GRAVITY RAINBOW (27 page)

– Oh, God. (A pause in which he tries to take it in-then, in panic, pushes it back:) No-how can you say that-you can't feel the
mem
ory?
the tug… we're in exile, we do have a home! (Silence from the other.) Back there! Not up at the interface. Back in the CNS!

– (Quietly) It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home-only the millions of last moments… no more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

She crosses the complex room dense with its supple hides, lemon-rubbed teak, rising snarls of incense, bright optical hardware, faded Central Asian rugs in gold and scarlet, hanging open-ribbed wrought-ironwork, a long, long downstage cross, eating an orange, section by acid section, as she goes, the faille gown flowing beautifully, its elaborate sleeves falling from very broadened shoulders till tightly gathered into long button-strung cuffs all in some nameless earth tone-a hedge-green, a clay-brown, a touch of oxidation, a breath of the autumnal-the light from the street lamps comes in through philodendron stalks and fingered leaves arrested in a grasp at the last straining away of sunset, falls a tranquil yellow across the cut-steel buckles at her insteps and streaks on along the flanks and down the tall heels of her patent shoes, so polished as to seem of no color at all past such mild citrus light where it touches them, and they refuse it, as if it were a masochist's kiss. Behind her steps the carpet relaxes ceilingward, sole and heel-shapes disappearing visibly slow out of the wool pile. A single rocket explosion comes thudding across the city, from far east of here, east by southeast. The light along her shoes flows and checks like af-

ternoon traffic. She pauses, reminded of something: the military frock trembling, silk filling-yarns shivering by crowded thousands as the chilly light slides over and
off
and touching again their unprotected backs. The smells of burning musk and sandalwood, of leather and spilled whisky, thicken in the room.

And he-passive as trance, allowing her beauty: to enter him or avoid him, whatever's to be her pleasure. How shall he be other than mild receiver, filler of silences? All the radii of the room are hers, watery cellophane, crackling tangential as she turns on her heel-axis, lancing as she begins to retrace her path. Can he have loved her for nearly a decade? It's incredible. This connoisseuse of "splendid weaknesses," run not by any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope. She is frightening. Someone called her an erotic nihilist… each of them, Cherrycoke, Paul de la Nuit, even, he would imagine, young Trefoil, even-so he's heard-Margaret Quartertone, each of them
used
for the ideology of the Zero… to make Nora's great rejection that much more awesome. For… if she does love him: if all her words, this decade of rooms and conversations meant anything… if she loves him and still will deny him, on the short end of 5-to-2 deny his gift, deny what's distributed in his every cell… then…

If she loves him. He's too passive, he hasn't the nerve to reach in, as Cherrycoke has tried to… Of course Cherrycoke is odd. He laughs too often. Not aimlessly either, but
directed at
something he thinks everyone else can see too. All of us watching some wry news-reel, the beam from the projector falling milky-white, thickening with smoke from briers and cheroots, Abdullas and Woodbines… the lit profiles of military personnel and young ladies are the edges of clouds: the manly crepe of an overseas cap knifing forward into the darkened cinema, the shiny rounding of a silk leg tossed lazily toe-in between two seats in the row ahead, the keen-shadowed turbans of velvet and feathering eyelashes beneath. Among these nights' faint and lusting couples, Ronald Cherrycoke's laughing and bearing his loneliness, brittle, easily crazed, oozing gum from the cracks, a strange mac of most unstable plastic… Of all her splendid weaklings, it is he who undertakes the most perilous trips into her void, looking for a heart whose rhythms
he
will call. It must astonish her, Nora-so-heartless, Cherrycoke kneeling, stirring her silks, between his hands old history flowing in eddy-currents-scarves of lime, aqua, lavender passing, pins, brooches, opalescent scorpions (her birth sign) inside gold mountings in triskelion, shoe-buckles, broken nacre fans and theatre programs, suspender-tabs, dark, lank, pre-austerity stockings… on his unaccustomed knees, hands swimming, turning, seeking out her past in molecular traces so precarious among the flow of objects, the progress through his hands, she delighted to issue her denials, covering up his hits (close, often dead on) skillfully as if it were drawing-room comedy…

It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out… she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She
has
turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference… Any more than she can accept the truth he knows about himself. He does receive emanations, impressions… the cry inside the stone… excremental kisses stitched unseen across the yoke of an old shirt… a betrayal, an informer whose guilt will sicken one day to throat cancer, chiming like daylight through the fourchettes and quirks of a tattered Italian glove… Basher St. Blaise's angel, miles beyond designating, rising over Lubeck that Palm Sunday with the poison-green domes underneath its feet, an obsessive crossflow of red tiles rushing up and down a thousand peaked roofs as the bombers banked and dived, the Baltic already lost in a pall of incendiary smoke behind, here was the Angel: ice crystals swept hissing away from the back edges of wings perilously deep, opening as they were moved into new white abyss… For half a minute radio silence broke apart. The traffic being:

St. Biaise: Freakshow Two,
did you see that,
over.

Wingman: This is Freakshow Two-affirmative.

St. Biaise: Good.

No one else on the mission seemed to've had radio communication. After the raid, St. Biaise checked over the equipment of those who got back to base and found nothing wrong: all the crystals on frequency, the power supplies rippleless as could be expected-but others remembered how, for the few moments the visitation lasted, even static vanished from the earphones. Some may have heard a high singing, like wind among masts, shrouds, bedspring or dish antennas of winter

fleets down in the dockyards… but only Basher and his wingman saw it, droning across in front of the fiery leagues of face, the eyes, which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red as embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a strike at earth for a strike at heaven…

Group Captain St. Biaise did not include an account of this angel in his official debriefing, the W.A.A.E officer who interrogated him being known around the base as the worst sort of literal-minded dragon (she had reported Blowitt to psychiatric for his rainbowed Valkyrie over Peenemunde, and Creepham for the bright blue gremlins scattering like spiders off of his Typhoon's wings and falling gently to the woods of The Hague in little parachutes of the same color). But damn it, this was not a cloud. Unofficially, in the fortnight between the fire-raising at Lubeck and Hitler's order for "terror attacks of a retaliatory nature"-meaning the V-weapons-word of the Angel got around. Although the Group Captain seemed reluctant, Ronald Cher-rycoke was allowed to probe certain objects along on the flight. Thus the Angel was revealed.

Carroll Eventyr attempted then to reach across to Terence Overbaby, St. Blaise's wingman. Jumped by a skyful of MEs and no way out. The inputs were confusing. Peter Sachsa intimated that there were in fact many versions of the Angel which might apply. Overbaby's was not as available as certain others. There are problems with levels, and with Judgment, in the Tarot sense… This is part of the storm that sweeps now among them all, both sides of Death. It is unpleasant. On his side, Eventyr tends to feel wholly victimized, even a bit resentful. Peter Sachsa, on his, falls amazingly out of character and into nostalgia for life, the old peace, the Weimar decadence that kept him fed and moving. Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon during a street action in Neukolln, he recalls now, sentimentally, evenings of rubbed darkwood, cigar smoke, ladies in chiseled jade, panne, attar of damask roses, the latest angular pastel paintings on the walls, the latest drugs inside the many little table drawers. More than any mere "Kreis," on most nights full mandalas came to bloom: all degrees of society, all quarters of the capital, palms down on that famous blood veneer, touching only at little fingers. Sachsa's table was like a deep pool in the forest. Beneath the surface things were rolling, slipping, beginning to rise… Walter Asch ("Taurus") was vis-

ited one night by something so unusual it took three "Hieropons" (750 nig,) to bring him back, and even so he seemed reluctant to sleep. They all stood watching him, in ragged rows resembling athletic formations, Wimpe the IG-man who happened to be holding the Hiero-pon keying on Sargner, a civilian attached to General Staff, flanked by Lieutent Weissmann, recently back from South-West Africa, and the Herero aide he'd brought with him, staring, staring at them all, at everying… while behind diem ladies moved in a sibilant weave, sequins and high-albedo stockings aflash, black-and-white make-up in daintily nasal alarm, eyes wide going
oh…
Each face that watched Walter Asch was a puppet stage: each a separate routine.

… shows good hands yes droop and wrists as far up as muscle relaxant respiratory depression…

… same… same… my own face white in mirror three three-thirty four march of the Hours clock ticking room no can't go in no not enough light not enough no
aaahhh
-

… theatre nothing but Walter really look at head phony angle wants to catch light good fill-light throw a yellow gel…

(A pneumatic toy frog jumps up onto a lily pad trembling: beneath the surface lies a terror… a late captivity… but he floats now over the head of what would take him back… his eyes cannot be read…)

… mba rara m'eroto ondyoze… mbe mu munine m'oruroto ayo u n'omuinyo… (further back than this is a twisting of yarns or cordage, a giant web, a wrenching of hide, of muscles in the hard grip of something that comes to wrestle when the night is deep… and a sense, too, of visitation by the dead, afterward a sick feeling that they are not as friendly as they seemed to be… he has wakened, cried, sought explanation, but no one ever told him anything he could believe. The dead have talked with him, come and sat, shared his milk, told stories of ancestors, or of spirits from other parts of the veld-for time and space on their side have no meaning, all is together).

"There are sociologies," Edwin Treacle, his hair going all directions, attempts to light a pipeful of wretched leftovers-autumn leaves, bits of string, fag-ends, "that we haven't even begun to look into. The sociology of our own lot, for example. Psi Section, the S.P.R., the old ladies in Altrincham trying to summon up the Devil, all of us on this side, you see, are still only half the story."

"Careful with that 'we,' " Roger Mexico distracted today by a hundred things, chi-square fittings that refuse to jibe, textbooks lost, Jessica's absence…

"It makes no sense unless we also consider those who've passed

over to the other side. We do transact with them, don't we? Through specialists like Eventyr and their controls over there. But all together we form a single subculture, a psychical community, if you will."

"I won't," Mexico says dryly, "but yes I suppose someone ought to be looking into it."

"There are peoples-these Hereros for example-who carry on business every day with their ancestors. The dead are as real as the living. How can you understand them without treating both sides of the wall of death with the same scientific approach?"

And yet for Eventyr it's not the social transaction Treacle hopes it is. There's no memory on his side: no personal record. He has to read about it in the notes of others, listen to discs. Which means he has to trust the others.
That's
a complicated social setup. He must base the major part of his life on the probity of men charged with acting as interface between what he is supposed to be and himself. Eventyr knows how close he is to Sachsa on the other side, but he doesn't
remember,
and he's been brought up a Christian, a Western European, believing in the primacy of the "conscious" self and its memories, regarding all the rest as abnormal or trivial, and so he is troubled, deeply…

The transcripts are a document on Peter Sachsa as much as on the souls he puts in touch. They tell, in some detail, of his obsessive love for Leni Pokier, who was married to a young chemical engineer and also active with the K.P.D., shuttling between the 12th District and Sachsa's sittings. Each night she came he wanted to cry at the sight of her captivity. In her smudged eyes was clear hatred of a life she would not leave: a husband she didn't love, a child she had not learned to escape feeling guilty for not loving enough.

The husband Franz had a connection, too vague for Sachsa to pass across, with Army Ordnance, and so there were also ideological barriers that neither one found energy enough to climb. She attended street actions, Franz reported to the rocket facility at Reinickendorf after swallowing his tea in an early-morning room full of women he thought were sullen and waiting for him to leave: bringing their bundles of leaflets, their knapsacks stuffed with books or political newspapers, filtering through the slum courtyards of Berlin at sunrise…