East Pyrites

East Pyrites is an underground Nevada city built in the shadow of a radioactive surface, celebrated for its obsessive devotion to vice and pleasure. Joe Pareti chooses it as the first stop in a planned new life, and its extravagant public culture initially seems to offer exactly the excitement he has missed. But the city also becomes the setting for an encounter with an apparently animated jacket, turning a chosen holiday into an uncertain beginning.

Setting and Character

East Pyrites lies eighty-seven miles south of the radioactive ghost town once called Las Vegas, and three miles beneath it. The city is described as one of the world’s marvels: its devotion to pleasure is so comprehensive that it takes on the force of a civic creed. Pleasure is treated not as a private indulgence but as a duty imposed by the world, giving the place an unusually disciplined face beneath its reputation for excess.

That contrast shapes the city’s identity. Ancient fertility cults have returned there in earnest, while religious standing, public punishment, and gambling are all folded into its pursuit of experience. Christianity has little prestige because it is not considered entertaining; public executions for impiety belong to the city’s spectacle, and wagering has developed beyond ordinary gambling into practices with genuinely dangerous stakes. The account also characterizes some local customs as unconstitutional, others as implausible, and still others as nearly inconceivable. East Pyrites is therefore not merely a refuge for leisure: it is a society that has reorganized public life around pleasure, with few conventional limits left intact.

Pareti’s Arrival

Pareti arrives with a practical plan as well as a desire for excitement. After three years working in the Goo fields, he has saved money and has free passage to the destination of his choice. He selects East Pyrites for a period of pleasure before buying land topside, finding a partner, settling down, and seeking a good position with the Companies. The sequence makes the city a deliberate interlude between his work and the stable future he imagines, rather than the destination of that future.

His appetite for a break is sharpened by the nine months he has spent away from excitement. Yet his response to an attractive stewardess on the journey shows that his condition follows him even as he leaves his former life: he expects her reaction to be the same as that of Peggy Flinn, who had already responded to his ailment. The scene establishes a limit on what Pareti can comfortably pursue, before East Pyrites tests that limit in a very different way.

On reaching the seventieth underlevel, he encounters the city’s sexualized public culture at an intersection where members of the Ishtar Boppers and the Swingers of Cybele are gathered in a fertility-cult event. Pareti carefully avoids joining in. It looks tempting, but he does not want to help the Goo take him over. His restraint is not a rejection of the city: he is trying to enjoy its attractions without surrendering control to the condition he fears. The distinction between choosing pleasure and being overtaken by desire is central to his experience of the place.

The City as an Itinerary

Pareti’s first impression is enthusiastic: he loves East Pyrites at once. He checks into the Round-The-World Combination Hotel, near the Hall of Perversions and across from the green expanse of Torture Garden. After showering and changing, he considers a sequence of amusements, including dinner at the Slaughterhouse and a visit to the Mudbath Club. The carefully named destinations make pleasure feel organized into an itinerary, as though the city’s abundance can be approached one attraction at a time.

The route also conveys the scale of East Pyrites through named institutions rather than a conventional account of its streets or government. Its temples, courts, gambling customs, and leisure venues place religious ceremony, punishment, risk, and recreation side by side. Pareti navigates this environment as a visitor, selecting what to see and avoiding what might threaten his independence. His immediate delight is genuine, but his caution makes clear that even a city dedicated to pleasure cannot guarantee that its visitors remain masters of their own experience.

An Unsettling Interruption

Before Pareti can begin the evening he has planned, he becomes aware that something else is in his hotel room. Nothing initially appears out of place except his jacket, which he remembers leaving on a chair and now sees on the bed. When he reaches for it, the garment slides away and speaks in a coy voice; his attempt to catch it turns into a brief chase around the room. The encounter is the first sharp break in the orderly leisure itinerary he has just assembled.

The episode gives East Pyrites a second narrative function. The city first appears as a chosen escape, a place where Pareti can spend his savings and recover a sense of excitement before settling down. The speaking jacket introduces an unexplained disturbance within that escape, while Pareti’s fear of being taken over by the Goo has already made him wary of surrendering control. The evidence does not resolve the jacket’s appearance or establish what follows from it, but the juxtaposition leaves his planned holiday suspended between chosen pleasure and an encounter he did not choose.