GRAVITY RAINBOW (13 page)

"Ah, Crutchfield," flipping a hand, "how nice of you to show up."

"You knew I'd show up, you little rascal," shit that Whappo is such a caution. Always baiting his master in hopes of getting a leather-keen stripe or two across those dusky Afro-Scandinavian buttocks, which combine the callipygian rondure observed among the races of the Dark Continent with the taut and noble musculature of sturdy Olaf, our blond Northern cousin. But this time Crutchfield only turns back to watching the distant mountains. Whappo sulks. His top hat reflects the coming holocaust. What the white man does not have to utter, however casually, is anything like "Toro Rojo's gonna be riding in tonight." Both pardners know about
that.
The wind, bringing them down that raw Injun smell, ought to be enough for anybody. Oh God it's gonna be a shootout and bloody as hell. The wind will be blowing so hard blood will glaze on the north sides of the trees. The redskin'll have a dog with him, the only Indian dog in these whole ashen plains-the cur will mix it up with little Whappo and end hung on the meathook of an open meat stall in the dirt plaza back in Los Madres, eyes wide open, mangy coat still intact, black fleas hopping against the sunlit mortar and stone of the church wall across the square, blood darkened and crusting at the lesion in his neck where Whappo's teeth severed his jugular (and maybe some tendons, for the head dangles to one side). The hook enters in the back, between two vertebrae. Mexican ladies poke at the dead dog, and it sways reluctantly in the forenoon market-smell of platanos for frying, sweet baby carrots from the Red River Valley, trampled raw greens of many kinds, cilantro smelling like animal musk, strong white onions, pineapples fermenting in the sun, about to blow up, great mottled shelves of mountain mushroom. Slothrop moves among the bins and hung cloths, invisible, among horses and dogs, pigs, brown-uniformed militia, Indian women with babies slung in shawls, servants from the pastel houses farther up the hillside-the plaza is seething with life, and Slothrop is puzzled. Isn't there supposed to be only one of each?

A. Yes.

Q. Then one Indian girl…

A. One
pure
Indian. One
mestiza.
One
criolla.
Then: one Yaqui. One Navaho. One Apache-

Q. Wait a minute, there was only one Indian to begin with. The one that Crutchfield killed.

A. Yes.

Look on it as an optimization problem. The country can best support only one of each.

Q. Then what about all the others? Boston. London. The ones who live in cities. Are those people real, or what?

A. Some are real, and some aren't.

Q. Well are the real ones necessary? or unnecessary?

A. It depends what you have in mind.

Q. Shit, I don't have anything in mind.

A.
We
do.

For a moment, ten thousand stiffs humped under the snow in the Ardennes take on the sunny Disneyfied look of numbered babies under white wool blankets, waiting to be sent to blessed parents in places like Newton Upper Falls. It only lasts a moment. Then for another moment it seems that all the Christmas bells in the creation are about to join in chorus-that all their random pealing will be, this one time, coordinated, in harmony, present with tidings of explicit comfort, feasible joy.

But segway into the Roxbury hillside. Snow packs into the arches, the crosshatchings of his black rubber soles. His Ar'tics clink when he moves his feet. The snow in this slum darkness has the appearance of soot in a negative… it flows in and out of the night… The brick surfaces by daylight (he only sees them in very early dawn, aching inside his overshoes, looking for cabs up and down the Hill) are flaming corrosion, dense, deep, fallen upon by frosts again and again: historied in a way he hasn't noticed in Beacon Street…

In the shadows, black and white holding in a panda-pattern across his face, each of the regions a growth or mass of scar tissue, waits the connection he's traveled all this way to see. The face is as weak as a house-dog's, and its owner shrugs a lot.

Slothrop: Where is he? Why didn't he show? Who are you?

Voice: The Kid got busted. And you know me, Slothrop. Remember? I'm Never.

Slothrop (peering):
You,
Never? (A pause.)
Did
the Kenosha Kid?

"Kryptosam" is a proprietary form of stabilized tyrosine, developed by IG Farben as part of a research contract with OKW. An activating agent is included which, in the presence of some component of the seminal fluid to date [1934] unidentified, promotes conversion of the tyrosine into melanin, or skin pigment. In the absence of seminal fluid, the "Kryptosam" remains invisible. No other known reagent,

among those available to operatives in the field, will alter "Kryp-tosam" to visible melanin. It is suggested, in cryptographic applications, that a proper stimulus be included with the message which will reliably produce tumescence and ejaculation. A thorough knowledge of the addressee's psychosexual profile would seem of invaluable aid.

– prof. dr. laszlo jamf, "Kryptosam" (advertising brochure), Agfa, Berlin, 1934

The drawing, on heavy cream paper under the black-letter inscription GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE, is in pen and ink, very finely textured, somewhat after the style of von Bayros or Beardsley. The woman is a dead ringer for Scorpia Mossmoon. The room is one they talked about but never saw, a room they would have liked to live in one day, with a sunken pool, a silken tent draped from the ceiling-a De Mille set really, slender and oiled girls in attendance, a suggestion of midday light coming through from overhead, Scorpia sprawled among fat pillows wearing exactly the corselette of Belgian lace, the dark stockings and shoes he daydreamed about often enough but never-

No, of course he never told her. He never told anyone. Like every young man growing up in England, he was conditioned to get a hardon in the presence of certain fetishes, and then conditioned to feel shame about his new reflexes. Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty… how
else
would They know?

"Hush," she whispers. Her fingers stroke lightly her long olive thighs, bare breasts swell from the top of her garment. Her face is toward the ceiling, but her eyes are looking into Pirate's own, long, narrow with lust, two points of light glittering through the thick lashes… "I'll leave him. We'll come here and live. We'll never stop making love. I belong to you, I've known that for a long time…" Her tongue licks out over her little sharpened teeth. Her furry quim is at the center of all the light, and there is a taste in his mouth he would feel again…

Well, Pirate nearly doesn't make it, barely gets his cock out of his trousers before he's spurting all over the place. Enough sperm saved, though, to rub over the blank scrap enclosed with the picture. Slowly then, a revelation through the nacreous film of his seed, in Negro-brown, comes his message: put in a simple Nihilist transposition whose keywords he can almost guess. Most of it he does in his head. There is a time given, a place, a request for help. He burns the message, fallen on him from higher than Earth's atmosphere, salvaged from Earth's prime meridian, keeps the picture, hmm, and washes his

hands. His prostate is aching. There is more to this than he can see. He has no recourse, no appeal: he has to go over there and bring the operative out again. The message is tantamount to an order from the highest levels.

Far away, through the rain, comes the crack-blast of another German rocket. The third today. They hunt the sky like Wuotan and his mad army.

Pirate's own robot hands begin to search drawers and folders for necessary vouchers and forms. No sleep tonight. Probably no chance even to catch a cup or cigarette on route. Why?

In Germany, as the end draws upon us, the incessant walls read WAS TUST DU FUR DIE FRONT, FUR DEN SIEG? WAS HAST DU HEUTE FUR DEUTSCHLAND GETAN? At "The White Visitation" the walls read ice. Graffiti of ice the sunless day, glazing the darkening blood brick and terra cotta as if the house is to be preserved weatherless in some skin of clear museum plastic, an architectural document, an old-fashioned apparatus whose use is forgotten. Ice of varying thickness, wavy, blurred, a legend to be deciphered by lords of the winter, Glacists of the region, and argued over in their journals. Uphill, toward the sea, snow gathers like light at all windward edges of the ancient Abbey, its roof long ago taken at the manic whim of Henry VIII, its walls left to stand and mitigate with saintless window-hollows the salt wind, blowing as the seasons replay the grass floor in great cowlicks, green to blonde, to snow. From the Palladian house down in its resentful and twilit hollow this is the only view: the Abbey or else gentle, broadly mottled swoops of upland. View of the sea denied, though certain days and tides you can smell it, all your vile ancestry. In 1925 Reg Le Froyd, an inmate at "The White Visitation," escaped-rushed through the upper town to stand teetering at the edge of the cliff, hair and hospital garment flickering in the wind, the swaying miles of south coast, pallid chalk, jetties and promenades fading right and left into brine haze. After him came a Constable Stuggles, at the head of a curious crowd. "Don't jump!" cries the constable.

"I never thought of that," Le Froyd continuing to stare out to sea.

"Then what are you doing here. Eh?"

"Wanted to look at the sea," Le Froyd explains. "I've never seen it. I am, you know, related, by blood, to the sea."

"Oh aye," sly Stuggles edging up on him all the while, "visiting your relatives are you, how nice."

"I can hear the Lord of the Sea," cries Le Froyd, in wonder.

"Dear me, and what's his name?" Both of them wetfaced, shouting for the wind.

"Oh, I don't know," yells Le Froyd, "what would be a good name?"

"Bert," suggests the constable, trying to remember if it's right hand grasps left arm above elbow or left hand grasps…

Le Froyd turns, and for the first time sees the man, and the crowd. His eyes grow round and mild. "Bert is fine," he says, and steps back into the void.

That's all the townsfolk of Ick Regis had from "The White Visitation" in the way of relief-from summers of staring at the pink or sun-freckled overflow from Brighton, Flotsam and Jetsam casting each day of wireless history into song, sunsets on the promenade, lens openings forever changing for the sea light, blown now brisk, now sedate about the sky, aspirins for sleep-only Le Froyd's leap, that single entertainment, up till the outbreak of this war.

At the defeat of Poland, ministerial motorcades were suddenly observed at all hours of the night, putting in at "The White Visitation," silent as sloops, exhausts well muffled-chromeless black machinery that shone if there were starlight, and otherwise enjoyed the camouflage of a face about to be remembered, but through the act of memory fading too far… Then at the fall of Paris, a radio transmitting station was set up on the cliff, antennas aimed at the Continent, themselves heavily guarded and their landlines back mysteriously over the downs to the house patrolled night and day by dogs specially betrayed, belted, starved into reflex leaps to kill, at any human approach. Had one of the Very High gone higher-that is, dotty? Was Our Side seeking to demoralize the German Beast by broadcasting to him random thoughts of the mad, naming for him, also in the tradition of Constable Stuggles that famous day, the deep, the scarcely seen? The answer is yes, all of the above, and more.

Ask them at "The White Visitation" about the master plan of the BBC's eloquent Myron Grunton, whose melted-toffee voice has been finding its way for years out the fraying rust boucle of the wireless speakers and into English dreams, foggy old heads, children at the edges of attention… He's had to keep putting his plan off, at first only a voice alone, lacking the data he really needed, no support, trying to get at the German soul from whatever came to hand, P/W interrogations, Foreign Office Handbooks, the brothers Grimm, tourist

memories of his own (young sleepless Dawes-era flashes, vineyards sunlit very green bearding the south valley-slopes of the Rhine, at night in the smoke and worsted cabarets of the capital long frilled suspenders like rows of carnations, silk stockings highlighted each in one long fine crosshatching of light…). But at last the Americans came in, and the arrangement known as SHAEF, and an amazing amount of money.

The scheme is called Operation Black Wing. My what a careful construction, five years in the making. No one could claim it all as his own, not even Grunton. It was General Eisenhower who laid down the controlling guideline, the "strategy of truth" idea. Something "real," Ike insisted on: a hook on the war's pocked execution-wall to hang the story from. Pirate Prentice of the S.O.E. came back with the first hard intelligence that there were indeed in Germany real Africans, Hereros, ex-colonials from South-West Africa, somehow active in the secret-weapons program. Myron Grunton, inspired, produced on the air one night completely ad lib the passage that found its way into the first Black Wing directive: "Germany once treated its Africans like a stern but loving stepfather, chastising them when necessary, often with death. Remember? But that was far away in Sudwest, and since then a generation has gone by. Now the Herero lives in his stepfather's house. Perhaps you, listening, have seen him. Now he stays up past the curfews, and watches his stepfather while he sleeps, invisible, protected by the night which is his own colour. What are they all thinking? Where are the Hereros tonight? What are they
do
ing,
this instant, your dark, secret children?" And Black Wing has even found an American, a Lieutenant Slothrop, willing to go under light narcosis to help illuminate
racial
problems in his own country. An invaluable extra dimension. Toward the end, as more foreign morale data began to come back-Yank pollsters with clipboards and squeaky new shoe-pacs or galoshes visiting snow-softened liberated ruins to root out the truffles of truth created, as ancients surmised, during storm, in the instant of lightning blast-a contact in American PWD was able to bootleg copies and make them available to "The White Visitation." No one is sure who suggested the name "Schwarzkommando." Myron Grunton had favored "Wutende Heer," that company of spirits who ride the heaths of the sky in furious hunt, with great Wuotan at their head-but Myron agreed that was more a northern myth. Effectiveness in Bavaria might be less than optimum.