GRAVITY RAINBOW (108 page)

The sets for the movie-to-be help some. The buildings are real, not a false front in sight. The boliche is stocked with real liquor, the pulperia with real food. The sheep, cattle, horses, and corrals are real. The huts are weatherproof and are being slept in. When von Goll leaves-if he ever comes-nothing will be struck. Any of the extras who want to stay are welcome. Many of them only want to rest up awhile for more DP trains, more fantasies of what home was like before the destruction, and some dream of getting somewhere. They'll move on. But will others come? And what will the military government think of a community like this in the middle of their garrison state?

It isn't the strangest village in the Zone. Squalidozzi has come in out of his wanderings with tales of Palestinian units strayed all the way from Italy, who've settled down farther east and started up Hasidic communes, on the pattern of a century and a half ago. There are onetime company towns come under the fleet and jittery rule of Mercury, dedicated now to a single industry, mail delivery, eastward and back, in among the Soviets and out, 100 marks a letter. One village in Mecklenburg has been taken over by army dogs, Dobermans and Shepherds, each one conditioned to kill on sight any human except the one

who trained him. But the trainers are dead men now, or lost. The dogs have gone out in packs, ganged cows in the fields and brought the carcasses miles overland, back to the others. They've broken into supply depots Rin-Tin-Tin style and looted K-rations, frozen hamburger, cartons of candy bars. Bodies of neighboring villagers and eager sociologists litter all the approaches to the Hund-Stadt. Nobody can get near it. One expeditionary force came armed with rifles and grenades, but the dogs all scattered in the night, slender as wolves, and no one could bring himself to destroy the houses and shops. No one wanted to occupy the village, either. So they went away. And the dogs came back. If there are lines of power among themselves, loves, loyalties, jealousies, no one knows. Someday G-5 might send in troops. But the dogs may not know of this, may have no German anxieties about encirclement-may be living entirely in the light of the one man-installed reflex: Kill The Stranger. There may be no way of distinguishing it from the other given quantities of their lives-from hunger or thirst or sex. For all they know, kill-the-stranger was born in them. If any have remembered the blows, the electric shocks, the rolled-up newspapers no one read, the boots and prods, their pain is knotted in now with the Stranger, the hated. If there are heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careful about suggesting out loud any extra-canine source for these sudden eruptions of lust to kill that take them over, even the pensive heretics themselves, at any first scent of the Stranger. But in private they point to the remembered image of one human, who has visited only at intervals, but in whose presence they were tranquil and affectionate-from whom came nourishment, kind scratches and strokings, games of fetch-the-stick. Where is he now? Why is he different for some and not for others?

There is a possibility, among the dogs, latent so far because it's never been seriously tested, of a crystallizing into sects, each around the image of its trainer. A feasibility study, in fact, is going on even now at staff level in G-5, to see whether original trainers might not be located, and this crystallizing begun. One sect might try to protect its trainer against attacks from others. Given the right combinations and an acceptable trainer-loss figure, it might be cheaper to let the dogs finish themselves off than to send in combat troops. The study has been contracted to, of all people, Mr. Pointsman, who is now restricted to one small office at Twelfth House, the rest of the space having been taken over by an agency studying options for nationalizing coal and steel-given him more out of sympathy than anything else. Since the castrating of Major Marvy, Pointsman has been officially in

disgrace. Clive Mossmoon and Sir Marcus Scammony sit in their club, among discarded back copies of
British Plastics,
drinking the knight's favorite, Quimporto-a weird prewar mixture of quinine, beef-tea and port-with a dash of Coca-Cola and a peeled onion. Ostensibly the meeting is to finalize plans for the Postwar Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat, a source of great corporate fun these days ("Imagine the look on some poor bastard's face when the whole
sleeve
simply falls out of the shoulder-" "O-or how about mixing in something that will actually
dissolve
in the rain?"). But Mossmoon really wants to discuss Pointsman: "What shall we do with Pointsman?"

"I found the most darling boots in Portobello Road," pipes Sir Marcus, whom it's always hard to get around to talking business. "They'll look stunning on you. Blood-red cordovan and halfway up your thighs. Your naked thighs."

"We'll give it a go," replies Clive, neutral as can be (though it's a thought, old Scorpia's been so damned bitchy lately). "I could use a spot of relaxation after trying to explain Pointsman away to the Higher Levels."

"Oh, the
dog
chap. I say, have you ever thought about a Saint Bernard? Big, shaggy darlings."

"On occasion," Clive keeps at it, "but mostly I think about Pointsman."

"Not your sort, darling. Not at all. And he
is
getting on, poor chap."

"Sir Marcus," last resort, usually the willowy knight demands to be called Angelique, and there seems no other way to get his attention, "if this show prangs, we're going to see a national crisis. I've got Ginger Groupers jamming my switchboard and my mailbox day and night-"

"Mm, I'd like to jam your male box, Clivey-"

"-
and
1922 Committee coming in the windows. Bracken and Beaverbrook go
on,
you know, it isn't as if the election put them out of a job or something-"

"Dear
chap,"
smiling angelically, "there isn't going to
be
any crisis. Labour wants the American found as much as we do. We sent him out to destroy the blacks, and it's obvious now he won't do the job. What harm can he cause, roaming around Germany? For all we know he's taken ship for South America and all those adorable little mustachios. Let it
be
for a while. We've got the Army, when the time is right. Slothrop was a good try at a moderate solution, but in the end it's always the Army, isn't it?"

"How can you be so sure the Americans will ever condone that?"

A long disagreeable giggle. "Clive, you're such a little boy. You don't know the Americans. I do. I deal with them. They'll want to see how we do with
our
lovely black animals-oh dear, ex Africa semper aliquid novi, they're just so big, so
strong
-before they try it on their own, ah, target groups. They may
say
a good many harsh things if we fail, but there'll be no sanctions."

"Are we going to fail?"

"We're all going to fail," Sir Marcus primping his curls, "but the Operation won't."

Yes. Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower self. The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. Even in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus's estate, "The Birches," the fore-play is a game about who has the real power, who's had it all along, chained and corseted though he be, outside these shackled walls. The humiliations of pretty "Angelique" are calibrated against their degree of fantasy. No joy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of us has his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain…

It wasn't always so. In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat… It was the end of the world, it was total revolution (though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): every day thousands of the aristocracy new and old, still haloed in their ideas of right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine of Flanders, run day in and out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those of the people-an English class was being decimated, the ones who'd volunteered were dying for those who'd known something and hadn't, and despite it all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper…

What?

– richard M. nixon

BETTE DAVIS AND MARGARET DUMONT are in the curly-Cuvillies drawing-room of somebody's palatial home. From outside the window, at some point, comes the sound of a kazoo, playing a tune of astounding tastelessness, probably "Who Dat Man?" from
A Day at the Races
(in more ways than one). It is one of Groucho Marx's vulgar friends. The sound is low, buzzing, and guttural. Bette Davis freezes, tosses her head, flicks her cigarette, "What," she inquires, "is
that?"
Margaret Dumont smiles, throws out her chest, looks down her nose. "Well it
sounds,"
she replies, "like a kazoo."

For all Slothrop knows, it
was
a kazoo. By the time he's awake, the racket has faded in the morning. Whatever it was, it woke him up. What it was, or is, is Pirate Prentice, in a more or less hijacked P-47, on route to Berlin. His orders are terse and clear, like those of the others, agents of the Pope, Pope got religion, go out 'n' find that minnesinger, he's a good guy after all…

Well, it's an older Jug, one with a greenhouse canopy. The barred field of sight gives Pirate twinges of memory in his neck muscles. The plane seems permanently out of trim to him, though he still fiddles now and then with different tabs. Right now he's trying the War Emergency Power to see how it works, even though there seems to be no War, no Emergency, keeping an eye on the panel, where RPMs, manifold pressure, and cylinder-head temperature are all nudging their red lines. He eases it down and flies on, and presently is trying a slow roll over Celle, then a loop over Brunswick, then, what the hell, an Immelmann over Magdeburg. On his back, molars aching in a grin,

he starts his roll a hair too slow, just this side of one-thirty, and nearly stalls it, jolts over a set of surprise points-finish it as an ordinary loop or go for the Immelmann?-already reaching for ailerons, forget the damn rudder, a spin isn't worth worrying about… but at the last second does give the pedal just a touch anyway, a minor compromise (I'm nearly forty, good God, is it happening to me
too?)
and rolls himself upright again. It had to be the Immelmann.

Oh I'm the Eagle of Tooting,

Bombing and shooting,

And nobodee can bring me down!

Old Kaiser Bill, you're over the hill,

Cause I'm comin' into your home town!

Tell all the frauleins and mademoiselles

To keep a light in the window for me…

Cause I'm the Eagle of Tooting, just rooty-toot-tooting.

And flyin' on to victo-ree!

By now, Osbie Feel ought to be in Marseilles, already trying to contact Blodgett Waxwing. Webley Silvernail is on route to Zurich. Katje will be going to Nordhausen… Katje…

No, no, she hasn't told him everything she's been up to. It's none of his business. However much she told him, there'd always be the bit of mystery to her. Because of what he is, because of directions he can't move in. But how is it both of them kept from vanishing from each other, into the paper cities and afternoons of this strange peace, and the coming Austerity? Could it be there's something about ad hoc arrangements, like the present mission, that must bring you in touch with the people you need to be with? that more formal adventures tend, by their nature, to separation, to loneliness? Ah, Prentice… What's this, a runaway prop? no, no, check the fuel-pressure-here's the gauge needle wobbling, rather low, tank's run dry-

Little in-flight annoyance for Pirate here, nothing serious… Out of his earphones now and then, ghost-voices will challenge or reprimand him: air traffic people down in their own kingdom, one more overlay on the Zone, antennas strung in the wilderness like redoubts, radiating half-spheres of influence, defining invisible corridors-in-the-sky that are real only for them. The Thunderbolt is painted Kelly green. Hard to miss. Pirate's idea. Gray was for the War. Let them chase. Catch me if you can.

Gray was for the War. So, it seems, was Pirate's odd talent for living the fantasies of others. Since V-E Day, nothing. But it's not the

end of his psychic difficulties. He is still being "haunted," in the same marginal and uncertain way, by Katje's ancestor Frans van der Groov, dodo killer and soldier of fortune. The man never quite arrives, nor quite leaves. Pirate is taking it personally. He is the Dutchman's compatible host, despite himself. What does Frans see in him? Has it to do-of course it does-with the Firm?

He has warped a skein of his dreams into Pirate's own, heretical dreams, exegeses of windmills that turned in shadow at the edges of dark fields, each arm pointing at a spot on the rim of a giant wheel that turned through the sky, stop and go, always exactly with the spinning cross: "wind" was a middle term, a convention to express what really moved the cross… and this applied to all wind, everywhere on Earth, shrieking between the confectionery pink and yellow mountains of Mauritius or stirring the tulips at home, red cups in the rain filling bead by clear bead with water, each wind had its own cross-in-motion, materially there or implied, each cross a unique mandala, bringing op-posites together in the spin (and tell me now, Frans, what's this wind I'm in, this 25,000-foot wind? What mill's that, grinding there below? What does it grind, Frans, who tends the stone?).