GRAVITY RAINBOW (117 page)

Is he interested in all those other worlds who send their dwarf reps out on the backs of eagles? Nope. Nor does he want to write a classic

of anthropology, with the lightning-struck grouped into a subculture, even secretly organized, handshakes with sharp cusp-flicks of fingernails, private monthly magazine
A Nickel Saved
(which looks perfectly innocent, old Ben Franklin after inflation, unless you know the other half of the proverb: "… is a stockpile of nickel. "Making the
real
quote nickel-magnate Mark Hanna's: "You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public office owes the public anything." So the real tide is
Long Enough,
which Those Who Know, know. The text of each issue of the magazine, when transformed this way, yields many interesting messages). To outsiders it's just a pleasant little club newsletter-Jed Plunkitt held a barbecue for the Iowa Chapter the last weekend in April. Heard about the Amperage Contest, Jed. Tough luck! But come next Barbecue, you'll be back good as new… Minnie Calkins (Chapter 1.793) got married Easter Sunday to a screen-door salesman from California. Sorry to say he's not eligible for Membership-at least not yet. But with all those
screen doors
around, we'll sure keep our fingers crossed!… Your Editor has been receiving many, many "Wha hoppen?" 's concerning the Spring Convention in De-catur when all the lights failed during the blessing. Glad to report now that trouble was traced finally to a giant transient in the line, "Kind of an electrical tidal wave," sez Hank Faffner, our engineer-on-the-scene. "Every bulb in the place burned out, a ceilingful of sooty, sterile eggs." Quite a poet, Hank! Now if you can only find out where that spike
came
from-

But does the Polish undertaker in the rowboat care about busting this code, about secret organizations or recognizable subcultures? No, he doesn't. The reason he is seeking these people out is that he thinks it will help him
in his job.
Can you dig
that,
gates? He wants to know how people behave before and after lightning bolts, so he'll know better how to handle bereaved families.

"You are perverting a great discovery to the uses of commerce," sez Thanatz, stepping ashore. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself." He is no more than five minutes into the empty town at the edge of the marsh when nockle KKAHH-
UHNN!
nocklenockle nockle an enormous blast of light and sound hits the water back where the undertaker, peeved at what he takes to be no gratitude, is hauling away.

"Oh," comes his faint voice.
"Oh,
ho.
Oh-ho-ho-ho!"

"Nobody lives here but us." A solid figure, a whispering silhouette, charcoal-colored, has materialized in Thanatz's path. "We do not harm visitors. But it would be better if you took another way."

They are 175s-homosexual prison-camp inmates. They have

come north from the Dora camp at Nordhausen, north till the land ended, and have set up an all-male community between this marsh and the Oder estuary. Ordinarily, this would be Thanatz's notion of paradise, except that none of the men can bear to be out of Dora-Dora was home, and they are homesick. Their "liberation" was a banishment. So here in a new location they have made up a hypothetical SS chain of command-no longer restricted to what Destiny allotted then for jailers, they have now managed to come up with some really
mean ass
imaginary Nazi playmates, Schutzhaftlingsfuhrer to Blockfuhrer, and chosen an internal hierarchy for themselves too: Lager and Block-altester, Kapo, Vorarbeiter, Stubendienst, Laufer (who is a runner or messenger, but also happens to be the German name for a chess bishop… if you have seen him, running across the wet meadows in very early morning, with his red vestments furling and fluttering darkened almost to tree-bark color among the watery downs, you will have some notion of his real purpose here inside the community-he is carrier of holy strategies, memoranda of conscience, and when he approaches over the reedy flats of morning you are taken by your bowed nape and brushed with the sidebands of a Great Moment-for the Laufer is the most sacred here, it is he who takes messages out to the ruinous interface between the visible Lager and the invisible SS).

At the top of the complex is Schutzhaftlingsfuhrer Blicero. The name has found its way this far east, as if carrying on the man's retreat for him, past the last stand in the Luneburg Heath. He is the Zone's worst specter. He is malignant, he pervades the lengthening summer nights. Like a cankered root he is changing, growing toward winter, growing whiter, toward the idleness and the famine. Who else could the 175s have chosen for their very highest oppressor? His power is absolute. And don't think he isn't really waiting, out by the shelled and rusty gasworks, under the winding staircases, behind the tanks and towers, waiting for the dawn's first carmine-skirted runner with news of how die night went. The night is his dearest interest, so he must be told.

This phantom SS command here is based not so much on the one the prisoners knew at Dora as on what they inferred to be the Rocket-structure next door at the Mittelwerke. The A4, in its way, was also concealed behind an uncrossable wall that separated real pain and terror from summoned deliverer. Weissmann/Blicero's presence crossed the wall, warping, shivering into the fetid bunkrooms, with the same reach toward another shape as words trying to make their way through dreams. What the 175s heard from their real SS guards there was enough to elevate Weissmann on the spot-they, his own brother-

elite,
didn't know
what this man was up to. When prisoners came in earshot, the guards stopped whispering. But their fear kept echoing: fear not of Weissmann personally, but of the time itself, a time so desperate that
he
could now move through the Mittelwerke as if he owned it, a time which was granting him a power different from that of Auschwitz or Buchenwald, a power they couldn't have borne themselves…

On hearing the name of Blicero now, Thanatz's asshole tightens a notch. Not that he thinks the name was planted here or anything. Paranoia is not a major problem for Thanatz. What does bother him is
being reminded at all
-reminded that he's had no word, since the noon on the Heath when 00000 was fired, of Blicero's status-alive or dead, powerlord or fugitive. He isn't sure which he prefers. As long as the
Anubis
kept moving, there was no need to choose: the memory could have been left so far behind that one day its "reality" wouldn't matter any more. Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen.

"We think he's out there," the town spokesman is telling Thanatz, "alive and on the run. Now and then we hear something-it could fit Blicero easily enough. So we wait. He will find us. He has a prefabricated power base here, waiting for him."

"What if he doesn't stay?" pure meanness, "what if he laughs at you, and passes by?"

"Then I can't explain," the other beginning to step backward, back out into the rain, "it's a matter of faith."

Thanatz, who has sworn that he will never seek out Blicero again, not after the 00000, feels the flat of terror's blade. "Who is your runner?" he cries.

"Go yourself," a filtered whisper.

"Where?"

"The gasworks."

"But I have a message for-"

"Take it yourself…"

The white
Anubis,
gone on to salvation. Back here, in her wake, are the preterite, swimming and drowning, mired and afoot, poor passengers at sundown who've lost the way, blundering across one another's flotsam, the scrapings, the dreary junking of memories-all they have to hold to-churning, mixing, rising, falling. Men overboard and our common debris…

Thanatz remains shaking and furious in the well-established rain, under the sandstone arcade. I should have sailed on, he wants to scream, and presently does. "I wasn't supposed to be left with you dis-

cards…" Where's the court of appeals that will hear his sad story? "I lost my footing!" Some mess cook slipped in a puddle of elite vomit and spilled a whole galvanized can full of creamed yellow chicken nausea all over that starboard weather deck, Thanatz didn't see it, he was looking for Margherita… Too bad, les jeux sont faits, nobody's listening and the
Anubis
is gone. Better here with the swimming debris, Thanatz, no telling what'll come sunfishing by, ask that Oberst En-zian, he knows (there is a key, among the wastes of the World… and it won't be found on board the white
Anubis
because they throw everything of value over the side).

So-Thanatz is out by the gasworks, up against a tar wall, mackerel eyes bulging out of wet wool collar-shadows, all black and white, really scared, breath smoking out corners of his mouth as green dawn begins to grow back among the gassen.
He won't be here, he's only dead
only dead? Isn't this an "interface" here? a meeting surface for two worlds… sure, but
which two?
There's no counting on any positivism to save him, that didn't even work back in Berlin, before the War, at Peter Sachsa's sittings… it only got in the way, made others impatient with him. A screen of words between himself and the numinous was always just a tactic… it never let him feel any freer. These days there's even less point to it. He knows Blicero exists.

It wasn't a dream. Don't you wish it could be. Another fever that sooner or later will break, releasing you into the cool reality of a room… you don't have to perform that long and complicated mission after all, no, you see it was only the fever… it wasn't real…

This time it is real, Blicero, alive or dead, is real. Thanatz, a little crazy now with fear, wants to go provoke him, he can't wait any more, he has to see what it will take to get Blicero across the interface. What screaming ass-wiggling surrender might bring him back…

All it brings is the Russian police. There's a working agreement about staying inside the limits of the 175-Stadt that of course no one told Thanatz about. The gasworks used to be a notorious hustling spot till the Russians made a series of mass busts. A last fading echo of the 175-Stadt Chorale goes skipping away down the road singing some horrible salute to faggotry such as

Yumsy-numsy 'n'
poopsie-poo,

If I'm
a degenerate,
so are you.
…

"Nowadays all we get are you tourists," sez the natty civilian with the white handkerchief in his breast-pocket, snickering in the shadow of his hat brim. "And, of course, the odd spy."

"Not me," Thanatz sez.

"Not you, eh? Tell me about it."

Something of a quandary, all right. In less than half a day, Thanatz has moved from no need to worry or even
think
about Blicero, to always needing some formulation of him at hand to please any stray curious cop. This is one of his earlier lessons in being preterite: he won't escape any of the consequences he sets up for himself now, not unless it's by accident.

For example, at the outskirts of Stettin, by accident, a Polish guerrilla group, just arrived back from London, mistakes the police car for one transporting an anti-Lublin journalist to prison, shoots out the tires, roars in, kills the driver, wounds the civilian interrogator, and escapes lugging Thanatz like a sack of potatoes.

"Not me," Thanatz sez.

"Shit. He's right."

They roll him out the car door into a DP encampment a few miles farther on. He is herded into a wire enclosure along with 1,999 others being sent west to Berlin.

For weeks he rides the freights, hanging in shifts to the outside of his assigned car while inside someone else sleeps on the straw space he vacated. Later they change places. It helps to stay awake. Every day Thanatz sees half a dozen DPs go on the nod and fall off the train, and sometimes it's funny to watch, but too often it's not, though DP humor is a very dependent thing. He is rubber-stamped on hands, forehead, and ass, deloused, poked, palpated, named, numbered, consigned, invoiced, misrouted, detained, ignored. He passes in and out the paper grasp of Russian, British, American and French body-jobbers, round and round the occupation circuit, getting to recognize faces, coughs, pairs of boots on new owners. Without a ration card or Soldbuch, you are doomed to be moved, in lots of 2,000, center to center, about the Zone, possibly forever. So, out among the ponds and fenceposts of Mecklenburg somewhere, Thanatz discovers that he is exempt from nothing. His second night on the rails his shoes are stolen. He comes down with a deep bronchial cough and a high fever. For a week no one comes to look at him. For two aspirins he has to suck off the orderly in charge, who has grown to enjoy rough-bearded cheeks flaming at 103° against his thighs, the furnace breath under his balls. In Mecklenburg Thanatz steals a cigarette butt from a sleeping one-armed veteran, and is beaten and kicked for half an hour by people whose language he has never heard before, whose faces he never gets a look at. Bugs crawl over him only slightly irritated that he's in

their way. His daily bread is taken away by another DP smaller than he is, but with the
look
of some right to it, a look Thanatz at best can only impersonate-and so he's afraid to go after the little rag-coated liver-colored back, the munching haystack head… and others are watching: the woman who tells everyone that Thanatz molests her little girl at night (Thanatz can never meet her eyes because yes he wants to, pull down the slender pretty pubescent's oversize GI trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throatback Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it) and a beetlebrowed Slav too, who has forced Thanatz to go hunting cigarette butts for him after lights out, to give up his sleep not so much to the chance of finding a real butt as to the Slav's right to demand it-the Slav is watching too-in fact, a circle of enemies have all observed the taking of the bread and Thanatz's failure to go after it. Their judgment is clear, a clarity in their eyes Thanatz never saw back on the
Anubis,
an honesty he can't avoid, can't shrug off… finally, finally he has to face, literally with his own real face, the transparency, the
real light
of…