GRAVITY RAINBOW (8 page)

They have drawn near a glow over the rooftops. Fire Service vehicles come roaring by them, heading the same direction. It is an oppressive region of brick streets and silent walls.

Roger brakes for a crowd of sappers, firefighters, neighbors in dark coats over white nightclothes, old ladies who have a special place in their night-thoughts for the Fire Service
no please you 're not going to use
that great Hose on me… oh no… aren't you even going to take off those horrid rubber boots… yesyes that's
-

Soldiers stand every few yards, a loose cordon, unmoving, a bit supernatural. The Battle of Britain was hardly so formal. But these new robot bombs bring with them chances for public terror no one has sounded. Jessica notes a coal-black Packard up a side street, filled with dark-suited civilians. Their white collars rigid in the shadows.

"Who're they?"

He shrugs: "they" is good enough. "Not a friendly lot."

"Look who's talking." But their smile is old, habitual. There was a time when his job had her a bit mental: lovely little scrapbooks on the flying bombs, how sweet… And his irritated sigh: Jess don't make me out some cold fanatical man of science…

Heat beats at their faces, eye-searing yellow when the streams shoot into the fire. A ladder hooked to the edge of the roof sways in the violent drafts. Up top, against the sky, figures in slickers brace, wave arms, move together to pass orders. Half a block down, flare lamps illuminate the rescue work in the charry wet wreckage. From trailer pumps and heavy units, canvas hoses run fat with pressure, hastily threaded unions sending out stars of cold spray, bitter cold, that flash yellow when the fire leaps. Somewhere over a radio comes a woman's voice, a quiet Yorkshire girl, dispatching other units to other parts of the city.

Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both alumni of the Battle of Britain, both have-been drafted into the early black mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb inertia of cobbles and beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days… By the time one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim free of one's nth pile of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be that personal… the value of n may be different for each of us, but I'm sorry: sooner or later…

And past the exhaustion with it there is also this. If they have not quite seceded from war's state, at least they've found the beginnings of gentle withdrawal… there's never been the space or time to talk about it, and perhaps no need-but both know, clearly, it's better together, snuggled in, than back out in the paper, fires, khaki, steel of the Home Front. That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.

They have found a house in the stay-away zone, under the barrage balloons south of London. The town, evacuated in '40, is still "regulated"-still on the Ministry's list. Roger and Jessica occupy the place illegally, in a defiance they can never measure unless they're caught. Jessica has brought an old doll, seashells, her aunt's grip filled with lace knickers and silk stockings. Roger's managed to scare up a few chickens to nest in the empty garage. Whenever they meet here, one always remembers to bring a fresh flower or two. The nights are filled with explosion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over the downs a last smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette over a little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally, with brown twine. There's never much talk but touches and looks, smiles together, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry, chilly-most times they're too paranoid to risk a fire-but it's something they want to keep, so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.

Tonight's quarry, whose name will be Vladimir (or Ilya, Sergei, Nikolai, depending on the doctor's whim), slinks carefully toward the cellar entrance. This jagged opening ought to lead to something deep and safe. He has the memory, or reflex, of escaping into similar darkness

from an Irish setter who smells of coal smoke and will attack on sight… once from a pack of children, recently from a sudden blast of noiselight, a fall of masonry that caught him on the left hindquarter (still raw, still needs licking). But tonight's threat is something new: not so violent, instead a systematic stealth he isn't used to. Life out here is more direct.

It's raining. The wind hardly flickers. It brings a scent he finds strange, never having been near a laboratory in his life.

The smell is ether, it emanates from Mr. Edward W. A. Pointsman, F.R.C.S. As the dog vanishes around the broken remnant of a wall, just as the tip of his tail flicks away, the doctor steps into the white waiting throat of a toilet bowl he has not, so intent on his prey, seen. He bends over, awkwardly, tugging loose the bowl from its surrounding debris, muttering oaths against all the careless, meaning not himself, particularly, but the owners of this ruined flat (if they weren't killed in the blast) or whoever failed to salvage this bowl, which seems, actually, to be wedged on rather tight…

Mr. Pointsman drags his leg over to a shattered staircase, swings it quietly, so as not to alarm the dog, against the lower half of a fumed-oak newel post. The bowl only clanks back, the wood shudders. Mocking him-all right. He sits on stairsteps ascending to open sky and attempts to pull the damned thing loose of his foot. It will not come. He hears the invisible dog, toenails softly clicking, gain the sanctuary of the cellar. He can't reach inside the toilet bowl even to untie his fucking
boot…

Settling the window of his Balaclava helmet snug and tickling just under his nose, resolved not to give way to panic, Mr. Pointsman stands up, has to wait for blood to drain, resurge, bounce up and down its million branches in the drizzly night, percolate to balance-then limping, clanking, he heads back toward the car to get a hand from young Mexico, who did remember, he hopes, to bring the electric lantern…

Roger and Jessica found him a bit earlier, lurking at the end of a street of row houses. The V-bomb whose mutilation he was prowling took down four dwellings the other day, four exactly, neat as surgery. There is the soft smell of house-wood down before its time, of ashes matted down by the rain. Ropes are strung, a sentry lounges silent against the doorway of an intact house next to where the rubble begins. If he and the doctor have chatted at all, neither gives a sign now. Jessica sees two eyes of no particular color glaring out the window of a Balaclava helmet, and is reminded of a mediaeval knight wearing a casque. What creature is he possibly here tonight to fight for his king? The rubble waits him, sloping up to broken rear walls in a clogging, an open-work of laths pointlessly chevroning-flooring, furniture, glass, chunks of plaster, long tatters of wallpaper, split and shattered joists: some woman's long-gathered nest, taken back to separate straws, flung again to this wind and this darkness. Back in the wreckage a brass bedpost winks; and twined there someone's brassiere, a white, prewar confection of lace and satin, simply left tangled… For an instant, in a vertigo she can't control, all the pity laid up in her heart flies to it, as it would to a small animal stranded and forgotten. Roger has the boot of the car open. The two men are rummaging, coming up with large canvas sack, flask of ether, net, dog whistle. She knows she must not cry: that the vague eyes in the knitted window won't seek their Beast any more earnestly for her tears. But the poor lost flimsy thing… waiting in the night and rain for its owner, for its room to reassemble round it…

The night, full of fine rain, smells like a wet dog. Pointsman seems to've been away for a bit. "I've lost my mind. I ought to be cuddling someplace with Beaver this very minute, watching him light up his Pipe, and here instead I'm with this
gillie
or something, this spiritualist, statistician, what
are
you anyway-"

"Cuddling?" Roger has a tendency to scream.
"Cuddling?"

"Mexico." It's the doctor, sighing, toilet bowl on his foot and knitted helmet askew.

"Hello, doesn't that make it difficult for you to walk? should think it would… up here, first get it in the door, this way, and, ah, good," then closing the door again around Pointsman's ankle, the bowl now occupying Roger's seat, Roger half-resting on Jessica's lap, "tug now, hard as ever you can."

Thinking
young prig
and
mocking ass
the doctor rocks back on his free leg, grunting, the bowl wallowing to and fro. Roger holds the door and peers attentively into where the foot vanished. "If we had a bit of Vaseline, we could-something slippery. Wait! Stay there, Pointsman, don't move, we'll have this resolved…" Under the car, impulsive lad, in search of the crankcase plug by the time Pointsman can say, "There isn't
time
Mexico, he'll escape, he'll escape."

"Quite right." Up again fumbling a flashlight from his jacket pocket. "I'll flush him out, you wait with the net. Sure you can get about all right? Nasty if you fell or something just as he made his break for the open."

"For pity's sake," Pointsman thumping after him back into the wreckage. "Don't frighten him Mexico, this isn't Kenya or something, we need him as close to normative, you know, as possible."

Normative?
Normative?

"Roger," calls Roger, giving him short-long-short with the flash.

"Jessica," murmurs Jessica, tiptoeing behind them.

"Here, fellow," coaxes Roger. "Nice bottle of
ether
here for you," opening the flask, waving it in the cellar entrance, then switching on his beam. Dog looks up out of an old rusted pram, bobbing black shadows, tongue hanging, utter skepticism on his face. "Why it's Mrs. Nussbaum!" Roger cries, the same way he's heard Fred Allen do, Wednesday nights over the BBC.

"You were ekshpecting maybe
Lessie?"
replies the dog.

Roger can smell ether fumes quite strongly as he starts his cautious descent.
"Come
on mate, it'll be over before you know it. Pointsman just wants to count the old drops of saliva, that's all. Wants to make a wee incision in your cheek, nice glass tube, nothing to bother about, right? Ring a bell now and then. Exciting world of the laboratory, you'll love it." Ether seems to be getting to him. He tries to stopper the flask: takes a step, foot plunges into a hole. Lurching sideways, he gropes for something to steady himself. The stopper falls back out of the flask and in forever among the debris at the bottom of the smashed house. Overhead Pointsman cries, "The sponge, Mexico, you forgot the
sponge!"
down comes a round pale collection of holes, bouncing in and out of the light of the flash. "Frisky chap," Roger making a two-handed grab for it, splashing ether liberally about. He locates the sponge at last in his flashlight beam, the dog looking on from the pram in some confusion. "Hah!" pouring ether to drench the sponge and go wisping cold off his hands till the flask's empty. Taking the wet sponge between two fingers he staggers toward the dog, shining the light up from under his chin to highlight the vampire face he thinks he's making. "Moment-of truth!" He lunges. The dog leaps off at an angle, streaking past Roger toward the entrance while Roger keeps going with his sponge, headfirst into the pram, which collapses under his weight. Dimly he hears the doctor above whimper, "He's getting away. Mexico, do hurry."

"Hurry." Roger, clutching the sponge, extricates himself from the infant's vehicle, taking it off as if it were a shirt, with what seems to him not unathletic skill.

"Mexico-o-o," plaintive.

"Right," Roger blundering up the cellar's rubble to the outside again, where he beholds the doctor closing in on the dog, net held

aloft and outspread. Rain falls persistently over this tableau. Roger circles so as to make with Pointsman a pincer upon the animal, who now stands with paws planted and teeth showing near one of the pieces of rear wall still standing. Jessica waits halfway into it, hands in her pockets, smoking, watching.

"Here," hollers the sentry, "you. You idiots. Keep away from that bit of wall, there's nothing to hold it up."

"Do you have any cigarettes?" asks Jessica.

"He's going to bolt," Roger screams.

"For God's sake, Mexico, slowly now." Testing each footstep, they move upslope over the ruin's delicate balance. It's a system of lever arms that can plunge them into deadly collapse at any moment. They draw near their quarry, who scrutinizes now the doctor, now Roger, with quick shifts of his head. He growls tentatively, tail keeping up a steady slap against the two sides of the corner they've backed him into.

As Roger, who carries the light, moves rearward, the dog, some circuit of him, recalls the other light that came from behind in recent days-the light that followed the great blast so seethed through afterward by pain and cold. Light from the rear signals death / men with nets about to leap can be avoided-

"Sponge," screams the doctor. Roger flings himself at the dog, who has taken off in Pointsman's direction and away toward the street whilst Pointsman, groaning, swings his toiletbowl foot desperately, misses, momentum carrying him around a full turn, net up like a radar antenna. Roger, snoot full of ether, can't check his lunge-as the doctor comes spinning round again Roger careens on into him, toilet bowl hitting Roger a painful thump in the leg. The two men fall over, tangled in the net now covering them. Broken beams creak, chunks of rain-wet plaster tumble. Above them the unsupported wall begins to sway.

"Get out of there," hollers the sentry. But the efforts of the pair under the net to move away only rock the wall more violently.

"We're for it," the doctor shivers. Roger seeks his eyes to see if he means it, but the window of the Balaclava helmet now contains only a white ear and fringe of hair.

"Roll," Roger suggests. They contrive to roll a few yards down toward the street, by which time part of the wall has collapsed, in the other direction. They manage to get back to Jessica without causing any more damage.