GRAVITY RAINBOW (119 page)

But where inside Marcel is the midget Grandmaster, the little Jo-hann Allgeier? where's the pantograph, and the magnets? Nowhere.

Marcel really is a mechanical chessplayer. No fakery inside to give him any touch of humanity at all. Each of the FF is, in fact, gifted while at the same time flawed by his gift-unfit by it for human living. Myrtle Miraculous specializes in performing miracles. Stupendous feats, impossible for humans. She has lost respect for humans, they are clumsy, they fail, she does want to love them but love is the only miracle that's beyond her. Love is denied her forever. The others of her class are either homosexuals, fanatics about law 'n' order, off on strange religious excursions, or as intolerant of failure as herself, and though friends such as Mary Marvel and Wonder Woman keep inviting her to parties to meet eligible men, Myrtle knows it's no use… As for Maximilian, he has a natural sense of rhythm, which means
all
rhythms, up to and including the cosmic. So he will never be where the fathomless manhole awaits, where the safe falls from the high window shrieking like a bomb-he is a pilot through Earth's baddest minefields, if we only stay close to him, be where he is as much as we can-yet Maximilian's doom is never to go any further into danger than its dapperness, its skin-exciting first feel…

Fine crew this is, getting set to go off after the Radiant-say what? what's Slothrop's
own
gift and Fatal Flaw? Aw,
c'mon
-uh, the Radiant Hour, collecting their equipment, Myrtle zooming to and fro materializing this and that:

The Golden Gate Bridge ("How about that one?" "Uh, let's see the other one, again? with the, you know, uh…" "The Brooklyn?" "-kind of old-fashioned looking-" "The Brooklyn Bridge?" "Yeah, that's it, with the pointed… whatever they are…").

The Brooklyn Bridge ("See, for a chase-scene, Myrtle, we ought to observe proportions-" "Do tell." "Now if we were gonna be in highspeed automobiles, well, sure, we might use the Golden Gate… but for zooming through the air now, we/need something older, more intimate,
human
-").

A pair of superlatively elegant Rolls Royces ("Quit fooling, Myrtle, we already agreed, didn't we? No automobiles…").

A small plastic baby's steering wheel ("Aw all right, I know you don't respect me as a leader but listen can't we be reasonable…").

Any wonder it's hard to feel much confidence in these idiots as they go up against Pernicious Pop each day? There's no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really
made
-at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery. This is less a fighting team than nest full of snits, blues, crotchets and grudges, not a rare or

fabled bird in
the
lot. Its survival seems, after all, only a mutter of blind fortune groping through the heavy marbling of skies one Titanic-Night at a time. Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that
doesn 't
cancel out to apathy-it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives). It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come down on one side or another. Those whom the old Puritan sermons denounced as "the glozing neuters of the world" have no easy rog d to haul down, Wear-the-Pantsers, just cause you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there! Energy inside is just as real, just as binding and inescapable, as energy that shows. When's the last time you felt
intensely lukewarm?
eh? Glozing neuters are just as human as heroes and villains. In many ways they have the most grief to put up with, don't they? Why don't you, right now, wherever you are, city folks or out in the country, snuggled in quilts or riding the bus, just turn to the Glozing Neuter nearest you, even your own reflection in the mirror, and… just… sing,

How-dy neighbor, how-dy pard! Ain't it lone-ly, say ain't it hard, Passin' by so silent, day-after-day, with-out, even a smile-or, a friendly word to say? Oh, let me Tell ya bud-dy, tell ya ace, Things're fal-lin', on their face- Maybe we should stick together part o' the way, and Skies'll be bright-er some day! Now
ev
'rybody-

As the 4 suit up, voices continue singing for a while, depending how much each one happens to care-Myrtle displaying generous expanses of nifty gam, and Maximilian leering up beneath the fast-talking young tomato's skirts, drawing bewildered giggles from adolescent Marcel, who may be a bit repressed.

"Now," Slothrop with a boobish, eager-to-please smile, "time for that
Pause that Refreshes!"
And he's into the icebox before Myrtle's "Oh, Jesus" has quite finished echoing… the light from the cold wee bulb turning his face to summernight blue, Broderick and Nalline's shadow-child, their unconfessed, their monster son, who was born with hydraulic clamps for hands that know only how to reach and grab… and a heart that gurgles audibly, like a funny fatman's stomach… but look how lost, how unarrested his face is, was that 1 1/2
seconds in the glow from the folksy old icebox humming along in Kelvinator-

Bostonian dialect, Why cummawn in, T'rone, it's nice and friendly heeah in my stummick, gawt lawtsa nice things, like Mawxies, 'n' big Baby Rooths…" Walking now in among miles-down-the-sky shelves and food-mountains or food-cities of Iceboxland (but look out, it can get pretty Fascist in here, behind the candy-colored sweet stuff is ther-modynamic elitism at its clearest-bulbs can be replaced with candles and the radios fall silent, but the Grid's big function in this System is iceboxery: freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness), climbing over the celery ridges where the lettered cheese glasses loom high and glossy in the middle distance, slippin' on the butter dish, piggin' on the watermelon down to the rind, feelin' yellow and bright as you skirt the bananas, gazing down at verdigris reaches of mold across the crusted terrain of an old, no longer identifiable casserole-
bananas!
who-who's been putting bananas-

In-the-re-frig er a-tor! O no-no-no, no-no-no!

Chiquita Banana sez we shouldn't! Somethin' awful'll happen! Who would do that? It couldn't be Mom, and Hogan's in
love
with Chiquita Banana, Tyrone's come in the room plenty of times found his brother with banana label glued on his erect cock for ready reference, lost in masturbatory fantasies of nailing this cute but older Latin lady
while
she's wearing her hat,
gigantic fruit-market hat and a big saucy smile;Ay, ay, how passionate you Yankees are!… a-and it couldn't've been Pop, no Pop wouldn't, but if it (is it getting cold in here?) wasn't any of us, then (what's happening to the Spike Jones record of "Right in the Fuhrer's Face" playing back out in the living room, why's the sound fading?)… unless I did it without knowing (look around, something's squeaking on its hinges) and maybe that means I'm going crazy (what's this
brightening the bulblight,
what's-) SLAM well whoever it is that's been wantonly disregarding United Fruit's radio commercials has also just closed young Tyrone in that icebox, and now he'll have to count on Myrtle to get him out. Embarrassing as heck.

"Good thinking, boss man."

"Gee, M.M., I don't know what happened…"

"Do you ever? Grab on to my cape."

Whoosh-

"Whew. Well," sez Slothrop, "uh, are we all…?"

"That Radiant Hour's probably light-years away by now," sez Myrt, "and
you
have a snot icicle hanging outa your nose." Marcel

springs to the controls of the mobile building, keys in to Central Control a request for omnidirectional top-speed clearance, which sometimes comes through and sometimes not, depending on a secret process among the granters of permission, a process it is one of the 4's ongoing mandates to discover and impart to the world. This time they get Slow Crawl, Suburban Vectors, lowest traffic status in the Raketen-Stadt, invoked only once in recorded history, against a homosexual child-murdering Indian liked to wipe
off
his organ afterwards on the Flag and so on-"Shit!" hollers Maximilian at Slothrop, "Slow Crawl, Suburban
Vec
tors! whut th' fuck we s'posed to
do
man,
swim
or some shit?"

"Uh, Myrtle…" Slothrop approaches gold-snooded M.M. a little deferent, "uh, do you think you could…" Jesus they run through this same routine every time-doesn't Myrtle wish Sniveling Slothrop would cut this wishy-washy malarkey 'n' be a
man
fer once! She lights a cigarette, lets it droop from one corner of her mouth, juts out the opposite hip and sighs, "On the beam," exasperated already with this creep-

And
Los!
the miracle is done, they're now zipping along the corridor-streets of the Raketen-Stadt like some long-necked sea monster. Little kids boil up like ants on the webby arches of viaducts high over the city dripping stone like Spanish moss petrified in mid-collapse, kids up over the airy railings and onto the friendly back of the sleek city-cruising monster. They climb window to window, too full of grace ever to fall. Some of them, naturally, are spies: that honey-curled little cutie in the blue checked pinafore and blue knee-socks, up there under the gargoyle at the window listening in to Maximilian, who began drinking heavily as soon as the building started to move, and is now carrying on a long denunciation of Marcel under the thin scholarly disguise of trying to determine if the Gallic Genius can truly be said to have any "soul." Young lady under gargoyle is taking it all down in shorthand. These are valuable data for the psychological warfare effort.

For the first time now it becomes apparent that the 4 and the Father-conspiracy do not entirely fill their world. Their struggle is not the only, or even the ultimate one. Indeed, not only are there many
other
struggles, but there are also
spectators,
watching, as spectators will do, hundreds of thousands of them, sitting around this dingy yellow amphitheatre, seat after seat plunging down in rows and tiers endless miles, down to the great arena, brown-yellow lights, food scattered on the stone slopes up higher, broken buns, peanut shells, bones, bottles

half-filled with green or orange sweet, fires in small wind-refuges, set in angles where seats have been chiseled away, shallow depressions in the stone and a bed of cherry embers where old women are cooking hashes of the scavenged bits and crumbles and gristly lumps of food, heating them in thin frying pans of gray oil-water bubbling, as the faces of children gather around to wait for food, and in the wind the dark young man, the slippery young knife who waits for your maid outside the iron gate each Sunday, who takes her away to a park, a stranger's automobile and a shape of love you can never imagine, stands now with his hair untended in the wind, his head averted from the fire, feeling the cold, the mountain cold, at his temples and high under his jaw… while beside other fires the women gossip, one craning over now and then to look miles downward at the stage, to see if a new episode's come on yet-crowds of students running by dark as ravens, coats draped around shoulders, back out into a murky sector of seats which traditionally are never entered (being reserved for the Ancestors), their voices fading still very intense, dramatic, trying to sound good or at least acceptable. The women go on, playing cards, smoking, eating. See if you can borrow a blanket from Rose's fire over there, it's gonna be cold tonight. Hey-and a pack of Armies while you're out-and come right back, hear me? Of course the cigarette machine turns out to be Marcel, who else, in another of his clever mechanical disguises, and inside one pack is a message for one of the spectators. "I'm sure you wouldn't want Them to know about the summer of 1945. Meet me in the Male Transvestites' Toilet, level L16/39C, station Metatron, quadrant Fire, stall Malkuth. You know what time. The usual Hour. Don't be late."

What's this? What're the antagonists doing here-infiltrating their own audience? Well, they're not, really. It's somebody else's audience at the moment, and these nightly spectacles
are
an appreciable part of the darkside-hours life of the Rocket-capital. The chances for any paradox here, really, are less than you think.

Maximilian is way down in the bottom of the orchestra pit posing as the C-melody saxophone player, complete with Closet Intellectual Book,
The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots,
with illustrations by Walt Disney-screaming, hairy-nosed, front teeth in white dihedral, slant-eyed (long, elaborate
curlicued
shapes) round black licorice dog-nosed
Japs,
zoomin' through ev'ry page! and any time he's not playing that saxophone, you can be sure Maximilian will be, to the casual observer, immersed in this diffuse, though rewarding, work. Myrtle meantime is back in the candycane control room, manning the switch-

board and ready to swoop in at any time to save the others, who are sure (through their own folly if nothing else) to be in deep trouble soon. And Slothrop himself lurks in the Transvestites' Toilet, in the smoke, the crowds, the buzzing fluorescent lights, piss hot as melted butter, making notes of all the dealing going on among the stalls, bowls 'n' urinals (you've got to look butch but not
that
butch and another thing no metal showing at any
vital spots,
she'll knock off ten marks for every one she sees, and the only bonuses she gives are spelled out here: blood drawn on first try, that's an extra 20-) wondering if the cigarette-pack message got through and if they'll come in person or if Pop'll send a hit man to try for a first-round KO.

Well, there is the heart of it: the monumental yellow structure, out there in the slum-suburban night, the never-sleeping percolation of life and enterprise through its shell, Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely labyrinthine, for either category to have much hegemony any more. The nonstop revue crosses its stage, crowding and thinning, surprising and jerking tears in an endless ratchet: