Gravity's Rainbow (46 page)

Our brains at the cleaners, our souls at the Fair,

Just freaks on a fur-lough, away from the blues,

As daffy and sharp as—the taps on our shoes!

Hey, we’re passin’ the hat for—your frowns and your tears,

And the fears you thought’d never go ’way—

Oh take it from a loony, life’s so dear and swoony,

So just hug it and kiss it to-day!

La-da-da, ya-ta ya-ta ta-ta &c . . . (They go on humming the tune behind what follows):

First Nut (or maybe Keeper): Got an amazing deal for you here, American? I thought
so, always tell a face from home, saaay, like your suit there, go far enough up the
glacier ’n’ nobody’d be able to see ya! Well yes now, I know how you feel about these
street-vendors keep coming by, it’s the old three-card monte on the sidewalk [trucks
across the stage for a while, back and forth, waving his finger in the air, singing
“Three-card monte on-the
side, walk
,” over and over in the same obsessive monotone, for as many repetitions as he can
get away with] and you can spot right away what’s wrong, every one promises ya somethin’
fer nothin’, right? yes now oddly enough, that’s the main objection engineers and
scientists have always had to the idea of [lowering his voice] perpetual motion or
as we like to call it Entropy Management—here, here’s our card—well, sure, they’ve
got a point. At least they
had
a point. Up till now. . . .

Second Nut or Keeper: Now you’ve heard about the two-hundred-mile-per-gallon carburetor,
the razor edge that never gets dull, the eternal bootsole, the mange pill that’s good
to your glands, engine that’ll run on sand, ornithopters and robobopsters—you heard
me, got a little goatee made out of steel wool—jivey, that’s fine, but
here’s
one for yo’
mind!
Are you ready? It’s Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens
You!

Slothrop: Think I’ll go take my nap now. . . .

Third N. or K.: Transmogrify common air into diamonds through Cataclysmic Carbon Dioxide
Reducti-o-o-o-o-n-n-n. . . .

If he were sensitive about such things, it’d all be pretty insulting, this first wave.
It passes, gesturing, accusative, pleading. Slothrop manages to stay calm. There is
a pause—then on come the real ones, slowly at first but gathering, gathering. Synthetic
rubber or gasoline, electronic calculators, aniline dyes, acrylics, perfumes (stolen
essences in vials in sample cases), sexual habits of a hundred selected board members,
layouts of plants, codebooks, connections and payoffs, ask for it, they can get it.

At last, one day at the Sträggeli, Slothrop eating on a bratwurst and hunk of bread
he’s been toting around all morning in a paper bag, suddenly from noplace appears
one Mario Schweitar in a green frogged waistcoat, just popped out of the echoing cuckoo
clock of Dubya Dubya Two here, the endless dark corridors at his back, with a change
of luck for Slothrop. “Pssst, Joe,” he begins, “hey, mister.”

“Not me,” replies Slothrop with his mouth full.

“You interested in some L.S.D.?”

“That stands for pounds, shillings, and pence. You got the wrong café, Ace.”

“I think I’ve got the wrong country,” Schweitar a little mournful. “I’m from Sandoz.”

“Aha, Sandoz!” cries Slothrop, and pulls out a chair for the fella.

Turns out Schweitar is very tight indeed with Psychochemie AG, being one of those
free-floating trouble-shooters around the Cartel, working for them on a per diem basis
and spying on the side.

“Well,” Slothrop sez, “I’d sure like anything they got on L. Jamf, a-and on that Imipolex
G.”

“Gaaah—”

“Pardon me?”

“That stuff. Forget it. It’s not even our line. You ever try to develop a polymer
when there’s nothing but indole people around? With our giant parent to the north
sending in ultimatums every day? Imipolex G is the company albatross, Yank. They have
vice-presidents whose only job is to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday
to spit on old Jamf’s grave. You haven’t spent much time with the indole crowd. They’re
very elitist. They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations
of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost
up there in folds of mountain that haven’t known an unhallucinated day in the last
500 years—keepers of a tradition, aristocrats—”

“
Wait
a minute. . . .” Jamf dead? “You say Jamf’s
grave
, now?” It ought to be making more of a difference to him, except that the man was
never really alive so how can he be really—

“Up in the mountains, toward the Uetliberg.”

“You ever—”

“What?”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“Before my time. But I know that there’s a lot of data on him in the classified files
at Sandoz. It would be some job getting you what you want. . . .”

“Uh . . .”

“Five hundred.”

“Five hundred what?”

Swiss francs. Slothrop hasn’t got 500 anything, unless it’s worries. The money from
Nice is almost gone. He heads toward Semyavin’s, across the Gemüse-Brücke, deciding
he’ll walk everywhere from now on, chewing his white sausage and wondering when he’ll
see another.

“First thing you want to do,” Semyavin advises him, “is go to a pawnshop and raise
a few francs on that, ah,” pointing at the suit. Aw no, not the suit. Semyavin goes
rummaging in a back room, comes out with a bundle of workmen’s clothes. “You should
start thinking more about your visibility. Come back tomorrow, I’ll see what else
I can find.”

White zoot in a bundle under his arm, a less visible Ian Scuffling goes back outside,
down into the mediaeval afternoon of the Niederdorf, stone walls now developing like
baking bread in the failing sun, oboy oboy he can see it now: gonna turn into another
of them Tamara/Italo drills here, ’n’ then he’ll be in so deep he’ll just never get
out. . . .

At the entrance to his street, in the wells of shadow, he notes a black Rolls parked,
motor idling, its glass tinted and afternoon so dark he can’t see inside. Nice car.
First one he’s seen in a while, should be no more than a curiosity, except for

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4:
You
hide, they seek.

Zunnggg! diddilung, diddila-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta William Tell Overture here, back
in the shadows, hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass—zoom, zoom, dodging
around corners, scooting down alleys, no sound of pursuit but then it’s the quietest
engine on the road except for the King Tiger tank. . . .

Forget that Hotel Nimbus, he reckons. His feet are already starting to bother him.
He gets to the Luisenstrasse and the hockshop just before closing time, and manages
to raise a little, baloney for a day or two maybe, on the zoot. So long zoot.

This town sure closes up early. What does Slothrop do tonight for a bed? He has a
moment’s relapse into optimism: ducks in a restaurant and rings up the desk at the
Hotel Nimbus. “Ah, yes,” English English, “can you possibly tell me if the British
chap who’s been waiting in the foyer is still
there
, you know . . .”

In a minute on comes a pleasant, awkward voice with an are-you-there. Oh, so seraphic.
Slothrop funks, hangs up, stands looking at all the people at dinner staring at him—blew
it, blew it, now They know he’s on to Them. There is the usual chance his paranoia’s
just out of hand again, but the coincidences are running too close. Besides, he knows
the sound of Their calculated innocence by now, it’s part of Their style. . . .

Out again in the city: precision banks, churches, Gothic doorways drilling by . . .
he must avoid the hotel and the three cafés now, right, right. . . . The permanent
Zürchers in early-evening blue stroll by. Blue as the city twilight, deepening blue. . . .
The spies and dealers have all gone indoors. Semyavin’s place is out, the Waxwing
circle have been kind, no point bringing any heat down on them. How much weight do
the Visitors have in this town? Can Slothrop risk checking in to another hotel? Probably
not. It’s getting cold. A wind is coming in now off the lake.

He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the great world cafés, whose
specialty is not listed anywhere—indeed has never been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky,
James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was
they
all had in common: whatever they’d come to this vantage to score . . . perhaps it
had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing
of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street . . . dialectics, matrices,
archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian
blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last
hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse. . . .

Slothrop finds he has enough spare change for coffee. He goes sits inside, choosing
a seat that’ll face the entrance. Fifteen minutes and he’s getting the spy-sign from
a swarthy, curly-headed alien in a green suit a couple tables away. Another front-facer.
On his table is an old newspaper that appears to be in Spanish. It is open to a peculiar
political cartoon of a line of middle-aged men wearing dresses and wigs, inside the
police station where a cop is holding a loaf of white . . . no it’s a baby, with a
label on its diaper sez
LA
REVOLUCIÓN
 . . . oh, they’re all claiming the infant revolution as their own, all these politicians
bickering like a bunch of putative mothers, and somehow this cartoon here is supposed
to be some kind of a touchstone, this fella in the green suit, who turns out to be
an Argentine named Francisco Squalidozzi, is looking for a reaction . . . the key
passage is at the very end of the line where the great Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones
is saying, “Now I’m going to tell you, in verse, how I conceived her free from the
stain of Original Sin. . . .” It is the Uriburu revolution of 1930. The paper is fifteen
years old. There is no telling what Squalidozzi is expecting from Slothrop, but what
he gets is pure ignorance. This seems to be acceptable, and presently the Argentine
has loosened up enough to confide that he and a dozen colleagues, among them the international
eccentric Graciela Imago Portales, hijacked an early-vintage German U-boat in Mar
de Plata a few weeks ago, and have sailed it back across the Atlantic now, to seek
political asylum in Germany, as soon as the War’s over there. . . .

“You say
Germany?
You gone goofy? It’s a mess there, Jackson!”

“Not nearly the mess we left back home,” the sad Argentine replies. Long lines have
appeared next to his mouth, lines learned from living next to thousands of horses,
watching too many doomed colts and sunsets south of Rivadavia, where the true South
begins. . . . “It’s been a mess since the colonels took over. Now, with Perón on his
way . . . our last hope was Acción Argentina,”
what’s he talking about, Jesus I’m hungry
, “. . . suppressed it a month after the coup . . . now everybody waits. Attending
the street actions out of habit. No real hope. We decided to move before Perón got
another portfolio. War, most likely. He already has the
descamisados
, this will give him the Army too you see . . . it’s only a matter of time . . . we
could have gone to Uruguay, waited him out—it’s a tradition. But perhaps he will be
in for a long time. Montevideo is swarming with failed exiles, and failed hopes. . . .”

“Yeah, but Germany—that’s the last place you want to go.”

“
Pero ché, no sós argentino. . . .”
A long look away, down the engineered scars of Swiss avenues, looking for the South
he left. Not the same Argentine, Slothrop, that that Bob Eberle’s seen toasts to Tangerine
raised in ev-ry bar across, now. . . . Squalidozzi wants to say:
We of all magical precipitates out of Europe’s groaning, clouded alembic, we are the
thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses. . . . We tried to exterminate
our Indians, like you: we wanted the closed white version of reality we got—but even
into the smokiest labyrinths, the furthest stacked density of midday balcony or courtyard
and gate, the land has never let us forget. . . .
But what he asks aloud is: “Here—you look hungry. Have you eaten? I was about to go
to supper. Would you do me the honor?”

In the Kronenhalle they find a table upstairs. The evening rush is tapering off. Sausages
and fondue: Slothrop’s starving.

“In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched
as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride,
that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All
the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside.
Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are
obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw
ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that
openness:
it is terror to us. Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant
Rosas has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets,
the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel track, the
Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled
serenity . . . that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. . . .”

“But-but bobwire,” Slothrop with his mouth full of that fondue, just gobblin’ away,
“that’s
progress
—you, you can’t have open range forever, you can’t just stand in the way of progress—”
yes, he is actually going to go on for half an hour, quoting Saturday-afternoon western
movies dedicated to Property if anything is, at this foreigner who’s springing for
his meal.

Squalidozzi, taking it for mild insanity instead of rudeness, only blinks once or
twice. “In ordinary times,” he wants to explain, “the center always wins. Its power
grows with time, and that can’t be reversed, not by ordinary means. Decentralizing,
back toward anarchism, needs extraordinary times . . . this War—this incredible War—just
for the moment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that’s prevailed in
Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean.
Opened it.
”