GRAVITY RAINBOW (21 page)

But something's different… something's… been
changed…
don't mean to bitch, folks, but-well for instance he could almost. swear he's being followed, or watched anyway. Some of the tails are pretty slick, but others he can spot, all right. Xmas shopping yesterday at that Woolworth's, he caught a certain pair of beady eyes in the toy section, past a heap of balsa-wood fighter planes and little-kid-size En-fields. A hint of constancy to what shows up in the rearview mirror of his Humber, no color or model he can pin down but
something
always present inside the tiny frame, has led him to start checking out other cars when he goes off on a morning's work. Things on his desk at ACHTUNG seem not to be where they were. Girls have found excuses not to keep appointments. He feels he's being gently separated from the life he lived before going into St. Veronica's. Even in movies there's always someone behind him being careful not to talk, rattle paper, laugh too loud: Slothrop's been to enough movies that he can pick up an anomaly like that right away.

The cubicle near Grosvenor Square begins to feel more and more like a trap. He spends his time, often whole days, ranging the East End, breathing the rank air of Thameside, seeking places the followers might not follow.

One day, just as he's entering a narrow street all ancient brick walls and lined with costermongers, he hears his name called-and hubba hubba what's this then, here she conies all right, blonde hair flying in telltales, white wedgies clattering on cobblestone, an adorable tomato in a nurse uniform, and her name's, uh, well, oh-Darlene. Golly, it's Darlene. She works at St. Veronica's hospital, lives nearby at the home of a Mrs. Quoad, a lady widowed long ago and since suffering a series of antiquated diseases-greensickness, tetter, kibes, purples, im-posthumes and almonds in the ears, most recently a touch of scurvy. So, out in search of limes for her landlady, the fruit beginning to jog and spill from her straw basket and roll yellowgreen back down the street, young Darlene comes running in her nurse's cap, her breasts soft fenders for this meeting on the gray city sea.

"You came back! Ah Tyrone, you're
back"
a tear or two, both of them down picking up citrus, the starch khaki dress rattling, even the odd sniffle from Slothrop's not unsentimental nose.

"It's me love…"

Tire tracks in the slush have turned to pearl, mellow pearl. Gulls cruise slowly against the high windowless brick walls of the district.

Mrs. Quoad's is up three dark flights, with the dome of faraway St. Paul's out its kitchen window visible in the smoke of certain afternoons, and the lady herself tiny in a rose plush chair in the sitting-room by the wireless, listening to Primo Scala's Accordion Band. She looks healthy enough. On the table, though, is her crumpled chiffon handkerchief: feathered blots of blood in and out the convolutions like a floral pattern.

"You were here when I had that horrid quotidian ague," she recalls Slothrop, "the day we brewed the wormwood tea," sure enough, the very taste now, rising through his shoe-soles, taking him along. They're reassembling… it must be outside his memory… cool clean interior, girl and woman, independent of his shorthand of stars… so many fading-faced girls, windy canalsides, bed-sitters, bus-stop good-bys, how can he be expected to remember? but this room has gone on clarifying: part of whoever he was inside it has kindly remained, stored quiescent these months outside of his head, distributed through the grainy shadows, the grease-hazy jars of herbs, candies, spices, all the Compton Mackenzie novels on the shelf, glassy ambrotypes of her late husband Austin night-dusted inside gilded frames up on the mantel where last time Michaelmas daisies greeted and razzled from a little Sevres vase she and Austin found together one Saturday long ago in a Wardour Street shop…

"He was my good health," she often says. "Since he passed away I've had to become all but an outright witch, in pure self-defense." From the kitchen comes the smell of limes freshly cut and squeezed. Darlene's in and out of the room, looking for different botanicals, asking where the cheesecloth's got to, "Tyrone help me just reach down that-no next to it, the tall jar, thank you love"-back into the kitchen in a creak of starch, a flash of pink. "I'm the only one with a memory around here," Mrs. Quoad sighs. "We help each other, you see." She brings out from behind its cretonne camouflage a great bowl of candies.
"Now,
" beaming at Slothrop. "Here: wine jellies. They're prewar."

"Now I remember you-the one with the graft at the Ministry of Supply!" but he knows, from last time, that no gallantry can help him now. After that visit he wrote home to Nalline: "The English are kind of weird when it comes to the way things taste, Mom. They aren't like us. It might be the climate. They go for things we would never dream of. Sometimes it is enough to turn your stomach, boy. The other day I had had one of these things they call 'wine jellies.' That's their idea of
candy,
Mom! Figure out a way to feed some to that Hitler 'n' I betcha the war'd be over
tomorrow!"
Now once again he finds himself checking out these ruddy gelatin objects, nodding, he hopes amiably, at Mrs. Quoad. They have the names of different wines written on them in bas-relief.

"Just a touch of menthol too," Mrs. Quoad popping one into her mouth. "Delicious."

Slothrop finally chooses one that says Lafitte Rothschild and stuffs it on into his kisser. "Oh yeah. Yeah. Mmm. It's great."

"If you
really
want something peculiar try the Bernkastler Doktor. Oh! Aren't you the one who brought me those lovely American slimy elm things, maple-tasting with a touch of sassafras-"

"Slippery elm. Jeepers I'm sorry, I ran out yesterday."

Darlene comes in with a steaming pot and three cups on a tray. "What's that?" Slothrop a little quickly, here.

"You don't really want to know, Tyrone."

"Quite right," after the first sip, wishing she'd used more lime juice or something to kill the basic taste, which is ghastly-bitter. These people are really insane. No sugar, natch. He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice drop. It looks safe. But just as

he's biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, "Oh, I thought we got rid of all
those
-" a blithe, Gilbert Sullivan ingenue's
thewse
-
"years
ago," at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels.

"You've taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!" cries Mrs. Quoad, having now with conjuror's speed produced an egg-shaped confection of pastel green, studded all over with lavender nonpareils. "Just for that I shan't let you have any of these marvelous rhubarb creams." Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.

"Serves me right," Slothrop, wondering just what he means by this, sipping herb tea to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy- oops but that's a mistake, right, here's his mouth filling once again with horrible alkaloid desolation, all the way back to the soft palate where it digs in. Darlene, pure Nightingale compassion, is handing him a hard red candy, molded like a stylized raspberry… mm, which oddly enough even tastes like a raspberry, though it can't begin to take away that bitterness. Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the act knows, fucking idiot, he's been had once more, there comes pouring out onto his tongue the most godawful crystalline concentration of Jeez it must be pure nitric acid, "Oh mercy that's really
sour,"
hardly able to get the words out he's so puckered up, exactly the sort of thing Hop Harrigan used to pull to get Tank Tinker to quit playing his ocarina, a shabby trick then and twice as reprehensible coming from an old lady who's supposed to be one of our Allies, shit he can't even
see
it's up his nose and whatever it is won't dissolve, just goes on torturing his shriveling tongue and crunches like ground glass among his molars. Mrs. Quoad is meantime busy savoring, bite by dainty bite, a cherry-quinine
petit four.
She beams at the young people across the candy bowl. Slothrop, forgetting, reaches again for his tea. There is no graceful way out of this now. Darlene has brought a couple-three more candy jars down off of the shelf, and now he goes plunging, like a journey to the center of some small, hostile planet, into an enormous bonbon
chomp
through the mantle of chocolate to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally into a core of some very tough grape gum arabic. He fingernails a piece of this out from between his teeth and stares at it for a while. It is purple in color.

"Now you're getting the idea!" Mrs. Quoad waving at him a marbled conglomerate of ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed, "you see, you also have to enjoy the way it
looks.
Why are Americans so impulsive?"

"Well," mumbling, "usually we don't get any more complicated than Hershey bars, see…"

"Oh, try
this,"
hollers Darlene, clutching her throat and swaying against him.

"Gosh, it must really be something," doubtfully taking this nasty-looking brownish novelty, an exact quarter-scale replica of a Mills-type hand grenade, lever, pin and everything, one of a series of patriotic candies put out before sugar was quite so scarce, also including, he no-dees, peering into the jar, a.455 Webley cartridge of green and pink striped taffy, a six-ton earthquake bomb of some silver-flecked blue gelatin, and a licorice bazooka.

"Go on then," Darlene actually taking his hand with the candy in it and trying to shove it into his mouth.

"Was just, you know, looking at it, the way Mrs. Quoad suggested."

"And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone."

Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy camphor-gum center. It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop's head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue's a hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to
smoke
that stuff. "Poisoned…" he is able to croak.

"Show a little backbone," advises Mrs. Quoad.

"Yes," Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, "don't you know there's a war on? Here now love, open your mouth."

Through the tears he can't see it too well, but he can hear Mrs. Quoad across the table going "Yum, yum, yum," and Darlene giggling. It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow-unless something is now going seriously wrong with his brain-it tastes like gin. "Wha's 'is," he inquires thickly.

"A gin marshmallow," sez Mrs. Quoad.

"Awww…"

"Oh that's nothing, have one of
these
-" his teeth, in some perverse reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry shell into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it's tapioca, little glutinous chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.

"More tea?" Darlene suggests. Slothrop is coughing violently, having inhaled some of that clove filling.

"Nasty cough," Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of English coughdrops, the Meggezone. "Darlene, the tea is lovely, I can feel my scurvy going away, really I can."

The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop's mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much to breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His head floats in a halo of ice.

Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in the air. Slothrop lies with Darlene, the Disgusting English Candy Drill a thing of the past, his groin now against her warm bottom. The one candy he did not get to taste-one Mrs. Quoad withheld-was the Fire of Paradise, that famous confection of high price and protean taste-"salted plum" to one, "artificial cherry" to another… "sugared violets"… "Worcestershire sauce"… "spiced treacle"… any number of like descriptions, positive, terse-never exceeding two words in length-resembling the descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in training manuals, "sweet-and-sour eggplant" being perhaps the lengthiest to date. The Fire of Paradise today is operationally extinct, and in 1945 can hardly be found: certainly nowhere among the sunlit shops and polished windows of Bond Street or waste Belgravia. But every now and then one will surface, in places which deal usually other merchandise than sweets: at rest, back inside big glass jars clouded by the days, along with objects like itself, sometimes only one candy to a whole jar, nearly hidden in the ambient tourmalines in German gold, carved ebony finger-stalls from the last century, pegs, valve-pieces, threaded hardware from obscure musical instruments, electronic components of resin and copper that the War, in its glutton, ever-nibbling intake, has not yet found and licked back into its darkness… Places where the motors never come close enough to be loud, and there are trees outside along the street. Inner rooms and older faces developing under light falling through a skylight, yellower, later in the year…

Hunting across the zero between waking and sleep, his halfway limp cock still inside her, their strengthless legs bent the same angle… The bedroom deepens into water and coolness. Somewhere the sun is going down. Just enough light to see the darker freckles on her back. In the parlor Mrs. Quoad is dreaming she's back in the gardens at Bournemouth, among the rhododendrons, and a sudden rain, Austin crying
Touch her throat, Majesty. Touch!
and Yrjo-a pretender but the true king, for a very doubtful branch of the family usurped the throne in 1878 during the intrigues over Bessarabia-Yrjo in an old-fashioned frock coat with golden galloons shining at the sleeves, bending toward her in the rain to cure her forever of King's Evil, looking exactly as he does in the rotogravure, his lovely Hrisoula a step or two behind kindly, seriously waiting, around them the rain thundering down, the King's white ungloved hand bending like a butterfly to touch the hollow of Mrs. Quoad's throat, the miracle touch, gently… touch…