GRAVITY RAINBOW (83 page)

closed. Everything is about to come, come incredibly, and he's helpless here in this exploding
emprise…
red flesh echoing… an extraordinary sense of
waiting to rise…

She posts, his pretty horsewoman, face to the overhead, quivering up and down, thightop muscles strung hard as cable, baby breasts working out the top of her garment… Slothrop pulls Bianca to him by her nipples and bites each one very hard. Sliding her arms around his neck, hugging him, she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower's summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?

Somewhere in their lying-still are her heart, buffeting, a chickadee in the snow, her hair, draping and sheltering both their faces, little tongue at his temples and eyes on and on, silk legs rubbing his flanks, cool leather of her shoes against his legs and ankles, shoulderblades rising like wings whenever she hugs him. What happened back there? Slothrop thinks he might cry.

They have been holding each other. She's been talking about hiding out.

"Sure. But we'll have to get off sometime, Swinemunde, someplace."

"No. We can get away. I'm a child, I know how to hide. I can hide you too."

He knows she can. He knows. Right here, right now, under the makeup and the fancy underwear, she
exists,
love, invisibility… For Slothrop this is some discovery.

But her arms about his neck are shifting now, apprehensive. For good reason. Sure he'll stay for a while, but eventually he'll go, and for this he is to be counted, after all, among the Zone's lost. The Pope's staff is always going to remain barren, like Slothrop's own unflowering cock.

So when he disentangles himself, it is extravagantly. He creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites… but coming back is something he's already forgotten about. Straightening his bow tie, brushing off the satin lapels of his jacket, buttoning up his pants, back in uniform of the day, he turns his back on her, and up the ladder he goes. The last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him…

Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest. And like Margherita, she has her worst visions in black and white. Each day she feels closer to the edge of something. She dreams often of the same

journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by that same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. In a Pullman, dictating her story. She feels able at last to tell of a personal horror, tell it clearly in a way others can share. That may keep it from taking her past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her mind's flank… when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence… In her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. Frayed ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone. Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old daylight: late, and cold. Horror in the brightest hour of afternoon… sails on the sea too small and distant to matter… water too steel and cold…

Her look now-this deepening arrest-has already broken Slothrop's seeing heart: has broken and broken, that same look swung as he drove by, thrust away into twilights of moss and crumbling colony, of skinny clouded-cylinder gas pumps, of tin Moxie signs gentian and bittersweet as the taste they were there to hustle on the weathered sides of barns, looked for how many Last Times up in the rearview mirror, all of them too far inside metal and combustion, allowing the days' targets more reality than anything that might come up by surprise, by Murphy's Law, where the salvation could be… Lost, again and again, past poor dambusted and drowned Becket, up and down the rut-brown slopes, the hayrakes rusting in the afternoon, the sky purple-gray, dark as chewed gum, the mist starting to make white dashes in the air, aimed earthward a quarter, a half inch… she looked at him once, of course he still remembers, from down at the end of a lunchwagon counter, grill smoke working onto the windows patient as shoe grease against the rain for the plaid, hunched-up leaky handful inside, off the jukebox a quick twinkle in the bleat of a trombone, a reed section, planting swing notes precisely into the groove between silent midpoint and next beat, jumping
it pah
(hm)
pah
(hm)
pah
so exactly in the groove that you knew it was ahead
but felt
it was behind, both of you, at both ends of the counter, could feel it, feel your age delivered into a new kind of time that may have allowed you to miss the rest, the graceless expectations of old men who watched, in bifocal and mucus indifference, watched you lindy-hop into the pit by millions, as many millions as necessary… Of course Slothrop lost her, and kept losing her-it was an American requirement-out the windows of the Greyhound, passing into beveled stonery, green and elm-folded on into a failure of perception, or, in a more sinister sense,

of will (you used to know what these words mean), she has moved on, untroubled, too much Theirs, no chance of a beige summer spook at
her
roadside…

Leaving Slothrop in his city-reflexes and Harvard crew sox-both happening to be red-ring manacles, comicbook irons (though the comic book was virtually uncirculated, found by chance near nightfall by a hopper at a Berkshire sandbank. The name of the hero-or being-was Sundial. The frames never enclosed him-or it-for long enough to tell. Sundial, flashing in, flashing out again, came from "across the wind," by which readers understood "across some flow, more or less sheet and vertical: a wall in constant motion"-over there was a different world, where Sundial took care of business they would never understand).

Distant, yes these are pretty distant. Sure they are. Too much closer and it begins to hurt to bring her back. But there is this Eurydice-obsession, this
bringing back out of…
though how much easier just to leave her there, in fetid carbide and dead-canary soups of breath and come out and have comfort enough to try only for a reasonable fascimile-"Why bring her back? Why try? It's only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for Them." No. How can he believe that? It's what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy's based on
that…
but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay…

Of all her putative fathers-Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pokier and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that
Alpdrucken
Night, on the other-Bianca is closest, this last possible moment below decks here behind the ravening jackal, closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying
sure I know them,
omitted, chuckling
count me in,
unable, thinking
probably some hooker…
She favors you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you.

Halfway up the ladder, Slothrop is startled by a bright set of teeth, beaming out of a dark hatchway. "I was watching. I hope you don't mind." Seems to be that Nip again, who introduces himself now as Ensign Morituri, of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

"Yeah, I…" why is Slothrop drawling this way? "saw ya watching… last
night too,
mister…"

"You think I am a voyeur. Yes you do. But it isn't that. There is no thrill, I mean. But when I watch people, I feel less alone."

"W'l hell, Ensign… why don'tcha just… join in?
They're
always lookin' fer… company."

"Oh, my goodness," grinning one of them big polyhedral Jap grins, like they do, "then I would feel
more
alone."

Tables and chairs have been set out under orange-and-red-stripe awnings on the fantail. Slothrop and Morituri have got the place almost to themselves, except for some girls in two-piece swimsuits out to catch some sun before it goes away. Cumulonimbus are building up dead ahead. You can hear thunder in the distance. The air is coming awake.

A steward brings coffee, cream, porridge and fresh oranges. Slothrop looks at the porridge, doubtful. "I'll take it," Ensign Morituri grabbing the bowl.

"Oh, sure." Slothrop notices now how this Nip also has this wide handle-bar mustache. "Aha, aha. I'm hep to you. A porridge fan! Shameful. A latent Anglophile-yeah, you're blushing." Pointing and hollering ha, ha, ha.

"You've found me out. Yes, yes. I've been on the wrong side for six years."

"Ever try to get away?"

"And find out what you people are really like? Oh, my golly. What if phile changes then to phobe? Where would I be?" He giggles, spits an orange pit over the side. Seems he put in a few weeks' training on that Formosa, in Kamikaze school, but they washed him out. No one ever told him why, exactly. Something to do with his attitude. "I just didn't have a good attitude," he sighs. "So they sent me back here again, by way of Russia and Switzerland. This time with the Propaganda Ministry." He would sit most of the day watching Allied footage for what could be pulled and worked into newsreels to make the Axis look good and the other side look bad. "All I know about Great Britain comes from that raw material."

"Looks like German movies have warped other outlooks around here too."

"You mean Margherita's. Did you know, that's how we met! A mutual friend at Ufa. I was on holiday at Bad Karma-just before the Pol-

ish invasion. The little town where you joined us. It was a spa. I watched you fall in the water. Then you climbed aboard. I also watched Margherita watching you. Please don't be offended, Slothrop, but it might be better to stay away from her right now."

"Not at all. I know something creepy is going on." He tells Mori-turi about the incident in the Sprudelhof, and Margherita's flight from the apparition in black.

The Ensign nods, grim, twisting half his mustache up so it points in a saber at one eye. "She didn't tell you what happened there? Golly, Jack, you had better know…"

ensign morituri's story

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still… isn't the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited… and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant to…

They'd tried to talk Margherita out of going to Hollywood. She went, and she failed. Rollo was there when she returned, to keep the worst from happening. For a month he impounded sharp objects, kept her at ground level and away from chemicals, which meant she didn't sleep much. She would drop off and wake up hysterical. Afraid to go to sleep. Afraid she wouldn't know how to get back.

Rollo did not have a keen mind. He meant well, but after a month of her he found he couldn't take any more. Actually it surprised everyone that he'd lasted so long. Greta was handed over to Sigmund, hardly improved, but perhaps no worse.

The trouble with Sigmund was the place he happened to be living in, a drafty, crenelated deformity overlooking a cold little lake in the Bavarian Alps. Parts of it must have dated back to the fall of Rome. That was where Sigmund brought her.

She had got the idea somewhere that she was part Jewish. Things in Germany by then, as everyone knows, were very bad. Margherita was terrified of being "found out." She heard Gestapo in every puff of air that slipped in, among any of a thousand windways of dilapidation. Sigmund spent whole nights trying to talk it away. He was no better at it than Rollo. It was around this time that her symptoms began.

However psychogenic these pains, tics, hives and nauseas, her suffering was real. Acupuncturists came down by Zeppelin from Berlin,

showing up in the middle of the night with little velvet cases full of gold needles. Viennese analysts, Indian holy men, Baptists from America trooped in and out of Sigmund's castle, stage-hypnotists and Colombian
curanderos
slept on the rug in front of the fireplace. Nothing worked. Sigmund grew alarmed, and before long as ready as Margherita to hallucinate. Probably it was she who suggested Bad Karma. It had a reputation that summer for its mud, hot and greasy mud with traces of radium, jet black, softly bubbling. Ah. Anyone who's been sick in that way can imagine her hope. That mud would cure anything.

Where was anybody that summer before the War? Dreaming. The spas that summer, the summer Ensign Morituri came to Bad Karma, were crowded with sleepwalkers. Nothing for him to do at the Embassy. They suggested a holiday till September. He should have known something was up, but he only went on holiday to Bad Karma-spent the days drinking Pilsener Urquelle in the cafe by the lake in the Pavilion Park. He was a stranger, half the time drunk, silly beer-drunk, and he hardly spoke their language. But what he saw must have been going on all over Germany. A premeditated frenzy.

Margherita and Sigmund moved along the same magnolia-shaded paths, sat out in rolling-chairs to hear concerts of patriotic music… when it rained they fidgeted over card games in one of the public rooms of their Kurhaus. At night they watched the fireworks-fountains, spark-foaming rockets, yellow starbursts high over Poland. That oneiric season… There was no one in all the spas to read anything in the patterns the fires made. They were only gay lights, nervous as the fantasies that flickered from eye to eye, trailing the skin like the ostrich fans of 50 years ago.

When did Sigmund first notice her absences, or when did they become for him more than routine? Always she gave him plausible stories: a medical appointment, a chance meeting with an old friend, drowsiness in the mud-baths, while time raced by. It may have been this unaccustomed sleep that got him suspicious at last, because of what her wakefulness had put him through in the South. The stories about the children in the local newspapers could have made no impression, not then. Sigmund only read headlines, and rarely at that, to fill up a dead moment.