GRAVITY RAINBOW (31 page)

"I don't know. I don't feel Jewish today."

"I meant flying outward?" He means alone and forever separate: Pointsman knows what he means. So, by surprise, something in him is touched. He feels the Christmas snow now at crevices of his boots, the bitter cold trying to get in. The brown wool flank of Gwenhidwy moves at the edge of his sight, a pocket of color, a holdout against this whitening day. Flying outward. Flying… Gwenhidwy, a million ice-points falling at a slant across his caped immensity, looking so improbable of extinction that now, from where it's been lying, the same yawing-drunk chattering fear returns, the Curse of the Book, and here is someone he wants, truly, with all his mean heart, to see preserved… though he's been too shy, or proud, ever to've smiled at Gwenhidwy without some kind of speech to explain and cancel out the smile…

Dogs run barking at their approach. They get the Professional Eye from Pointsman. Gwenhidwy is humming "Aberystwyth." Out comes the doorkeeper's daughter Estelle with a shivering kid or two under-

foot and a Christmas bottle of something acrid but very warming inside the breast after about the first minute it's down. Smells of coal smoke, piss, garbage, last night's bubble-and-squeak, fill the hallways. Gwenhidwy is drinking from the bottle, carrying on a running slap-and-tickle with Estelle and getting in a fast game of where'd-he-go-there-he-is with Arch her youngest around the broad mouton hipline of his mother who keeps trying to smack him but he's too fast.

Gwenhidwy breathes upon a gas meter which is frozen all through, too tight to accept coins. Terrible weather. He surrounds it, curses it, bending like a screen lover, wings of his cape reaching to enfold- Gwenhidwy, radiating like a sun…

Out the windows of the sitting-room are a row of bare Army-colored poplars, a canal, a snowy trainyard, and beyond it a long sawtooth pile of scrap coal, still smoldering from a V-bomb yesterday. Ragged smoke is carried askew, curling, broken and back to earth by the falling snow.

"It's the closest yet," Gwenhidwy at the kettle, the sour smell of a sulfur match in the air. After a moment, still on watch over the gas ring, "Pointsman, do you want to hear something really paranoid?"

"You too?"

"Have you consulted a map of London lately? All this great meteoric plague of V-weapons, is being dumped out
here,
you see. Not back on Whitehall, where it's supposed to be, but on me, and I think it is beast-ly?"

"What a damned unpatriotic thing to say."

"Oh," hawking and spitting into the washbowl, "you don't want to believe it. Why should you? Harley Street lot, my good Jesus Christ."

It's an old game with Gwenhidwy, Royal Fellow-baiting. Some unaccustomed wind or thermocline along the sky is bringing them down the deep choral hum of American bombers: Death's white Gymanfa Ganu. A switching-locomotive creeps silently across the web of tracks below.

"They're falling in a Poisson distribution," says Pointsman in a small voice, as if it was open to challenge.

"No doubt man, no doubt-an excellent point. But all over the rucking
East End,
you see." Arch, or someone, has drawn a brown, orange, and blue Gwenhidwy carrying a doctor's bag along a flat horizon-line past a green gasworks. The bag's full of gin bottles, Gwenhidwy is smiling, a robin is peeking out from its nest in his beard, and the sky is blue and the sun yellow. "But have you ever thought of why? Here is the City Paranoiac. All these long centuries,

growing over the country-side? like an intelligent creature. An actor, a fantastic
mimic,
Pointsman! Count-erfeiting all the correct forces? the eco-nomic, the demographic? oh yes even the ran-dom, you see."

"What do you mean 'I see'? I
don't
see." Against the window, back-lit by the white afternoon, Pointsman's face is invisible except for a tiny bright crescent glowing off each eyeball. Should he fumble behind him for the window catch? Is the woolly Welshman gone raving mad, then?

"You don't see
them,"
steam in tight brocade starting to issue from the steel-blotched swan's mouth, "the blacks and Jews, in their darkness. You can't. You don't hear their silence. You became so used to talking, and to light."

"To barking, anyway."

"Nothing comes through my hos-pital but fail-ure, you see." Staring with a fixed, fool-alcoholic smile. "What can I cure? I can only send them back, outside again? Back to
that?
It might as well be Europe here, corn-bat, splint-ing and drug-ging them all into some minimum condition to get on with the kill-ing?"

"Here, don't you know there's a war on?" Thus Pointsman receives, with his cup, a terrible scowl. In truth, he is hoping with nitwit irrelevancies to discourage Gwenhidwy from going on about his City Paranoiac. Pointsman would rather talk about the rocket victims admitted today to the hospital down there. But this is exorcism man, it is the poet singing back the silence, adjuring the white riders, and Gwenhidwy knows, as Pointsman cannot, that it's part of the plan of the day to sit inside this mean room and cry into just such a deafness: that Mr. Pointsman is to play exactly himself-stylized, irritable, uncomprehending…

"In some cities the rich live upon the heights, and the poor are found below. In others the rich occupy the shoreline, while the poor must live inland. Now in London, here is a gra-dient of wretchedness? increasing as the river widens to the sea. I am only ask-ing, why? Is it because of the ship-ping? Is it in the pat-terns of land use, especially those relating to the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an-cient tribal tabu, surviving down all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From The East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly. The people out here were
meant to go down first.
We're expendable: those in the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don't mean the Threat has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Paranoiac dreams, it's not accessible to
us.
Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of another, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to

invade the es-tuary… or of waves of darkness… waves of fire… Perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It's none of
my
business, city dreams… But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing. It was known, don't deny it-
known,
Pointsman! that the front in Eu-rope someday
must
develop like this? move away east, make the rock-ets necessary, and
known
how, and where, the rockets would fall short. Ask your friend Mexico? look at the densities on his map? east, east, and south of the river too, where all the bugs live, that's who's getting it
thick-est,
my friend."

"You're right, Gwenhidwy," judicious, sipping his tea, "that is very paranoid."

"It's true." He is out with the festive bottle of Vat 69 now, and about to pour them a toast.

"To the babies." Grinning, completely mad.

"Babies, Gwenhidwy?"

"Ah. I've been keep-ing my
own
map? Plot-ting da-ta from the maternity wards. The ba-bies born during this Blitz are al-so fol-lowing a Poisson distribution, you see."

"Well-to the oddness of it, then. Poor little bastards."

Later, toward dusk, several enormous water bugs, a very dark reddish brown, emerge like elves from the wainscoting, and go lumbering toward the larder-pregnant mother bugs too, with baby translucent outrider bugs flowing along like a convoy escort. At night, in the very late silences between bombers, ack-ack fire and falling rockets, they can be heard, loud as mice, munching through Gwenhidwy's paper sacks, leaving streaks and footprints of shit the color of themselves behind. They don't seem to go in much for soft things, fruits, vegetables, and such, it's more the solid lentils and beans they're into, stuff they can gnaw at, paper and plaster barriers, hard interfaces to be pierced, for they are agents of unification, you see. Christmas bugs. They were deep in the straw of the manger at Bethlehem, they stumbled, climbed, fell glistening red among a golden lattice of straw that must have seemed to extend miles up and downward-an edible tenement-world, now and then gnawed through to disrupt some mysterious sheaf of vectors that would send neighbor bugs tumbling ass-OVer-antennas down past you as you held on with all legs in that constant tremble of golden stalks. A tranquil world: the temperature and hu-

midity staying nearly steady, the day's cycle damped to only a soft easy sway of light, gold to antique-gold to shadows, and back again. The crying of the infant reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see…

Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she and her sisters have brought back from the sea.

Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and kissing. Elizabeth is teasing Claire in the hallway. Their mother is in the W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now to look like a cat. It's Boxing Day. The evening's very still. The last rocket bomb was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth a frock that Penelope will grow into.

The pantomime Roger took them all to see this afternoon was
Hansel and
Gretel.
Claire immediately took off under the seats where others were moving about by secret paths, a flash of braid or of white collar now and then among the tall attentive uncles in uniform, the coat-draped backs of seats. On stage Hansel, who was supposed to be a boy but was really a tall girl in tights and smock, cowered inside the cage. The funny old Witch foamed at the mouth and climbed the scenery. And pretty Gretel waited by the Oven for her chance…

Then the Germans dropped a rocket just down the street from the theatre. A few of the little babies started crying. They were scared. Gretel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped: put the broom down, in the gathering silence stepped to the footlights, and sang:

Oh, don't let it get you,

It will if they let you, but there's

Something I'll bet you can't see-

It's big and it's nasty and it's right over there,

It's waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!

Oh, the greengrocer's wishing on a rainbow today,

And the dustman is tying his tie…

And it all goes along to the same jolly song, With a peppermint face in the sky!

"Now sing along," she smiled, and actually got the audience, even Roger, to sing:

With a peppermint face in the sky-y,

And a withered old dream in your heart,

You'll get hit with a piece of the pie-ie,

With the pantomime ready to start!

Oh, the Tommy is sleeping in a snowbank tonight,

And the Jerries are learning to fly-

We can fly to the moon, we'll be higher than noon,

In our polythene home in the sky…

Pretty polythene home in the sky, Pretty platinum pins in your hand- Oh your mother's a big fat machine gun, And your father's a dreary young man… (Whispered and staccato):

Oh, the, man-a-ger's suck-ing on a corn-cob, pipe, And the bank-ers are, eat-ing their, wives, All the world's in a daze, while the orchestra plays, So turn your pockets and get your surprise-

Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-se,

There was nobody there af-ter all!

And the lamps up the stairway are dying,

It's the season just after the ball…

Oh the palm-trees whisper on the beach somewhere,

And the lifesaver's heaving a sigh,

And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,

Are of children who are learning to die…

Penelope's father's chair, in the corner, next to the table with the lamp, is empty. It faces her now. She can see the crocheted shawl over the back, many knots of gray, tan, black, and brown, with amazing clarity. In the pattern, or in front of it, something is stirring: at first no more than refraction, as if there were a source of heat directly in front of the empty chair.

"No," she whispers out loud. "I don't want to. You're not him, I don't know who you are but you're not my father. Go away."

Its arms and legs are silent and rigid. She stares into it.

"You want to possess me."

Demonic possessions in this house are not unknown. Is this really Keith, her father? taken when she was half her present age, and returned now as not the man she knew, but only the shell-with the soft meaty slug of soul that smiles and loves, that feels its mortality, either rotted away or been picked at by the needle mouths of death-by-government-a process by which living souls unwillingly become the demons known to the main sequence of Western magic as the Qlip-poth, Shells of the Dead… It is also what the present dispensation often does to decent men and women entirely on this side of the grave. In neither process is there any dignity, or any mercy. Mothers and fathers are conditioned into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways: giving themselves cancer and heart attacks, getting into motor accidents, going off to fight in the War-leaving their children alone in the forest. They'll always tell you fathers are "taken," but fathers only leave-that's what it really is. The fathers are all covering for each other, that's all. Perhaps it's even better to have this presence, rubbing the room dry as glass, slipping in and out of an old chair, than a father who still hasn't died yet, a man you love and have to watch it happening to…