She tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Oedipa had been named also to execute the will in a codicil dated a year ago. Metzger was to act as co-executor and special counsel in the event of any involved litigation. It said Pierce had died back in the spring, and they'd only just now found the will. The letter was from the law firm of Warpe, Wist-full, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles, and signed by somebody named Metzger. Was that how he'd died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only icon in the house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew. She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she'd always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them.

Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. The Crying of Lot 49 1 One summer afternoon Mrs.

The crying of lot