Gravity's Rainbow (13 page)

“Ah, Crutchfield,” flipping a hand, “how nice of you to show up.”

“You knew I’d show up, you little rascal,” shit that Whappo is such a caution. Always
baiting his master in hopes of getting a leather-keen stripe or two across those dusky
Afro-Scandinavian buttocks, which combine the callipygian rondure observed among the
races of the Dark Continent with the taut and noble musculature of sturdy Olaf, our
blond Northern cousin. But this time Crutchfield only turns back to watching the distant
mountains. Whappo sulks. His top hat reflects the coming holocaust. What the white
man does not have to utter, however casually, is anything like “Toro Rojo’s gonna
be riding in tonight.” Both pardners know about
that.
The wind, bringing them down that raw Injun smell, ought to be enough for anybody.
Oh God it’s gonna be a shootout and bloody as hell. The wind will be blowing so hard
blood will glaze on the north sides of the trees. The redskin’ll have a dog with him,
the only Indian dog in these whole ashen plains—the cur will mix it up with little
Whappo and end hung on the meathook of an open meat stall in the dirt plaza back in
Los Madres, eyes wide open, mangy coat still intact, black fleas hopping against the
sunlit mortar and stone of the church wall across the square, blood darkened and crusting
at the lesion in his neck where Whappo’s teeth severed his jugular (and maybe some
tendons, for the head dangles to one side). The hook enters in the back, between two
vertebrae. Mexican ladies poke at the dead dog, and it sways reluctantly in the forenoon
market-smell of platanos for frying, sweet baby carrots from the Red River Valley,
trampled raw greens of many kinds, cilantro smelling like animal musk, strong white
onions, pineapples fermenting in the sun, about to blow up, great mottled shelves
of mountain mushroom. Slothrop moves among the bins and hung cloths, invisible, among
horses and dogs, pigs, brown-uniformed militia, Indian women with babies slung in
shawls, servants from the pastel houses farther up the hillside—the plaza is seething
with life, and Slothrop is puzzled. Isn’t there supposed to be only one of each?

A. Yes.

Q. Then one Indian girl . . .

A. One
pure
Indian. One
mestiza.
One
criolla.
Then: one Yaqui. One Navaho. One Apache—

Q. Wait a minute, there was only one Indian to begin with. The one that Crutchfield
killed.

A. Yes.

Look on it as an optimization problem. The country can best support only one of each.

Q. Then what about all the others? Boston. London. The ones who live in cities. Are
those people real, or what?

A. Some are real, and some aren’t.

Q. Well are the real ones necessary? or unnecessary?

A. It depends what you have in mind.

Q. Shit, I don’t have anything in mind.

A.
We
do.

For a moment, ten thousand stiffs humped under the snow in the Ardennes take on the
sunny Disneyfied look of numbered babies under white wool blankets, waiting to be
sent to blessed parents in places like Newton Upper Falls. It only lasts a moment.
Then for another moment it seems that all the Christmas bells in the creation are
about to join in chorus—that all their random pealing will be, this one time, coordinated,
in harmony, present with tidings of explicit comfort, feasible joy.

But segway into the Roxbury hillside. Snow packs into the arches, the crosshatchings
of his black rubber soles. His Ar’tics clink when he moves his feet. The snow in this
slum darkness has the appearance of soot in a negative . . . it flows in and out of
the night. . . . The brick surfaces by daylight (he only sees them in very early dawn,
aching inside his overshoes, looking for cabs up and down the Hill) are flaming corrosion,
dense, deep, fallen upon by frosts again and again: historied in a way he hasn’t noticed
in Beacon Street. . . .

In the shadows, black and white holding in a panda-pattern across his face, each of
the regions a growth or mass of scar tissue, waits the connection he’s traveled all
this way to see. The face is as weak as a house-dog’s, and its owner shrugs a lot.

Slothrop: Where is he? Why didn’t he show? Who are you?

Voice: The Kid got busted. And you know me, Slothrop. Remember? I’m Never.

Slothrop (peering):
You,
Never? (A pause.)
Did
the Kenosha Kid?

• • • • • • •

“Kryptosam” is a proprietary form of stabilized tyrosine, developed by IG Farben as
part of a research contract with OKW. An activating agent is included which, in the
presence of some component of the seminal fluid to date [1934] unidentified, promotes
conversion of the tyrosine into melanin, or skin pigment. In the absence of seminal
fluid, the “Kryptosam” remains invisible. No other known reagent, among those available
to operatives in the field, will alter “Kryptosam” to visible melanin. It is suggested,
in cryptographic applications, that a proper stimulus be included with the message
which will reliably produce tumescence and ejaculation. A thorough knowledge of the
addressee’s psychosexual profile would seem of invaluable aid.

—P
ROF
. D
R
. L
ASZLO
J
AMF
, “Kryptosam” (advertising brochure), Agfa, Berlin, 1934

The drawing, on heavy cream paper under the black-letter inscription
GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE
, is in pen and ink, very finely textured, somewhat after the style of von Bayros
or Beardsley. The woman is a dead ringer for Scorpia Mossmoon. The room is one they
talked about but never saw, a room they would have liked to live in one day, with
a sunken pool, a silken tent draped from the ceiling—a De Mille set really, slender
and oiled girls in attendance, a suggestion of midday light coming through from overhead,
Scorpia sprawled among fat pillows wearing exactly the corselette of Belgian lace,
the dark stockings and shoes he daydreamed about often enough but never—

No, of course he never told her. He never told anyone. Like every young man growing
up in England, he was conditioned to get a hardon in the presence of certain fetishes,
and then conditioned to feel shame about his new reflexes. Could there be, somewhere,
a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and
read since puberty . . . how
else
would They know?

“Hush,” she whispers. Her fingers stroke lightly her long olive thighs, bare breasts
swell from the top of her garment. Her face is toward the ceiling, but her eyes are
looking into Pirate’s own, long, narrow with lust, two points of light glittering
through the thick lashes . . . “I’ll leave him. We’ll come here and live. We’ll never
stop making love. I belong to you, I’ve known that for a long time. . . .” Her tongue
licks out over her little sharpened teeth. Her furry quim is at the center of all
the light, and there is a taste in his mouth he would feel again. . . .

Well, Pirate nearly doesn’t make it, barely gets his cock out of his trousers before
he’s spurting all over the place. Enough sperm saved, though, to rub over the blank
scrap enclosed with the picture. Slowly then, a revelation through the nacreous film
of his seed, in Negro-brown, comes his message: put in a simple Nihilist transposition
whose keywords he can almost guess. Most of it he does in his head. There is a time
given, a place, a request for help. He burns the message, fallen on him from higher
than Earth’s atmosphere, salvaged from Earth’s prime meridian, keeps the picture,
hmm, and washes his hands. His prostate is aching. There is more to this than he can
see. He has no recourse, no appeal: he has to go over there and bring the operative
out again. The message is tantamount to an order from the highest levels.

Far away, through the rain, comes the crack-blast of another German rocket. The third
today. They hunt the sky like Wuotan and his mad army.

Pirate’s own robot hands begin to search drawers and folders for necessary vouchers
and forms. No sleep tonight. Probably no chance even to catch a cup or cigarette on
route. Why?

• • • • • • •

In Germany, as the end draws upon us, the incessant walls read
WAS TUST DU FÜR DIE FRONT, FÜR DEN SIEG? WAS HAST DU HEUTE FÜR DEUTSCHLAND GETAN
? At “The White Visitation” the walls read ice. Graffiti of ice the sunless day, glazing
the darkening blood brick and terra cotta as if the house is to be preserved weatherless
in some skin of clear museum plastic, an architectural document, an old-fashioned
apparatus whose use is forgotten. Ice of varying thickness, wavy, blurred, a legend
to be deciphered by lords of the winter, Glacists of the region, and argued over in
their journals. Uphill, toward the sea, snow gathers like light at all windward edges
of the ancient Abbey, its roof long ago taken at the manic whim of Henry VIII, its
walls left to stand and mitigate with saintless window-hollows the salt wind, blowing
as the seasons replay the grass floor in great cowlicks, green to blonde, to snow.
From the Palladian house down in its resentful and twilit hollow this is the only
view: the Abbey or else gentle, broadly mottled swoops of upland. View of the sea
denied, though certain days and tides you can smell it, all your vile ancestry. In
1925 Reg Le Froyd, an inmate at “The White Visitation,” escaped—rushed through the
upper town to stand teetering at the edge of the cliff, hair and hospital garment
flickering in the wind, the swaying miles of south coast, pallid chalk, jetties and
promenades fading right and left into brine haze. After him came a Constable Stuggles,
at the head of a curious crowd. “Don’t jump!” cries the constable.

“I never thought of that,” Le Froyd continuing to stare out to sea.

“Then what are you doing here. Eh?”

“Wanted to look at the sea,” Le Froyd explains. “I’ve never seen it. I am, you know,
related, by blood, to the sea.”

“Oh aye,” sly Stuggles edging up on him all the while, “visiting your relatives are
you, how nice.”

“I can hear the Lord of the Sea,” cries Le Froyd, in wonder.

“Dear me, and what’s his name?” Both of them wetfaced, shouting for the wind.

“Oh, I don’t know,” yells Le Froyd, “what would be a good name?”

“Bert,” suggests the constable, trying to remember if it’s right hand grasps left
arm above elbow or left hand grasps . . .

Le Froyd turns, and for the first time sees the man, and the crowd. His eyes grow
round and mild. “Bert is fine,” he says, and steps back into the void.

That’s all the townsfolk of Ick Regis had from “The White Visitation” in the way of
relief—from summers of staring at the pink or sun-freckled overflow from Brighton,
Flotsam and Jetsam casting each day of wireless history into song, sunsets on the
promenade, lens openings forever changing for the sea light, blown now brisk, now
sedate about the sky, aspirins for sleep—only Le Froyd’s leap, that single entertainment,
up till the outbreak of this war.

At the defeat of Poland, ministerial motorcades were suddenly observed at all hours
of the night, putting in at “The White Visitation,” silent as sloops, exhausts well
muffled—chromeless black machinery that shone if there were starlight, and otherwise
enjoyed the camouflage of a face about to be remembered, but through the act of memory
fading too far. . . . Then at the fall of Paris, a radio transmitting station was
set up on the cliff, antennas aimed at the Continent, themselves heavily guarded and
their landlines back mysteriously over the downs to the house patrolled night and
day by dogs specially betrayed, belted, starved into reflex leaps to kill, at any
human approach. Had one of the Very High gone higher—that is, dotty? Was Our Side
seeking to demoralize the German Beast by broadcasting to him random thoughts of the
mad, naming for him, also in the tradition of Constable Stuggles that famous day,
the deep, the scarcely seen? The answer is yes, all of the above, and more.

Ask them at “The White Visitation” about the master plan of the BBC’s eloquent Myron
Grunton, whose melted-toffee voice has been finding its way for years out the fraying
rust bouclé of the wireless speakers and into English dreams, foggy old heads, children
at the edges of attention. . . . He’s had to keep putting his plan off, at first only
a voice alone, lacking the data he really needed, no support, trying to get at the
German soul from whatever came to hand, P/W interrogations, Foreign Office Handbooks,
the brothers Grimm, tourist memories of his own (young sleepless Dawes-era flashes,
vineyards sunlit very green bearding the south valley-slopes of the Rhine, at night
in the smoke and worsted cabarets of the capital long frilled suspenders like rows
of carnations, silk stockings highlighted each in one long fine crosshatching of light . . .).
But at last the Americans came in, and the arrangement known as SHAEF, and an amazing
amount of money.

The scheme is called Operation Black Wing. My what a careful construction, five years
in the making. No one could claim it all as his own, not even Grunton. It was General
Eisenhower who laid down the controlling guideline, the “strategy of truth” idea.
Something “real,” Ike insisted on: a hook on the war’s pocked execution-wall to hang
the story from. Pirate Prentice of the S.O.E. came back with the first hard intelligence
that there were indeed in Germany real Africans, Hereros, ex-colonials from South-West
Africa, somehow active in the secret-weapons program. Myron Grunton, inspired, produced
on the air one night completely ad lib the passage that found its way into the first
Black Wing directive: “Germany once treated its Africans like a stern but loving stepfather,
chastising them when necessary, often with death. Remember? But that was far away
in Südwest, and since then a generation has gone by. Now the Herero lives in his stepfather’s
house. Perhaps you, listening, have seen him. Now he stays up past the curfews, and
watches his stepfather while he sleeps, invisible, protected by the night which is
his own colour. What are they all thinking? Where are the Hereros tonight? What are
they
doing,
this instant, your dark, secret children?” And Black Wing has even found an American,
a Lieutenant Slothrop, willing to go under light narcosis to help illuminate racial
problems in his own country. An invaluable extra dimension. Toward the end, as more
foreign morale data began to come back—Yank pollsters with clipboards and squeaky
new shoe-pacs or galoshes visiting snow-softened liberated ruins to root out the truffles
of truth created, as ancients surmised, during storm, in the instant of lightning
blast—a contact in American PWD was able to bootleg copies and make them available
to “The White Visitation.” No one is sure who suggested the name “Schwarzkommando.”
Myron Grunton had favored “Wütende Heer,” that company of spirits who ride the heaths
of the sky in furious hunt, with great Wuotan at their head—but Myron agreed that
was more a northern myth. Effectiveness in Bavaria might be less than optimum.