Oedipa Maas Timeline and Summary

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• Oedipa returns home from a Tupperware party to find that she has been named executrix of the estate of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity.
• When Oedipa's husband Mucho comes home, he suggests that she go see their family lawyer Roseman about the will.
• That night, Oedipa receives a call from her psychotherapist Dr. Hilarius, who is trying to get her to serve as a subject in an experiment on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs.
• For the first time, we learn that Oedipa hallucinates.
• The next day, Oedipa goes to see Roseman, the family lawyer. At lunch, he flirts with her and she ignores him.
• Oedipa just wants Roseman to handle the estate. She is not very interested in it.
• Upon returning home, Oedipa remembers going to Mexico City with Pierce and seeing a painting by Remedios Varo, which made her cry because she saw it as an image of her life: trapped in a tower, surrounded by a void, with no means of escape.
• She wonders, "If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?" (1.55).
• Oedipa drives down to San Narciso to meet Metzger, the co-executor of Inverarity's will.
• When she first arrives, she experiences "an odd, religious instant" (2.2).
• Oedipa stops at a small motel called Echo Courts, and a young boy named Miles walks her to her room. When he reveals that he is in a band, Oedipa suggests that Mucho might play their tape on the radio.
• Miles thinks she is coming on to him, and she has to defend herself with a TV antenna.
• When the lawyer Metzger shows up, Oedipa is surprised to find that he is hawt.
• The two of them watch a movie that Metzger starred in when he was a child actor named Baby Igor.
• Oedipa thinks that Metzger must have paid the hotel manager to play the movie; "it's all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot" (2.31).
• Metzger flirts with Oedipa intensely, and gradually reveals that he knows a fair amount about her relationship with Inverarity.
• Metzger wants Oedipa to place a bet on the outcome of the movie, and she bets that Baby Igor and his family will die.
• Oedipa begins to ask questions about the movie, and then agrees to play a game Metzger calls Strip Botticelli, in which she will take off a piece of clothing every time she asks a question.
• Before they begin playing, however, Oedipa slips into the bathroom and puts on all the clothes that she can find. When she looks in the mirror, she sees "a beach ball with feet" and begins laughing so hard that she falls and knocks over a can of hair spray that begins atomizing and flying all around the room (2.78).
• Oedipa and Metzger eventually have sex, with Miles and his band serenading them from out by the pool.
• Afterward, they lie there "amid a wall-to-wall scatter of clothing and spilled bourbon" while Baby Igor and his family drown on the TV screen (2.106).
• Oedipa asks what Inverarity told Metzger about her.
• Metzger says, "That you wouldn't be easy" (2.110).
• Oedipa begins to cry, but after awhile she goes back to Metzger on the floor.
• After her tryst with Metzger, things grow increasingly strange. Oedipa feels as if "there were revelation in progress all around her," but she just isn't privy to it.
• Oedipa goes to a bar called The Scope with Metzger, where they meet Mike Fallopian, the head of the Peter Pinguid Society.
• Fallopian explains the Society's origin, and tells them that they oppose government mail and so use Yoyodyne's (a huge aerospace company based in San Narciso) inter-office delivery service to subvert the system.
• When Oedipa goes to the bathroom, she sees some graffiti advertising an orgy. It says one should contact Kirby at WASTE, and beneath there is a symbol that Oedipa does not recognize, but which is meant to be a muted post-horn. She writes down WASTE's address and copies the symbol in her notebook.
• The next day, Oedipa goes to Fangoso Lagoons with Metzger and the Paranoids.
• On the way, she thinks of the Pacific Ocean as some pure place, which might serve as "redemption for Southern California" (3.56).
• At the Lagoons, a bizarre lawyer-friend of Metzger's turns up, who reveals that his client wants to sue the Inverarity Estate.
• Oedipa is interested in his story, though she is not sure why. His client claims that he dredged up the bones of American GI's massacred in World War II and sold them to Inverarity, who used them in cigarette filters. Inverarity never paid him.
• When one of the Paranoids' girls says it all sounds a lot like a Jacobean revenge drama called The Courier's Tragedy, Oedipa insists that Metzger take her to go see it the next night.
• The play has a very bloody and convoluted plot, but there is a scene that resembles the claim of Di Presso's client. There are also references to the Trystero, an organization opposed to the Thurn and Taxis mail system, which murders the main character in the play.
• Afterward, Oedipa insists on going to see the director, who discourages her from reading too much into Trystero or the play.
• He tells her, "you could waste your life that way and never touch the truth" (3.170).
• As Oedipa leaves, she is bothered by the fact that she meant to come discuss the bones but instead ended up discussing Trystero.
• At this point, Oedipa feels as if revelations are now multiplying "exponentially" all around her (4.1). It seems that everywhere she looks, she finds Trystero.
• First Oedipa rereads Inverarity's will in an attempt to make herself useful. Noting his ownership in Yoyodyne, she decides to go to a stockholder's meeting.
• During the tour after the meeting, Oedipa gets lost and happens on an engineer named Stanley Koteks, who happens to be sketching the muted post horn on the back of an envelope when she walks up.
• Koteks complains to Oedipa about the patent clause in his Yoyodyne contract, which gives them a right to their employees' inventions.
• Oedipa decides to antagonize him by saying that she didn't think people invented things any more, and he proceeds to tell her about John Nefastis and his fantastic-sounding perpetual motion machine.
• Oedipa thinks that she is in the presence of madness.
• When Koteks throws out what might be Nefastis's address (or might be the WASTE address), Oedipa begins to question him.
• He quickly realizes that she isn't who she is pretending to be when she thinks that it is in Berkeley, and when she pronounces the acronym WASTE as if it were a word.
• Oedipa goes to see Fallopian, who isn't much help.
• She thinks that "a pattern was beginning to emerge, having to do with the mail and how it was delivered" (4.32).
• Oedipa remembers a historical marker at the Fangoso Lagoons, which said that in 1853 a bunch of Wells Fargo men were massacred by mysterious men in black uniforms. The only witness was a post rider, and there was a cross etched in the dust by one of the victims.
• Oedipa wonders if it was a cross or the initial T, for Trystero.
• She tries calling Randolph Driblette to ask if he was thinking about the Wells Fargo incident when he had his actors dress in black, but there is no answer.
• Oedipa goes to Zapf's Used Books to track down a copy of Jacobean Revenge Plays. She looks at the copyright page and finds that the textbook in which Wharfinger's play was printed was published by a press in Berkeley. She resolves to make a trip there.
• The next day Oedipa goes to Vesperhaven House, an old-folks home that Inverarity owned near San Narciso.
• She randomly meets a man named Mr. Thoth there, who begins describing a dream involving his grandfather, who was a Pony Express Rider.
• Oedipa thinks of the Wells Fargo incident and asks if his grandfather was ever attacked.
• He tells her that he was attacked by a group of men wearing feathers they had died black using burned bones. He cut off one of their fingers and on it was a signet ring.
• Thoth gives Oedipa the ring, and on it is the symbol of the muted post horn (what Oedipa now thinks of as the WASTE symbol).
• When Oedipa tells Fallopian about this, he sees a connection, but Oedipa "thought of how tenuous it was, like a long white hair, over a century long" (4.57).
• Some time later, Oedipa gets a phone call from Genghis Cohen, a renowned philatelist (stamp expert) that Metzger has hired to inventory and appraise Inverarity's stamp collection. Cohen wants to discuss some irregularities in Inverarity's collection.
• Oedipa goes to see Cohen at his apartment/office, where he immediately offers her wine made from dandelions that he picked from a cemetery that was later displaced by the East San Narciso Freeway.
• Oedipa immediately remembers Metzger's reference to the same cemetery and thinks that she has become sensitized to such correlations. Yet she worries that this is closer to mental illness than intuition and she sees "how far it might be possible to get lost in this" (4.69).
• Cohen shows her a stamp with a very unusual watermark—the WASTE symbol. He also shows her a Thurn and Taxis stamp, which has the symbol of the post horn but without the mute.
• For the first time, it becomes clear to her what the WASTE symbol might be, and she thinks, "Whoever they were their aim was to mute the Thurn and Taxis post horn" (4.82).
• Cohen reveals to her that the stamps are forgeries, and on of them "U.S. Postage" is transposed to read "Potsage," just like on the letter she received from Mucho.
• Oedipa begins to tell Cohen about all the coincidences, but he seems to withdraw.
• Cohen pours more dandelion wine and Oedipa thinks of a world in which "their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine" (4.100).
• The next day, Oedipa drives to Berkeley.
• She locates Lectern Press and is shocked to find that there are several different editions of The Courier's Tragedy, and only one of them mentions something like Trystero.
• Given the edition Driblette worked with, she has no idea where he came up with the line and resolves to ask the English professor who edited the book, a man named Emory Bortz who lives back in San Narciso.
• Oedipa then goes to John Nefastis's house on Telegraph Avenue.
• She tells Nefastis that Koteks sent her to see if she is a "sensitive."
• Nefastis brings out his machine and explains the concept of Maxwell's Demon to Oedipa.
• She is left staring at a picture of James Clerk Maxwell trying to mentally sort out the fast and slow particles in Nefastis's machine.
• It doesn't work, and Oedipa thinks that Nefastis is a nut. Yet she is so disappointed that she almost begins crying.
• Nefastis comes to comfort her and proposes that they have sex while watching the news broadcast on China.
• Oedipa runs out screaming.
• Oedipa spends the rest of the night wandering around San Francisco.
• First she is swept by a group of tourists into a gay bar called The Greek Way.
• Inside she meets a man wearing the WASTE symbol. It turns out that he is a member of Inamorati Anonymous, a group for people trying to recover from addiction to love. The man eventually goes to the bathroom and never comes back.
• Oedipa continues with her wandering, and she sees the Trystero symbol everywhere around San Francisco. She begins to have trouble knowing when she is hallucinating and when she is seeing something real.
• Extremely late in the night, Oedipa runs into an old homeless sailor who asks her to send something to his wife in Fresno using WASTE.
• He directs Oedipa to a mailbox under the freeway, and after dropping in his letter, she waits until a mail courier comes.
• Oedipa follows the courier on his route around San Francisco and then back to Berkeley, where he ends up leading her right back to Nefastis's house.
• Oedipa realizes that twenty-four hours have passed and heads back to her hotel.
• At the hotel, they are hosting an event for deaf-mutes. A handsome deaf-mute grabs Oedipa when she enters and pulls her out onto the dance floor. There is no music, and Oedipa cannot understand how the deaf-mutes don't bump into one another since they are all just dancing to the music in their head.
• After a day of sleep, Oedipa decides to go see Dr. Hilarius in Kinneret, hoping he will tell her that she is crazy and that the Tristero is all in her imagination.
• When she gets there, Hilarius has gone crazy and begins shooting at her with a German rifle.
• He takes her hostage inside and reveals that he used to be a Nazi and that he is afraid he will be put on trial in Israel.
• The police come to arrest Hilarius, and Oedipa wanders outside to find her husband Mucho in a van in the driveway reporting on the event for KCUF.
• Oedipa goes back to the Studio with Mucho, where his program director, Funch, tells her that Mucho is not the same lately.
• Oedipa dismisses the idea, but when she goes out to dinner with Mucho she realizes that Funch is right. Mucho is acting very strangely, and he reveals to Oedipa that Hilarius gave him LSD, which he has been taking.
• Oedipa realizes that when she left her husband in San Narciso, she left him for the last time.
• After Oedipa and Mucho part, she realizes she meant to ask him about the transposed "Potsmaster" on the letter he sent her, but then figures that it's too late to matter anyway.
• Oedipa returns to Echo Courts, only to find that Metzger has run off with one of the Paranoid's young girlfriends.
• She gets in touch with Professor Emory Bortz, and on her way there learns that Zapf's Used Book Store has burned to the ground.
• Oedipa finds Bortz lying drunkenly in a hammock in his backyard surrounded by graduate students.
• She learns that Randolph Driblette killed himself, and that this is his wake.
• Oedipa explains her interest in The Courier's Tragedy to Bortz, and he takes her in to look at his "Wharfingeriana" (6.68).
• Using his materials, Oedipa manages to piece together the story of the Tristero's origins in the late sixteenth century. She tries to stick to facts, but Bortz often lets his imagination run wild when confronted with new evidence.
• Oedipa goes to see Mike Fallopian, who tells her that perhaps the entire thing is just a hoax. Oedipa is angry, though she admits to herself that it's a possibility.
• A few days later, Cohen shows Oedipa some more Tristero forgeries, and on one stamp they see the motto: "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire" (6.109).
• Oedipa finally realizes what WASTE stands for.
• Cohen proceeds to show her more forgeries, but Oedipa's interest in the whole conspiracy begins to wane.
• She seriously considers the possibility that somehow Inverarity is playing a joke on her. She also considers the possibility that she might be insane, and she begins to behave more and more neurotically.
• Even as Oedipa's interest wanes, certain details seem to fall into place. Then Cohen reveals that a mysterious bidder has emerged who wants to buy the Tristero forgeries without revealing his identity.
• Oedipa gets drunk at Echo Courts and goes driving on the highway with her lights off.
• She calls The Greek Way from a phone booth and begs to speak to the man from Inamorati Anonymous. She tells him that she just tried to kill herself and asks him to tell her what is going on. The man says it's too late.
• Oedipa stands outside the phone booth and thinks about the Tristero and the American dispossessed.
• Oedipa and Cohen go to the auction of Inverarity's estate.
• Oedipa finds her seat and "[settles] back, to await the crying of lot 49" (6.158).