Gravity's Rainbow (115 page)

In less than a fortnight, a gong sounds along the ice and stone corridors of the Phoebus
headquarters, and faces swivel over briefly from their meters. Not too many gongs
around here. Gongs are special. Byron has passed 1000 hours, and the procedure now
is standard: the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies sends a hit man to Berlin.

But here something odd happens. Yes, damned odd. The plan is to smash up Byron and
send him back right there in the shop to cullet and batch—salvage the tungsten, of
course—and let him be reincarnated in the glassblower’s next project (a balloon setting
out on a journey from the top of a white skyscraper). This wouldn’t be too bad a deal
for Byron—he knows as well as Phoebus does how many hours he has on him. Here in the
shop he’s watched enough glass being melted back into the structureless pool from
which all glass forms spring and re-spring, and wouldn’t mind going through it himself.
But he is trapped on the Karmic wheel. The glowing orange batch is a taunt, a cruelty.
There’s no escape for Byron, he’s doomed to an infinite regress of sockets and bulbsnatchers.
In zips young Hansel Geschwindig, a Weimar street urchin—twirls Byron out of the ceiling
into a careful pocket and Gesssschhhh
win
dig! out the door again. Darkness invades the dreams of the glassblower. Of all the
unpleasantries his dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light is the
worst. Light, in his dreams, was always hope: the basic, mortal hope. As the contacts
break helically away, hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight
crying, “Who?
Who?
”

Phoebus isn’t exactly thrown into a frenzy. It’s happened before. There is still a
procedure to follow. It means more overtime for some employees, so there’s that vague,
full-boweled pleasure at the windfall, along with an equally vague excitement at the
break in routine. You want high emotion, forget Phoebus. Their stonefaced search parties
move out into the streets. They know more or less where in the city to look. They
are assuming that no one among their consumers knows of Byron’s immortality. So the
data for
Non
-immortal Bulbsnatchings ought to apply also to Byron. And the data happen to hump
up in poor sections, Jewish sections, drug, homosexual, prostitute, and magic sections
of the capital. Here are the most logical bulbsnatchers, in terms of what the crime
is. Look at all the propaganda. It’s a
moral
crime. Phoebus discovered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time—that
consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a
most powerful weapon. In America, Lyle Bland and his psychologists had figures, expert
testimony and money (money in the Puritan sense—an outward and visible O.K. on their
intentions) enough to tip the Discovery of Guilt at the cusp between scientific theory
and fact. Growth rates in later years were to bear Bland out (actually what bore Bland
out was an honorary pallbearer sextet of all the senior members of Salitieri, Poore,
Nash, De Brutus and Short, plus Lyle, Jr., who was sneezing. Buddy at the last minute
decided to go see
Dracula.
He was better off). Of all the legacies Bland left around, the Bulbsnatching Heresy
was perhaps his grandest. It doesn’t just mean that somebody isn’t buying a bulb.
It also means that same somebody is not putting any power in that socket! It is a
sin both against Phoebus and against the Grid. Neither one is about to let
that
get out of hand.

So, out go the Phoebus flatfoots, looking for the snatched Byron. But the urchin has
already left town, gone to Hamburg, traded Byron to a Reeperbahn
prostitute
so he can
shoot up some morphine
—the young woman’s customer tonight is a cost-accountant who likes to have light bulbs
screwed into his asshole
, and this John has also brought a little
hashish to smoke
, so by the time he leaves he’s forgotten about Byron still there in his asshole—doesn’t
ever, in fact, find out, because when he finally gets around to sitting down (having
stood up in trolleys all the way home) it’s on his own home toilet and plop! there
goes Byron in the water and flusssshhhh! away down the waste lines to the Elbe estuary.
He is just round enough to get through smoothly all the way. For days he floats over
the North Sea, till he reaches Helgoland, that red-and-white Napoleon pastry tipped
in the sea. He stays there for a while at a hotel between the Hengst and the Mönch,
till being brought back one day to the mainland by a very old priest who’s been put
hep to Byron’s immortality in the course of a routine dream about the taste of a certain
1911 Hochheimer . . . suddenly here’s the great Berlin Eispalast, a booming, dim iron-trussed
cavern, the smell of women in the blue shadows—perfumes, leathers, fur skating-costumes,
ice-dust in the air, flashing legs, jutting haunches, desire in grippelike flashes,
helplessness at the end of a crack-the-whip, rocketing through beams of sunlight choked
with the powdered ice, and a voice in the blurred mirror underfoot saying, “Find the
one who has performed this miracle. He is a saint. Expose him. Expedite his canonization. . . .”
The name is on a list the old man presently draws up of about a thousand tourists
who’ve been in and out of Helgoland since Byron was found on the beach. The priest
begins a search by train, footpath, and Hispano-Suiza, checking out each of the tourists
on his list. But he gets no farther than Nürnberg, where his valise, with Byron wrapped
inside in an alb, is ripped off by a transsectite, a Lutheran named Mausmacher who
likes to dress up in Roman regalia. This Mausmacher, not content with standing in
front of his own mirror making papal crosses, thinks it will be a really bizarre kick
to go out to the Zeppelin field to a Nazi torchlight rally in full drag, and walk
around blessing people at random. Green torches flaring, red swastikas, twinkling
brasses and Father Mausmacher, checking out tits ’n’ asses, waistlines ’n’ baskets,
humming a clerical little tune, some Bach riff, smiling as he moves through the Sieg
Heils and choruses of “Die Fahne Hoch.” Unknown to him, Byron slides out of the stolen
vestments onto the ground. He is then walked past by several hundred thousand boots
and shoes, and not one so much as brushes him, natch. He is scavenged next day (the
field now deathempty, columned, pale, streaked with long mudpuddles, morning clouds
lengthening behind the gilded swastika and wreath) by a poor Jewish ragpicker, and
taken on, on into another 15 years of preservation against chance and against Phoebus.
He will be screwed into mother
(Mutter)
after mother, as the female threads of German light-bulb sockets are known, for some
reason that escapes everybody.

The cartel have already gone over to Contingency Plan B, which assumes a seven-year
statute of limitations, after which Byron will be considered legally burned out. Meanwhile,
the personnel taken off of Byron’s case are busy tracking a long-lived bulb that once
occupied a socket on the porch of an army outpost in the Amazon jungle, Beatriz the
Bulb, who has just been stolen, mysteriously, by an Indian raiding party.

Through his years of survival, all these various rescues of Byron happen as if by
accident. Whenever he can, he tries to instruct any bulbs nearby in the evil nature
of Phoebus, and in the need for solidarity against the cartel. He has come to see
how Bulb must move beyond its role as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has
restricted Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies, above and
below the visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to
grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping
eye, and operate among the dreams of men.” Some bulbs listened attentively—others
thought of ways to fink to Phoebus. Some of the older anti-Byronists were able to
fool with their parameters in systematic ways that would show up on the ebonite meters
under the Swiss mountain: there were even a few self-immolations, hoping to draw the
hit men down.

Any talk of Bulb’s transcendence, of course, was clear subversion. Phoebus based everything
on bulb efficiency—the ratio of the usable power coming out, to the power put in.
The Grid demanded that this ratio stay as small as possible. That way they got to
sell more juice. On the other hand, low efficiency meant longer burning hours, and
that cut into bulb sales for Phoebus. In the beginning Phoebus tried increasing filament
resistance, reducing the hours of life on the sly and gradually—till the Grid noticed
a fall-off in revenues, and started screaming. The two parties by and by reached an
accord on a compromise bulb-life figure that would bring in enough money for both
of them, and to go fifty-fifty on the costs of the antibulbsnatching campaign. Along
with a more subtle attack against those criminal souls who forswear bulbs entirely
and use candles. Phoebus’s long-standing arrangement with the Meat Cartel was to restrict
the amount of tallow in circulation by keeping more fat in meat to be sold regardless
of cardiac problems that might arise, and redirecting most of what was trimmed off
into soap production. Soap in those days was a booming concern. Among the consumers,
the Bland Institute had discovered deep feelings about shit. Even at that, meat and
soap were minor interlocks to Phoebus. More important were items like tungsten. Another
reason why Phoebus couldn’t cut down bulb life too far. Too many tungsten filaments
would eat into available stockpiles of the metal—China being the major world source,
this also brought in very delicate questions of Eastern policy—and disturb the arrangement
between General Electric and Krupp about how much tungsten carbide would be produced,
where and when and what the prices would be. The guidelines settled on were $37–$90
a pound in Germany, $200–$400 a pound in the U.S. This directly governed the production
of machine tools, and thus all areas of light and heavy industry. When the War came,
some people thought it unpatriotic of GE to have given Germany an edge like that.
But nobody with any power. Don’t worry.

Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact
with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the streets.
Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (
Seek
, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander
and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything,
and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs
in the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard,
and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t
last long—they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to
make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been
visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and
powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger
and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb,
enjoying it. . . .

Laszlo Jamf walks away down the canal, where dogs are swimming now, dogs in packs,
dogs’ heads bobbing down the scummy canals . . . dogs’ heads, chess knights, also
may be found invisible in the air over secret airbases, in the thickest fogs, conditions
of temperature, pressure and humidity form Springer-shapes the tuned flyer can feel,
the radars can see, the helpless passengers can almost glimpse, now and then, out
the little window, as through sheets of vapor . . . it is the kind Dog, the Dog no
man ever conditioned, who is there for us at beginnings and ends, and journeys we
have to take, helpless, but not quite unwilling. . . . The pleats in Jamf’s suit go
weaving away like iris leaves in a backyard wind. The colonel is left alone in Happyville.
The steel city waits him, the even cloud-light raising a white streak down each great
building, all of them set up as modulations on the perfect grid of the streets, each
tower cut off at a different height—and where is the Comb that will move through
this
and restore the old perfect Cartesian harmony? where are the great Shears from the
sky that will readjust Happyville?

There is no need to bring in blood or violence here. But the colonel does have his
head tilted back now in what may truly be surrender: his throat is open to the pain-radiance
of the Bulb. Paddy McGonigle is the only other witness, and he, a one-man power system
with dreams of his own, wants the colonel out of the way as much as anyone. Eddie
Pensiero, with the blues flooding his shaking muscles, the down, mortal blues, is
holding his scissors in a way barbers aren’t supposed to. The points, shuddering in
the electric cone, are aiming downward. Eddie Pensiero’s fist tightens around the
steel loops his fingers have slid out of. The colonel, with a last tilt of his head,
exposes his jugular, clearly impatient with the—

• • • • • • •

She comes riding into town on a stolen bicycle: a white kerchief at her crown, fluttering
behind in points, a distinguished emissary from a drained and captured land, herself
full of ancient title, but nothing in the way of usable power, not even a fantasy
of it. She’s wearing a lean white dress, a tennis dress from prewar summers, falling
now not in knife-edge pleats but softer, more accidental, half-crisp, touches of blue
in its deeper folds, a dress for changes in the weather, a dress to be flowed upon
by shadows of leaves, by a crumble of brown and sun-yellow moving across it and on
as she coasts preoccupied but without private smiles, under the leafy trees that line
the road of hard-packed dirt. Her hair is wound, in braids, up on her head, which
she holds not too high nor what used to be called “gravely,” but toward (say against)
a particular future, for the first time since the Casino Hermann Goering . . . and
she’s not of our moment, our time, at all.