Gravity's Rainbow (94 page)

Up the slippery ladder goes salty and buccaneering Slothrop, hefting his grappling
hook, letting out line, keeping an eye on that Otto—wind up, spin like a lasso, wheeee—clank.
Springer and Otto at bow and stern are grappling on at the same time, hauling in as
the vessels hit, bounce, hit . . . but the
Anubis
, softwhite, has slowed, sprawled, allowed . . . Otto gets line around chocks forward
and up around the scrimshawed railing of the yacht—then dashes aft, sneakers splashing,
ribbed footprints left behind then rained out, to repeat the lashing there. A newly-arranged
river roars, white and violent, backward between the two ships. Springer is already
up on the yacht’s main deck. Slothrop tucks Luger in belt and follows.

Springer with the classic gangster head-move gestures him up to the bridge. Slothrop
moves through groping hands, greetings in broken Russian, puffs of alcoholic breath,
around to the ladder on the port side—climbing, edging quietly onto the bridge. But
Procalowski is only sitting in the captain’s chair smoking one of Springer’s
amis
with his cap tilted back, and Springer’s just at the punch line to one of his giant
repertoire of German toilet jokes.

“What the devil, Gerhardt,” Procalowski waving a thumb. “The Red Army’s working for
you too?”

“Hello again, Antoni.” The three silver stars on each of his epaulets twinkle howdy,
but it’s no good.

“I don’t know you.” To the Springer: “All right. It’s in the engine room. Starboard
side, down behind the generator,” which is Slothrop’s cue to leave.

At the bottom of the ladder he meets Stefania coming along the passageway. “Hi. Sorry
we have to meet again this way.”

“Hello, I’m Stefania,” shuttering a fast smile as she passes, “there’s liquor next
deck up, enjoy yourself,” already gone, out in the rain. What?

Slothrop steps down through a hatchway, starts to climb down toward the engineering
spaces. Somewhere above him three bells strike, slowly, a little hollow, with a slight
echo. It’s late . . .
late.
He remembers where he is.

Just as he touches the deck, all the lights go out. Air blowers whine down to stillness.
The engine room is down one more deck. Will he have to do this in the dark?

“I can’t,” out loud.

“You can,” replies a voice close to his ear. He can feel its breath. He is smashed
expertly at the base of the neck. Light loops through the pitch dark. His left arm
has gone numb. “I’ll leave you the other one,” the voice whispers, “for climbing down
to the engine room.”

“Wait—” It feels like the pointed toe of a dancing-pump, in out of nowhere to hover
a second and stroke the soft underside of his chin—then it flicks up, slamming his
teeth shut on his tongue.

The pain is awful. He tastes blood. Sweat gathers next to his eyes.

“Move, now.” When he hesitates he is pinched on the back of the neck. Oh, it hurts . . .
he holds to the ladder, night-blind, starting to cry . . . then he thinks of the Luger,
but before he can get to it he’s been kicked viciously between hip and groin. The
gun falls to the steel deck. Slothrop is down on one knee, groping, when the shoe
descends lightly on his fingers. “You will need this hand for holding on to the ladder,
remember?
Remember?”
Then the shoe is lifted, but only to kick him under the armpit. “Up, up.”

Slothrop gropes to the next ladder, makes his stiff one-armed way down onto it. He
feels the steel hatch-opening rise around him. “Don’t try to come back up till you’ve
done what you have to do.”

“Thanatz?” Slothrop’s tongue hurts. The name comes out clumsily. Silence. “Morituri?”
No answer. Slothrop moves one foot up one rung.

“No, no. I’m still here.”

As he edges downward, shaking, rung by rung, feeling prickles back into his arm. How
can he go down? How can he go up? He tries to concentrate on the pain. His feet strike
steel plate finally. Blindness. He moves to starboard, colliding at every step with
shin-high edges, sharp projections . . .
I don’t want to . . . how can I . . . reach down behind . . . bare hands . . . what
if . . .

A sudden whine to his right—something mechanical—he jumps, breath sucking very cold
between teeth, nerves in back and arms off and on, skittering . . . he reaches a cylindrical
barrier . . . might be the generator . . . stoops and begins to— His hand closes on
stiff taffeta. He jerks it away, tries to get up, slams his head against something
sharp . . . he wants to crawl back toward the ladder, but has lost all sense of direction
now . . . he squats, turning in a circle, slowly . . .
let it end letitend. . . .
But his hands, pawing the deck, return to slippery satin.

“No.” Yes: hooks and eyes. He breaks a fingernail, trying to lose them but they follow . . .
lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger. . . .

“
No
. . . .” He rises to a crouch, moves forward into something hanging from the overhead.
Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. They smell of the sea. He turns
away, only to be lashed across the cheek by long wet hair. No matter which way he
tries to move now . . . cold nipples . . . the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume
and shit and the smell of brine . . . and the smell of . . .
of . . .

When the lights come back on, Slothrop is on his knees, breathing carefully. He knows
he will have to open his eyes. The compartment reeks now with suppressed light—with
mortal possibilities for light—as the body, in times of great sadness, will feel its
real chances for pain: real and terrible and only just under the threshold. . . .
The brown paper bundle is two inches from his knee, wedged behind the generator. But
it’s what’s dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight . . . and are
the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?

Back on the Frau’s boat, Springer is out with a bottle of champagne courtesy of the
Anubis
, untwisting the bright wires and firing the cork in a farewell salvo. Slothrop’s
hands are shaking and he spills most of his. Antoni and Stefania watch from the bridge
as the two vessels pull apart, Baltic sky visible through the backs of their eyes.
Her white hair in filaments of foam, her cheeks sculptured fog . . . cloudman, fogwife,
they dwindle, aloof, silent, back into the heart of the storm.

The Frau heads south, along the other coast of Rügen, into the straits by way of the
Bug. The storm keeps pace, as night comes down. “We’ll put in at Stralsund,” her scrawled
face streaming with lube-green shadow, yellow light, as the oil-lantern sways in the
pilot house.

Slothrop reckons he’ll get off there. Head for that Cuxhaven. “Springer, you think
you’ll have those papers for me on time?”

“I can’t guarantee anything,” sez Gerhardt von Göll.

At Stralsund, on the quai, in the lamplight and the rain, they say good-by. Frau Gnahb
kisses Slothrop, and Otto gives him a pack of Lucky Strikes. The Springer looks up
from his green notebook and nods auf Wiedersehen over his pince-nez. Slothrop walks
away, over the brow, into the wet Hafenplatz, sea-legs trying to balance rolling he’s
left behind, past booms and masts and strung tackle of derricks, past a crew on the
night shift offloading the creaking lighters into wood wagons, bowed gray horses kissing
the grassless stones . . . good-bys in his pockets warming his empty hands. . . .

• • • • • • •

Where is the Pope whose staff will bloom for me?

Her mountain vamps me back, with silks and scents,

Her oiled, athletic slaves, her languid hints

Of tortures transubstantiate to sky,

To purity of light—of bonds that sing,

And whips that trail their spectra as they fall.

At weather’s mercy now, I find her call

At every turn, at night’s foregathering.

I’ve left no sick Lisaura’s fate behind.

I made my last confession as I knelt,

Agnostic, in the radiance of his jewel . . .

Here, underneath my last and splintering wind,

No song, no lust, no memory, no guilt:

No pentacles, no cups, no holy Fool. . . .

Brigadier Pudding died back in the middle of June of a massive
E. coli
infection, whining, at the end, “Me little Mary hurts . . .” over and over. It was
just before dawn, as he had wished. Katje stayed on at “The White Visitation” for
a while, roaming the demobbed corridors, smoky and still at the ends of all the emptied
lattices of cages in the laboratory, herself part of the ash-colored web, the thickening
dust and fly-pocked windows.

One day she found the cans of film, stacked carelessly by Webley Silvernail in what
had been a music room, occupied now only by a disintegrating Wittmaier harpsichord
no one played, quills and stops broken shamefully, strings left to sharp, flat, or
corrode in the busy knives of weather pushing relentlessly into all the rooms. Pointsman
happened that day to be up in London, working out of Twelfth House, lingering at alcoholic
luncheons with his various industrialists. Was he forgetting her? Would she be free?
Was she, already?

Out of apparently nothing more than the emptiness of “The White Visitation,” she finds
a projector, threads a reel and focuses the image on a water-stained wall, next to
a landscape of some northern coomb, with daft aristocrats larking about. She sees
a white-haired girl in Pirate Prentice’s Chelsea maisonette, a face so strange that
she has recognized the mediaeval rooms before she does herself.

When did they—ah, the day Osbie Feel was processing the Amanita mushrooms. . . . Fascinated,
she stares at twenty minutes of herself in pre-Piscean fugue. What on earth did they
use it for? The answer to that one’s in the can too, and it isn’t long before she
finds it—Octopus Grigori in his tank, watching the Katje footage. Clip after clip:
flickering screen and cutaways to Octopus G., staring—each with its typewritten date,
showing the improvement in the creature’s conditioned reflex.

Spliced on at the end of all this, inexplicably, is what seems to be a screen test
of Osbie Feel, of all people. There is a sound track. Osbie is improvising a scenario
for a movie he’s written, entitled:

D
OPER’S
G
REED

“We open with Nelson Eddy in the background, singing:

Doper’s greed,

Oh, doper’s greed!

It’s the most disgustin’ thing I ever seed!

When you’re out there feelin’ fine,

It’ll turn you into swine,

If you ever get a taste of DOPER’S GREED!

“Now into town ride two trail-weary cowboys, Basil Rathbone and S. Z. (‘Cuddles’)
Sakall. At the entrance to town, barring their way, stands the Midget who played the
lead in
Freaks.
The one with the German accent. He is the town sheriff. He is wearing an enormous
gold star that nearly covers his chest. Rathbone and Sakall rein up, with uneasy smiles
on their faces.

“R
ATHBONE
: That can’t possibly be
real
, can it?

“S
AKALL
: Hoo, hoo! Of course that’s real, you wretched
eddict
, you vent ’n’ chewed too much o’ that veird
cectus
, beck down the trail. You should hev smucked that nice veed I had, I
tuld
you—

“R
ATHBONE
(with his nervous Sickly Smile): Please—I
don’t
need a Jewish mother. I know what’s real, and what isn’t real.

“(The Midget, meanwhile, is posturing in different tough-hombre attitudes, and waving
a brace of gigantic Colts about.)

“S
AKALL
: Vhen you been out on the trail—and
you know vhich
trail too, don’t you you sniveling punk—for as long as I have, you know ah real midget
sheriff from ah hallucinated vun.

“R
ATHBONE
: I hadn’t known either class existed. You must obviously have seen midget sheriffs
all over this Territory, else you would hardly have invented the category. O-or would
you? You know, you’re just dodgy enough to try anything.

“S
AKALL
: You forgot ‘You old rescal.’

“R
ATHBONE
: You old rascal.

“They laugh, draw their guns, and exchange a few playful shots. The Midget is rushing
back and forth, furious, emitting high-pitched German-accented Westernisms like ‘This
town ain’t big enough for both of us!’

“S
AKALL
: Vell, ve’re
both seeing
him. That means he’s real.

“R
ATHBONE
: Joint hallucination is not unknown in our world, podner.

“S
AKALL
: Who sez it’s
joint
hallucination? Hoo, hoo! If it vas any kind of hallucination—I’m not saying it
is
, now—it vould be peyote. Or jimson veed, mebbe. . . .

“This interesting conversation goes on for an hour and a half. There are no cuts.
The Midget is active the whole time, reacting to the many subtle and now and then
dazzling points presented. Occasionally the horses will shit in the dust. It is not
clear if the Midget knows that his reality is being discussed. Another of this film’s
artful ambiguities. Finally, Rathbone and Sakall agree that the only way to settle
the argument is to kill the Midget, who gathers their intention and runs off screaming
down the street. Sakall laughs so hard he falls off his horse into the horse trough,
and we get a final closeup of Rathbone smiling, in his uncertain way. Fade up song:

When you’re out there feelin’ fine,

It’ll turn you into swine,

If you ever get a taste of Doper’s Greed!”

There is a brief epilogue to this, with Osbie trying to point out that of course the
element of
Greed
must be worked somehow into the plot line, in order to justify the title, but the
film runs out in the middle of an “uh . . .”.