Gravity's Rainbow (118 page)

“We think he’s out there,” the town spokesman is telling Thanatz, “alive and on the
run. Now and then we hear something—it could fit Blicero easily enough. So we wait.
He will find us. He has a prefabricated power base here, waiting for him.”

“What if he doesn’t stay?” pure meanness, “what if he laughs at you, and passes by?”

“Then I can’t explain,” the other beginning to step backward, back out into the rain,
“it’s a matter of faith.”

Thanatz, who has sworn that he will never seek out Blicero again, not after the 00000,
feels the flat of terror’s blade. “Who is your runner?” he cries.

“Go yourself,” a filtered whisper.

“Where?”

“The gasworks.”

“But I have a message for—”

“Take it yourself. . . .”

The white
Anubis
, gone on to salvation. Back here, in her wake, are the preterite, swimming and drowning,
mired and afoot, poor passengers at sundown who’ve lost the way, blundering across
one another’s flotsam, the scrapings, the dreary junking of memories—all they have
to hold to—churning, mixing, rising, falling. Men overboard and our common debris. . . .

Thanatz remains shaking and furious in the well-established rain, under the sandstone
arcade. I should have sailed on, he wants to scream, and presently does. “I wasn’t
supposed to be left with you discards. . . .” Where’s the court of appeals that will
hear his sad story? “I lost my footing!” Some mess cook slipped in a puddle of elite
vomit and spilled a whole galvanized can full of creamed yellow chicken nausea all
over that starboard weather deck, Thanatz didn’t see it, he was looking for Margherita. . . .
Too bad, les jeux sont faits, nobody’s listening and the
Anubis
is gone. Better here with the swimming debris, Thanatz, no telling what’ll come sunfishing
by, ask that Oberst Enzian, he knows (there is a key, among the wastes of the World . . .
and it won’t be found on board the white
Anubis
because they throw everything of value over the side).

So—Thanatz is out by the gasworks, up against a tar wall, mackerel eyes bulging out
of wet wool collar-shadows, all black and white, really scared, breath smoking out
corners of his mouth as green dawn begins to grow back among the gassen.
He won’t be here, he’s only dead
only dead? Isn’t this an “interface” here? a meeting surface for two worlds . . .
sure, but
which two?
There’s no counting on any positivism to save him, that didn’t even work back in
Berlin, before the War, at Peter Sachsa’s sittings . . . it only got in the way, made
others impatient with him. A screen of words between himself and the numinous was
always just a tactic . . . it never let him feel any freer. These days there’s even
less point to it. He knows Blicero exists.

It wasn’t a dream. Don’t you wish it could be. Another fever that sooner or later
will break, releasing you into the cool reality of a room . . . you don’t have to
perform that long and complicated mission after all, no, you see it was only the fever . . .
it wasn’t real. . . .

This time it is real, Blicero, alive or dead, is real. Thanatz, a little crazy now
with fear, wants to go provoke him, he can’t wait any more, he has to see what it
will take to get Blicero across the interface. What screaming ass-wiggling surrender
might bring him back. . . .

All it brings is the Russian police. There’s a working agreement about staying inside
the limits of the 175-Stadt that of course no one told Thanatz about. The gasworks
used to be a notorious hustling spot till the Russians made a series of mass busts.
A last fading echo of the 175-Stadt Chorale goes skipping away down the road singing
some horrible salute to faggotry such as

Yumsy-numsy ’n’
poop
sie-
poo
,

If
I’m
a degenerate,
so
are
you. . . .

“Nowadays all we get are you tourists,” sez the natty civilian with the white handkerchief
in his breast-pocket, snickering in the shadow of his hat brim. “And, of course, the
odd spy.”

“Not me,” Thanatz sez.

“Not you, eh? Tell me about it.”

Something of a quandary, all right. In less than half a day, Thanatz has moved from
no need to worry or even
think
about Blicero, to always needing some formulation of him at hand to please any stray
curious cop. This is one of his earlier lessons in being preterite: he won’t escape
any of the consequences he sets up for himself now, not unless it’s by accident.

For example, at the outskirts of Stettin, by accident, a Polish guerrilla group, just
arrived back from London, mistakes the police car for one transporting an anti-Lublin
journalist to prison, shoots out the tires, roars in, kills the driver, wounds the
civilian interrogator, and escapes lugging Thanatz like a sack of potatoes.

“Not me,” Thanatz sez.

“Shit. He’s right.”

They roll him out the car door into a DP encampment a few miles farther on. He is
herded into a wire enclosure along with 1,999 others being sent west to Berlin.

For weeks he rides the freights, hanging in shifts to the outside of his assigned
car while inside someone else sleeps on the straw space he vacated. Later they change
places. It helps to stay awake. Every day Thanatz sees half a dozen DPs go on the
nod and fall off the train, and sometimes it’s funny to watch, but too often it’s
not, though DP humor is a very dependent thing. He is rubber-stamped on hands, forehead,
and ass, deloused, poked, palpated, named, numbered, consigned, invoiced, misrouted,
detained, ignored. He passes in and out the paper grasp of Russian, British, American
and French body-jobbers, round and round the occupation circuit, getting to recognize
faces, coughs, pairs of boots on new owners. Without a ration card or Soldbuch, you
are doomed to be moved, in lots of 2,000, center to center, about the Zone, possibly
forever. So, out among the ponds and fenceposts of Mecklenburg somewhere, Thanatz
discovers that he is exempt from nothing. His second night on the rails his shoes
are stolen. He comes down with a deep bronchial cough and a high fever. For a week
no one comes to look at him. For two aspirins he has to suck off the orderly in charge,
who has grown to enjoy rough-bearded cheeks flaming at 103° against his thighs, the
furnace breath under his balls. In Mecklenburg Thanatz steals a cigarette butt from
a sleeping one-armed veteran, and is beaten and kicked for half an hour by people
whose language he has never heard before, whose faces he never gets a look at. Bugs
crawl over him only slightly irritated that he’s in their way. His daily bread is
taken away by another DP smaller than he is, but with the
look
of some right to it, a look Thanatz at best can only impersonate—and so he’s afraid
to go after the little rag-coated liver-colored back, the munching haystack head . . .
and others are watching: the woman who tells everyone that Thanatz molests her little
girl at night (Thanatz can never meet her eyes because yes he wants to, pull down
the slender pretty pubescent’s oversize GI trousers stuff penis between pale little
buttocks reminding him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs
pull long hair throatback Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it) and
a beetlebrowed Slav too, who has forced Thanatz to go hunting cigarette butts for
him after lights out, to give up his sleep not so much to the chance of finding a
real butt as to the Slav’s right to demand it—the Slav is watching too—in fact, a
circle of enemies have all observed the taking of the bread and Thanatz’s failure
to go after it. Their judgment is clear, a clarity in their eyes Thanatz never saw
back on the
Anubis
, an honesty he can’t avoid, can’t shrug off . . . finally, finally he has to face,
literally with his own real
face
, the transparency, the
real light
of . . .

Little by little his memory of that last rocket-firing on the Heath grows clearer.
The fevers fire-polish, the pain removes impurities. An image keeps recurring—a muddy
brown almost black eyeball reflecting a windmill and a jagged reticule of tree-branches
in silhouette . . . doors at the sides of the windmill open and shut quickly, like
loose shutters in a storm . . . in the iris sky one cloud, the shape of a clamshell,
rises very purple around the edges, the puff from an explosion, something light ocher
at the horizon . . . closer in it seems snarling purple around a yellow that’s brightening,
intestines of yellow shadowed in violet spilling outward, outward in a bellying curve
toward us. There are, oddly (not to cut this picturesque scene off, but) oddly enough,
get this, no windmills on the Lüneburg Heath! Thanatz even checked around real fast
just to make sure, nope, no windmills, O.K., so, how come Blicero’s eye, looking out
on the Heath, is reflecting a windmill, huh? Well, to be honest,
now
it isn’t reflecting a windmill, it’s reflecting a bottle of gin. No bottle of gin
out here on the Heath either. But it
was
reflecting a windmill. What’s this? Could it be that Blicero’s eyes, in which Greta
Erdmann saw maps of his Kingdom, are for Thanatz reflecting the past?
That would
be strange. Whatever went on on those eyeballs when you weren’t looking would just
be lost. You’d only have fragments, now and then. Katje, looking back over her shoulder
at fresh whip-marks. Gottfried in the morning lineup, body all Wandervogel-limp, wind
blowing his uniform in great ripples back from the bough-curves of his thighs, hair
flying in the wind, saucy sideways smile, mouth a little open, jaw forward, eyelids
down. Blicero’s own reflection in the oval mirror, an old face—he is about to don
a wig, a Dragon Lady pageboy with bangs, and he pauses, looking in, face asking what?
what did you say? wig held to the side and slightly lower so as to be another face
in heavy wig-shadows nearly invisible . . . but looking closer you can see bone-ridges
and fat-fields begin to emerge now, an ice-glaze white bobbing, a mask hand-held,
over the shadows in the hollow hood-space—
two faces
looking back now, and Thanatz, are you going to judge this man? Thanatz, haven’t
you loved the whip? Haven’t you longed for the brush and sigh of ladies’ clothes?
Haven’t you wanted to murder a child you loved, joyfully kill something so helpless
and innocent? As he looks up at you, at the last possible minute, trusting you, and
smiles, purses his lips to make a kiss
just as the blow
falls across his skull . . . isn’t that best of all? The cry that breaks in your
chest
then
, the sudden, solid arrival of loss, loss forever, the irreversible end of love, of
hope . . . no denying what you finally are . . . (but so much fear at taking it in,
the serpent face—at opening your arms and legs and letting it
enter
you, into your true face
it’ll kill you if it—
)

He is telling the Schwarzkommando this now, all this and more. After a week of shouting
I
know
, of crying
I’ve seen the Schwarzgerät
whenever a black face appears behind the flowing wire fences, at the cinderbanks
or the crossings, word has got around. One day they come for him: he is lifted from
the straw as black with coal-dust as they—lifted easy as an infant, a roach flicked
in kindness off of his face—and transported shivering, gathered moaning south to the
Erdschweinhöhle where now they are all sitting around a fire, smoking and munching,
eyes riveted on blue Thanatz, who has been gabbing for seven hours nonstop. He is
the only one privileged, in a way, to tell this much of the story, he’s the fella
who lost out, the loser,

Just a fool-who-never-wins, at love,

Though-he-plays, most-ev’, ry night . . .

A loser-to-the-Ones, Above,

Who stack-the-cards, of wrong, and right. . . .

Oh the loser never bets-it-all, and-he never-plays, to win,

He knows if-once, you don’t-succeed, you can al-ways lose-again!

Just a loser at-the-game, of love . . .

Spending night after night a-lo-o-o-one!

He lost Gottfried, he lost Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to
see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. By now he’s forgotten the sequence
in time. Doesn’t know which child he lost first, or even—hornet clouds of memory welling
up—even if they aren’t two names, different names, for the same child . . . but then
in the crash of others’ flotsam, sharp edges, and high-spin velocities you understand,
he finds he can’t hold on to this thought for long: soon he’s floundering in the open
water again. But he’ll remember that he held it for a little, saw its texture and
color, felt it against the side of his face as he woke from a space of sleeping near
it—that the two children, Gottfried and Bianca,
are the same. . . .

He lost Blicero, but it wasn’t quite as real. After the last firing, the unremembered
night-hours to Hamburg, the hop from Hamburg to Bydgoszcz in a purloined P-51 Mustang
was so clearly Procalowski-down-out-of-the-sky-in-a-machine, that Thanatz came to
imagine he had disposed of Blicero too only in that same very conditional, metallic
way. And sure enough, the metal has given way to flesh, and sweat, and long chattering
night encounters, Blicero cross-legged stammering down at his crotch I cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh—“Can’t,”
Blicero? “Couldn’t”? “Care”? “Cry”? Blicero that night was offering all his weapons,
laying down all maps of his revetments and labyrinths.

Thanatz was really asking: when mortal faces go by, sure, self-consistent and never
seeing me, are they real? Are they souls, really? or only attractive sculpture, the
sunlit faces of clouds?

And: “How can I love them?”

But there’s no answer from Blicero. His eyes go casting runes with the windmill silhouettes.
A number of contributed scenes do now flash by for Thanatz. From Ensign Morituri,
a banana-leaf floor somewhere near Mabalacat in the Philippines, late ’44, a baby
squirms, rolls, kicks in drops of sunlight, raising dust off the drying leaves, and
the special-attack units roar away overhead, Zeros bearing comrades away, finally
as fallen cherry-blossoms—that favorite Kamikaze image—in the spring . . . from Greta
Erdmann, a world below the surface of Earth or mud—it crawls like mud, but cries like
Earth, with layer-pressed generations of gravities and losses thereto—losses, failures,
last moments followed by voids stringing back, a series of hermetic caves caught in
the suffocated layers, those forever lost . . . from someone, who’ll ever know who?
a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow
under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead
and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for . . .
will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting
of her love—