Berkeley

Berkeley is the northern California base of a pivotal stretch in Oedipa Maas’s investigation of Tristero. She comes seeking the sources behind Richard Wharfinger’s historical references and the route by which John Nefastis receives his mail; her inquiries lead from an old play to Nefastis’s apartment and, eventually, along a clandestine postal route that returns her to the same address. Berkeley therefore becomes both a site of research and a test of whether the scattered clues form a real network.

Researching Wharfinger

Oedipa drives north to learn where Wharfinger obtained his information about Tristero and to see how Nefastis’s mail reaches him. Near midnight, after missing the exit for Kinneret, she arrives in Berkeley and stays in a large, many-level hotel hosting the California chapter of an American deaf-mute assembly. Exhausted by the drive, she sleeps fitfully before continuing her inquiry the next day.

At the Lectern Press office on Shattuck Avenue, Oedipa orders a copy of Plays of Ford, Webster, Tourneur and Wharfinger. The book is not on the premises, so she pays $12.50, receives a warehouse address in Oakland, and collects it there later that day. Reading the relevant passage, she finds that the printed couplet does not match the Trystero wording she remembers. A note in the paperback had identified a variant, but the volume she has obtained is supposed to be a straight reprint. Berkeley’s investigation thus yields not a settled source but a textual discrepancy: the line central to her search varies across editions.

Meeting Nefastis

After leaving Berkeley, Oedipa finds John Nefastis’s address in a telephone book at a gas station along Telegraph Avenue. She drives to his pseudo-Mexican apartment building and introduces herself by invoking Stanley Koteks, who had suggested Nefastis might determine whether she was a “sensitive.” Her approach links Berkeley’s literary investigation to a second, purportedly scientific avenue of inquiry. The available evidence establishes the meeting’s location and purpose, but does not make Berkeley itself the source of a conclusive explanation for Tristero.

The postal route and return

Later, Oedipa discovers a W.A.S.T.E. collection box beneath the freeway in San Francisco. After placing a sailor’s letter in it, she waits for a carrier, follows him through the city, and boards the bus to Oakland after he does. She trails him across Oakland and then onto a Berkeley bus. Halfway up Telegraph Avenue, he gets off and leads her to the same pseudo-Mexican apartment building where Nefastis lives.

The pursuit makes Berkeley the endpoint of a functioning route as well as the destination of Oedipa’s earlier research. The carrier has not looked back, and the trail has taken her across city streets, hills, and bus lines before bringing her to the place where she began. Oedipa registers the return with disbelief, unsure whether a full twenty-four hours have passed. The circuit strengthens the apparent connection between Nefastis and W.A.S.T.E. without by itself establishing who controls the network or what its ultimate purpose is.

Berkeley within the mystery

Berkeley gathers distinct forms of evidence: a disputed line in a Jacobean play, a possible contact among inventors, and a courier route whose destination coincides with Nefastis’s residence. Elsewhere, Oedipa recognizes the muted post horn in the watermark on a stamp from Pierce Inverarity’s collection, while the Tristero history she later hears describes its messengers as operating through disguise and silence. Those connections make Berkeley part of an expanding pattern, but they also sharpen the uncertainty surrounding it: access routes can be traced back toward Inverarity’s estate, and Oedipa cannot tell whether she has found a concealed communications system, an elaborate arrangement tied to the dead man, or a misleading convergence. Berkeley matters less as a final answer than as a place where research and pursuit fold back upon each other.