Gravity's Rainbow (109 page)

Graciela Imago Portales, dark hair parted in the middle and drawn back from her forehead,
wearing a long black riding skirt and black boots, sits shuffling cards, stacking
herself flushes, full houses, four of a kind, just for her own amusement. The supernumeraries
have brought next to nothing to play with. She knew it would come to this: she’d thought
once that by using it only in games, money would lose its reality. Wither away. Has
it, or is she playing a game with herself? It seems Beläustegui has been watching
her more closely since they got here. She doesn’t want to threaten his project. She’s
been to bed with the solemn engineer a few times (though at first, back in B.A., she’d
have sworn to you she couldn’t have drunk him even with a silver straw), and she knows
he’s a gambler too. A good pair, wired front-to-front: she picked it up the first
time he touched her. The man knows his odds, the shapes of risk are intimate to him
as loved bodies. Each moment has its value, its probable success against other moments
in other hands, and the shuffle for him is always moment-to-moment. He can’t afford
to remember other permutations, might-have-beens—only what’s present, dealt him by
something he calls Chance and Graciela calls God. He will stake everything on this
anarchist experiment, and if he loses, he’ll go on to something else. But he won’t
hold back. She’s glad of that. He’s a source of strength. She doesn’t know, if the
moment came, how strong she’d be. Often at night she’ll break through a fine membrane
of alcohol and optimism to see really how much she needs the others, how little use,
unsupported, she could ever be.

The sets for the movie-to-be help some. The buildings are real, not a false front
in sight. The boliche is stocked with real liquor, the pulpería with real food. The
sheep, cattle, horses, and corrals are real. The huts are weatherproof and are being
slept in. When von Göll leaves—if he ever comes—nothing will be struck. Any of the
extras who want to stay are welcome. Many of them only want to rest up awhile for
more DP trains, more fantasies of what home was like before the destruction, and some
dream of getting somewhere. They’ll move on. But will others come? And what will the
military government think of a community like this in the middle of their garrison
state?

It isn’t the strangest village in the Zone. Squalidozzi has come in out of his wanderings
with tales of Palestinian units strayed all the way from Italy, who’ve settled down
farther east and started up Hasidic communes, on the pattern of a century and a half
ago. There are onetime company towns come under the fleet and jittery rule of Mercury,
dedicated now to a single industry, mail delivery, eastward and back, in among the
Soviets and out, 100 marks a letter. One village in Mecklenburg has been taken over
by army dogs, Dobermans and Shepherds, each one conditioned to kill on sight any human
except the one who trained him. But the trainers are dead men now, or lost. The dogs
have gone out in packs, ganged cows in the fields and brought the carcasses miles
overland, back to the others. They’ve broken into supply depots Rin-Tin-Tin style
and looted K-rations, frozen hamburger, cartons of candy bars. Bodies of neighboring
villagers and eager sociologists litter all the approaches to the Hund-Stadt. Nobody
can get near it. One expeditionary force came armed with rifles and grenades, but
the dogs all scattered in the night, slender as wolves, and no one could bring himself
to destroy the houses and shops. No one wanted to occupy the village, either. So they
went away. And the dogs came back. If there are lines of power among themselves, loves,
loyalties, jealousies, no one knows. Someday G-5 might send in troops. But the dogs
may not know of this, may have no German anxieties about encirclement—may be living
entirely in the light of the one man-installed reflex: Kill The Stranger. There may
be no way of distinguishing it from the other given quantities of their lives—from
hunger or thirst or sex. For all they know, kill-the-stranger was born in them. If
any have remembered the blows, the electric shocks, the rolled-up newspapers no one
read, the boots and prods, their pain is knotted in now with the Stranger, the hated.
If there are heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careful about suggesting out loud
any extra-canine source for these sudden eruptions of lust to kill that take them
over, even the pensive heretics themselves, at any first scent of the Stranger. But
in private they point to the remembered image of one human, who has visited only at
intervals, but in whose presence they were tranquil and affectionate—from whom came
nourishment, kind scratches and strokings, games of fetch-the-stick. Where is he now?
Why is he different for some and not for others?

There is a possibility, among the dogs, latent so far because it’s never been seriously
tested, of a crystallizing into sects, each around the image of its trainer. A feasibility
study, in fact, is going on even now at staff level in G-5, to see whether original
trainers might not be located, and this crystallizing begun. One sect might try to
protect its trainer against attacks from others. Given the right combinations and
an acceptable trainer-loss figure, it might be cheaper to let the dogs finish themselves
off than to send in combat troops. The study has been contracted to, of all people,
Mr. Pointsman, who is now restricted to one small office at Twelfth House, the rest
of the space having been taken over by an agency studying options for nationalizing
coal and steel—given him more out of sympathy than anything else. Since the castrating
of Major Marvy, Pointsman has been officially in disgrace. Clive Mossmoon and Sir
Marcus Scammony sit in their club, among discarded back copies of
British Plastics
, drinking the knight’s favorite, Quimporto—a weird prewar mixture of quinine, beef-tea
and port—with a dash of Coca-Cola and a peeled onion. Ostensibly the meeting is to
finalize plans for the Postwar Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat, a source of great corporate
fun these days (“Imagine the look on some poor bastard’s face when the whole
sleeve
simply falls out of the shoulder—” “O-or how about mixing in something that will
actually
dissolve
in the rain?”). But Mossmoon really wants to discuss Pointsman: “What shall we do
with Pointsman?”

“I found the most darling boots in Portobello Road,” pipes Sir Marcus, whom it’s always
hard to get around to talking business. “They’ll look stunning on you. Blood-red cordovan
and halfway up your thighs. Your naked thighs.”

“We’ll give it a go,” replies Clive, neutral as can be (though it’s a thought, old
Scorpia’s been so damned bitchy lately). “I could use a spot of relaxation after trying
to explain Pointsman away to the Higher Levels.”

“Oh, the
dog
chap. I say, have you ever thought about a Saint Bernard? Big, shaggy darlings.”

“On occasion,” Clive keeps at it, “but mostly I think about Pointsman.”

“Not your sort, darling. Not at all. And he
is
getting on, poor chap.”

“Sir Marcus,” last resort, usually the willowy knight demands to be called Angelique,
and there seems no other way to get his attention, “if this show prangs, we’re going
to see a national crisis. I’ve got Ginger Groupers jamming my switchboard and my mailbox
day and night—”

“Mm, I’d like to jam your male box, Clivey—”

“
—and
1922 Committee coming in the windows. Bracken and Beaverbrook go
on
, you know, it isn’t as if the election put them out of a job or something—”

“Dear
chap
,” smiling angelically, “there isn’t going to
be
any crisis. Labour wants the American found as much as we do. We sent him out to
destroy the blacks, and it’s obvious now he won’t do the job. What harm can he cause,
roaming around Germany? For all we know he’s taken ship for South America and all
those adorable little mustachios. Let it
be
for a while. We’ve got the Army, when the time is right. Slothrop was a good try
at a moderate solution, but in the end it’s always the Army, isn’t it?”

“How can you be so sure the Americans will ever condone that?”

A long disagreeable giggle. “Clive, you’re such a little boy. You don’t know the Americans.
I do. I deal with them. They’ll want to see how we do with
our
lovely black animals—oh dear, ex Africa semper aliquid novi, they’re just so big,
so
strong
—before they try it on their own, ah, target groups. They may
say
a good many harsh things if we fail, but there’ll be no sanctions.”

“Are we going to fail?”

“We’re all going to fail,” Sir Marcus primping his curls, “but the Operation won’t.”

Yes. Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political
fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Operation, where all
is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its
mired darkness. But here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is
no lower self. The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. Even
in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus’s estate, “The Birches,” the foreplay is a
game about who has the real power, who’s had it all along, chained and corseted though
he be, outside these shackled walls. The humiliations of pretty “Angelique” are calibrated
against their degree of fantasy. No joy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the
Operation. Each of us has his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain. . . .

It wasn’t always so. In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love
one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of
their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly
visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces
of human meat. . . . It was the end of the world, it was total revolution (though
not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): every day thousands of the aristocracy
new and old, still haloed in their ideas of right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine
of Flanders, run day in and out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those
of the people—an English class was being decimated, the ones who’d volunteered were
dying for those who’d known something and hadn’t, and despite it all, despite knowing,
some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved.
But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle
and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality
in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is
done on paper. . . .

4

The Counterforce

What?

— R
ICHARD
M. N
IXON

• • • • • • •

B
ETTE
D
AVIS
AND
M
ARGARET
D
UMONT
are in the curly-Cuvilliés drawing-room of somebody’s palatial home. From outside
the window, at some point, comes the sound of a kazoo, playing a tune of astounding
tastelessness, probably “Who Dat Man?” from
A Day at the Races
(in more ways than one). It is one of Groucho Marx’s vulgar friends. The sound is
low, buzzing, and guttural. Bette Davis freezes, tosses her head, flicks her cigarette,
“What,” she inquires, “is
that?
” Margaret Dumont smiles, throws out her chest, looks down her nose. “Well it
sounds,
” she replies, “like a kazoo.”

For all Slothrop knows, it
was
a kazoo. By the time he’s awake, the racket has faded in the morning. Whatever it
was, it woke him up. What it was, or is, is Pirate Prentice, in a more or less hijacked
P-47, on route to Berlin. His orders are terse and clear, like those of the others,
agents of the Pope, Pope got religion, go out ’n’ find that minnesinger, he’s a good
guy after all. . . .

Well, it’s an older Jug, one with a greenhouse canopy. The barred field of sight gives
Pirate twinges of memory in his neck muscles. The plane seems permanently out of trim
to him, though he still fiddles now and then with different tabs. Right now he’s trying
the War Emergency Power to see how it works, even though there seems to be no War,
no Emergency, keeping an eye on the panel, where RPMs, manifold pressure, and cylinder-head
temperature are all nudging their red lines. He eases it down and flies on, and presently
is trying a slow roll over Celle, then a loop over Brunswick, then, what the hell,
an Immelmann over Magdeburg. On his back, molars aching in a grin, he starts his roll
a hair too slow, just this side of one-thirty, and nearly stalls it, jolts over a
set of surprise points—finish it as an ordinary loop or go for the Immelmann?—already
reaching for ailerons, forget the damn rudder, a spin isn’t worth worrying about . . .
but at the last second does give the pedal just a touch anyway, a minor compromise
(I’m nearly forty, good God, is it happening to me
too?
) and rolls himself upright again. It had to be the Immelmann.

Oh I’m the Eagle of Tooting,

Bombing and shooting,

And nobodee can bring me down!

Old Kaiser Bill, you’re over the hill,

Cause I’m comin’ into your home town!

Tell all the fräuleins and mademoiselles

To keep a light in the window for me . . .

Cause I’m the Eagle of Tooting, just rooty-toot-tooting.

And flyin’ on to victo-ree!

By now, Osbie Feel ought to be in Marseilles, already trying to contact Blodgett Waxwing.
Webley Silvernail is on route to Zürich. Katje will be going to Nordhausen . . . Katje. . . .

No, no, she hasn’t told him everything she’s been up to. It’s none of his business.
However much she told him, there’d always be the bit of mystery to her. Because of
what he is, because of directions he can’t move in. But how is it both of them kept
from vanishing from each other, into the paper cities and afternoons of this strange
peace, and the coming Austerity? Could it be there’s something about ad hoc arrangements,
like the present mission, that must bring you in touch with the people you need to
be with? that more formal adventures tend, by their nature, to separation, to loneliness?
Ah, Prentice. . . . What’s this, a runaway prop? no, no, check the fuel-pressure—here’s
the gauge needle wobbling, rather low, tank’s run dry—

Little in-flight annoyance for Pirate here, nothing serious. . . . Out of his earphones
now and then, ghost-voices will challenge or reprimand him: air traffic people down
in their own kingdom, one more overlay on the Zone, antennas strung in the wilderness
like redoubts, radiating half-spheres of influence, defining invisible corridors-in-the-sky
that are real only for them. The Thunderbolt is painted Kelly green. Hard to miss.
Pirate’s idea. Gray was for the War. Let them chase. Catch me if you can.

Gray was for the War. So, it seems, was Pirate’s odd talent for living the fantasies
of others. Since V-E Day, nothing. But it’s not the end of his psychic difficulties.
He is still being “haunted,” in the same marginal and uncertain way, by Katje’s ancestor
Frans van der Groov, dodo killer and soldier of fortune. The man never quite arrives,
nor quite leaves. Pirate is taking it personally. He is the Dutchman’s compatible
host, despite himself. What does Frans see in him? Has it to do—of course it does—with
the Firm?

He has warped a skein of his dreams into Pirate’s own, heretical dreams, exegeses
of windmills that turned in shadow at the edges of dark fields, each arm pointing
at a spot on the rim of a giant wheel that turned through the sky, stop and go, always
exactly with the spinning cross: “wind” was a middle term, a convention to express
what really moved the cross . . . and this applied to all wind, everywhere on Earth,
shrieking between the confectionery pink and yellow mountains of Mauritius or stirring
the tulips at home, red cups in the rain filling bead by clear bead with water, each
wind had its own cross-in-motion, materially there or implied, each cross a unique
mandala, bringing opposites together in the spin (and tell me now, Frans, what’s this
wind I’m in, this 25,000-foot wind? What mill’s that, grinding there below? What does
it grind, Frans, who tends the stone?).

Far beneath the belly of the Thunderbolt, brushed on the green countryside, pass the
time-softened outlines of ancient earthworks, villages abandoned during the Great
Dying, fields behind cottages whose dwellers were scythed down without mercy by the
northward march of black plague. Behind a scrim, cold as sheets over furniture in
a forbidden wing of the house, a soprano voice sings notes that never arrange themselves
into a melody, that fall apart in the same way as dead proteins. . . .

“It’s as clear as the air,” rants Gustav the composer, “if you weren’t an old fool
you’d see it—I know, I know, there’s an Old Fools’ Benevolent Association, you all
know each other, you vote censures against the most troublesome under-70s and my name’s
at the head of the list. Do you think I care? You’re all on a different frequency.
There’s no way you’ll get interference from us. We’re too far separated. We have our
own problems.”

Cryptozoa of many kinds scurry through crumbs, pubic hairs, winesplashes, tobacco
ash and shreds, a litter of dram cocaine vials, each with a red Bakelite top bearing
the seal of Merck of Darmstadt. The bugs’ atmosphere ends about an inch from the floor,
an ideal humidity, darkness, stability of temperature. Nobody bothers them. There
is an unspoken agreement about not stomping on bugs in Säure’s place.

“You’re caught in tonality,” screams Gustav. “Trapped. Tonality is a game. All of
them are. You’re too old. You’ll never move beyond the game, to the Row. The Row is
enlightenment.”

“The Row is a game too.” Säure sits grinning with an ivory spoon, shoveling incredible
piles of cocaine into his nose, going through his whole repertoire: arm straight out
swinging in in a giant curve
zoom
precisely to the nostril he’s aiming at, then flicking in the lot from two feet away
without losing a crystal . . . then a whole bunch gets tossed up in the air like a
piece of popcorn and nose-gobbled
ngkok
on target, inside where it’s smooth as a Jo block, not a cilium in sight there since
the Liebknecht funeral, if not before . . . hand-to-hand shifts of spoon two or three
times, faster than ivory ever moved in air . . . rails disappearing in a wink without
benefit of a tube to guide them. “
Sound
is a game, if you’re capable of moving that far, you adenoidal closet-visionary.
That’s why I listen to Spohr, Rossini, Spontini, I’m choosing
my
game, one full of light and kindness. You’re stuck with that stratosphere stuff and
rationalize its dullness away by calling it ‘enlightenment.’ You don’t know what enlightenment
is, Kerl, you’re blinder than I am.”

Slothrop moseys down the trail to a mountain stream where he’s left his harp to soak
all night, wedged between a couple of rocks in a quiet pool.

“Your ‘light and kindness’ are the jigging of the doomed,” sez Gustav. “You can smell
mortality in every one of those bouncy little tunes.” Surly, he decapitates a vial
of cocaine with his teeth, and spits the red debris in among the shimmering bugs.

Through the flowing water, the holes of the old Hohner Slothrop found are warped one
by one, squares being bent like notes, a visual blues being played by the clear stream.
There are harpmen and dulcimer players in all the rivers, wherever water moves. Like
that Rilke prophesied,

And though Earthliness forget you,

To the stilled Earth say: I flow.

To the rushing water speak: I am.

It is still possible, even this far out of it, to find and make audible the spirits
of lost harpmen. Whacking the water out of his harmonica, reeds singing against his
leg, picking up the single blues at bar 1 of this morning’s segment, Slothrop, just
suckin’ on his harp, is closer to being a spiritual medium than he’s been yet, and
he doesn’t even know it.

The harp didn’t show up right away. His first days in these mountains, he came across
a set of bagpipes, left behind in April by some Highland unit. Slothrop has a knack
for doping things out. The Imperial instrument was a cinch. In a week he mastered
that dreamy tune Dick Powell sang in the movies, “In the Shadows Let Me Come and Sing
to You,” and spent most of his time playing that, WHANGde-
did
dle de-dee, WHANG de
dum
—de-doooooo . . . over and over, on the bagpipes. By and by he began to notice that
offerings of food were being left near the lean-to he’d put up. Mangel-wurzels, a
basket of cherries, even fresh fish. He never saw who was leaving them. Either he
was supposed to be a bagpiper’s ghost, or just purely sound itself, and he knew enough
about solitudes and night-voices to figure what was going on. He quit playing the
bagpipes, and next day he found the harp. It happens to be the same one he lost in
1938 or -9 down the toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, but that’s too long ago for him
to remember.

He’s kept alone. If others have seen him or his fire, they haven’t tried to approach.
He’s letting hair and beard grow, wearing a dungaree shirt and trousers Bodine liberated
for him from the laundry of the
John E. Badass.
But he likes to spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies lighting
on his shoulders, watching the life on the mountain, getting to know shrikes and capercaillie,
badgers and marmots. Any number of directions he ought to be moving in, but he’d rather
stay right here for now. Everyplace he’s been, Cuxhaven, Berlin, Nice, Zürich, must
be watched now. He could still make a try at finding Springer, or Blodgett Waxwing.
Why does he have this obsession with getting papers? What th’ fuck are
papers
, anyhow? He could try one of the Baltic ports, wait around for Frau Gnahb to put
in, and get over to that Denmark or that Sweden. DPs, offices burned, records lost
forever—papers might not mean so much in Europe . . . waitaminute, so much as
where
, Slothrop? Huh? America? Shit. C’mon—

Yup, still thinking there’s a way to get back. He’s been changing, sure, changing,
plucking the albatross of self now and then, idly, half-conscious as picking his nose—but
the one ghost-feather his fingers always brush by is America. Poor asshole, he can’t
let her go. She’s whispered
love me
too often to him in his sleep, vamped insatiably his waking attention with come-hitherings,
incredible promises. One day—he can see a day—he might be able finally to say
sorry
, sure and leave her . . . but not just yet. One more try, one more chance, one more
deal, one more transfer to a hopeful line. Maybe it’s just pride. What if there’s
no place for him in her stable any more? If she has turned him out, she’ll never explain.
Her “stallions” have no rights. She is immune to their small, stupid questions. She
is exactly the Amazon Bitch your fantasies have called her to be.

Then there’s Jamf, the coupling of “Jamf” and “I” in the primal dream. Who can he
go to with
it?
it will not bear that much looking into, will it? If he gets too close, there will
be revenge. They might warn him first, They might not.

Omens grow clearer, more specific. He watches flights of birds and patterns in the
ashes of his fire, he reads the guts of trout he’s caught and cleaned, scraps of lost
paper, graffiti on the broken walls where facing has been shot away to reveal the
brick underneath—broken in specific shapes that may also be read. . . .

One night, on the wall of a public shithouse stinking and ripe with typhoid, he finds
among initials, dates, hasty pictures of penises and mouths open to receive them,
Werewolf stencils of the dark man with the high shoulders and the Homburg hat, an
official slogan:
WILLST
DU
V-2,
DANN
ARBEITE
. If you want the V-2, then work. Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop . . . no, no, wait,
it’s O.K., over on the other wall they’ve also painted
WILLST
DU
V-4,
DANN
ARBEITE
. Lucky. The brimming voices recede, the joke clarifies, he is only back with Goebbels
and the man’s inability to let a good thing be. But it had taken an effort to walk
around and look at that other wall. Anything could’ve been back there. It was dusk.
Plowed fields, power lines, ditches and distant windbreaks went for miles. He felt
brave and in control. But then another message caught his eye:

ROCKETMAN WAS HERE

His first thought was that he’d written it himself and forgot. Odd that that should’ve
been his first thought, but it was. Might be he was starting to implicate himself,
some yesterday version of himself, in the Combination against who he was right then.
In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred.