Since Roswell had only been in the asylum for a day or two, they found his equipment untouched by local scavengers or the landlord.
* * * * * * * * * *
Pynchon often shows his contempt for the police. I'm glad to see he treats landlords with the same disrespect. He has only mentioned landlords once before but in a similar context. Landlords hold an inordinate amount of power over people's lives and so they can, on a whim, evict a tenant or, as hinted at here, simply steal from a tenant who hasn't been around for a bit. The suggestion here might be that Roswell pays rent by the week and so just a few days didn't alert the landlord to his absence. But it also suggests that if Roswell had been incarcerated for a little longer, the landlord would have quickly swooped in and claimed his possessions, selling them off to pay for the missed rent. Or even that the landlord simply would have stolen from him if he thought he could, rent paid or not.
The mention of local scavengers points to two things: the general poverty level of the vacancies the visiting Ætherists have taken up and as a direct comparative to landlords. And the term, "landlord", of course, is a term rife with imperialist and capitalist symbolism, indicating that they are one of the bad guys of the novel.
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