GRAVITY RAINBOW (36 page)

Just-like, a dream's-got, lost in yer brain!

Dancin' like a fool through that Forbid-den Wing,

Waitin' fer th' light to start shiver-ing-well,

Who ev-ver said ya couldn't move that way,

Who ev-ver said ya couldn't try?

If-ya find-there's-a-lit-tle-pain,

Ya can al-ways-go-back-a-gain, cause

Ya don't-ev-er-real-ly-say, good-by!

Why here? Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room? say why should walking in here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden itself-here are the same long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery, of condensations and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten corruptions, rooms full of upright gray-feathered statues with wings spread, indistinct faces in dust-rooms fall of dust that will cloud the shapes of inhabitants around the corners or deeper inside, that will settle on their black formal lapels, that will soften to sugar the

white faces, white shirt fronts, gems and gowns, white hands that move too quickly to be seen… what game do They deal? What passes are these, so blurred, so old and perfect?

"Fuck you," whispers Slothrop. It's the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that. His whisper is baffled by the thousands of tiny rococo surfaces. Maybe he'll sneak in tonight-no not at night-but sometime, with a bucket and brush, paint FUCK YOU in a balloon coming out the mouth of one of those little pink shepherdesses there…

He steps back out, backward out the door, as if half, his ventral half, were being struck in kingly radiance: retreating from yet facing the Presence feared and wanted.

Outside, he heads down toward the quay, among funseekers, swooping white birds, an incessant splat of seagull shit. As I walk along the Bwa-deboolong with an independent air… Saluting everybody in uniform, getting it to a reflex, don't ask for extra trouble, try for invisible… bringing his arm each time a bit more stupidly to his side. Clouds now are coming up fast, out of the sea. No sign of Tantivy out here, either.

Ghosts of fishermen, glassworkers, fur traders, renegade preachers, hilltop patriarchs and valley politicians go avalanching back from Slothrop here, back to 1630 when Governor Winthrop came over to America on the
Arbella,
flagship of a great Puritan flotilla that year, on which the first American Slothrop had been a mess cook or something-there go that
Arbella
and its whole fleet, sailing backward in formation, the wind sucking them east again, the creatures leaning from the margins of the unknown
sucking in
their cheeks, growing crosseyed with the effort, in to black deep hollows at the mercy of teeth no longer the milky molars of cherubs, as the old ships zoom out of Boston Harbor, back across an Atlantic whose currents and swells go flowing and heaving in reverse… a redemption of every mess cook who ever slipped and fell when the deck made an unexpected move, the night's stew collecting itself up out of the planks and off the indignant shoes of the more elect, slithering in a fountain back into the pewter kettle as the servant himself staggers upright again and the vomit he slipped on goes gushing back into the mouth that spilled it… Presto change-o! Tyrone Slothrop's English again! But it doesn't seem to be redemption exactly that
this
They have in mind…

He's on a broad cobbled esplanade, lined with palms shifting now to coarse-grained black as clouds begin to come over the sun. Tantivy isn't out on the beach, either-nor are any of the girls. Slothrop sits on

a low wall, feet swinging, watching the front, slate, muddy purple, advancing from the sea in sheets, in drifts. Around him the air is cooling. He shivers. What are They doing?

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn't about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end. He just runs. Rain grows in wet crescendo. His footfalls send up fine flowers of water, each hanging a second behind his flight. It is flight. He comes in speckled, pied with rain, begins a frantic search through the great inert Casino, starting again with the same smoky, hooch-fumed bar, proceeding through the little theatre, where tonight will play an abbreviated version of
L'Inutil Precauzione
(that imaginary opera with which Rosina seeks to delude her guardian in
The Barber of Seville),
into its green room where girls, a silkenness of girls, but not the three Slothrop wants most to see, tease hair, arrange garters, glue on eyelashes, smile at Slothrop. No one has seen Ghislaine, Francoise, Yvonne. From another room the orchestra rehearses a lively Rossini tarantella. The reeds are all something like a half tone flat. At once Slothrop understands that he is surrounded by women who have lived a good fraction of their lives at war and under occupation, and for whom people have been dropping out of sight every day… yes, in one or two pairs of eyes he finds an old and European pity, a look he will get to know, well before he loses his innocence and becomes one of them…

So he drifts, through the bright and milling gaming rooms, the dining hall and its smaller private satellites, busting up tete-a-tetes, colliding with waiters, finding only strangers wherever he looks.
And if
you need help, well, Til help you…
Voices, music, the shuffling of cards all grow louder, more oppressive, till he stands looking into the Himmler-Spielsaal again, crowded now, jewels flashing, leather gleaming, roulette spokes whirling blurring-it's here that saturation hits him, it's all this playing games, too much of it, too many games: the nasal, obsessive voice of a croupier he can't see-messieurs, mesdames, les jeux sont faits-is suddenly speaking out of the Forbidden Wing directly to him, and about what Slothrop has been playing against the invisible House, perhaps after all for his soul, all day-terrified he turns, turns out into the rain again where the electric lights of the Casino, in full holocaust, are glaring off the glazed cobbles. Collar up, Bloat's hat down over his ears, saying
shit
every few minutes, shivering, his back aching from that fall out of that tree, he goes stumbling along

in the rain. He thinks he might begin to cry. How did this all turn against him so fast? His friends old and new, every last bit of paper and clothing connecting him to what he's been, have just, nicking, vanished. How can he meet this with any kind of grace? Only much later, worn out, snuffling, cold and wretched in his prison of soggy Army wool, does he think of Katje.

He gets back to the Casino near midnight, her hour, tramping upstairs leaving wet footprints behind, loud as a washing machine- stops at her door, rain pattering onto the carpet, afraid even to knock. Has she been taken too? Who's waiting behind the door and what machinery have They brought with Them? But she's heard him, and opens with a dimpled, chiding smile for being so wet. "Tyrone, I missed you."

He shrugs, convulsive, helpless, showering both of them. "It's the only place I knew to come." Her smile slowly unpurses. Gingerly he steps across the sill then, not sure if it's door or high window, into her deep room.

Good mornings of good old lust, early shutters open to the sea, winds coming in with the heavy brushing of palm leaves, the wheezing break to surface and sun of porpoises out in the harbor.

"Oh," Katje groans, somewhere under a pile of their batistes and brocade, "Slothrop, you
pig."

"Oink, oink, oink," sez Slothrop cheerfully. Seaglare dances up on the ceiling, smoke curls from black-market cigarettes. Given the precisions of light these mornings, there are forms of grace to be found in the rising of the smoke, meander, furl, delicate fade to clarity…

At certain hours the harbor blue will be reflected up on the whitewashed sea-facade, and the tall windows will be shuttered again. Wave images will flicker there in a luminous net. By then Slothrop will be up, in British uniform, gobbling down croissants and coffee, already busy at a refresher course in technical German, or trying to dope out the theory of arrow-stable trajectories, or tracing nearly with the end of his nose some German circuit schematic whose resistors look like coils, and the coils like resistors-"What bizarre shit," once he got hep to it, "why would they go and switch it around like that? Trying to camouflage it, or what?"

"Recall your ancient German runes," suggests Sir Stephen

Dodson-Truck, who is from the Foreign Office P.I.D. and speaks 3 3 languages including English with a strong Oxonian blither to it.

"My what?"

"Oh," lips compressing, some kind of brain nausea here, "that coil symbol there happens to be very like the Old Norse rune for 'S,'
sol,
which means 'sun.' The Old High German name for it is
sigil."

"Funny way to draw that
sun,"
it seems to Slothrop.

"Indeed. The Goths, much earlier, had used a circle with a dot in the center. This broken line evidently dates from a time of discontinuities, tribal fragmenting perhaps, alienation-whatever's analogous, in a social sense, to the development of an independent ego by the very young child, you see…"

Well, no, Slothrop doesn't see, not exactly. He hears this sort of thing from Dodson-Truck nearly every time they get together. The man just materialized one day, out on the beach in a black suit, shoulders starred with dandruff from thinning carrot hair, coming into view against the white face of the Casino, which trembled over him as he approached. Slothrop was reading a Plasticman comic. Katje was dozing in the sun, face-up. But when his footpads reached her hearing, she turned on one elbow to wave hello. The peer flung himself at full length, Attitude 8.11, Torpor, Undergraduate. "So this is Lieutenant Slothrop."

Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out of a keyhole, around a corner and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist's lab, out of whose faucet Plas's head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw, is just emerging. "Yeah. Who're you, Ace?"

Sir Stephen introduces himself, freckles roused by the sun, eying the comic book curiously. "I gather this isn't a study period."

"Is he cleared?"

"He's cleared," Katje smiling/shrugging at Dodson-Truck.

"Taking a break from that Telefunken radio control. That 'Hawaii I.' You know anything about that?"

"Only enough to wonder where they got the name from."

"There's a poetry to it, engineer's poetry… it suggests
Haverie
- average, you know-certainly you have the two lobes, don't you, symmetrical about the rocket's intended azimuth…
hauen,
too- smashing someone with a hoe or a club…" off on a voyage of his own here, smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression
ab-hauen,
quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient Greeks… Slothrop's first impulse

is to get back to what that Plas is into, but something about the man, despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him listening… an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs him, a love for the Word.

"Well, it might be just Axis propaganda. Something to do with that Pearl Harbor."

Sir Stephen considers this, seeming pleased. Did They choose him because of all those word-smitten Puritans dangling off of Slothrop's family tree? Were They trying to seduce his brain now, his reading eye too? There are times when Slothrop actually can find a clutch mechanism between him and Their iron-cased engine far away up a power train whose shape and design he has to guess at, a clutch he can disengage, feeling then all his inertia of motion, his real helplessness… it is not exactly unpleasant, either. Odd thing. He is almost sure that whatever They want, it won't mean risking his life, or even too much of his comfort. But he can't fit any of it into a pattern, there's no way to connect somebody like Dodson-Truck with somebody like Katje…

Seductress-and-patsy, all right, that's not so bad a game. There's very little pretending. He doesn't blame her: the real enemy's somewhere back in that London, and this is her job. She can be versatile, gay, and kind, and he'd rather be warm here with her than freezing back under the Blitz. But now and then… too insubstantial to get a fix on, there'll be in her face a look, something not in her control, that depresses him, that he's even dreamed about and so found amplified there to honest fright: the terrible chance that she might have been conned too. As much a victim as he is-an unlucky, an unaccountably
futureless
look…

One gray afternoon in where but the Himmler-Spielsaal, where else, he surprises her alone by a roulette wheel. She's standing, head bent, gracefully hipshot, playing croupier. An employee of the House. She wears a white peasant blouse and a rainbow-striped dirndl skirt of satin, which shimmers underneath the skylight. The ball's tattoo, against the moving spokes, gathers a long, scratchy resonance here in the muraled space. She doesn't turn till Slothrop is beside her. To her breathing there is a grave slow-beating tremor: she nudges at the shutters of his heart, opening to him brief flashes of an autumn country he has only suspected, only feared, outside him, inside her…

"Hey Katje…" Making a long arm, hooking a finger on a spoke to stop the wheel. The ball drops in a compartment whose number they

never see. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.

She shakes her head. He understands that it's something back in Holland, before Arnhem-an impedance permanently wired into the circuit of themselves. How many ears smelling of Palmolive and Camay has he crooned songs into, outside-the-bowling-alley songs, behind-the-Moxie-billboard songs, Saturday-night open-me-another-quart songs, all saying, honey, it don't matter where you've been, let's not live in the past, right now's all there is…