Gravity's Rainbow (20 page)

“But where will you go?” Both of them hands in pockets, scarves tightly wrapped, stones
the water has left behind shining black wait like writing in a dream, about to make
sense printed here along the beach, each fragment so amazingly clear yet . . .

“I don’t know. Where would be a good place?”

“‘The White Visitation,’” Pirate suggested.

“‘The White Visitation’ is fine,” she said, and stepped into the void. . . .

“Osbie, have I gone mad?” a snowy night, five rocket bombs since noon, shivering in
the kitchen, late and candlelit, Osbie Feel the house idiot-savant so far into an
encounter with nutmeg this evening that the inquiry seems quite proper, the pale cement
Jungfrau asquat, phlegmatic and one gathers nettled in a dim corner.

“Of course, of course,” sez Osbie, with a fluid passage of fingers and wrist based
on the way Bela Lugosi handed a certain glass of doped wine to some fool of a juvenile
lead in
White Zombie
, the first movie Osbie ever saw and in a sense the last, ranking on his All-Time
List along with
Son of Frankenstein, Freaks, Flying Down to Rio
and perhaps
Dumbo
, which he went to see in Oxford Street last night but mid-way through noticed, instead
of a magic feather, the humorless green and magenta face of Mr. Ernest Bevin wrapped
in the chubby trunk of the longlashed baby elephant, and decided it would be prudent
to excuse himself. “No,” since Pirate meantime has misunderstood whatever it was Osbie
said, “not ‘of course you’ve gone mad, Prentice,’ that wasn’t it at all. . . .”

“What then,” Pirate asks, after Osbie’s lapse has passed the minute mark.

“Ah?” sez Osbie.

Pirate is having second thoughts, is what it is. He keeps recalling that Katje now
avoids all mention of the house in the forest. She has glanced into it, and out, but
the truth’s crystal sheets have diffracted all her audible words—often to tears—and
he can’t quite make sense of what’s spoken, much less infer to the radiant crystal
itself. Indeed, why did she leave Schußstelle 3? We are never told why. But now and
then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really
play—and be unable then to continue in the same spirit. . . . Nor need it be anything
sudden, spectacular—it may come in gentle—and regardless of the score, the number
of watchers, their collective wish, penalties they or the Leagues may impose, the
player will, waking deliberately, perhaps with Katje’s own tough, young isolate’s
shrug and stride, say
fuck it
and quit the game, quit it cold. . . .

“All right,” he continues alone, Osbie lost in a mooning doper’s smile, tracking the
mature female snow-skin of the Alp in the corner, he and the frozen peak above and
the blue night . . . “it’s a lapse of character then, a crotchet. Like carrying the
bloody Mendoza.” Everyone
else
in the Firm packs a Sten you know. The Mendoza weighs three times as much, no one’s
even
seen
any 7 mm Mexican Mauser bullets lately, even in Portobello Road: it hasn’t the grand
Garage Simplicity or the rate of fire and still he loves it (yes, most likely it’s
love these days) “you see, it’s a matter of trade-off, i’n’t i’,” the nostalgia of
its Lewis-style straight pull, and being able to lift the barrel off in a second (ever
tried to take the barrel off of a Sten?), and having a double-ended striker in case
one breaks. . . . “Am I going to let the extra weight make a difference? It’s my
crotchet
, I’m indifferent to weight, or I wouldn’t have brought the girl back out, would I.”

“I am not your responsibility.” A statue in wine-colored
façonné
velvet from neck to wrists and insteps, and how long, gentlemen, has she been watching
from the shadows?

“Oh,” Pirate turning sheepish, “you are, you know.”

“The happy couple!” Osbie roars suddenly, taking another pinch of nutmeg like snuff,
eyeballs rolling white as the miniature mountain. Sneezing now loudly about the kitchen,
it strikes him as incredible that he has both these people inside the same field of
vision. Pirate’s face darkening with embarrassment, Katje’s unchanging, half struck
by light from the next room, half in slate shadows.

“Should I have left you, then?” and when she only compresses her mouth, impatient,
“or do you think someone over here owed it to you to bring you out?”

“No.”
That reached her. Pirate only asked because he’s begun to suspect, darkly, any number
of Someones Over Here. But to Katje a debt is for wiping out. Her old, intractable
vice—she wants to cross seas, to connect countries between whom there is no possible
rate of exchange. Her ancestors sang, in Middle Dutch,

ic heb u liever dan ên everswîn,

al waert van finen goude ghewracht,

love incommensurate with gold, golden calf, even in this case golden swine. But by
the middle of the 17th century there were no more pigs of gold, only of flesh mortal
as that of Frans Van der Groov, another ancestor, who went off to Mauritius with a
boatload of these live hogs and lost thirteen years toting his haakbus through the
ebony forests, wandering the swamps and lava flows, systematically killing off the
native dodoes for reasons he could not explain. The Dutch pigs took care of eggs and
younger birds. Frans carefully drew beads on the parents at 10 or 20 meters, the piece
propped on its hook, slowly squeezing the trigger, eye focused on the molting ugliness
while closer in the slow-match, soaked in wine, held in the jaws of the serpentine,
came blooming redly downward, its heat on his cheek
like my own small luminary
, he wrote home to Hendrik the older brother,
the ruler of my Sign . . .
uncovering the priming-powder he’d been keeping shielded with his other hand—sudden
flash in the pan, through the touchhole, and the loud report echoing off the steep
rocks, recoil smashing the butt up along his shoulder (the skin there at first raw,
blistered, then callused over, after the first summer). And the stupid, awkward bird,
never intended to fly or run at any speed—what
were
they good for?—unable now even to locate his murderer, ruptured, splashing blood,
raucously dying. . . .

At home, the brother skimmed the letters, some crisp, some sea-stained or faded, spanning
years, delivered all at once—understanding very little of it, only anxious to spend
the day, as usual, in the gardens and greenhouse with his tulips (a reigning madness
of the time), especially one new variety named for his current mistress: blood-red,
finely tattooed in purple. . . . “Recent arrivals all carrying the new snaphaan . . .
but I stick to my clumsy old matchlock . . . don’t I deserve a clumsy weapon for such
a clumsy prey?” But Frans got no closer to telling what kept him out among the winter
cyclones, stuffing pieces of old uniform down after the lead balls, sunburned, bearded
and filthy—unless it rained or he was in the uplands where the craters of old volcanoes
cupped rainfall blue as the sky in upward offering.

He left the dodoes to rot, he couldn’t endure to eat their flesh. Usually, he hunted
alone. But often, after months of it, the isolation would begin to change him, change
his very perceptions—the jagged mountains in full daylight flaring as he watched into
freak saffrons, streaming indigos, the sky his glass house, all the island his tulipomania.
The voices—he insomniac, southern stars too thick for constellations teeming in faces
and creatures of fable less likely than the dodo—spoke the words of sleepers, singly,
coupled, in chorus. The rhythms and timbres were Dutch, but made no waking sense.
Except that he thought they were warning him . . . scolding, angry that he couldn’t
understand. Once he sat all day staring at a single white dodo’s egg in a grass hummock.
The place was too remote for any foraging pig to’ve found. He waited for scratching,
a first crack reaching to net the chalk surface: an emergence. Hemp gripped in the
teeth of the steel snake, ready to be lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea,
and destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness, within its first minute
of amazed vision, of wet down stirred cool by these south-east trades. . . . Each
hour he sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever, he might have seen how the
weapon made an axis potent as Earth’s own between himself and this victim, still one,
inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink
of world’s light. There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the
hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only
the sun moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of mountains to Indian
ocean, to tarry night. The egg, without a quiver, still unhatched. He should have
blasted it then where it lay: he understood that the bird would hatch before dawn.
But a cycle was finished. He got to his feet, knee and hip joints in agony, head gonging
with instructions from his sleeptalkers droning by, overlapping, urgent, and only
limped away, piece at right shoulder arms.

When loneliness began to drive him into situations like this, he often returned to
a settlement and joined a hunting party. A drunken, university hysteria would take
hold of them all, out on night-rampages where they’d be presently firing at anything,
treetops, clouds, leather demon bats screaming up beyond hearing. Tradewinds moving
up-slope to chill their nights’ sweating, sky lit half crimson by a volcano, rumblings
under their feet as deep as the bats’ voices were high, all these men were caught
in the spectrum between, trapped among frequencies of their own voices and words.

This furious host were losers, impersonating a race chosen by God. The colony, the
venture, was dying—like the ebony trees they were stripping from the island, like
the poor species they were removing totally from the earth. By 1681,
Didus ineptus
would be gone, by 1710 so would every last settler from Mauritius. The enterprise
here would have lasted about a human lifetime.

To some, it made sense. They saw the stumbling birds ill-made to the point of Satanic
intervention, so ugly as to embody argument against a Godly creation. Was Mauritius
some first poison trickle through the sheltering dikes of Earth? Christians must stem
it here, or perish in a second Flood, loosed this time not by God but by the Enemy.
The act of ramming home the charges into their musketry became for these men a devotional
act, one whose symbolism they understood.

But if they were chosen to come to Mauritius, why had they also been chosen to fail,
and leave? Is that a choosing, or is it a passing-over? Are they Elect, or are they
Preterite, and doomed as dodoes?

Frans could not know that except for a few others on the island of Reunion, these
were the only dodoes in the Creation, and that he was helping exterminate a race.
But at times the scale and frenzy of the hunting did come through to trouble his heart.
“If the species were not such a perversion,” he wrote, “it might be profitably husbanded
to feed our generations. I cannot hate them quite so violently as do some here. But
what now can mitigate this slaughter? It is too late. . . . Perhaps a more comely
beak, fuller feathering, a capacity for flight, however brief . . . details of Design.
Or, had we but found savages on this island, the bird’s appearance might have then
seemed to us no stranger than that of the wild turkey of North America. Alas, their
tragedy is to be the dominant form of Life on Mauritius, but incapable of speech.”

That was it, right there. No language meant no chance of co-opting them in to what
their round and flaxen invaders were calling Salvation. But Frans, in the course of
morning lights lonelier than most, could not keep from finally witnessing a miracle:
a Gift of Speech . . . a Conversion of the Dodoes. Ranked in thousands on the shore,
with a luminous profile of reef on the water behind them, its roar the only sound
on the morning, volcanoes at rest, the wind suspended, an autumn sunrise dispensing
light glassy and deep over them all . . . they have come from their nests and rookeries,
from beside the streams bursting out the mouths of lava tunnels, from the minor islands
awash like debris off the north coast, from sudden waterfalls and the wasted rain-forests
where the axeblades are rusting and the rough flumes rot and topple in the wind, from
their wet mornings under the shadows of mountain-stubs they have waddled in awkward
pilgrimage to this assembly: to be sanctified, taken in. . . .
For as much as they are the creatures of God, and have the gift of rational discourse,
acknowledging that only in His Word is eternal life to be found . . .
And there are tears of happiness in the eyes of the dodoes. They are all brothers
now, they and the humans who used to hunt them, brothers in Christ, the little baby
they dream now of sitting near, roosting in his stable, feathers at peace, watching
over him and his dear face all night long. . . .

It is the purest form of European adventuring. What’s it all been for, the murdering
seas, the gangrene winters and starving springs, our bone pursuit of the unfaithful,
midnights of wrestling with the Beast, our sweat become ice and our tears pale flakes
of snow, if not for such moments as this: the little converts flowing out of eye’s
field, so meek, so trusting—how shall any craw clench in fear, any recreant cry be
offered in the presence of our blade, our necessary blade? Sanctified now they will
feed us, sanctified their remains and droppings fertilize our crops. Did we tell them
“Salvation”? Did we mean a dwelling forever in the City? Everlasting life? An earthly
paradise restored, their island as it used to be given them back? Probably. Thinking
all the time of the little brothers numbered among our own blessings. Indeed, if they
save us from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ’s kingdom, our salvations
must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they
appear as in the world’s illusory light—only our prey. God could not be that cruel.