GRAVITY RAINBOW (106 page)

house of ill repute, all its rooms swarming with soldiers, sailors, dames, tricks, winners, losers, conjurors, dealers, dopers, voyeurs, homosexuals, fetishists, spies and folks just looking for company, all talking, singing or raising hell at a noise level the house's silent walls seal off completely from the outside. Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide through the house in turbulences too gentle to feel or see. It's a floating celebration no one's thought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which victory? which war?

Springer is nowhere in sight, and from what Slothrop can gather from random questioning won't be by till later, if at all. Now this happens to be the very delivery date for that discharge they arranged sailing in with Frau Gnahb to Stralsund. And tonight, of all nights, after a week of not bothering him, the police decide to come after Slothrop. Oh yes, yes indeed NNNNNNNN Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop We Have Been Waiting For You. Of Course We Are Here. You Didn't Think We Had Just Faded Away, No, No Tyrone, We Must Hurt You Again If You Are Going To Be That Stupid, Hurt You Again And Again Yes Tyrone You Are So Hopeless So Stupid And Doomed. Are You Really Supposed To Find Anything? What If It Is Death Tyrone? What If We Don't Want You To Find Anything? If We Don't Want To Give You Your Discharge You'll Just Go On Like This Forever Won't You? Maybe We Want You Only To Keep On. You Don't Know Do You Tyrone. What Makes You Think You Can Play As Well As We Can? You Can't. You Think You're Good But You're Really Shit And We All Know It. That Is In Your Dossier. (Laughter. Humming.)

Bodine finds him sitting inside a coat closet, chewing on a velvet ear of his mask. "You look bad, Rocky. This is Solange. She's a masseuse." She is smiling, quizzical, a child brought to visit the weird pig in his cave.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

"Let me take you down to the baths," the woman's voice a soapy sponge already caressing at his troubles, "it's very quiet, restful…"

"I'll be around all night," Bodine sez. "I'll tell you if Springer shows."

"This is some kind of a plot, right?" Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile.

"Everything
is some kind of a plot, man," Bodine laughing.

"And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways," Solange illustrating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors. Which is Slothrop's first news, out loud, that the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself… that these are the els and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt, more tangled even than Boston's-and that by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he's headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom. He understands that he should not be so paranoid of either Bodine or Solange, but ride instead their kind underground awhile, see where it takes him…

Solange leads Slothrop off to the baths, and Bodine continues to search for his customer, 2? bottles of cocaine clinking and clammy against his bare stomach under his skivvy shirt. The Major isn't at any of the poker or crap games, nor attending the floor show wherein one Yolande, blonde and shining all over with baby oil, dances table to table picking up florin pieces and sovereigns, often hot from the flame of some joker's Zippo, between the prehensile lips of her cunt-nor is he drinking, nor, according to Monika, Putzi's genial, cigar-smoking, matelasse-suited madame, is he screwing. He hasn't even been by to hassle the piano player for "San Antonio Rose." It takes Bodine half an hour before colliding with the man finally, reeling out the swinging doors of a pissoir, groggy from a confrontation with the notorious Eisenkrote, known throughout the Zone as the ultimate test of manhood, before which bemedaled and brevetted Krautkillers, as well as the baddest shit-on-my-dick-or-blood-on-my-blade escapees from the grossest of Zonal stockades, all have been known to shrink, swoon, chicken out, and on occasion vomit, yes right where they stood. For it is indeed an Iron Toad, faithfully rendered, thousand-warted and some say faintly smiling, a foot long at its longest, lurking at the bottom of a rank shit-stained toilet and hooked up to the European Grid through a rheostat control rigged to deliver varying though not lethal surges of voltage and current. No one knows who sits behind the secret rheostat (some say it's the half-mythical Putzi himself), or if it isn't in fact hooked up to an automatic timer, for not everybody gets caught, really-you can piss on the Toad without anything at all happening. But you just never know. Often enough to matter, the current will be there-piranha-raid and salmon-climb up the gold glittering fall of piss, your treacherous ladder of salts and acids, bringing you back into touch with Mother Ground, the great, the planetary pool of electrons making you one with your prototype, the legendary poor drunk, too drunk to know anything, pissing on some long-ago third rail and nil-

minated to charcoal, to epileptic night, his scream not even his own but the electricity's, the amps speaking through his already shattering vessel, shattered too soon for them even to begin to say it, voice their terrible release from silence, nobody listening anyhow, some watchman poking down the track, some old man unable to sleep out for a walk, some city drifter on a bench under a million June bugs in green nimbus around the streetlight, his neck relaxing and tightening in and out of dreams and maybe it was only a cat screwing, a church bell in a high wind, a window being broken, no direction to it, not even alarming, replaced swiftly by the old, the coal-gas and Lysol, silence. And somebody else finds him next morning. Or you can find him any night at Putzi's if you're man enough to go in piss on that Toad. The Major has got off this time with only a mild jolt, and is in a self-congratulating mood.

"Ugly 'sucker tried his best," wrapping an arm about Bodine's neck, "but got his warty ol' ass handed to him tonight, damn 'f he didn't."

"Got your 'snow,' Major Marvy. Half a bottle shy, sorry, it's the best I could do."

"That's all reet, sailor. I know so many nose habits between here 'n' Wiesbaden you'd need three
ton
'n' that wouldn't last the 'suckers a day." He pays off Bodine, full price, overriding Bodine's offer to prorate for what's missing. "Call it a little lagniappe, goodbuddy, that's Duane Marvy's way o' doin' thangs.
Damn
that ol' toad's got my pecker to feelin' pretty good now. Damn 'f I wouldn't like to stick it inside one them little whores. Hey! Boats, where can I find me some
pussy
around here?"

The sailor shows him how to get downstairs to the whorehouse. They take you into a kind of private steam bath first, you can screw right there if you want, doesn't cost any extra. The madame-hey! ha, ha! looks like some kind of a dyke with that stogie in her face! raises an eyebrow at Marvy when he tells her he wants a nigger, but thinks she can get hold of one.

"It isn't the House of All Nations, but we do aim for variety," running the tortoise end of her cigar-holder down a call-sheet, "Sandra is engaged for the moment. An exhibition. In the meantime, here is our delightful Manuela, to keep you company."

Manuela is wearing only a high comb and black-lace mantilla, shadow-flowers falling to her hips, a professional smile for the fat American, who is already fumbling with uniform buttons.

"Hubba, hubba! Hey, she's pretty sunburned herself. Ain'tcha? You

got a leetle mulatto in there, a leetle Mayheecano, honey? You sabe es-panol? You sabe fucky-fucky?"

"Si," deciding tonight to be from the Levante, "I am Spanish. I from Valencia."

"Va-len-cia-a-a," sings Major Many, to the well-known tune of the same name, "Senorita, fucky-fucky, sucky-sucky sixty-ni-i-ine, la-lalala
la-lit la-h
laaa…" dancing her in a brief two-step about the grave center of the waiting madame.

Manuela doesn't feel obliged to join in. Valencia was one of the last cities to fall to Franco. She herself is really from the Asturias, which knew him first, felt his cruelty two years before the civil war even began for the rest of Spain. She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying. Marvy isn't her first, but almost her first, American. The clientele here at Putzi's is mostly British. During the War-how many camps and cities since her capture in '38?-it was German. She missed the International Brigades, shut away up in her cold green mountains and fighting hit-and-run long after the Fascists had occupied all the north-missed the flowers, children, kisses, and many tongues of Barcelona, of Valencia where she's never been, Valencia, this evening's home… Ya salimos de Espana… Pa' luchar en otros frentes, ay, Manuela, ay, Manuela…

She hangs his uniform neatly in a closet and follows her trick into heat, bright steam, the walls of the seething room invisible, feathered hairs along his legs, enormous buttocks and back beginning to come up dark with the dampness. Other souls move, sigh, groan unseen among the sheets of fog, dimensions in here under the earth meaningless-the room could be any size, an entire city's breadth, paved with birds not entirely gentle in twofold rotational symmetry, a foot-darkened yellow and blue, the only colors to its watery twilight.

"Aaahhh, hot damn," Marvy slithering fatly down, sleek with sweat, over the tiled edge into the scented water. His toenails, cut Army-square, slide under last.
"Come
on, everybody in the pool," a great happy bellow, seizing Manuela's ankle and tugging. Having taken a fall or two on these tiles, and seen a girl friend go into traction, Manuela comes along gracefully, falling hard enough astraddle, bottom hitting his stomach a loud
smack,
to hurt him, she hopes. But he only laughs again, loudly abandoned to the warmth and buoyancy and sounds encompassing-anonymous fucking, drowsiness, ease. Finds himself with a thick red hardon, and slips it without ado into the solemn girl half-hidden inside her cloud of damp black Spanish lace,

eyes anyplace but on his, aswing now through the interior fog, dreaming of home.

Well, that's all reet. He isn't fucking her eyes, is he? He'd rather not have to look at her face anyhow, all he wants is the brown skin, the shut mouth, that sweet and nigger submissiveness. She'll do anything he orders, yeah he can hold her head under the water till she drowns, he can bend her hand back, yeah, break her fingers like that cunt in Frankfurt the other week. Pistol-whip, bite till blood comes… visions go swarming, violent, less erotic than you think-more occupied with thrust, impact, penetration, and such other military values. Which is not to say he isn't enjoying himself innocently as you do. Or that Manuela doesn't find herself too, in some casual athletic way, liking the ride up and down the stubborn red shaft of Major Marvy, though her mind is on a thousand other things now, a frock of Sandra's that she covets, words to various songs, an itch below her left shoul-derblade, a tall English soldier she saw as she came through the bar around suppertime, his brown forearm, shirt rolled to the elbow, against the zinc top of the table…

Voices in the steam. Alarms, many feet clopping in shower shoes, silhouettes moving by, a gray cloudy evacuation. "What in thee hell," Major Marvy about to come, rising on his elbows distracted, squinting in several directions, rapidly getting a softoff.

"Raid," a voice going past. "MPs," shivers somebody else.

"Gaaahh!" screams Major Marvy, who has just recalled the presence of 2 1/2 ounces of cocaine in his uniform pockets. He rolls, walrus-heavy, Manuela sliding away and off his limpening nervous penis, hardly aroused but enough of a professional to feel the price includes a token
puto
and
sinverguenza
now. Scrambling up out of the water, skidding on the tiles, Duane Marvy, bringing up the rear, emerges into an ice-cold changing-room to find the last of the bathers fled, the closets stone-empty except for one multicolored velvet something or other. "Hey where's my uniform!" stomping on the floor, fists at his sides, face very red. "Oh you motherless bastards," thereupon throwing several bottles and ashtrays, breaking two windows, attacking the wall with an ornate umbrella stand, feeling better for it in his mind. He hears combat boots crashing overhead and in rooms nearby, girls screaming, a phonograph record knocked screeching into silence.

He checks out this plush or velvet rig, finds it to be a pig costume complete with mask, considers slyly that no MP would bother an innocent funseeking pig. As humorless limey voices move closer through the rooms of Putzi's, he rips frantically at silk lining and straw padding to make room for his own fat. And, struggled at last inside, whew, zipped up, mask hiding face, safe, clownish-anonymous, pushes out through bead curtains, then upstairs to the bar, only to run spang into a full division of the red-hatted 'suckers coming his way, all in step, swear to God.

"Here's our elusive swine, gentlemen," pocked face, blunt and ragged mustache, pointing a pistol right at his head, others moving up quickly. A civilian comes pushing through, spade-shape blazing dark on his smooth cheek.

"Right. Dr. Muffage is outside with the ambulance, and we'd like two of your chaps for a moment, sergeant, till we're all secure."

"Certainly, sir." Wrists weak from steam and comfort gathered skillfully behind his back before he can even get mad enough to start yelling at them-cold steel, ratcheting like a phone number being dialed late at night, with no hope in hell of any answer ever…

"Goddamn," he finally gets out, mask muffling his voice, giving it an echo that hurts his ears, "what'n thee hell's wrong with you, boy? Don't you know who I am?"

But oh-oh, waitaminute-if they've found the uniform, Marvy ID and cocaine in the same set of pockets, maybe it isn't such a hot idea to tell them his name just yet…

"Leftenant Slothrop, we presume. Come along, now."