GRAVITY RAINBOW (45 page)

"I beg your pardon?"

"There's still time."

"You don't understand. They've killed a friend of mine." But seeing it in the
Times
that way, so public… how could any of that be real, real enough to convince him Tantivy won't just come popping in the door some day, howdyfoax and a bashful smile… hey, Tantivy. Where were you?

"Where
was
I, Slothrop? That's a good one." His smile lighting the time again, and the world all free…

He flashes Waxwing's card. The old woman breaks into an amazing smile, the two teeth left in her head beam under the night's new bulbs. She thumbs him upstairs and then gives him either the V-for-victory sign or some spell from distant countryside against the evil eye that sours the milk. Whichever it is, she is chuckling sarcastically.

Upstairs is a roof, a kind of penthouse in the middle. Three young

men with Apache sideburns and a young woman packing a braided leather sap are sitting in front of the entrance smoking a thin cigarette of ambiguous odor. "You are lost, mon ami."

"Uh, well," out with Waxwing's card again.

"Ah, bien…" They roll aside, and he passes into a bickering of canary-yellow Borsalini, corksoled comicbook shoes with enormous round toes, lotta that saddle-stitching in contrasting colors (such as orange on blue, and the perennial favorite, green on magenta), workaday groans of comforted annoyance commonly heard in public toilets, telephone traffic inside clouds of cigar smoke. Waxwing isn't in, but a colleague interrupts some loud dealing soon as he sees the card.

"What do you need?"

"Carte d'identite, passage to Zurich, Switzerland."

"Tomorrow."

"Place to sleep."

The man hands over a key to one of the rooms downstairs. "Do you have any money?"

"Not much. I don't know when I could-"

Count, squint, riffle, "Here."

"Uh…"

"It's all right, it's not a loan. It comes out of overhead. Now, don't go outside, don't get drunk, stay away from the girls who work here."

"Aw…"

"See you tomorrow." Back to business.

Slothrop's night passes uncomfortably. There is no position he can manage to sleep in for more than ten minutes. The bugs sally out onto his body in skirmish parties not uncoordinated with his level of wake-fulness. Drunks come to the door, drunks and revenants.

" 'Rone, you've gotta let me in, it's Dumpster, Dumpster Villard."

"What's 'at-"

"It's really bad tonight. I'm sorry. I shouldn't impose this way, I'm more trouble than I'm worth… listen… I'm cold… I've been a long way…"

A sharp knock. "Dumpster-"

"No, no, it's Murray Smile, I was next to you in basic, company 84, remember? Our serial numbers are only two digits apart."

"I had to let… let Dumpster in… where'd he go? Was I asleep?"

"Don't tell them I was here. I just came to tell you you don't have to go back."

"Really? Did they say it was all right?"

"It's all right."

"Yeah, but did
they say
it was?" Silence. "Hey? Murray?" Silence.

The wind is blowing in the ironwork very strong, and down in the street a vegetable crate bounces end over end, wooden, empty, dark. It must be four in the morning. "Got to get back, shit I'm late…"

"No." Only a whisper… But it was her "no" that stayed with him.

"Whozat. Jenny? That you, Jenny?"

"Yes it's me. Oh love I'm so glad I found you."

"But I have to…" Would They ever let her live with him at the Casino…?

"No. I can't." But
what's wrong with her voice?

"Jenny, I heard your block was hit, somebody told me, the day after New Year's… a rocket… and I meant to go back and see if you were all right, but… I just
didn 't…
and then They took me to that Casino…"

"It's all right."'

"But not if I didn't-"

"Just don't go back to them."

And somewhere, dark fish hiding past angles of refraction in the flow tonight, are Katje and Tantivy, the two visitors he wants most to see. He tries to bend the voices that come to the door, bend them like notes on a harmonica, but it won't work. What he wants lies too deep…

Just before dawn knocking comes very loud, hard as steel. Slothrop has the sense this time to keep quiet.

"Come on, open up."

"MPs, open up."

American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the
Tightness
of what they planned to do… he'd been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and especially from Japs-
we
were the ones who always played fair-but this pair outside the door now are as demoralizing as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are, funny you never noticed before) screaming "BANZAI!"

"Wait a minute Ray, there he goes-"

"Hopper! You asshole, come back here-"

"You'll never get me in a strait jacket agaaaaain…" Hopper's voice goes fading around the corner as the MPs take off in pursuit.

It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown window shade, that this is his first day Outside. His first free morning. He
doesn't
have to go back. Free? What's free? He falls asleep at last. A little before noon a young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves him the papers. He is now an English war correspondent named Ian Scuffling.

"This is the address of one of our people in Zurich. Waxwing wishes you good luck and asks what kept you so long."

"You mean he wants an answer?"

"He said you'd have to think about it."

"Sa-a-a-ay." It's just occurred to him. "Why are all you folks helping me like this? For free and all?"

"Who knows? We have to play the patterns. There must be a pattern you're in, right now."

"Uh…"

But she's already left. Slothrop looks around the place: in the daylight it's mean and anonymous. Even the roaches must be uncomfortable here… Is he off so quickly, like Katje on her wheel, off on a ratchet of rooms like this, to be in each one only long enough to gather wind or despair enough to move on to the next, but no way backward now, ever again? No time even to get to know the Rue Rossini, which faces holler from the windows, where's a good place to eat, what's the name of the song everybody's whistling these premature summer days…

A week later he's in Zurich, after a long passage by train. While the metal creatures in their solitude, days of snug and stable fog, pass the hours at mime, at playing molecules, imitating industrial synthesis as they are broken up, put together, coupled and recoupled, he dozes in and out of a hallucination of Alps, fogs, abysses, tunnels, bone-deep la-borings up impossible grades, cowbells in the darkness, in the morning green banks, smells of wet pasture, always out the windows an unshaven work crew on the way to repair some stretch of track, long waits in marshaling-yards whose rails run like layers of an onion cut end to end, gray and desolate places, nights of whistles, coupling, crashes, sidings, staring cows on the evening hillsides, army convoys waiting at the crossings as the train puffs by, never a clear sense of nationality anywhere, nor even of belligerent sides, only the War, a single damaged landscape, in which "neutral Switzerland" is a rather stuffy convention, observed but with as much sarcasm as "liberated France" or "totalitarian Germany," "Fascist Spain," and others…

The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of…

He checks in to the Hotel Nimbus, in an obscure street in the Niederdorf or cabaret section of Zurich. The room's in an attic, and is reached by ladder. There's also a ladder outside the window, so he reckons it'll be O.K. When night comes down he goes out looking for the local Waxwing rep, finds him farther up the Limmatquai, under a bridge, in rooms full of Swiss watches, clocks and altimeters. He's a Russian named Semyavin. Outside boats hoot on the river and the lake. Somebody upstairs is practicing on a piano: stumbling, sweet lieder. Semyavin pours gentian brandy into cups of tea he's just brewed. "First thing you have to understand is the way everything here is specialized. If it's watches, you go to one cafe. If it's women, you go to another. Furs are subdivided into Sable, Ermine, Mink, and Others. Same with dope: Stimulants, Depressants, Psychomimetics… What is it you're after?"

"Uh, information?" Gee, this stuff tastes like Moxie…

"Oh. Another one." Giving Slothrop a sour look. "Life was simple before the first war. You wouldn't remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items. Currency in those days was no more than a sideline, and the term 'industrial espionage' was unknown. But I've seen it change- oh, how it's changed. The German inflation, that should've been my clue right there, zeros strung end to end from here to Berlin. I would have stern talks with myself. 'Semyavin, it's only a temporary lapse away from reality. A small aberration, nothing to worry about. Act as you always have-strength of character, good mental health.
Courage,
Semyavin! Soon all will be back to normal.' But do you know what?"

"Let me guess."

A tragic sigh. "Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?"

"I thought it was cigarettes."

"You dream." He brings out a list of Zurich cafes and gathering spots. Under Espionage, Industrial, Slothrop finds three. Ultra, Licht-spiel, and Straggeli. They are on both banks of the Limmat, and widely spaced.

"Footwork," folding the list in an oversize zoot-suit pocket.

"It'll get easier. Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future."

Begins a period of shuttling among the three cafes, sitting a few hours over coffee at each one, eating once a day, Zurich baloney and rosti at the People's Kitchens… watching crowds of businessmen in blue suits, sun-black skiers who've spent the duration schussing miles of glacier and snow hearing nothing of campaigns or politics, reading nothing but thermometers and weathervanes, finding their atrocities in avalanches or toppling seracs, their victories in layers of good powder… ragged foreigners in oil-stained leather jackets and tattered fatigues, South Americans bundled in fur coats and shivering in the clear sunlight, elderly hypochondriacs who were caught out lounging at some spa when the War began and have been here since, women in long black dresses who don't smile, men in soiled overcoats who do… and the mad, down from their fancy asylums on weekend furlough-oh, the mental cases of Switzerland: Slothrop is known to them, all right, among all the somber street faces and colors only he is wearing white, shoes zoot 'n' hat, white as the cemetery mountains here… He's also the New Mark In Town. It's difficult for him to sort out the first wave of corporate spies from the

loonies on leave!

(The Chorus line is divided not into the conventional Boys and Girls but into Keepers and Nuts, without regard to sex, though all four pos-; sibilities are represented on stage. Many are wearing sunglasses with black lenses and white rims, not so much to be fashionable as to suggest snow-blindness, the antiseptic white of the Clinic, perhaps even the darkness of the mind. But all seems happy, relaxed, informal… no sign of repression, not even a distinction in costume so that at first there is some problem telling Nuts from Keepers as they all burst in from the wings dancing and singing):

Here we come foax-ready or not! Put your mask on, and plot your plot, We're just laughin' and droolin', all-
over

the sleigh, Like a buncha happy midgets on a holiday!

Oh we're the LOONIES ON LEAVE, and We haven't a care-

Our brains at the cleaners, our souls at the Fair, Just freaks on a fur-lough, away from the blues,

As daffy and sharp as-the taps on our shoes! Hey, we're passin' the hat for-your frowns and

your tears,

And the fears you thought'd never go'way- Oh take it from a loony, life's so dear and swoony, So just hug it and kiss it to-day! La-da-da, ya-ta ya-ta ta-ta c… (They go on

humming the tune behind what follows):

First Nut (or maybe Keeper): Got an amazing deal for you here, American? I thought so, always tell a face from home, saaay, like your suit there, go far enough up the glacier 'n' nobody'd be able to see ya! Well yes now, I know how you feel about these street-vendors keep coming by, it's the old three-card monte on the sidewalk [trucks across the stage for a while, back and forth, waving his finger in the air, singing "Three-card monte on-the
side, walk,"
over and over in the same obsessive monotone, for as many repetitions as he can get away with] and you can spot right away what's wrong, every one promises ya somethin' fer nothin', right? yes now oddly enough, that's the main objection engineers and scientists have always had to the idea of [lowering his voice] perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management-here, here's our card-well, sure, they've got a point. At least they
had
a point. Up till now…

Second Nut or Keeper: Now you've heard about the two-hundred-mile-per-gallon carburetor, the razor edge that never gets dull, the eternal bootsole, the mange pill that's good to your glands, engine that'll run on sand, ornithopters and robobopsters-you heard me, got a little goatee made out of steel wool-jivey, that's fine, but
here's
one for yo'
mind!
Are you ready? It's Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens
You!