of the Vatican edition.
- He points out how the figure of Death hovers in the background as if in condemnation of the play, and he tells her that one scholar thinks it is a Scurvhamite edition (the Scurvhamites being a Puritan sect).
- Bortz explains that the Scurvhamite believes they were the only part of creation that ran off of God's will.
- "The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatism that led to eternal death" (6.62).
- The Scurvhamites all eventually abandoned their faith.
- Bortz explains that the Scurvhamites made this exaggerated and dirty version of The Courier's Tragedy as "their way of putting the play entirely away from them, into hell" (6.64).
- He thinks that Trystero was a symbol of "the brute Other" that gave meaning to the Scurvhamite theology (6.66).
- Oedipa finally asks the question she came to ask, "What was Trystero" (6.67)?
- In response, Bortz gives her access to his "Wharfingeriana," a collection of all sorts of things Wharfinger was interested in.
- The first book she looks at is written in Old English and is called An Account of the Singular Peregrinations of Dr. Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales from the True History of That Outlandish And Fantastical Race (6.68).
- Reading the book, Oedipa finds out that Blobb was once attacked by the Trystero when he was riding in a Thurn and Taxis car near the "Lake of Piety." (Just think how oddly and incredibly close this is to the story of the American GIs that Manny DiPresso told at Fangoso Lagoons.)
- Oedipa wonders how Blobb got away, and Bortz suggests that maybe the Trystero were trying to expand to the English market. They expected Blobb to run ahead and spread the word that they were coming.
- Oedipa continues to research the Trystero with the help of Bortz and manages to come up with a story of the group's founding.
- In 1577, the Protestant William of Orange had been fighting against Catholic Spain and the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor for nine years.
- He was invited to head up a Brussels Commune that was opposed to the Current Establishment because they thought that it no longer represented the rights of skilled workers.
- In the process of throwing out Establishment figures, the Commune unsuited one Leonard I, the executor of the Thurn and Taxis monopoly at the time.
- Leonard was replaced Jan Hinckart, Lord of Ohian.
- Yet, at the same time, a Spaniard named Hernando Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera came forward and claimed that he was rightful lord of Ohian.
- For the next seven years, Tristero kept up a guerrilla war against Hinckart, attempting to assassinate him four separate times.
- Eventually Hinckart was disposed and the Thurn and Taxis system put back in place. Yet it was a difficult time for the postal monopoly because the Emperor temporarily withdrew his support, and they began to lose money.
- Tristero decided to set up his own postal system; "He styled himself El Desheredado, The Disinherited, and fashioned a livery of black for his followers, black to symbolize the only thing that truly belonged to them in their exile: the night" (6.80).
- At this time, Tristero also introduced the muted post horn as their symbol. He began a campaign of terror along Thurn and Taxis postal routes.
- Oedipa goes to Driblette's funeral with Bortz and his students.
- Afterward, they sit on his grave and drink wine.
- Oedipa wonders if part of herself vanished with Driblette. She wonders if his spirit might inhabit her and communicate what happened in his final minutes.
- She thinks that the Trystero have been killing and driving insane all of the men in her life. Yet at the same time, there seems to be little meaning to any of it, as if it is nothing but whimsy.
- Oedipa shouts Driblette's name at the top of his grave, but nothing happens.
- Oedipa and Bortz continue to track Tristero through the 17th century, but at some point the historical record goes silent.
- They wonder why the Tristero didn't take revenge for being mentioned in the play. They wonder why they didn't stage a coup of the postal service when Thurn and Taxis began to decay in the mid-17th century.
- Bortz lets his mind run wild and imagines that Tristero might have considered merging with Thurn and Taxis. Or he imagines infighting within Tristero that kept them from acting.
- As the narrator puts it, as the record went silent and Thurn and Taxis gradually lost power, "Possibilities for paranoia become abundant" (6.88).
- Bortz imagines that people began to think of Tristero as some otherworldly malicious force "like the Scurvhamite's blind, automatic anti-God" (6.88). He even imagines that Tristero staged the French Revolution only to obtain a Proclamation that ended the Thurn and Taxis monopoly in France.
- Oedipa, for her part, begins to feel reluctant to follow up on anything. She doesn't pursue the publisher of Jacobean Revenge Plays, she doesn't go back to see Thoth, and she avoids talking about Driblette.
- In general, she "left it alone, anxious that her revelation not expand beyond a certain point" (6.92).
- Yet she does go back to the Scope, where she finds Mike Fallopian surrounded by young women. He shoos them away to talk to Oedipa.
- Oedipa brings Fallopian up to speed, then asks him why the Peter Pinguid Society isn't using the WASTE system.
- Fallopian waits for a minute, then makes a new suggestion: "Has it ever occurred to you, Oedipa, that somebody's putting you on? That this is all a hoax, maybe something Inverarity set up before he died?" (6.99).
- Fallopian encourages her to sort out fact from speculation, but Oedipa doesn't want to even consider the possibility.
- She accuses Fallopian of hating her, and sarcastically tells him to get in touch with Winthrop Tremaine if his Society needs any more supplies.
- Fallopian says that they are already in touch.
- A few days later, Genghis Cohen calls Oedipa to show her an old American stamp he has come across with the Tristero symbols and the motto: "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire" (6.109).
- Oedipa finally realizes what WASTE stands for.
- Cohen pulls out an old Scott catalog on stamps and shows her an addendum to it about the Tristero stamp.
- Oedipa goes "off on a kind of intuitive high," and flips to the back of the catalog, where she sees a sticker for Zapf's Used Books (6.111).
- Oedipa goes back to San Narciso to reread Inverarity's will. She is not surprised to find that he owned Zapf's Used Books and Tremaine's Surplus and the Tank Theater (where she and Metzger went to see The Courier's Tragedy).
- She realizes that Bortz teaches at San Narciso College, which was heavily endowed by Inverarity, and she has no doubt that Blobb's Peregrinations was acquired at Zapf's Used Book Store.
- "Meaning what? That Bortz, along with Metzger, Cohen, Driblette, Koteks, the tattooed sailor in San Francisco, the W.A.S.T.E. carriers she'd seen—that all of them were Pierce Inverarity's men? Bought? Or loyal, for free, for fun, to some grandiose practical joke he'd cooked up, all for her embarrassment, or terrorizing, or moral improvement" (6.115).
- Oedipa thinks that she has become one of the Paranoids. She lists her options:
- She has either stumbled on a legitimate conspiracy, or she is hallucinating, or Pierce plotted the entire thing, or she has imagined that Pierce plotted the entire thing, in which case she is insane.
- She still thinks that the plot is "so labyrinthine that it must have meaning beyond just a practical joke" (6.116) (Again: Oedipa is in the same position as the reader. Would Pynchon really put together such an intricate maze just to mess with our heads? What could be the meaning of it all?).
- That night Oedipa sits alone for hours and thinks that of all the undesirable options, she hopes that she is just insane.
- Oedipa begins to behave extremely neurotically and wonders if she is pregnant.
- At the same time, Genghis Cohen keeps turning up with more information.
- He shows her an article from 1865 in Bibliotheque des Timbrophiles by Jean-Baptiste Moens.
- The article claims that there was a split in the Tristero during the French Revolution.
- Some sympathized with Thurn and Taxis and wanted to subsidize them during their trouble, which caused a huge split in the organization.
- As the author puts it, at that point "did the organization enter the penumbra of historical eclipse" (6.119).
- The Tristero continued doing small-time work for European anarchists, but most of them, the article notes, fled to America in 1849-1850," rendering their services to those who seek to extinguish the flame of Revolution" (6.119).
- Oedipa goes to discuss the article with Bortz, who points out that the Tristero arrived just in time for the great postal reform movement in the U.S.
- He thinks that they must have continued their conspiracy; "All they've done is to change oppositions" (6.121).
- As Bortz imagines it, they began harassing the Pony Express disguised as Indians (men like Mr. Thoth's grandfather), and running their own mail routes.
- By now, Oedipa knows all of the Tristero stamps in Cohen's collection by heart. There are many throughout the years which are only slightly altered in some creepy way to imply that the organization still exists.
- At night, Oedipa continues to feel as if she is losing her mind.
- Then one day Cohen calls her and tells her that "The Tristero "forgeries" were to be sold, as lot 49" (6.128).
- What is extremely strange, however, is that a man has placed what is called a book bid on the stamps. With a book bid, someone bids by mail so that they don't have to identify themselves.
- Cohen assumes that the bid is coming from the Tristero and that they want to suppress any evidence of their existence.
- Oedipa goes back to Echo Courts and gets drunk on bourbon. She goes driving on the freeway with the lights off (not quite trying to commit suicide, but not far off) and then stops at a phone booth.
- She calls the Greek Way and describes the man she spoke with there. They connect her to him, and she begs him to tell her whether or not he was hired to play a practical joke on her. She says that she's been driven mad and is near the point of suicide.
- After a long pause, the man tells her that it is too late. Not for Oedipa, but for him. He hangs up.
- Oedipa realizes that she does not have any more coins to call him back and feels completely isolated and disoriented.
- She wonders if San Narciso is really so unique, or if it is just incidental that she is handling Inverarity's Estate here and not somewhere else in America.
- Oedipa remembers that Pierce's fascination with business was what had separated them. She considers all the other possibilities for how Pierce might have conned her, and wonders if—by enmeshing himself in this conspiracy—he was trying to ensure his legacy and cheat death.
- Yet Oedipa also has to admit the possibility that the Tristero is real. She thinks of squatters all around America and wonders what there is left to inherit in this country anyway.
- She thinks of the intricate miracle of communication that runs all across the American landscape, and wonders if there is something that connects all those randomly made phone calls, something like the Biblical Word that would eventually come to reveal itself through this communication system.
- Oedipa wonders how many people knew about Tristero, how many were similarly dispossessed in America.
- She considers splitting up the will amongst all of the American dispossessed, but knows that she'd be declared insane and removed as executor.
- Oedipa begins to think of her search for some meaning behind things as a binary option: either there is meaning or there isn't.
- "Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia" (6.148).
- Oedipa decides that she has nothing left to lose, and so calls C. Morris Schrift, the lawyer representing the anonymous book bidder.
- The lawyer tells her that the bidder has decided to appear in person and hangs up.
- Oedipa goes to the auction, where she meets Genghis Cohen, who apologizes but says that he wants to bid on some of Inverarity's stamps.
- Cohen tells her that Loren Passerine, the finest auctioneer in the west, is "crying" today (6.154). He tells her that crying is the official name for calling out sales.
- Oedipa sits at the auction as Passerine takes the stage and looks around the room at the backs of necks, wondering which belongs to the mysterious book bidder.
- "Passerine spread his arms in a gesture that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture; perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat. Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49" (6.158).
- And that, folks, is the end.