GRAVITY RAINBOW (121 page)

Somewhere in Der Platz now, early morning, somebody's two-year-old, a baby as fat as a suckling pig, has just learned the word "Sonnenschein." "Sunshine," sez the baby, pointing.
"Sunshine,"
running into the other room.

"Sunshine," croaks some grownup morning-voice.

"Sunshine!" hollers the baby, tottering off.

"Sunshine," a smiling-girl voice, maybe his mother.

"Sunshine!"
the baby at the window, showing her, showing anybody else who'll look,
exactly.

shit 'n' shinola

"Now,"
Saure wants to know, "you will tell me about the American expression 'Shit from Shinola.' "

"What is this," screams Seaman Bodine, "I'm being set
tasks
now? This is some
Continuing Study
of American Slang or some shit? Tell me you old fool," grabbing Saure by throat and lapel and shaking him asymmetrically, "you're one of Them too, right? Come
on,"
the old man Raggedy Andy in his hands, a bad morning of suspicion here for the usually mellow Bodine, "Stop, stop," snivels the amazed Saure, amazement giving way, that is, to a sniveling conviction that the hairy American gob has lost his mind…

Well.
You've
heard the expression "Shit from Shinola." As in, "Aw, he don't know Shit from Shinola! 'bout that." Or, "Marine-you don't know Shit from Shinola!" And you get sent to the Onion Room, or

worse. One implication is that Shit and Shinola are in wildly different categories. You would envision-maybe just because they smell different-no way for Shit and Shinola to coexist. Simply impossible. A stranger to the English language, a German dopefiend such as Saure, not knowing either word, might see "Shit" as a comical interjection, one a lawyer in a bowler hat, folding up papers tucking them in a tan briefcase might smiling use, "Schitt, Herr Bummer," and he walks out of your cell, the oily bastard, forever… or
Scchhit!
down comes a cartoon guillotine on one black white politician, head bouncing downhill, lines to indicate amusing little spherical vortex patterns, and you thought yes, like to see that all right, yes cut it off, one less rodent,
schittja!
As for Shinola, we pass to universitarians Franz Pokier, Kurt Mondaugen, Bert Fibel, Horst Achtfaden and others, their Schein-Aula is a shimmering, Albert Speer-style alabaster open-air stadium with giant cement birds of prey up at each corner, wings shrugged forward, sheltering under each wing-shadow a hooded German face… from the outside, the Hall is golden, the white gold precisely of one lily-of-the-valley petal in 4 o'clock sunlight, serene, at the top of a small, artificially-graded hill. It has a talent, this Seeming-Hall, for posing up there in attractive profiles, in front of noble clouds, to suggest persistence, through returns of spring, hopes for love, meltings of snow and ice, academic Sunday tranquillities, smells of grass just crushed or cut or later turning to hay… but inside the Schein-Aula all is blue and cold as the sky overhead, blue as a blueprint or a planetarium. No one in here knows which way to look. Will it begin above us? Down
there?
Behind us?
In the middle of the air?
and how soon… Well there's one place where Shit 'n' Shinola do come together, and that's in the men's toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet, as revealed in the St. Veronica Papers (preserved, mysteriously, from that hospital's great holocaust). Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman's warm and private own
asshole,
which is getting pretty intimate. That's what that white toilet's for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet's the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain's the very emblem of Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine polish happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm's in the toilet slappin' on the Shinola, working off whiteman's penance on his sin of being born the color of Shit 'n' Shinola. It is nice to think that one Saturday night, one floor-shaking Lindyhopping Roseland night,

Malcolm looked up from some Harvard kid's shoes and caught the eye of Jack Kennedy (the Ambassador's son), then a senior. Nice to think that young Jack may have had one of them Immortal Lightbulbs then go on overhead-did Red suspend his ragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just enough gap in the moire there to let white Jack see through, not through to but through
through
the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slothrop's shoes? Were the three ever lined up that way-sitting, squatting, passing through? Eventually Jack and Malcolm both got murdered. Slothrop's fate is not so clear. It may be that They have something different in mind for Slothrop.

an incident in the transvestites' toilet

A small ape or orangutan, holding something behind his back, comes sidling unobserved among net-stockinged legs, bobby sox rolled down to loop under ankle bones, subdeb beanies tucked into rayon aquamarine waist-sashes. Finally he reaches Slothrop, who is wearing a blonde wig and the same long flowing white cross-banded number Fay Wray wears in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong on the boat (considering his history in the Roseland toilet, Slothrop may have chosen this gown not only out of some repressed desire to be sodomized, unimaginably, by a gigantic black ape, but also because of an athletic innocence to Fay that he's never spoken of except to point and whisper, "Oh, look…" -some honesty, pluck, a cleanness to the garment itself, its enormous sleeves so that wherever you pass is visibly where you've been…).

At that first moment, long before our flight: Ravine, tyrannosaurus (flying-mares And jaws cracked out of joint), the buzzing serpent That jumped you in your own stone living space, The pterodactyl or the Fall, no-just… While I first hung there, forest and night at one, Hung waiting with the torches on the wall. And waiting for the night's one Shape to come, I prayed then, not for Jack, still mooning sappy Along the weather-decks-no. I was thinking Of Denham-only him, with gun and camera Wisecracking in his best bum actor's way Through Darkest Earth, making the unreal reel By shooting at it, one way or the other- Carl Denham, my director, my undying,

Ah, show me the key light, whisper me a line…

We've seen them under a thousand names… "Greta Erdmann" is only one, these dames whose job it is always to cringe from the Terror… well, home from work they fall asleep just like us and dream of assassinations, of plots against good and decent men…

The ape reaches up taps Slothrop on the ass, hands him what he's been carrying yaahhgghh it's a round black iron anarchist
bomb's
what it is, with
lit fuse
too… Ape goes scampering away. Slothrop just stands there, in the glassed and humid rooms, his makeup starting to run, consternation in his eyes clear as marbles and lips pressed into a bee-stung well-what-th'-heck-'m-I-s'posed-t'-do-
now
? He can't
say
anything, the contact still hasn't showed and his voice would blow his disguise… The fuse is burning shorter and shorter. Slothrop looks around. All the washbowls and urinals are occupied. Should he just put the fuse out in front of somebody's
cock,
right in the stream of piss… uh, but wouldn't that look like I was propositioning them or something? Gee, sometimes I wish I wasn't so indecisive… m-maybe if I picked somebody
weaker
than me… but then it's the little guys got the reflexes, remember-

He is rescued from his indecision by a very tall, fat, somewhat Oriental-looking transvestite, whose ideal, screen and personal, seems to be little Margaret O'Brien. Somehow this Asiatic here is managing to look pigtailed and wistful even as he snatches the sputtering bomb away from Slothrop, runs heaves it into an empty toiletbowl and flushes it, turning back to Slothrop and the others with an air of civic duty well done when suddenly-

KRUPPALOOMA comes this giant
explosion:
water leaps in a surprised blue-green tongue (ever seen a toilet hollering, "Yikes!"?) out of every single black-lidded bowl, pipes wrench and scream, walls and floor shudder, plaster begins to fall in crescents and powder-sheets as all the chattering transvestites fall silent, reach out to touch anyone nearby as a gesture of preparation for the Voice out of the Loudspeaker, saying:

"That was a sodium bomb. Sodium explodes when it touches water." So the fuse was a
dummy,
the dirty rat… "You saw who threw it in the toilet. He is a dangerous maniac. Apprehend him, and there'll be a large reward. Your closet
could
make Norma Shearer's look like the wastebasket in Gimbel's basement."

So they all leap on the poor protesting Margaret O'Brien devotee, while Slothrop, for whom the humiliation and (presently, as the arrival of the police grows later and later) the sexual abuse and torture were really intended (Gotta hand it to ya, Pop!) slips away, loosening as he nears the outside the satin ties of his gown, dragging reluctantly, off of his grease-chevroned head, the shining wig of innocence…

A moment of fun with takeshi and ichizo,

Takeshi is tall and fat (but doesn't braid his hair like that Margaret O'Brien), Ichizo is short and skinny. Takeshi flies a Zero, while Ichizo flies an Ohka device, which is a long bomb, actually, with a cockpit for Ichizo to sit in, stub wings, rocket propulsion and a few control surfaces back aft. Takeshi only had to go to Kamikaze School for two weeks, on Formosa. Ichizo had to go to Ohka school for six
months,
in Tokyo. They are as different as peanut butter and jelly, these two. No fair asking which is which.

They are the only two Kamikazes out here at this air base, which is rather remote actually, on an island that nobody, well, really
cares
much about, any more. The fighting is going on at Leyte… then on to Iwo Jima, moving toward Okinawa, but always too far away for any sortie from
here
to reach. But they have their orders, and their exile. Not much to do for kicks but go wandering on the beaches looking for dead Cypridinae. These are crustaceans with three eyes, shaped like a potato with catwhiskers at one end. Dried and powdered, Cypridinae are also a great source of light. To make the stuff glow in the dark, all you do is add water. The light is blue, weird multishaded blue-some green in it, and some indigo-amazingly cool and nocturnal blue. On moonless or overcast nights, Takeshi and Ichizo take off all their clothes and splash each other with Cypridina light, running and giggling under the palm trees.

Every morning, and sometimes evening too, the Scatterbrained Suicidekicks mosey down to the palm-thatched radar shack to see if there's any American targets worth a crash-dive, anywhere inside their flying radius. But it's the same story every time. Old Kenosho the loony radarman who's always brewing up a batch of that sake back in the transmitter room, in a still he's hooked up to a magnetron tube in some fiendish-Nip way that defies Western science, every time the fellas show up this drunken old reprobate starts cackling, "No dying today! No dying today! So solly!" pointing at all the blank PPI scopes, green radii sweeping silent round and round trailing clear webs of green shampoo, nothing but surface return for more miles than you

can fly, and of the fatal mandala both hearts would leap to, green carrier-blob screened eightfold in a circle of destroyer-strokes, nothing… no, each morning's the same-only the odd whitecap and old hysterical Kenosho, who by now is on the floor gagging on saliva and tongue, having his Seizure, an eagerly awaited part of each daily visit, each fit trying to top the one before, or at least bring in a new twist- a back-flip in the air, a gnaw or two after Takeshi's blue-and-yellow patent wingtips, an improvised haiku:

The lover leaps in the
volcano!

It's ten feet deep,

And inactive-

as the two pilots mug, giggle, and jump around trying to avoid the grizzled old radarman's thrashings-
what?
You didn't like the haiku. It wasn't
ethereal
enough? Not Japanese at all? In fact it sounded like something
right outa Hollywood?
Well, Captain-yes you, Marine Captain Esberg from Pasadena-
you,
have just had, the Mystery Insight! (gasps and a burst of premonitory applause) and so
you
-are our
Paranoid… For The Day!
(band burst into "Button Up Your Overcoat," or any other suitably paranoid up-tempo tune, as the bewildered contestant is literally yanked to his feet and dragged out in the aisle by this M.C. with the gleaming face and rippling jaw). Yes, it
is
a movie! Another World War II situation comedy, and your chance, to find out what it's
really like,
because
you
-have
won
(drumroll, more gasps, more applauding and whistling) an all-expense, one-way trip for
one,
to the movie's actual location, exotic Puke-a-hook-a-look-i
Island!
(the orchestra's ukulele section taking up now a tinkling reprise of that "White Man Welcome" tune we last heard in London being directed at Geza Rozsavolgyi) on a giant TWA Constellation! You'll while your nights away chasing vampire mosquitoes away from your
own throat!
Getting blind
lost,
out in the middle of torrential tropical downpours! Scooping rat turds out of the enlisted men's water barrel! But it won't be all nighttime giddiness and excitement, Captain, because daytimes, up at five a.m. sharp, you'll be out making the acquaintance of the Kamikaze Zero you'll be flying! getting all checked out on those con-
trols,
making sure you know
just where
that bomb-safety-release is! A-ha-hand of
course,
trying to stay out of the way, of those two
Nonsensical Nips,
Takeshi and Ichizo! as they go about their uproarious weekly adventures, seemingly oblivious to your presence, and the frankly ominous implications of your day's routine…

streets