Oswald wanted to be a novelist. Lane says he and Pynchon were on the same bus to Mexico. “To divide Tom the man from Pynchon the idea for biographical purposes, however, is to risk the folly in which Lane indulges in Journey into the Mind of [P.], particularly when he speculates that Pynchon was on the bus Lee Harvey Oswald took from Houston, Texas, to Mexico City on September 26, 1963,[23] about a month after Pynchon served as best man at Richard Fariña and Mimi Baez’s wedding on August 21, 1963. Lane never offers an explanation for why Pynchon would travel from California to Texas to return to Mexico rather than take a bus from Pacific Grove, to which he had traveled from Mexico City in August.[24] Lane admits that he is offering nothing more than “ridiculous rumor,” a description he quickly recasts as “ridiculous speculation,” apparently to indicate that the story is his own, but he also conjectures that Pynchon’s “secret,” his reason for avoiding the press, involves the conversation he had with Oswald. “This is the kind of fun people like me can have,” Lane then says. But the speculation isn’t simply ridiculous; it ignores the record, even as it existed at the time of the film’s making. Pynchon had already begun his famed avoidance of the media before Oswald went to Mexico, as George Plimpton, a literary journalist, and Jules Siegel, a former friend, point out in the film just after Lane’s speculation. There is no reasonable way to place Pynchon on a bus with Oswald, despite Lane’s insistence that connections can be forged even if the words we have don’t imply them, or to attribute Pynchon’s desire for privacy to a meeting between him and Kennedy’s assassin. Indeed, it has more recently been revealed that Pynchon headed further north after Fariña’s wedding, meeting up with friends from Cornell, Mary Ann Tharaldsen and David Seidler, in Berkeley, where he remained until “shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.”[25] Pynchon might observe of Lane’s speculation: “Opera librettos, movies and television drama are allowed to get away with all kinds of errors in detail. Too much time in front of the Tube and a writer [or biographical researcher, it turns out] can get to believing the same thing. . . . The lesson here, obvious but now and then overlooked, is just to corroborate one’s data.”[26]