Gravity's Rainbow (82 page)

“Antoni.” She has brought Slothrop to an enormous figure in Polish cavalry fatigues
and with a lot of maniacal teeth.

“American?” pumping Slothrop’s hand. “Bravo. You nearly complete the set. We are the
ship of all nations now. We’ve even got a Japanese on board. An ex-liaison man from
Berlin who didn’t quite get out by way of Russia. You’ll find a bar on the next deck.
Anything wandering around”—hugging Stefania to him—��except this one, is fair game.”

Slothrop salutes, gathers they would like to be alone, and finds the ladder to the
bar. The bar is hung with festive garlands of flowers and light bulbs, and crowded
with dozens of elegantly-decked guests, who have just now, with the band accompanying,
broken into this up-tempo song:

W
ELCOME
A
BOARD
!

Welcome aboard, gee, it’s a fabulous or-gy

That you just dropped in on, my friend—

We can’t recall just how it star-ted,

But there’s only one way it can end!

The behavior is bestial, hardly Marie-Celestial,

But you’ll fit right in with the crowd,

If you jettison all of those prob-lems,

And keep it hysterically loud!

There are mo-thers, with their lo-vers,

Stealing rot-ters, from their daught-ers,

Big erec-tions, predilec-tions

That you wouldn’t believe,

So put your brain on your sleeve,

And come a-

      board the
Titanic
, things’ll really be manic,

Folks’ll panic the second that sunken
iceberg
is knocked,

Naughty ’n’ noisy, and very Walpurgisnacht,

That’s how the party will end,

So—welcome aboard, welcome aboard, my friend!

Well here’s couples moaning together in the lifeboats, a drunk’s gone to sleep in
the awning over Slothrop’s head, fat fellows in white gloves with pink magnolias in
their hair are dancing tummy-to-tummy and murmuring together in Wendish. Hands grope
down inside satin gowns. Waiters with brown skins and doe eyes circulate with trays
on which you are likely to find any number of substances and paraphernalia. The band
is playing a medley of American fox-trots. The Baron de Mallakastra sifts a sinister
white powder into the highball of Mme. Sztup. It is the same old shit that was going
on back at Raoul de la Perlimpinpin’s place, and for all Slothrop knows it’s the same
party.

He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but there is a density of orgy-goers
around them that keeps him at a distance. He knows he’s vulnerable, more than he should
be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it’s just as well, because that Bianca’s
a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk
stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven
with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny
lobes . . . help, help. Why do these things have to keep coming down on him? He can
see the obit now in
Time
magazine—Died, Rocketman, pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust.

The woman who tried to chop Slothrop down with the cleaver is now seated on a bitt,
holding a half-liter of some liquid which has already seeped into and begun to darken
the orchid garnishing it. She is telling everybody a story about Margherita. Her hair
has been combed or styled in a way that makes it look like a certain cut of meat.
Slothrop’s drink, nominally Irish whisky and water, arrives and he moves in to listen.

“. . . her Neptune is afflicted. Whose isn’t? some will ask. Ah. But as residents
on
this
planet, usually. Greta lived, most of the time,
on
Neptune—her affliction was more direct, purer, clearer than we know it here.

“She found Oneirine on a day when her outpost in England, the usual connection for
Chlordyne, failed. Beside the Thames, as geraniums of light floated in the sky too
slow to tell—brass light, tanned-skin and mellow peach light, stylized blooms being
drafted on and on among the clouds, to fade here, to regenerate there—as this happened
to the day’s light, he fell. A fall of hours, less extravagant than Lucifer’s, but
in the same way part of a deliberate pattern. Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each
plot carries its signature. Some are God’s, some masquerade as God’s. This is a very
advanced kind of forgery. But still there’s the same meanness and mortality to it
as a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The members have names, like the
Archangels. More or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken,
and the names learned. But those names are not magic. That’s the key, that’s the difference.
Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention,
they do not work.

“So he fell from their grace. So there was no Chlordyne. So she happened to meet V-Mann
Wimpe in the street, in Berlin, under a theatre marquee whose sentient bulbs may have
looked on, a picturesque array of extras, witnesses to grave and historic encounters.
So she had come to Oneirine, and the face of her afflicted home planet was rearranged
in the instant.”

Oneirine Jamf Imipolex A4. . . .

“That silly bitch,” observes a voice at Slothrop’s elbow, “tells it worse every time.”

“Beg pardon?” Slothrop looks around and finds Miklos Thanatz, full beard, eyebrows
feathering out like trailing edges of hawks’ wings, drinking absinthe out of a souvenir
stein on which, in colors made ghastly by the carnival lights on deck, bony and giggling
Death is about to surprise two lovers in bed.

There is no problem steering him onto the subject of the Rocket—“I think of the A4,”
sez he, “as a baby Jesus, with endless committees of Herods out to destroy it in infancy—Prussians,
some of whom in their innermost hearts still felt artillery to be a dangerous innovation.
If you’d been out there . . . inside the first minute, you saw, you grew docile under
its . . . it really did possess a Max Weber charisma . . . some joyful—and
deeply
irrational—force the State bureaucracy could never routinize, against which it could
not prevail . . . they did resist it, but they also allowed it to happen. We can’t
imagine anyone
choosing
a role like that. But every year, somehow, their numbers grow.”

But the tour with General Kammler’s rocketeers is what Slothrop, perversely, wants—wants?—to
know about, “Well I’ve been to that Nordhausen, sure, seen the bits and pieces. But
never a fully-assembled A4. That must really be something, huh?”

Thanatz is holding out his stein for a refill. The waiter, deadpan, dribbles water
down a spoon to turn the absinthe milky green while Thanatz caresses his buttocks,
then moves away. It is not clear if Thanatz has been thinking about his answer. “Yes,
fueled, alive, ready for firing . . . fifty feet high, trembling . . . and then the
fantastic, virile roar. Your ears nearly burst. Cruel, hard, thrusting into the virgin-blue
robes of the sky, my friend. Oh, so phallic. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Uh . . .”

“Hmm, ja, you would have got on with them out at the batteries, they were sedate,
like you. More studious than your infantry or Panzer types, attentive to the point
of fanaticism. Oh, with notable exceptions of course. One lives for notable exceptions. . . .
There was a boy.” Drunk reminiscence? Is he faking this? “His name was Gottfried.
God’s peace, which I trust he’s found. For us I hold no such hope. We are weighed
in the balance and found wanting, and the Butcher has had His thumb in the scales . . .
you think I’m jaded. So did I, until that terrible week. It was a time of dissolution,
falling back across the Niedersächsisch oil fields. Then I understood I was but a
dewy child. The battery commander had become a screaming maniac. He called himself
‘Blicero.’ He’d begun to talk the way the captain in
Wozzeck
sings, his voice breaking suddenly up into the higher registers of hysteria. Things
were falling apart, and he reverted to some ancestral version of himself, screamed
at the sky, sat hours in a rigid trance, with his eyes rolled clear up into his head.
Breaking without warning into that ungodly coloratura. White blank ovals, the eyes
of a statue, with the gray rain behind them. He had left 1945, wired his nerves back
into the pre-Christian earth we fled across, into the Urstoff of the primitive German,
God’s poorest and most panicked creature. You and I perhaps have become over the generations
so Christianized, so enfeebled by Gesellschaft and our obligation to its celebrated
‘Contract,’ which never did exist, that we, even we, are appalled by reversions like
that. But deep, out of its silence, the Urstoff wakes, and sings . . . and on the
last day . . . it is shameful . . . through that whole terrible day, I had an erection . . .
don’t judge me . . . it was out of my control . . .
everything
was out of control—”

About here they are interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, playing stage mother and
reluctant child. Whispers to the bandleader, fun-seekers crowding eagerly around a
cleared space where Bianca now stands pouting, her little red frock halfway up her
slender thighs, with black lace petticoats peeping from beneath the hem, surely it’s
going to be something sophisticated, bigcity, and wicked, but what’s she doing with
her finger posed aside of one dimpled cheek like this—at which point comes the band’s
intro, and pre-vomit saliva begins to gush into Slothrop’s mouth, along with a horrible
doubt into his brain about how he is going to make it through the next few minutes.

Not only is her song “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” but she is also now commencing,
without a trace of shame, to
grunt
her way through it, in perfect mimickry of young Shirley Temple—each straining baby-pig
inflection, each curl-toss, unmotivated smile, and stumbling toe-tap . . . her delicate
bare arms have begun to grow fatter, her frock shorter—is somebody fooling with the
lights? But the billowings of asexual child-fat have not changed her eyes: they remain
as they were, mocking, dark, her own. . . .

Much applause and alcoholic bravo-ing when it’s finally over. Thanatz abstains, fatherly
head wagging, great eyebrows in a frown. “She’s never going to be a woman if this
goes on. . . .”

“And
now
, liebling,” Margherita with a rare, and somewhat phony, smile, “let’s hear ‘Animal
Crackers in My Soup’!”

“‘Super Animals in My Crack,’” hollers a humorist from the crowd.

“No,” groans the child.

“Bianca—”

“You bitch,” spike heel ringing on the steel deck. It’s an act. “Haven’t you humiliated
me enough?”

“Not nearly enough,” pouncing on her daughter, grabbing her by the hair and shaking
her. The little girl has fallen to her knees, struggling, trying to get away.

“Oh, delightful,” cries the meat-cleaver lady, “Greta’s going to punish her.”

“How
I’d
like to,” murmurs a striking mulatto girl in a strapless gown, pushing forward to
watch, tapping Slothrop’s cheek with her jeweled cigarette holder as satin haunches
whisper across his thigh. Someone has provided Margherita with a steel ruler and an
ebony Empire chair. She drags Bianca across her lap, pushing up frock and petticoats,
yanking down white lace knickers. Beautiful little-girl buttocks rise like moons.
The tender crevice tightens and relaxes, suspender straps shift and stretch as Bianca
kicks her legs, silk stockings squeak together, erotic and audible now that the group
have fallen silent and found the medium of touch, hands reaching out to breasts and
crotches, Adam’s apples bobbing, tongues licking lips . . . where’s the old masochist
and monument Slothrop knew back in Berlin? It’s as if Greta is now releasing all the
pain she’s stored up over the past weeks onto her child’s naked bottom, the skin so
finely grained that white centimeter markings and numerals are being left in mirror-image
against the red stripes with each blow, crisscrossing, building up a skew matrix of
pain on Bianca’s flesh. Tears go streaming down her inverted and reddening face, mixing
with mascara, dripping onto the pale lizard surfaces of her mother’s shoes . . . her
hair has loosened and spills to the deck, dark, salted with the string of little seed
pearls. The mulatto girl has backed up against Slothrop, reaching behind to fondle
his erection, which has nothing between it and the outside but somebody’s loosely-pleated
tuxedo trousers. Everyone is kind of aroused, Thanatz is sitting up on the bar having
his own as yet unsheathed penis mouthed by one of the white-gloved Wends. Two of the
waiters kneel on deck lapping at the juicy genitals of a blonde in a wine velvet frock,
who meantime is licking ardently the tall and shiny French heels of an elderly lady
in lemon organza busy fastening felt-lined silver manacles to the wrists of her escort,
a major of the Yugoslav artillery in dress uniform, who kneels with nose and tongue
well between the bruised buttocks of a long-legged ballerina from Paris, holding up
her silk skirt for him with docile fingertips while her companion, a tall Swiss divorcée
in tight-laced leather corselette and black Russian boots, undoes the top of her friend’s
gown and skillfully begins to lash at her bared breasts with the stems of half a dozen
roses, red as the beads of blood which spring up and soon are shaking off the ends
of her stiff nipples to splash into the eager mouth of another Wend who’s being jerked
off by a retired Dutch banker sitting on the deck, shoes and socks just removed by
two adorable schoolgirls, twin sisters in fact, in identical dresses of flowered voile,
with each of the banker’s big toes inserted now into a downy little furrow as they
lie forward along his legs kissing his shaggy stomach, pretty twin bottoms arched
to receive in their anal openings the cocks of the two waiters who have but lately
been, if you recall, eating that juicy blonde in that velvet dress back down the Oder
River a ways. . . .

As for Slothrop, he ends up coming between the round shuddering tits of a Viennese
girl with hair the color of a lioness’s pelt and emerald eyes with lashes thick as
fur, his sperm surging out into the hollow of her arched throat and among all the
diamonds of her necklace, burning agelessly through the haze of his seed—and it
feels
, at least, like everybody came together, though how could that be? He does notice
that the only person not connected, aside from Antoni and Stefania, seems to be the
Jap liaison man, who’s been sitting alone, one deck up, watching. Not masturbating
or anything, just watching, watching the river, the night . . . well, they’re pretty
inscrutable, you know, those Japs.