GRAVITY RAINBOW (25 page)

You sat bolt upright in bed, your heart pounding in fright. You waited for it to repeat, and became aware of the many bombers in the sky. Another knock. It was Thomas Gwenhidwy, come down all the way from London, with the news about poor Spectro. You slept through the loud squadrons roaring without letup, but Gwenhidwy's small, reluctant tap woke you. Something like what happens on the cortex of Dog during the "paradoxical" phase.

Now ghosts crowd beneath the eaves. Stretched among snowy soot chimneys, booming over air-shafts, too tenuous themselves for sound, dry now forever in this wet gusting, stretched and never breaking, whipped in glassy French-curved chase across the rooftops, along the silver downs, skimming where the sea combs freezing in to shore. They gather, thicker as the days pass, English ghosts, so many jostling in the nights, memories unloosening into the winter, seeds that will never take hold, so lost, now only an every-so-often word, a clue for the living-"Foxes," calls Spectro
_?
across astral spaces, the word in-

tended for Mr. Pointsman who is not present, who won't be told because the few Psi Section who're there to hear it get cryptic debris of this sort every sitting-if recorded at all it finds its way into Milton Gloaming's word-counting project-"Foxes," a buzzing echo on the afternoon, Carroll Eventyr, "The White Visitation" 's resident medium, curls thickly tightened across his head, speaking the word "Foxes," out of very red, thin lips… half of St. Veronica's hospital in the morning smashed roofless as the old Ick Regis Abbey, powdered as the snow, and poor Spectro picked off, lighted cubbyhole and dark ward subsumed in the blast and he never hearing the approach, the sound too late, after the blast, the rocket's ghost calling to ghosts it newly made. Then silence. Another "event" for Roger Mexico, a round-headed pin to be stuck in his map, a square graduating from two up to three hits, helping fill out the threes prediction, which lately's being lagged behind…

A pin? not even that, a pinhole in paper that someday will be taken down, when the rockets have stopped their falling, or when the young statistician chooses to end his count, paper to be hauled away by the charwomen, torn up, burned… Pointsman alone, sneezing helplessly in his dimming bureau, the barking from the kennels flat now and diminished by the cold, shaking his head
no…
inside me, in my memory… more than an "event"… our common mortality… these tragic days… But by now he is shivering, allowing himself to stare across his office space at the Book, to remind himself that of an original seven there are now only two owners left, himself and Thomas Gwenhidwy tending his poor out past Stepney. The five ghosts are strung in clear escalation: Pumm in a jeep accident, Easterling taken early in a raid by the Luftwaffe, Dromond by German artillery on Shellfire Corner, Lamplighter by a flying bomb, and now Kevin Spectro… auto, bomb, gun, V-l, and now V-2, and Pointsman has no sense but terror's, all his skin aching, for the mounting sophistication of this, for the dialectic it seems to imply…

"Ah, yes indeed. The mummy's curse, you idiot. Christ, Christ, I'm ready for D Wing."

Now D Wing is "The White Visitation" 's cover, still housing a few genuine patients. Few of the PISCES people go near it. The skeleton of regular hospital staff have their own canteen, W.C.s, sleeping quarters, offices, carrying on as under the old peace, suffering the Other Lot in their midst. Just as, for their part, PISCES staff suffer the garden or peacetime madness of D Wing, only rarely finding opportunity to swap information on therapies or symptoms. Yes, one would

expect more of a link. Hysteria is, after all, is it not, hysteria. Well, no, come to find out, it's not. How does one feel legitimist and easy for very long about the transition? From conspiracies so mild, so domestic, from the serpent coiled in the teacup, the hand's paralysis or eye's withdrawal at words,
words
that could frighten that much, to the sort of thing Spectro found every day in his ward, extinguished now… to what Pointsman finds in Dogs Piotr, Natasha, Nikolai, Sergei, Katinka-or Pavel Sergevich, Varvara Nikolaevna, and then their children, and-When it can be read so clearly in the faces of the physicians… Gwenhidwy inside his fluffy beard never as impassive as he might have wished, Spectro hurrying away with a syringe for his Fox, when nothing can really stop the Abreaction of the Lord of the Night unless the Blitz stops, rockets dismande, the entire film runs backward: faired skin back to sheet steel back to pigs to white incandescence to ore, to Earth. But the reality is not reversible. Each firebloom, followed by blast then by sound of arrival, is a mockery (how can it not be deliberate?) of the reversible process: with each one the Lord further legitimizes his State, and we who cannot find him, even to see, come to think of death no more often, really, than before… and, with no warning when they will come, and no way to bring them down, pretend to carry on as in Blitzless times. When it does happen, we are content to call it "chance." Or we have been persuaded. There do exist levels where chance is hardly recognized at all. But to the likes of employees such as Roger Mexico it is music, not without its majesty, this power series

, terms numbered according to

rocketfalls per square, the Poisson dispensation ruling not only these annihilations no man can run from, but also cavalry accidents, blood counts, radioactive decay, number of wars per year…

Pointsman stands by a window, his own vaguely reflected face blown through with the driven snow outside in the darkening day. Far across the downs cries a train whistle, grainy as late fog: a cockcrow-. -.-, a long whistle, another crow, fire at trackside, a

rocket, another rocket, in the woods or valley…

Well… Why
not
renounce the Book then Ned, give it up that's all, the obsolescent data, the Master's isolated moments of poetry, it's paper that's all, you don't need it, the Book and its terrible curse… before it's too late… Yes, recant, grovel, oh fabulous-but before whom? Who's listening? But he has crossed back to the desk and actually laid hands on it…

"Ass. Superstitious
ass."
Wandering, empty-headed… these episodes are coming more often now. His decline, creeping on him like the cold. Pumm, Easterling, Dromond, Lamplighter, Spectro… what should he've done then, gone down to Psi Section, asked Eventyr to get up a seance, try to get on to one of them at least… perhaps… yes… What holds him back? "Have I," he whispers against the glass, the aspirate, the later plosives clouding the cold pane in fans of breath, warm and disconsolate breath, "so much pride?" One cannot,
he
cannot walk down that particular corridor, cannot even suggest, no not even to Mexico, how he misses them… though he hardly knew Dromond, or Easterling… but… misses Allen Lamplighter, who would bet on anything, you know, on dogs, thunderstorms, tram numbers, on street-corner wind and a likely skirt, on how far a given doodle would get, perhaps… oh God… even the one that fell on him… Pumm's arranger-style piano and drunken baritone, his adventuring among the nurses… Spectro… Why
can't
he ask? When there are a hundred ways to put it…

I should… should have… There are, in his history, so many of these unmade moves, so many "should haves"-should have married her, let her father steer him, should have stayed in Harley Street, been kinder, smiled more at strangers, even smiled back this afternoon at Maudie Chilkes… why couldn't he? A silly bleeding smile, why not, what inhibits, what snarl of the mosaic? Pretty, amber eyes behind those government spectacles… Women avoid him. He knows in a general way what it is: he's creepy. He's even aware, usually, of the times when he's
being
creepy-it's a certain set to his face-muscles, a tendency to sweat… but he can't seem to
do
anything about it, can't ever concentrate for long enough, they distract him so-and next thing he knows he's back to radiating the old creepiness again… and their response to it is predictable, they run uttering screams only they, and he, can hear. Oh but how he'd like someday to give them something
really to scream about…

Here's an erection stirring, he'll masturbate himself to sleep again tonight. A joyless constant, an institution in his life. But goading him, just before the bright peak, what images will come whirling in? Why, the turrets and blue waters, the sails and churchtops of Stockholm- the yellow telegram, the face of a tall, cognizant, and beautiful woman turned to watch him as he passes in the ceremonial limousine, a woman who will later, hardly by chance, visit him in his suite at the Grand Hotel… it's not
all
ruby nipples and black lace cami-knickers, you know. There are hushed entrances into rooms that smell of paper,

satellite votes on this Committee or that, the Chairs, the Prizes… what could compare!
Later, -when you're older, you'll know,
they said. Yes and it grows upon him, each war year equal to a dozen of peacetime, oh my, how right they were.

As his luck has always known, his subcortical, brute luck, his gift of survival while other and better men are snatched away into Death, here's the door, one he's imagined so often in lonely Thesean brush-ings down his polished corridors of years: an exit out of the orthodox-Pavlovian, showing him vistas of Norrmalm, Sodermalm, Deer Park and Old City…

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living… and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been now losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry…

Kevin Spectro did not differentiate as much as he between Outside and Inside. He saw the cortex as an interface organ, mediating between the two,
but part of them both.
"When you've looked at how it really is," he asked once, "how can we, any of us, be separate?" He is my Pierre Janet, Pointsman thought…

Soon, by the dialectic of the Book, Pointsman will be alone, in a black field lapsing to isotropy, to the zero, waiting to be last to go… Will there be time? He
has
to survive… to try for the Prize, not for his own glory, no-but to keep a promise, to the human field of seven he once was, the ones who didn't make it… Here's a medium shot, himself backlit, alone at the high window in the Grand Hotel, whisky glass tipped at the bright subarctic sky and
here's to you then, chaps, it'll
be all of us up there onstage tomorrow, Ned Pointsman only happened to survive that's all…
TO STOCKHOLM his banner and cry, and after Stockholm a blur, a long golden twilight…

Oh yes once you know, he did believe in a Minotaur waiting for him: used to dream himself rushing into the last room, burnished sword at the ready, screaming like a Commando, letting it all out at last-some true marvelous peaking of life inside him for the first and last time, as the face turned his way, ancient, weary, seeing none of Pointsman's humanity, ready only to assume him in another long-routinized nudge of horn, flip of hoof (but this time there would be struggle, Minotaur blood the fucking beast, cries from far inside himself whose manliness and violence surprise him)… This was the dream. The settings, the face changed, little of it past the structure

survived the first cup of coffee and flat beige Benzedrine pill. It might be a vast lorry-park just at dawn, the pavement newly hosed, mottled in grease-browns, the hooded olive trucks standing each with a secret, each waiting… but he knows that inside one of these… and at last, sifting among them, finds it, the identifying code beyond voicing, climbs up into the back, under the canvas, waits in the dust and brown light, until through the cloudy oblong of the cab window a face, a face
he knows
begins to turn… but the underlying structure is the turning face, the meeting of eyes… stalking Reichssieger von Thanatz Alpdrucken, that most elusive of Nazi hounds, champion Weimaraner for 1941, bearing studbook number 416832 tattooed inside his ear along through a Londonized Germany, his liver-gray shape receding, loping at twilit canalsides strewn with debris of war, rocket blasts each time missing them, their chase preserved, a plate etched in firebursts, the map of a sacrificial city, of a cortex human and canine, the dog's ear-leather mildly aswing, top of his skull brightly reflecting the winter clouds, into a shelter lying steel-clad miles below the city, an opera of Balkan intrigue, in whose hermetic safety, among whose clusters of blue dissonance unperiodically stressed he's unable to escape completely because of how always the Reichssieger persists, leading, serene, uncancelable, and to the literal pursuit of whom he thus returns, must return time and again in a fever-rondo, until at last they are on some hillside at the end of a long afternoon of dispatches from Armageddon, among scarlet banks of bougainvillea, golden pathways where dust is rising, pillars of smoke far away over the spidery city they've crossed, voices in the air telling of South America burned to cinders, the sky over New York glowing purple with the new all-sovereign death-ray, and here at last is where the gray dog can turn and the amber eyes gaze into Ned Pointsman's own…