Gravity's Rainbow (31 page)

A silence, which prolongs itself. There is some shifting in the seats around the table,
but the sets of little fingers stay in touch.

“Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?” It is Heinz Rippenstoss, the irrepressible
Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to
his room. “Is God really Jewish?”

• • • • • • •

Pumm, Easterling, Dromfond, Lamplighter, Spectro are stars on the doctor’s holiday
tree. Shining down on this holiest of nights. Each is a cold announcement of dead
ends, suns that will refuse to stand, but flee south, ever south, leaving us to north-without-end.
But Kevin Spectro is brightest, most distant of all. And the crowds they swarm in
Knightsbridge, and the wireless carols drone, and the Underground’s a mob-scene, but
Pointsman’s all alone. But he’s got his Xmas present, fa la la, he won’t have to settle
for any Spam-tin dog this year mates, he’s got his own miracle and human child, grown
to manhood but carrying, someplace on the Slothropian cortex now a bit of Psychology’s
own childhood, yes pure history, inert, encysted, unmoved by jazz, depression, war—a
survival, if you will, of a piece of the late Dr. Jamf himself, past death, past the
reckoning of the, the old central chamber you know. . . .

He has no one to ask, no one to tell. My heart, he feels, my heart floods now with
such virility and hope. . . . News from the Riviera is splendid. Experiments
here
begin to run smoothly for a change. From some dark overlap, a general appropriation
or sinking fund someplace, Brigadier Pudding has even improved the funding for ARF.
Does he feel Pointsman’s power too? Is he buying some insurance?

At odd moments of the day Pointsman, fascinated, discovers himself with an erect penis.
He begins making jokes, English Pavlovian jokes, nearly all of which depend on one
unhappy accident: the Latin
cortex
translates into English as “bark,” not to mention the well-known and humorous relation
between dogs and trees (these are bad enough, and most PISCES folk have the good sense
to avoid them, but they are dazzling witticisms compared with jokes
out
of the mainstream, such as the extraordinary “What did the Cockney exclaim to the
cowboy from San Antonio?”). Sometime during the annual PISCES Christmas Party, Pointsman
is led by Maudie Chilkes to a closet full of belladonna, gauze, thistle tubes, and
the scent of surgical rubber, where in a flash she’s down on her red knees, unbuttoning
his trousers, as he, confused, good God, strokes her hair, clumsily shaking much of
it loose from its wine-colored ribbon—here what’s this, an actual, slick and crimson,
hot, squeak-stockinged slavegirl “gam” yes right among these winter-pale clinical
halls, with the distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses, woodblocks, wearied
blown sheets of tropic string cadences audible as everyone dances back there on the
uncarpeted floors, and the old Palladian shell, conch of a thousand rooms, gives,
resonates, shifting stresses along walls and joists . . . bold Maud, this is incredible,
taking the pink Pavlovian cock in as far as it will go, chin to collarbone vertical
as a sword-swallower, releasing him each time with some small ladylike choking sound,
fumes of expensive Scotch rising flowerlike, and her hands up grabbing the loose wool
seat of his pants, pleating, unpleating—it’s happening so fast that Pointsman only
sways, blinks a bit drunkenly you know, wondering if he’s dreaming or has found the
perfect mixture, try to remember, amphetamine sulphate, 5 mg q 6 h, last night amobarbital
sodium 0.2 Gm. at bedtime, this morning assorted breakfast vitamin capsules, alcohol
an ounce, say, per hour, over the past . . . how many cc.s is that and oh, Jesus I’m
coming. Am I? yes . . . well . . . and Maud, dear Maudie, swallowing, wastes not a
drop . . . smiling quietly, unplugged at last, she returns the unstiffening hawk to
its cold bachelor nest but kneels still a bit longer in the closet of this moment,
the drafty, white-lit moment, some piece by Ernesto Lecuona, “Siboney” perhaps, now
reaching them down corridors long as the sea-lanes back to the green shoals, slime
stone battlements, and palm evenings of Cuba . . . a Victorian pose, her cheek against
his leg, his high-veined hand against her face. But no one saw them, then or ever,
and in the winter ahead, here and there, her look will cross his and she’ll begin
to blush red as her knees, she’ll come to his room off the lab once or twice perhaps,
but somehow they’re never to have this again, this sudden tropics in the held breath
of war and English December, this moment of perfect peace. . . .

No one to tell. Maud knows something’s up all right, the finances of PISCES pass through
her hands, nothing escapes her. But he
can’t
tell her . . . or not everything, not the
exact terms of his hope
, he’s never, even to himself . . . it lies ahead in the dark, defined inversely,
by horror, by ways all hopes might yet be defeated and he find only his death, that
dumb, empty joke, at the end of this Pavlovian’s Progress.

Now Thomas Gwenhidwy too senses change fibrillating in the face and step of his colleague.
Fat, prematurely white Santa Claus beard, a listing, rumpled showman, performing every
instant, trying to speak a double language, both Welsh comic-provincial and hard diamond
gone-a-begging truth, hear what you will. His singing voice is incredible, in his
spare time he strolls out past the wire-mesh fighter runways looking for bigger planes—for
he loves to practice the bass part to “Diadem” as the Flying Fortresses take off at
full power, and even so you can hear him, bone-vibrating and pure above the bombers,
all the way to Stoke Poges, you see. Once a lady even wrote in to the
Times
from Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, asking who was the man with the lovely deep voice singing
“Diadem.” A Mrs. Snade. Gwenhidwy likes to drink a lot, grain alcohol mostly, mixed
in great strange mad-scientist concoctions with beef tea, grenadine, cough syrup,
bitter belch-gathering infusions of blue scullcap, valerian root, motherwort and lady’s-slipper,
whatever’s to hand really. His is the hale alcoholic style celebrated in national
legend and song. He is descended directly from the Welshman in
Henry V
who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek. None of your sedentary drinkers though.
Pointsman has never seen Gwenhidwy off of his feet or standing still—he fusses endlessly
pitch-and-roll avast you scum down the long rows of sick or dying faces, and even
Pointsman has noted rough love in the minor gestures, changes of breathing and voice.
They are blacks, Indians, Ashkenazic Jews speaking dialects you never heard in Harley
Street: they have been bombed out, frozen, starved, meanly sheltered, and their faces,
even the children’s, all possess some ancient intimacy with pain and reverse that
amazes Pointsman, who is more polarized upon West End catalogues of genteel signs
and symptoms, headborn anorexias and constipations the Welshman could have little
patience with. On Gwenhidwy’s wards some BMRs run low as
^-
35,
^-
40. The white lines go thickening across the X-ray ghosts of bones, gray scrapings
from underneath tongues bloom beneath his old wrinkle-black microscope into clouds
of Vincentesque invaders, nasty little fangs achop and looking to ulcerate the vitamin-poor
tissue they came from. A quite different domain altogether, you see.

“I don’t know, man—no, I don’t,” flinging a fat slow-motion arm out of his hedgehog-colored
cape, back at the hospital, as they walk in the falling snow—to Pointsman a clear
separation, monks here and cathedral there, soldiers and garrison—but not so to Gwenhidwy,
part of whom remains behind, hostage. The streets are empty, it’s Christmas day, they
are tramping uphill to Gwenhidwy’s rooms as the quiet snow curtains fall on and on
between themselves and the pierced walls of the institution marching in stone parallax
away into a white gloom. “How they
persist.
The poor, the black. And the Jews! The Welsh, the Welsh once upon a time were Jew
ish
too? one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a black tribe, who wandered overland, centuries?
oh an incredible journey. Until at last they reached Wales, you see.”

“Wales . . .”

“Stayed on, and became the Cymri. What if we’re all Jews, you see? all scattered like
seeds? still flying outward from the primal fist so long ago. Man, I believe that.”

“Of course you do, Gwenhidwy.”

“Aren’t we then? What about you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t feel Jewish today.”

“I meant flying outward?” He means alone and forever separate: Pointsman knows what
he means. So, by surprise, something in him is touched. He feels the Christmas snow
now at crevices of his boots, the bitter cold trying to get in. The brown wool flank
of Gwenhidwy moves at the edge of his sight, a pocket of color, a holdout against
this whitening day. Flying outward. Flying . . . Gwenhidwy, a million ice-points falling
at a slant across his caped immensity, looking so improbable of extinction that now,
from where it’s been lying, the same yawing-drunk chattering fear returns, the Curse
of the Book, and here is someone he wants, truly, with all his mean heart, to see
preserved . . . though he’s been too shy, or proud, ever to’ve smiled at Gwenhidwy
without some kind of speech to explain and cancel out the smile. . . .

Dogs run barking at their approach. They get the Professional Eye from Pointsman.
Gwenhidwy is humming “Aberystwyth.” Out comes the doorkeeper’s daughter Estelle with
a shivering kid or two underfoot and a Christmas bottle of something acrid but very
warming inside the breast after about the first minute it’s down. Smells of coal smoke,
piss, garbage, last night’s bubble-and-squeak, fill the hallways. Gwenhidwy is drinking
from the bottle, carrying on a running slap-and-tickle with Estelle and getting in
a fast game of where’d-he-go-there-he-is with Arch her youngest around the broad mouton
hipline of his mother who keeps trying to smack him but he’s too fast.

Gwenhidwy breathes upon a gas meter which is frozen all through, too tight to accept
coins. Terrible weather. He surrounds it, curses it, bending like a screen lover,
wings of his cape reaching to enfold—Gwenhidwy, radiating like a sun. . . .

Out the windows of the sitting-room are a row of bare Army-colored poplars, a canal,
a snowy trainyard, and beyond it a long sawtooth pile of scrap coal, still smoldering
from a V-bomb yesterday. Ragged smoke is carried askew, curling, broken and back to
earth by the falling snow.

“It’s the closest yet,” Gwenhidwy at the kettle, the sour smell of a sulfur match
in the air. After a moment, still on watch over the gas ring, “Pointsman, do you want
to hear something really paranoid?”

“You too?”

“Have you consulted a map of London lately? All this great meteoric plague of V-weapons,
is being dumped out
here
, you see. Not back on Whitehall, where it’s supposed to be, but on me, and I think
it is beast-ly?”

“What a damned unpatriotic thing to say.”

“Oh,” hawking and spitting into the washbowl, “you don’t want to believe it. Why should
you? Harley Street lot, my good Jesus Christ.”

It’s an old game with Gwenhidwy, Royal Fellow–baiting. Some unaccustomed wind or thermocline
along the sky is bringing them down the deep choral hum of American bombers: Death’s
white Gymanfa Ganu. A switching-locomotive creeps silently across the web of tracks
below.

“They’re falling in a Poisson distribution,” says Pointsman in a small voice, as if
it was open to challenge.

“No doubt man, no doubt—an excellent point. But all over the fucking
East End
, you see.” Arch, or someone, has drawn a brown, orange, and blue Gwenhidwy carrying
a doctor’s bag along a flat horizon-line past a green gasworks. The bag’s full of
gin bottles, Gwenhidwy is smiling, a robin is peeking out from its nest in his beard,
and the sky is blue and the sun yellow. “But have you ever thought of why? Here is
the City Paranoiac. All these long centuries, growing over the country-side? like
an intelligent creature. An actor, a fantastic
mimic
, Pointsman! Count-erfeiting all the correct forces? the eco-nomic, the demographic?
oh yes even the ran-dom, you see.”

“What do you mean ‘I see’? I
don’t
see.” Against the window, backlit by the white afternoon, Pointsman’s face is invisible
except for a tiny bright crescent glowing off each eyeball. Should he fumble behind
him for the window catch? Is the woolly Welshman gone raving mad, then?

“You don’t see
them,
” steam in tight brocade starting to issue from the steel-blotched swan’s mouth, “the
blacks and Jews, in their darkness. You can’t. You don’t hear their silence. You became
so used to talking, and to light.”

“To barking, anyway.”

“Nothing comes through my hos-pital but fail-ure, you see.” Staring with a fixed,
fool-alcoholic smile. “What can I cure? I can only send them back, outside again?
Back to
that?
It might as well be Europe here, com-bat, splint-ing and drug-ging them all into
some mini-mum condition to get on with the kill-ing?”

“Here, don’t you know there’s a war on?” Thus Pointsman receives, with his cup, a
terrible scowl. In truth, he is hoping with nitwit irrelevancies to discourage Gwenhidwy
from going on about his City Paranoiac. Pointsman would rather talk about the rocket
victims admitted today to the hospital down there. But this is exorcism man, it is
the poet singing back the silence, adjuring the white riders, and Gwenhidwy knows,
as Pointsman cannot, that it’s part of the plan of the day to sit inside this mean
room and cry into just such a deafness: that Mr. Pointsman is to play exactly himself—stylized,
irritable, uncomprehending. . . .

“In some cities the rich live upon the heights, and the poor are found below. In others
the rich occupy the shoreline, while the poor must live inland. Now in London, here
is a gra-dient of wretchedness? increasing as the river widens to the sea. I am only
ask-ing, why? Is it because of the ship-ping? Is it in the pat-terns of land use,
especially those relating to the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an-cient tribal tabu,
surviving down all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From
The East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly. The people
out here were
meant to go down first.
We’re expendable: those in the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don’t
mean the Threat has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Paranoiac
dreams, it’s not accessible to
us.
Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of another, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade
the es-tuary . . . or of waves of darkness . . . waves of fire. . . . Perhaps of being
swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It’s none of
my
business, city dreams. . . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across
the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst,
se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op and cowardly knight, all we
condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing. It was known,
don’t deny it—
known
, Pointsman! that the front in Eu-rope someday
must
develop like this? move away east, make the rock-ets necessary, and
known
how, and where, the rockets would fall short. Ask your friend Mexico? look at the
densities on his map? east, east, and south of the river too, where all the bugs live,
that’s who’s getting it
thick
-est, my friend.”