GRAVITY RAINBOW (116 page)

So she's only been talking with Enzian about a common friend. Is this how the Vacuum feels?

"Slothrop and I" didn't work too well. Should she have said "Blicero and I"? What would
that
have got her into with the African?

"Blicero and I," he begins softly, watching her over burnished cheekbones, cigarette smoldering in his curled right hand, "we were only close in certain ways. There were doors I did not open. Could not. Around here, I play an omniscient. I'd say don't give me away, but it wouldn't matter. Their minds are made up. I am the Berlin Snoot supreme, Oberhauptberlinerschnauze Enzian. I know it all, and they don't trust me. They gossip in a general way about me and Blicero, as yarns to be spun-the truth wouldn't change either their distrust or my Unlimited Access. They'd only be passing a story along, another story. But the truth must mean something to you.

"The Blicero I loved was a very young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance. Those all must have been important to me once. What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's still human, you'd no more turn him out than you'd turn out any other kind of cripple, would you?"

He seems to be asking her for real advice. Are these the sorts of problems that occupy his time? What about the Rocket, the Empty Ones, the perilous infancy of his nation?

"What
can
Blicero matter to you?" is what she finally asks.

He doesn't have to think for long. He has often imagined the coming of a Questioner. "At this point, I would take you to a balcony. An observation deck. I would show you the Raketen-Stadt. Plexiglass maps of the webs we maintain across the Zone. Underground schools, systems for distributing food and medicine… We would gaze down on staff-rooms, communications centers, laboratories, clinics. I would say-"

"All this will I give you, if you will but-"

"Negative.
Wrong story. I would say: This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance…" who looks out over the Raketen-Stadt in the amber evenings, with washed and darkening cloud sheets behind him-"who has lost everything else but this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels like?"

He is a lion, this man, ego-mad-but despite everything, Katje likes him. "But if he were still alive-"

"No way to know. I have letters he wrote after he left your city. He was changing. Terribly. You ask what he could matter to me. My slender white adventurer, grown twenty years sick and old-the last heart in which I might have been granted some being-was changing, toad

to prince, prince to fabulous monster… 'If he is alive,' he may have changed by now past our recognition. We could have driven under him in the sky today and never seen. Whatever happened at the end, he has transcended. Even if he's only dead. He's gone beyond
his
pain,
his
sin-driven deep into Their province, into control, synthesis and control, further than-" well, he was about to say "we" but "I" seems better after all, "I haven't transcended. I've only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it's worse than being told you won't have to die by someone you can't believe in…

"Yes he matters to me, very much. He is an old self, a dear albatross I cannot let go."

"And me?" She gathers that he expects her to sound like a woman of the 1940s. "And me," indeed. But she can think of no other way offhand to help him, to allow him a moment of comfort…

"You, poor Katje. Your story is the saddest of all." She looks up to see exactly how his face will be mocking her. She is stunned to see tears instead running, running over his cheeks.
"You've only been set free,"
his voice then breaking on the last word, his face brushing forward a moment into a cage of hands, then uncaging again for a try at her own gay waltztime gallows laugh. Oh, no, is
he
about to go goofy on her too? What she needs right now in her life, from
some
man in her life, is stability, mental health and strength of character. Not this. "I told Slothrop he was free, too. I tell anybody who might listen. I will tell them as I tell you: you are free. You are free. You are free…"

"How can my story be sadder than that?" Shameless girl, she isn't humoring him, she's actually flirting with him now, any technique her crepe-paper and spider-italics young ladyhood ever taught her, to keep from having to move into his blackness. Understand it isn't
his
blackness, but her own-an inadmissible darkness she is making believe for the moment is Enzian's, something beyond even the center of Pan's grove, something not pastoral at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground and come out very like the malignant dead: the Qlip-poth that Weissmann has "transcended," souls whose journey across was so bad that they lost all their kindness back in the blue lightning (the long sea-furrows of it rippling), and turned to imbecile killers and jokers, making unintelligible honks in the emptiness, sinewed and stripped thin as rats-a city-darkness that is her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends. But as time passes things get louder there. It is shaking itself into her consciousness.

"Flirt if you want," Enzian now just as smooth as that Gary Grant, "but expect to be taken seriously." Oh,
ho.
Here's whatcha came for, folks.

Not necessarily. His bitterness (all properly receipted in German archives which may, however, be destroyed now) runs too deep for her, really. He must have learned a thousand masks (as the City will continue to mask itself against invasions we often do not see, whose outcomes we never learn, silent and unnoticed revolutions in the warehouse districts where the walls are blank, in the lots where the weeds grow thick), and this, no doubt, this Suave Older Exotic, is one of them.

"I don't know what to do." She gets up in a long, long shrug and begins to stalk gracefully in the room. Her old style: a girl about 16 who thinks everyone is staring at her. Her hair falls like a hood. Her arms often touch.

"You don't have to come into this any further than locating Slothrop," he finally gets around to telling her. "All you
have
to do is tag along with us, and wait till he shows up again. Why bother yourself with the rest?"

"Because I feel," her voice, perhaps by design, very small, "that 'the rest' is exactly what I
ought
to be doing. I don't want to get away with some shallow win. I don't just want to-I don't know, pay him back for the octopus, or something. Don't I have to know
why
he's out here, what I did to him, for Them? How can They be stopped? How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits?
Shouldn't
I be going all the way in?"

Her masochism [Weissmann wrote from The Hague] is reassurance for her. That she can still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because, often, she will forget. I can only try to guess how terrible that must be… So, she needs the whip. She raises her ass not in surrender, but in despair-like your fears of impotence, and mine: can it still… will it fail… But of true submission, of letting go the self and passing into the All, there is nothing, not with Katje. She is not the victim I would have chosen to end this with. Perhaps, before the end, there will be another. Perhaps I dream… I am not here, am I, to devote myself to
her
fantasies!

"You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you want to make it for yourself, still you're always going to come through. You're free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be. Usually it's given as a reward. I won't ask for what. I'm sorry, but

you seem really not to know. That's why your story
is
saddest of all."

"Reward
-" she's getting mad. "It's a life-sentence. If you call that a reward, then what are you calling me?"

"Nothing political."

"You black bastard."

"Exactly." He has allowed her to speak the truth. A clock chimes in the stone corner. "We have someone who was with Blicero in May. Just before the end. You don't have to-"

"Come and listen, yes, Oberst. But I will."

He rises, crooks her his official and gentlemanly arm, smiling sideways and feeling like a clown. Her own smiling is upward like mischievous Ophelia just having glimpsed the country of the mad and itching now to get away from court.

Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out to is
we will never know each other.
Beaming, strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both loved and we're strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings.

Far away in another corridor a loud drill-bit strains, smokes, just before snapping. Cafeteria trays and steelware rattle, an innocent and kind sound behind familiar regions of steam, fat at the edge of souring, cigarette smoke, washwater, disinfectant-a cafeteria in the middle of the day.

There are things to hold on to…

You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the
Anubis.
He was rescued by a Polish undertaker in a rowboat, out in the storm tonight to see if he can get struck by lightning. The undertaker is wearing, in hopes it will draw electricity, a complicated metal suit, something like a deep-sea diver's, and a Wehrmacht helmet through which he has drilled a couple of hundred holes and inserted nuts, bolts, springs and conductive wands of many shapes so that he jingles whenever he nods or shakes his head, which is often. He's a digital companion all right, everything gets either a yes or a no, and two-tone checkerboards of odd shape and texture indeed bloom in the rainy night around him and Thanatz. Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a

lightning bolt. All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived. What stories
they
could tell!

What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one.

Well, it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life-do you know what the time rate of change
is
at a cusp?
Infinity,
that's what! A-and right across the point, it's
minus
infinity! How's
that
for sudden change, eh? Infinite miles per hour changing to the same speed
in re
verse,
all in the gnat's-ass or red cunt hair of the
across the point. That's getting hit by lightning, folks. You're
tv ay
up there on the needle-peak of a mountain, and don't think there aren't lammergeiers cruising there in the lurid red altitudes around, waiting for a chance to snatch you off. Oh yes. They are piloted by bareback dwarves with little plastic masks around their eyes that happen to be shaped just like the infinity symbol:
. Little men with wicked eyebrows, pointed ears and bald heads, although some of them are wearing outlandish headgear, not at all the usual Robin Hood green fedoras, no these are
Car
men Miranda
hats, for example, bananas, papayas, bunches of grapes, pears, pineapples, mangoes, jeepers even
watermelons
-and there are World War I spiketop Wilhelmets, and baby bonnets and crosswise Napoleon hats with and without
N
s on them, not to mention little red suits and green capes, well here they are leaning forward into their cruel birds' ears, whispering like jockeys, out to nab you, buster, just like that sacrificial ape off of the Empire State Building, except that they won't let you fall, they'll carry you away, to the places they are agents of. It will
look
like the world you left, but it'll be different. Between congruent and identical there seems to be another class of look-alike that only finds the lightning-heads. Another world laid down on the previous one and to all appearances no different, Ha
-ha!
But the lightning-struck know, all right! Even if they may not
know
they know. And that's what this undertaker tonight has set out into the storm to find.