GRAVITY RAINBOW (111 page)

All right Pointsman
stomping into Twelfth House, rattling the

corkboards down the seven hallways and flights, receptionists making long arms for the telephone
dammit now where are you
-

Not in his office. But Geza Rozsavolgyi is, and tries to give Roger a hard time. "You are
ma-lang
a
spec-tacle oiyour-self,
young
man."

"Shurrup you Transylvanian twit," snarls Roger, "I'm looking for the boss, see, one funny move out of you and it's your last taste of O-negative, Jackson, those fangs won't even be able to gum
oatmeal
when I'm through wiv you-" Alarmed Rozsavolgyi, retreating around the water cooler, tries to pick up a swivel chair to defend himself with. The seat falls off, and Rozsavolgyi is left with only the base, which happens, embarrassingly, to be shaped like a cross.

"Where is he," Mexican standoff, Roger gritting his teeth
do not
succumb to hysteria, it is a counter-productive luxury you cannot, in your present great vulnerability, afford…
"Come on you sod, tell me or you'll never see the inside of a coffin again-"

In runs a short but spunky secretary, bit of a chubbette here, and commences belting Roger in the shins with the excess-profits tax records from 1940 to '44 of an English steel firm which happened to share a pattent with Vereinigte Stahlwerke for an alloy used in the liquid-oxygen couplings for the line running aft to the S-Gerat in A4 number 00000. But Roger's shins are not set up for this kind of information. The secretary's glasses fall off. "Miss Muller-Hochleben," reading her nametag, "you look
beastly
without your glasses. Put ssem back on, at vunce!" this comic Nazi routine being inspired by her surname.

"I can't find them," German accent all right, "I don't see too well."

"
Well
, we'll see if we can't
help
you here-ah! what's this? Miss Muller-Hochleben!"

"Ja…"

"What do they look like, these eyeglasses?"

"They are white-"

"With clever little
rhinestones
all around the rims, Fraulein? eh?"

"Ja, ja, und mit-"

"And running down all the earpieces too, a-and
feathers?"

"Ostrich feathers…"

"Male
ostrich feathers, dyed a stunning peacock blue, sprouting off the edges?"

"That is my eyeglasses, ja," sez the groping secretary, "where are they, please?"

"Right
here!''
bringing his foot down CRUNCH, smashing them to bright arctic gatherings all over Pointsman's rug.

"
l
-say,
" offers Rozsavolgyi from a far corner: the one corner of the room, by the way, which is not brightly lit, yes kind of an optic anomaly here, just a straight, square room, no odd-shaped polyhedrons in Twelfth House… and still, this strange, unaccountable prism of shadow in the corner… more than one visitor has popped in to find Mr. Pointsman not at his desk where he ought to be but standing in the shadow-corner-most disturbingly
facing into it…
Rozsavolgyi is not himself that fond of the Corner, he's tried it a few times but only came out shaking his head: "Mis-ter
Points
man, I-don't
like
it in there, at
all.
What
poss-
ible kind, of a
thrill
can
an-
yone
get,
from
such
an un-
whole
some
ex
per
ience
.
Eh?" raising one crookedly wistful eyebrow. Pointsman had only looked apologetic, not for himself but
to
something for Rozsavolgyi, and said gently, "This is one spot in the room where I feel alive," well bet your ass one or two memos went up toward Ministerial level over
that
one. If they reached the Minister himself, it was probably as office entertainment. "Oh yes, yes," shaking his wise old head of sheep's wool, high, almost Slavic cheekbones crinkling his eyes up into an inattentive but polite laughter, "yes Pointsman's famous Corner, yes… wouldn't be surprised if it was
haunted,
eh?" Reflex laughs from the underlings present, though only grim smiles from the overlings. "Get the S.P.R. in, to have a look," giggles someone with a cigar.
"The
poor bloke will think he's back in the
War
again." "Hear, hear," and, "That's a good one, all right," ring through the layering smoke. Practical jokes are all the rage among these particular underlings, a kind of class tradition.

"You say
what,"
Roger has been screaming for a while.

"
I
-say,"
sez Rozsavolgyi, again.

"You say, 'I say'? Is that it? Then you should have said, 'I say, "I say." ' "

"I did."

"No, no-you said, 'I say,'
once,
is what you-"

"
A
-ha!
But I
said
it
again.
I
-said
it…
twice."

"But that was after I asked you the question-you can't tell me the two 'I say's were both part of the same statement," unless, "that's asking me to be unreasonably," unless it's really true that, "credulous, and around
you
that's a form of," that we're the
same person,
and that the whole exchange was ONE SINGLE THOUGHT yaaaggghhh and that means, "insanity, Rozsavolgyi-"

"My glasses," snivels Fraulein Muller-Hochleben, now crawling around the room, Mexico scattering the glass splinters with his shoe so that now and then the unfortunate girl will cut a hand or a knee,

beginning to trail dark little feathers of blood for inches at a time, eventually-assuming she were to last long enough-dotting in Pointsman's rug like the train of a Beardsley gown.

"You're doing
fine,
Miss Muller-Hochleben!" cries Roger encouragingly, "and as for
you,
you-" but is stopped on noticing how Rozsavolgyi now is nearly invisible in the shadow, and how the whites of his eyes are actually
glowing
white, jittering around in the air, winking-out-coming-back… it is costing Rozsavolgyi an effort to stay in this shadow-corner. It is not, at all, his sort of place. For one thing, the rest of the room seems to be at more of a distance, as through the view-finder on a camera. And the walls-they don't appear to be… well,
solid,
actually. They flow: a coarse, a viscous passage, rippling like a standing piece of silk or nylon, the color watery gray but now and then with a surprise island in the flow, some color absolutely foreign to this room: saffron spindles, palm-green ovals, magenta firths running comblike into jagged comicbook-orange chunks of island as the wounded fighter-plane circles, jettisons the tanks, then the silver canopy, sets the flaps to just above a stall, wheels up as the
blue
(suddenly, such a violent blue!) rushes in just before impact throttle closed
uhhnnhb!
oh shit the
reef,
we're going to smash up on the-oh. Oh, there's no reef? We-we're
safe?
We are! Mangoes, I see mangoes on that tree over there! a-and there's a girl-there's a
lotta
girls! Lookit, they're all gorgeous, their tits point straight out, and they're all swingin' those grass skirts, playin' ukuleles and singing (though why are the voices so hard and tough, so nasally like the voices of an American chorus line?)-

White man welcome ta Puke-a-hook-a-look-i I-i-i-island!

One taste o' my pa-paya and y'll never wanna go a-waaaay!

Moon like a yel-low ba-na-na,

Hangin' over, my ca-ba-na,

And lotsa hula, hula games to play-

Oh the stars are fallin' over Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island,

And the lava down the mountain's runnin' scrump-shus as a

cherry pie-

Even Sweet Leilani in the Little Grass Shack Loves a coconut monkey and a missionary snack, Looky-looky, sugar cookie, you're on Puke-a-hook-a-look-i

I-i-i-island!

O-boy, o-boy
-go-ing to
nail
me, one, of those
lit-Ue is-hnd love-lies,
spend,
the
rest…
of my
life, eat-ing pa-pay-as, Jra-grant
as the
cunt,
of young
paradise
-

When paradise was young. The pilot is turning to Rozsavolgyi, who is still strapped in safety harness behind him. The face is covered with helmet, goggles that reflect too much light, oxygen mask-a face of metal, leather, isinglass. But now the pilot is raising the goggles, slowly, and whose eyes are these, so familiar, smiling hello, I know you, don't you know me? Don't you
really
know me?

Rozsavolgyi screams and backs out of the corner, shivering, blinded now in the overhead lights. Fraulein Muller-Hochleben is crawling around and around in the same circle, faster and faster, nearly a blur, croaking hysterically. Both have reached the exact level Roger's subtle psychological campaign here was intended to work them up to. Quietly but firmly: "Right. Now for the last time, where is Mr. Pointsman?"

"Mossmoon's office," they reply, in unison.

Mossmoon's office is a roller-skate ride away from Whitehall, and guarded by room after room of sentinel girls, each of them wearing a frock of a radically different color from the others (and this goes on for a while, so you can imagine what 3-sigma colors these are to begin with, if that many can be so "radically different," you know, like that- oh, colors such as lizard, evening star, pale Atlantis to name a few), and whom Roger romances, bribes, threatens, double-talks and (sigh) yes punches his way through till finally "Mossmoon," pounding on this gigantic oak door, carved like the stone doorways of certain temples, "Pointsman, the jig's up! In the name of whatever marginal decency enables you to get through the day without being shot dead by the odd armed stranger, open this door." This is quite a long speech, and the door actually opens halfway through, but Roger finishes it up anyhow. He's looking into a room of incandescent lemon-lime subdued drastically, almost to the milky point of absinthe-and-water, a room warmer than this tableful of faces really deserves, but perhaps it's Roger's entrance that deepens the color a bit now as he runs and jumps up on the polished table, over the polished head of a director of a steel company, skidding 20 feet down the waxed surface to confront the man at the end, who sits with a debonair (well, snotty) smile on his face. "Moss-moon, I'm on to you." Has he actually come inside, in among the hoods, eye-slits, gold paraphernalia, the incense and the thighbone scepter?

"That's
not
Mossmoon," Mr. Pointsman clearing his throat as he speaks, "Mexico
do
come down off the table won't you… gentlemen, one of my old PISCES colleagues, brilliant but rather unstable, as you may've noted-oh, Mexico,
really
-"

Roger has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busy pissing on the shiny table, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon on these poker-faced men themselves, who, although executive material all right, men of hair-trigger minds, are still not quite willing to admit that this is happening, you know, in any world that really touches, at too many points, the one
they're
accustomed to… and actually the fall of warm piss is quite pleasant as it sweeps by, across ten-guinea cravats, creative-looking little beards, up into a liver-spotted nostril, across a pair of Army-issue steel-rim eyeglasses, slashing up and down starched fronts, Phi Beta Kappa keys, Legions of Honour, Orders of Lenin, Iron Crosses, V.C.s, retirement watchchains, Dewey-for-President lapel pins, half-exposed service revolvers, and even a sawed-off shotgun under the shoulder there…

"Pointsman," the cock, stubborn, annoyed, bucks like an airship among purple clouds (very dense purple, as pile velvet that color) at nightfall when the sea-breeze promises a difficult landing, "I've saved you for last. But-goodness, I don't seem to have any urine left, here. Not even a drop. I'm so sorry. Nothing left for you at all. Do you understand? If it means giving my
life"
the words have just come out, and maybe Roger's exaggerating, but maybe not, "there will be nothing
anywhere
for you. What you get, I'll take. If you go higher in this, I'll come and get you, and take you back down. Wherever you go. Even should you find a spare moment of rest, with an understanding woman in a quiet room, I'll be at the window. I'll always be just outside. You will never cancel me. If you come out, I'll go in, and the room will be defiled for you, haunted, and you'll have to find another. If you stay inside I'll come in anyway-I'll stalk you room to room till I corner you in the last. You'll have the last room, Pointsman, and you'll have to live in it the rest of your scum, prostituted life."

Pointsman won't look at him. Won't meet his eyes. That's what Roger wanted. The security police show up as an anticlimax, although aficionados of the chase scene, those who cannot look at the Taj Mahal, the Uffizi, the Statue of Liberty without thinking chase scene, chase scene, wow yeah Douglas Fairbanks scampering across that moon minaret there-these enthusiasts may find interest in the following:

Roger dives under the table to button his fly and the zealous flatties leap at each other over the top of the table, colliding and cursing, but Roger has gone scuttling down the horsehide, hobnailed, pinstriped, Mom's-argyle-socked sublevel of these conspirators above, a precarious passage, any one foot could kick untelegraphed and wipe

him out-till he arrives back at the bald steel-magnate, reaches up, grabs him by the necktie or the cock, whichever it's easiest to get a hold on, and drags the man down under the table.

"Right. Now, we're going to get out of here, and you're my hostage,
get it?"
He emerges dragging the livid executive by his necktie or cock, pulling him like a child's sleigh strangling and apoplectic out the door, past the modally unusual rainbow of sentinel-ladies now intimidated-
looking
at least, sirens already wailing in the street MANIAC

ASSAULTS OIL PARLEY
Ousted After
-
ing on Conferees
and he's out of