Gravity's Rainbow (112 page)

White man welcome ta Puke-a-hook-a-look-i I-i-i-island!

One taste o’ my pa-paya and y’ll never wanna go a-waaaay!

Moon like a yel-low ba-na-na,

Hangin’ over, my ca-ba-na,

And lotsa hula, hula games to play—

Oh the stars are fallin’ over Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island,

And the lava down the mountain’s runnin’ scrump-shus as a cherry pie—

Even Sweet Leilani in the Little Grass Shack

Loves a coconut monkey and a missionary snack,

Looky-looky, sugar cookie, you’re on Puke-a-hook-a-look-i I-i-i-island!

O-
boy
, o-
boy
—
go
-ing to
nail
me, one, of those
lit
-tle
is
-land
love
-lies,
spend
, the
rest
 . . . of my
life, eat
-ing pa-
pay
-as,
fra
-grant as the
cunt
, of young para
dise
—

When paradise was young. The pilot is turning to Rózsavölgyi, who is still strapped
in safety harness behind him. The face is covered with helmet, goggles that reflect
too much light, oxygen mask—a face of metal, leather, isinglass. But now the pilot
is raising the goggles, slowly, and whose eyes are these, so familiar, smiling hello,
I know you, don’t you know me? Don’t you
really
know me?

Rózsavölgyi screams and backs out of the corner, shivering, blinded now in the overhead
lights. Fräulein Müller-Hochleben is crawling around and around in the same circle,
faster and faster, nearly a blur, croaking hysterically. Both have reached the exact
level Roger’s subtle psychological campaign here was intended to work them up to.
Quietly but firmly: “Right. Now for the last time, where is Mr. Pointsman?”

“Mossmoon’s office,” they reply, in unison.

Mossmoon’s office is a roller-skate ride away from Whitehall, and guarded by room
after room of sentinel girls, each of them wearing a frock of a radically different
color from the others (and this goes on for a while, so you can imagine what 3-sigma
colors these are to begin with, if that many can be so “radically different,” you
know, like that—oh, colors such as lizard, evening star, pale Atlantis to name a few),
and whom Roger romances, bribes, threatens, double-talks and (sigh) yes punches his
way through till finally “Mossmoon,” pounding on this gigantic oak door, carved like
the stone doorways of certain temples, “Pointsman, the jig’s up! In the name of whatever
marginal decency enables you to get through the day without being shot dead by the
odd armed stranger, open this door.” This is quite a long speech, and the door actually
opens halfway through, but Roger finishes it up anyhow. He’s looking into a room of
incandescent lemon-lime subdued drastically, almost to the milky point of absinthe-and-water,
a room warmer than this tableful of faces really deserves, but perhaps it’s Roger’s
entrance that deepens the color a bit now as he runs and jumps up on the polished
table, over the polished head of a director of a steel company, skidding 20 feet down
the waxed surface to confront the man at the end, who sits with a debonair (well,
snotty) smile on his face. “Mossmoon, I’m on to you.” Has he actually come inside,
in among the hoods, eye-slits, gold paraphernalia, the incense and the thighbone scepter?

“That’s
not
Mossmoon,” Mr. Pointsman clearing his throat as he speaks, “Mexico
do
come down off the table won’t you . . . gentlemen, one of my old PISCES colleagues,
brilliant but rather unstable, as you may’ve noted—oh, Mexico,
really—
”

Roger has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busy pissing on the shiny
table, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon on these poker-faced men themselves,
who, although executive material all right, men of hair-trigger minds, are still not
quite willing to admit that this is happening, you know, in any world that really
touches, at too many points, the one
they’re
accustomed to . . . and actually the fall of warm piss is quite pleasant as it sweeps
by, across ten-guinea cravats, creative-looking little beards, up into a liver-spotted
nostril, across a pair of Army-issue steel-rim eyeglasses, slashing up and down starched
fronts, Phi Beta Kappa keys, Legions of Honour, Orders of Lenin, Iron Crosses, V.C.s,
retirement watchchains, Dewey-for-President lapel pins, half-exposed service revolvers,
and even a sawed-off shotgun under the shoulder there. . . .

“Pointsman,” the cock, stubborn, annoyed, bucks like an airship among purple clouds
(very dense purple, as pile velvet that color) at nightfall when the sea-breeze promises
a difficult landing, “I’ve saved you for last. But—goodness, I don’t seem to have
any urine left, here. Not even a drop. I’m so sorry. Nothing left for you at all.
Do you understand? If it means giving my
life
,” the words have just come out, and maybe Roger’s exaggerating, but maybe not, “there
will be nothing
anywhere
for you. What you get, I’ll take. If you go higher in this, I’ll come and get you,
and take you back down. Wherever you go. Even should you find a spare moment of rest,
with an understanding woman in a quiet room, I’ll be at the window. I’ll always be
just outside. You will never cancel me. If you come out, I’ll go in, and the room
will be defiled for you, haunted, and you’ll have to find another. If you stay inside
I’ll come in anyway—I’ll stalk you room to room till I corner you in the last. You’ll
have the last room, Pointsman, and you’ll have to live in it the rest of your scum,
prostituted life.”

Pointsman won’t look at him. Won’t meet his eyes. That’s what Roger wanted. The security
police show up as an anticlimax, although aficionados of the chase scene, those who
cannot look at the Taj Mahal, the Uffizi, the Statue of Liberty without thinking chase
scene, chase scene, wow yeah Douglas Fairbanks scampering across that moon minaret
there—these enthusiasts may find interest in the following:

Roger dives under the table to button his fly and the zealous flatties leap at each
other over the top of the table, colliding and cursing, but Roger has gone scuttling
down the horsehide, hobnailed, pinstriped, Mom’s-argyle-socked sublevel of these conspirators
above, a precarious passage, any one foot could kick untelegraphed and wipe him out—till
he arrives back at the bald steel-magnate, reaches up, grabs him by the necktie or
the cock, whichever it’s easiest to get a hold on, and drags the man down under the
table.

“Right. Now, we’re going to get out of here, and you’re my hostage,
get it?
” He emerges dragging the livid executive by his necktie or cock, pulling him like
a child’s sleigh strangling and apoplectic out the door, past the modally unusual
rainbow of sentinel-ladies now intimidated-
looking
at least, sirens already wailing in the street
MANIAC
ASSAULTS
OIL
PARLEY
Ousted After——ing on Conferees
and he’s out of the elevator by now running down a back corridor to a central-heating
complex
zoom!
over the heads of a couple of black custodians who are passing back and forth a cigarette
rolled from some West African narcotic herb, stuffs his hostage into a gigantic furnace
which is banked for the spring (too bad), and flees out the back way down an aisle
of plane trees into a small park, over a fence, zippety zop, fastfoot Roger and the
London cops.

There’s nothing back at “The White Visitation” he really needs. Nothing he can’t let
go. Clothes on his back and the pool motorcycle, a pocket full of spare change and
anger unlimited, what more does a 30-year-old innocent need to make his way in the
city? “I’m fucking
Dick Whittington!
” it occurs to him zooming down Kings Road, “I’ve come to London! I’m your Lord Mayor. . . .”

Pirate is at home, and apparently expecting Roger. Pieces of his faithful Mendoza
lie about the refectory table, shining with oil or bluing, wads, patches, rods, bottles
occupy his hands, but his eyes are on Roger.

“No,” cutting into a denunciation of Pointsman when Milton Gloaming’s name comes up,
“it’s a minor item, but stop right there. Pointsman didn’t send him.
We
sent him.”

“We.”

“You’re a novice paranoid, Roger,” first time Prentice has ever used his Christian
name and it touches Roger enough to check his tirade. “Of course a well-developed
They-system is necessary—but it’s only half the story. For every They there ought
to be a We. In our case there is. Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough
a We-system as a They-system—”

“Wait, wait, first where’s the Haig and Haig, be a gracious host, second what is a
‘They-system,’ I don’t pull Chebychev’s Theorem on you, do I?”

“I mean what They and Their hired psychiatrists call ‘delusional systems.’ Needless
to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We don’t have to worry about questions
of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the
system
that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others
fall apart. Your idea that Pointsman sent Gloaming takes a wrong fork. Without any
contrary set of delusions—delusions about ourselves, which I’m calling a We-system—the
Gloaming idea might have been all right—”

“Delusions about ourselves?”

“Not real ones.”

“But officially defined.”

“Out of expediency, yes.”

“Well, you’re playing Their game, then.”

“Don’t let it bother you. You’ll find you can operate quite well. Seeing as we haven’t
won yet, it isn’t really much of a problem.”

Roger is totally confused. At this point, in wanders who but Milton Gloaming with
a black man Roger recognizes now as one of the two herb-smokers in the furnace room
under Clive Mossmoon’s office. His name is Jan Otyiyumbu, and he’s a Schwarzkommando
liaison man. One of Blodgett Waxwing’s apache lieutenants shows up with his girl,
who’s not walking so much as dancing, very fluid and slow, a dance in which Osbie
Feel, popping out of the kitchen now with his shirt off (and a Porky Pig tattoo on
his stomach? How long has Feel had
that?
) correctly identifies the influence of heroin.

It’s a little bewildering—if this is a “We-system,” why isn’t it at least thoughtful
enough to interlock in a reasonable way, like They-systems do?

“That’s exactly it,” Osbie screams, belly-dancing Porky into a wide, alarming grin,
“They’re
the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements. Don’t we . . . Mexico?”

“Hoorah!” cry the others. Well taken, Osbie.

Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck sits by the window, cleaning a Sten. Outside, blowing over
its dorsal and summer stillness, London today can feel advance chills of Austerity.
There isn’t a word in Sir Stephen’s head right now. He is completely involved with
the weapon. He no longer thinks about his wife, Nora, although she’s out there, in
some room, still surrounded by her planetary psychics, and aimed herself now toward
a peculiar fate. In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her
that her real identity is, literally, the Force of Gravity.
I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the prehistoric
wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History. . . .
Her wheeling freaks, her seers, teleporters, astral travelers and tragic human interfaces
all know of her visitation, but none see any way for her to turn. She must prove herself
now—find deeper forms of renunciation, deeper than Sabbatai Zvi’s apostasy before
the Sublime Porte. It is a situation not without its chances for a good practical
joke now and then—poor Nora will be suckered into séances that wouldn’t fool your
great-aunt, visits from the likes of Ronald Cherrycoke in a Jesus Christ getup, whistling
down the wires into a hidden ultraviolet baby spot where he will start fluorescing
in most questionable taste, blithering odd bits of Gospel together, reaching down
from his crucified altitudes to actually cop feels of Nora’s girdled behind . . .
highly offended, she will flee into hallways full of clammy invisible hands—poltergeists
will back toilets up on her, ladylike turds will bob at her virgin vertex, and screaming
ugh
, ass dripping, girdle around her knees, she will go staggering into her own drawing-room
to find no refuge even there, no, someone will have caused to materialize for her
a lesbian elephant soixante-neuf, slimy trunks pistoning symmetrically in and out
of juicy elephant vulvas, and when she turns to escape this horrid exhibition she’ll
find some playful ghost has latched the door behind her, and another’s just about
to sock her in the face with a cold Yorkshire pudding. . . .

In Pirate’s maisonette, everyone is singing now a counterforce traveling song, with
Thomas Gwenhidwy, who has not fallen to the dialectic curse of Pointsman’s Book after
all, accompanying on what seems to be a rosewood crwth:

They’ve been sleeping on your shoulder,

They’ve been crying in your beer,

And They’ve sung you all Their sad lullabies,

And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn’t care for souls,

And They never were about to put you wise.

But I’m telling you today,

That it ain’t the only way,

And there’s shit you won’t be eating any more—

They’ve been paying you to love it,

But the time has come to shove it,

And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war.

“It’s a war,” Roger sings, driving into Cuxhaven, wondering offhand how Jessica has
cut her hair for Jeremy, and how that insufferable prig would look with a thrust chamber
wrapped around his head, “it’s a war . . .”

Light one up before you mosey out that door,

Once you cuddled ’em and kissed ’em,

But we’re bringin’ down Their system,