Gravity's Rainbow (127 page)

“Oh
I
see,” sez Commando Connie, “it has to be al
lit
erative. How about . . . um . . .
discharge dumplings?
”

“We’re doing the soup course, babe,” sez cool Seaman Bodine, “so let me just suggest
a canker consommé, or perhaps a barf bouillon.”

“Vomit vichysoisse,” sez Connie.

“You got it.”

“Cyst salad,” Roger continues, “with little cheery-red squares of abortion aspic,
tossed in a subtle dandruff dressing.”

There is a sound of well-bred gagging, and a regional sales manager for ICI leaves
hurriedly, spewing a long crescent of lumpy beige vomit that splatters across the
parquetry. Napkins are being raised to faces all down the table. Silverware is being
laid down, silver ringing the fields of white, a puzzling indecision here again, the
same as at Clive Mossmoon’s office. . . .

On we go, through fart fondue (skillfully placed bubbles of anal gas rising slowly
through a rich cheese viscosity, yummm), boil blintzes, Vegetables Venereal in slobber
sauce. . . .

A kazoo stops playing. “Wart waffles!” Gustav screams.

“Puke pancakes, with sweat syrup,” adds André Omnopon, as Gustav resumes playing,
the Outer Voices meantime having broken off in confusion.

“And spread with pinworm preserves,” murmurs the cellist, who is not above a bit of
fun.

“Hemorrhoid hash,” Connie banging her spoon in delight, “
bowel burgers!
”

Frau Utgarthaloki jumps to her feet, upsetting a platter of stuffed sores—
beg
pardon, no they’re deviled eggs—and runs from the room, sobbing tragically. Her suave
metal husband also rises and follows, casting back at the troublemakers virile stares
that promise certain death. A discreet smell of vomit has begun to rise through the
hanging tablecloth. Nervous laughter has long embrittled to badmouth whispering.

“A choice of gangrene goulash, or some scrumptious creamy-white
leprosy loaf
,” Bodine in a light singsong “le-pro-sy [down a third to] loaf,” playfully hounding
the holdouts, shaking a finger, c’mon ya little rascals, vomit for the nice zootster. . . .

“Fungus fricassee!” screams Roger the Rowdy. Jessica is weeping on the arm of Jeremy
her gentleman, who is escorting her, stiff-armed, shaking his head at Roger’s folly,
away forever. Does Roger have a second of pain right here? Yes. Sure. You would too.
You might even question the worth of your cause. But there are nosepick noodles to
be served up buttery and steaming, grime gruel and pustule porridge to be ladled into
the bowls of a sniveling generation of future executives, pubic popovers to be wheeled
out onto the terraces stained by holocaust sky or growing rigid with autumn.

“Carbuncle cutlets!”

“With
groin gravy!
”

“And ringworm relish!”

Lady Mnemosyne Gloobe is having a seizure of some kind, so violent that her pearls
break and go rattling down the silk tablecloth. A general loss of appetite reigns,
not to mention overt nausea. The flames in the pit have dwindled. No fat to feed them
tonight. Sir Hannibal Grunt-Gobbinette is threatening, between spasms of yellow bile
foaming out his nose, to bring the matter up in Parliament. “I’ll see you two in the
Scrubs if it kills me!” Well . . .

A gentle, precarious soft-shoe out the door, Bodine waving his widebrim gangster hat.
Ta-ta, foax. The only guest still seated is Constance Flamp, who is still roaring
out dessert possibilities: “Crotch custard! Phlegm fudge! Mold muffins!” Will she
catch hell tomorrow. Pools of this and that glitter across the floor like water-mirages
at the Sixth Antechamber to the Throne. Gustav and the rest of the quartet have abandoned
Haydn and are all following Roger and Bodine out the door, kazoos and strings accompanying
the Disgusting Duo:

Oh gimme some o’ that acne, à-la-mode,

Eat so much-that Ah, jes’ ex-plode!

Say there budd
ih
you can chow all nite, on

Toe-jam tarts ’n’ Diarrhea Dee-lite. . . .

“I have to tell you,” Gustav whispering speedily, “I feel so awful about it, but perhaps
you don’t want people like me. You see . . . I was a Storm Trooper. A long time ago.
You know, like Horst Wessel.”

“So?” Bodine’s laughing. “Maybe I was a Melvin Purvis Junior G-Man.”

“A what?”

“For Post Toasties.”

“For whom?” The German actually thinks Post Toasties is the name of some American
Führer, looking vaguely like Tom Mix or some other such longlip bridlejaw cowboy.

The last black butler opens the last door to the outside, and escape. Escape tonight.
“Pimple pie with filth frosting, gentlemen,” he nods. And just at the other side of
dawning, you can see a smile.

• • • • • • •

In her pack, Geli Tripping brings along a few of Tchitcherine’s toenail clippings,
a graying hair, a piece of bedsheet with a trace of his sperm, all tied in a white
silk kerchief, next to a bit of Adam and Eve root and a loaf of bread baked from wheat
she has rolled naked in and ground against the sun. She has left off tending her herd
of toads on the witches’ hillsides, and has passed her white wand to another apprentice.
She is off to find her gallant Attila. Now there are a good few hundred of these young
women in the Zone who’re smitten with love for Tchitcherine, all of them sharp as
foxes, but none quite as stubborn as Geli—and none are witches.

At noon she comes to a farmhouse with a floor of blue and white tiles in the kitchen,
elaborate old china plates hung like pictures, and a rocking-chair. “Do you have a
photo of him?” the old woman handing her a tin army plate with the remains of her
morning’s Bauernfrühstuck. “I can give you a spell.”

“Sometimes I can call up his face in a cup of tea. But the herbs have to be gathered
carefully. I’m not that good at it yet.”

“But you’re in love. Technique is just a substitute for when you get older.”

“Why not stay in love always?”

The two women watch each other across the sunny kitchen. Cabinets with glass panes
shine from the walls. Bees buzz outside the windows. Geli goes and pumps water from
the well, and they brew some strawberry-leaf tea. But Tchitcherine’s face doesn’t
appear.

The night the blacks started off on their great trek, Nordhausen felt like a city
in a myth, under the threat of some special destruction—en-gulfment by a crystal lake,
lava from the sky . . . for an evening, the sense of preservation there was lost.
The blacks, like the rockets in the Mittelwerke, had given Nordhausen continuity.
Now the blacks are gone: Geli knows they are on collision course with Tchitcherine.
She doesn’t want duels. Let the university boys duel. She wants her graying steel
barbarian alive. She can’t bear to think that she may already have touched him, felt
his scarred and historied hands, for the last time.

Behind, pushing her, is the town’s somnolence, and at night—the strange canaried nights
of the Harz (where canary hustlers are busy shooting up female birds with male hormones
so they’ll sing long enough to be sold to the foreign suckers who occupy the Zone)—full
of too many spells, witch-rivalries, coven politics . . . she knows that’s not what
magic is about. The Hexes-Stadt, with its holy mountains cropped in pale circles all
up and down their green faces by the little tethered goats, has turned into just another
capital, where the only enterprise is administrating—the feeling there is of upstairs
at the musicians’ union—no music, just glass-brick partitions, spittoons, indoor plants—no
practicing
witches left. You either come to the Brocken-complex with a bureaucratic career in
mind, or you leave it, and choose the world. There are the two distinct sorts of witch,
and Geli is the World-choosing sort.

Here is the World. She is wearing gray men’s trousers rolled to the knee that flap
around her thighs as she walks by the rye fields . . . walking, with her head down,
pushing hair out of her eyes often. Sometimes soldiers come by, and give her rides.
She listens for news of Tchitcherine, of the trekking Schwarzkommando. If it feels
right, she will even ask about Tchitcherine. The variety of the rumors surprises her.
I’m not the only one who loves him . . .
though
their
love of course is friendly, admiring, unsexual . . . Geli’s the only one in the Zone
who loves him completely. Tchitcherine, known in some circles as “the Red Doper,”
is about to be purged: the emissary is none other than Beria’s top man, the sinister
N. Ripov himself.

Bullshit, Tchitcherine’s already dead, didn’t you hear, he’s been dead for months . . .

. . . they’ve had somebody impersonating him till all the others in his Bloc are taken
care of . . .

. . . no, he came into Lüneburg last weekend, my mate’s seen him before, no mistake,
it’s him . . .

. . . he’s lost a lot of weight and takes a heavy bodyguard everywhere he goes. At
least a dozen. Orientals mostly . . .

. . . fully equipped with Judas Iscariot no doubt.
That
one’s hard to believe. A dozen? Where does anybody find that many people he can trust?
Especially out at the edge like he is—

“What edge?” They’re rattling along in the back of a 2½-ton lorry through very green
rolling country . . . a storm is blowing up mute purple, veined in yellow, behind
them. Geli’s been drinking wine with this scurvy lot of tommies, a demolition squad
who’ve been out all day clearing canals. They smell of creosote, marsh-mud, ammonia
from the dynamite.

“Well
you
know what he’s doing.”

“The rockets?”

“I wouldn’t want to be in his place, that’s all.”

Up on the crest of a hill, an army surveying party is restoring a damaged road. One
silhouette leans peering through a transit, one holds a bob. A bit apart from the
instrument man another engineer stands with his arms out straight to the sides, his
head moves sighting along either pointed hand, then the arms swoop together . . .
if you close your eyes, and have learned to let your arms move by themselves, your
fingers will touch making a perfect right angle from where they were . . . Geli watches
the tiny act: it is devotional, graceful, and she
feels the cross
the man has made on his own circle of visible earth . . . unconsciously a mandala . . .
it is a sign for her. He is pointing her on her way. Later that evening she sees an
eagle flying across the marshes, in the same direction. It’s golden-dark, almost night.
The region is lonely and Pan is very close. Geli has been to enough Sabbaths to handle
it—she thinks. But what is a devil’s blue bite on the ass to the shrieking-outward,
into stone resonance, where there is no good or evil, out in the luminous spaces Pan
will carry her to? Is she ready yet for anything so real? The moon has risen. She
sits now, at the same spot where she saw the eagle, waiting, waiting for something
to come and take her. Have you ever waited for
it?
wondering whether it will come from outside or inside? Finally past the futile guesses
at what might happen . . . now and then re-erasing brain to keep it clean for the
Visit . . . yes wasn’t it close to here? remember didn’t you sneak away from camp
to have a moment alone with What you felt stirring across the land . . . it was the
equinox . . . green spring equal nights . . . canyons are opening up, at the bottoms
are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank,
dope-perfume, a hood of smell . . . human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed
and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. Too violently
pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only
to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was
a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a
green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler
had
to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers,
were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counterrevolutionaries.
It is our mission to promote death.
The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something
we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from scratch up to its present
status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But
only nearly as strong.

Only nearly, because of the defection rate. A few keep going over to the Titans every
day, in their striving subcreation (how can flesh tumble and flow so, and never be
any less beautiful?), into the rests of the folksong Death (empty stone rooms), out,
and through, and down under the net, down down to the uprising.

In harsh-edged echo, Titans stir far below. They are all the presences we are not
supposed to be seeing—wind gods, hilltop gods, sunset gods—that we train ourselves
away from to keep from looking further even though enough of us do, leave Their electric
voices behind in the twilight at the edge of the town and move into the constantly
parted cloak of our nightwalk till

Suddenly, Pan—leaping—its face too beautiful to bear, beautiful Serpent, its coils
in rainbow lashings in the sky—into the sure bones of fright—

Don’t walk home at night through the empty country. Don’t go into the forest when
the light is too low, even too late in the afternoon—it will get you. Don’t sit by
the tree like this, with your cheek against the bark. It is impossible in this moonlight
to see if you are male or female now. Your hair spills, silver white. Your body under
the gray cloth is so exactly vulnerable, so fated to degradation time and again. What
if he wakes and finds you’ve gone? He is now always the same, awake or asleep—he never
leaves the single dream, there are no more differences between the worlds: they have
become one for him. Thanatz and Margherita may have been his last ties with the old.
That may be why they stayed so long, it was his desperation, he wanted to hold on,
he needed them . . . but when he looks at them now he doesn’t see them as often any
more. They are also losing what reality they brought here, as Gottfried lost all of
his to Blicero long ago. Now the boy moves image to image, room to room, sometimes
out of the action, sometimes part of it . . . whatever he has to do, he does. The
day has its logic, its needs, no way for him to change it, leave it, or live outside
it. He is helpless, he is sheltered secure.