Gravity's Rainbow (117 page)

“Flirt if you want,” Enzian now just as smooth as that Cary Grant, “but expect to
be taken seriously.” Oh,
ho.
Here’s whatcha came for, folks.

Not necessarily. His bitterness (all properly receipted in German archives which may,
however, be destroyed now) runs too deep for her, really. He must have learned a thousand
masks (as the City will continue to mask itself against invasions we often do not
see, whose outcomes we never learn, silent and unnoticed revolutions in the warehouse
districts where the walls are blank, in the lots where the weeds grow thick), and
this, no doubt, this Suave Older Exotic, is one of them.

“I don’t know what to do.” She gets up in a long, long shrug and begins to stalk gracefully
in the room. Her old style: a girl about 16 who thinks everyone is staring at her.
Her hair falls like a hood. Her arms often touch.

“You don’t have to come into this any further than locating Slothrop,” he finally
gets around to telling her. “All you
have
to do is tag along with us, and wait till he shows up again. Why bother yourself
with the rest?”

“Because I feel,” her voice, perhaps by design, very small, “that ‘the rest’ is exactly
what I
ought
to be doing. I don’t want to get away with some shallow win. I don’t just want to—I
don’t know, pay him back for the octopus, or something. Don’t I have to know
why
he’s out here, what I did to him, for Them? How can They be stopped? How long can
I get away with easy work, cheap exits?
Shouldn’t
I be going all the way in?”

Her masochism [Weissmann wrote from The Hague] is reassurance for her. That she can
still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because, often, she will forget.
I can only try to guess how terrible that must be. . . . So, she needs the whip. She
raises her ass not in surrender, but in despair—like your fears of impotence, and
mine: can it still . . . will it fail. . . . But of true submission, of letting go
the self and passing into the All, there is nothing, not with Katje. She is not the
victim I would have chosen to end this with. Perhaps, before the end, there will be
another. Perhaps I dream. . . . I am not here, am I, to devote myself to
her
fantasies!

“You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you want to make it
for yourself, still you’re always going to come through. You’re free to choose exactly
how pleasant each passage will be. Usually it’s given as a reward. I won’t ask for
what. I’m sorry, but you seem really not to know. That’s why your story
is
saddest of all.”

“Reward
—
”
she’s getting mad. “It’s a life-sentence. If you call that a reward, then what are
you calling me?”

“Nothing political.”

“You black bastard.”

“Exactly.” He has allowed her to speak the truth. A clock chimes in the stone corner.
“We have someone who was with Blicero in May. Just before the end. You don’t have
to—”

“Come and listen, yes, Oberst. But I will.”

He rises, crooks her his official and gentlemanly arm, smiling sideways and feeling
like a clown. Her own smiling is upward like mischievous Ophelia just having glimpsed
the country of the mad and itching now to get away from court.

Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out to is
we will never know each other.
Beaming, strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both loved and
we’re strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings.

Far away in another corridor a loud drill-bit strains, smokes, just before snapping.
Cafeteria trays and steelware rattle, an innocent and kind sound behind familiar regions
of steam, fat at the edge of souring, cigarette smoke, washwater, disinfectant—a cafeteria
in the middle of the day.

There are things to hold on to. . . .

• • • • • • •

You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same
storm that took Slothrop from the
Anubis.
He was rescued by a Polish undertaker in a rowboat, out in the storm tonight to see
if he can get struck by lightning. The undertaker is wearing, in hopes it will draw
electricity, a complicated metal suit, something like a deep-sea diver’s, and a Wehrmacht
helmet through which he has drilled a couple of hundred holes and inserted nuts, bolts,
springs and conductive wands of many shapes so that he jingles whenever he nods or
shakes his head, which is often. He’s a digital companion all right, everything gets
either a yes or a no, and two-tone checkerboards of odd shape and texture indeed bloom
in the rainy night around him and Thanatz. Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin
in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been
obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt. All over
Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this
very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who
have been struck by lightning and survived. What stories
they
could tell!

What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason,
and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of
America may well have been one.

Well, it’s a matter of continuity. Most people’s lives have ups and downs that are
relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They’re
the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But
the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve
of life—do you know what the time rate of change
is
at a cusp?
Infinity
, that’s what! A-and right across the point, it’s
minus
infinity! How’s
that
for sudden change, eh? Infinite miles per hour changing to the same speed
in reverse
, all in the gnat’s-ass or red cunt hair of the Δt across the point. That’s getting
hit by lightning, folks. You’re
way
up there on the needle-peak of a mountain, and don’t think there aren’t lammergeiers
cruising there in the lurid red altitudes around, waiting for a chance to snatch you
off. Oh yes. They are piloted by bareback dwarves with little plastic masks around
their eyes that happen to be shaped just like the infinity symbol: ∞. Little men with
wicked eyebrows, pointed ears and bald heads, although some of them are wearing outlandish
headgear, not at all the usual Robin Hood green fedoras, no these are
Carmen Miranda
hats, for example, bananas, papayas, bunches of grapes, pears, pineapples, mangoes,
jeepers even
watermelons
—and there are World War I spiketop Wilhelmets, and baby bonnets and crosswise Napoleon
hats with and without
N
s on them, not to mention little red suits and green capes, well here they are leaning
forward into their cruel birds’ ears, whispering like jockeys, out to nab you, buster,
just like that sacrificial ape off of the Empire State Building, except that they
won’t let you fall, they’ll carry you away, to the places they are agents of. It will
look
like the world you left, but it’ll be different. Between congruent and identical
there seems to be another class of look-alike that only finds the lightning-heads.
Another world laid down on the previous one and to all appearances no different. Ha-
ha!
But the lightning-struck know, all right! Even if they may not
know
they know. And that’s what this undertaker tonight has set out into the storm to
find.

Is he interested in all those other worlds who send their dwarf reps out on the backs
of eagles? Nope. Nor does he want to write a classic of anthropology, with the lightning-struck
grouped into a subculture, even secretly organized, handshakes with sharp cusp-flicks
of fingernails, private monthly magazine
A Nickel Saved
(which looks perfectly innocent, old Ben Franklin after inflation, unless you know
the other half of the proverb: “. . . is a stockpile of nickel.” Making the
real
quote nickel-magnate Mark Hanna’s: “You have been in politics long enough to know
that no man in public office owes the public anything.” So the real title is
Long Enough
, which Those Who Know, know. The text of each issue of the magazine, when transformed
this way, yields many interesting messages). To outsiders it’s just a pleasant little
club newsletter—Jed Plunkitt held a barbecue for the Iowa Chapter the last weekend
in April. Heard about the Amperage Contest, Jed. Tough luck! But come next Barbecue,
you’ll be back good as new. . . . Minnie Calkins (Chapter 1.793) got married Easter
Sunday to a screen-door salesman from California. Sorry to say he’s not eligible for
Membership—at least not yet. But with all those
screen doors
around, we’ll sure keep our fingers crossed! . . . Your Editor has been receiving
many, many “Wha hoppen?” ’s concerning the Spring Convention in Decatur when all the
lights failed during the blessing. Glad to report now that trouble was traced finally
to a giant transient in the line, “Kind of an electrical tidal wave,” sez Hank Faffner,
our engineer-on-the-scene. “Every bulb in the place burned out, a ceilingful of sooty,
sterile eggs.” Quite a poet, Hank! Now if you can only find out where that spike
came
from—

But does the Polish undertaker in the rowboat care about busting this code, about
secret organizations or recognizable subcultures? No, he doesn’t. The reason he is
seeking these people out is that he thinks it will help him
in his job.
Can you dig
that
, gates? He wants to know how people behave before and after lightning bolts, so he’ll
know better how to handle bereaved families.

“You are perverting a great discovery to the uses of commerce,” sez Thanatz, stepping
ashore. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” He is no more than five minutes into
the empty town at the edge of the marsh when nockle KKAHH
-UHNN!
nocklenockle nockle an enormous blast of light and sound hits the water back where
the undertaker, peeved at what he takes to be no gratitude, is hauling away.

“Oh,” comes his faint voice.
“Oh
, ho. Oh-ho-ho-
ho!
”

“Nobody lives here but us.” A solid figure, a whispering silhouette, charcoal-colored,
has materialized in Thanatz’s path. “We do not harm visitors. But it would be better
if you took another way.”

They are 175s—homosexual prison-camp inmates. They have come north from the Dora camp
at Nordhausen, north till the land ended, and have set up an all-male community between
this marsh and the Oder estuary. Ordinarily, this would be Thanatz’s notion of paradise,
except that none of the men can bear to be out of Dora—Dora was home, and they are
homesick. Their “liberation” was a banishment. So here in a new location they have
made up a hypothetical SS chain of command—no longer restricted to what Destiny allotted
then for jailers, they have now managed to come up with some really
mean ass
imaginary Nazi playmates, Schutzhäftlingsführer to Blockführer, and chosen an internal
hierarchy for themselves too: Lager and Blockältester, Kapo, Vorarbeiter, Stubendienst,
Läufer (who is a runner or messenger, but also happens to be the German name for a
chess bishop . . . if you have seen him, running across the wet meadows in very early
morning, with his red vestments furling and fluttering darkened almost to tree-bark
color among the watery downs, you will have some notion of his real purpose here inside
the community—he is carrier of holy strategies, memoranda of conscience, and when
he approaches over the reedy flats of morning you are taken by your bowed nape and
brushed with the sidebands of a Great Moment—for the Läufer is the most sacred here,
it is he who takes messages out to the ruinous interface between the visible Lager
and the invisible SS).

At the top of the complex is Schutzhäftlingsführer Blicero. The name has found its
way this far east, as if carrying on the man’s retreat for him, past the last stand
in the Lüneburg Heath. He is the Zone’s worst specter. He is malignant, he pervades
the lengthening summer nights. Like a cankered root he is changing, growing toward
winter, growing whiter, toward the idleness and the famine. Who else could the 175s
have chosen for their very highest oppressor? His power is absolute. And don’t think
he isn’t really waiting, out by the shelled and rusty gasworks, under the winding
staircases, behind the tanks and towers, waiting for the dawn’s first carmine-skirted
runner with news of how the night went. The night is his dearest interest, so he must
be told.

This phantom SS command here is based not so much on the one the prisoners knew at
Dora as on what they inferred to be the Rocket-structure next door at the Mittelwerke.
The A4, in its way, was also concealed behind an uncrossable wall that separated real
pain and terror from summoned deliverer. Weissmann/Blicero’s presence crossed the
wall, warping, shivering into the fetid bunkrooms, with the same reach toward another
shape as words trying to make their way through dreams. What the 175s heard from their
real SS guards there was enough to elevate Weissmann on the spot—they, his own brother-elite,
didn’t know
what this man was up to. When prisoners came in earshot, the guards stopped whispering.
But their fear kept echoing: fear not of Weissmann personally, but of the time itself,
a time so desperate that
he
could now move through the Mittelwerke as if he owned it, a time which was granting
him a power different from that of Auschwitz or Buchenwald, a power they couldn’t
have borne themselves. . . .

On hearing the name of Blicero now, Thanatz’s asshole tightens a notch. Not that he
thinks the name was planted here or anything. Paranoia is not a major problem for
Thanatz. What does bother him is
being reminded at all
—reminded that he’s had no word, since the noon on the Heath when 00000 was fired,
of Blicero’s status—alive or dead, powerlord or fugitive. He isn’t sure which he prefers.
As long as the
Anubis
kept moving, there was no need to choose: the memory could have been left so far
behind that one day its “reality” wouldn’t matter any more. Of course it happened.
Of course it didn’t happen.