GRAVITY RAINBOW (30 page)

Gallows humor. A damned parlor game. Smaragd cannot really believe in any of this, Smaragd the technician and manager. He may only want signs, omens, confirmations of what's already in being, something to giggle over among the Herrenklub-"We even have the Jew's blessing!" Whatever comes through the medium tonight they will warp, they will edit, into a blessing. It is contempt of a rare order.

Leni finds a couch in a quiet corner of a room full of Chinese ivory and silk hangings, lies on it, one calf dangling, and tries to relax. Franz now will be home from the rocket-field, blinking under the bulb as Frau Silberschlag next door delivers Leni's last message. Messages tonight, borne on the lights of Berlin… neon, incandescent, stellar… messages weave into a net of information that no one can escape…

"The path is clear," a voice moving Sachsa's lips and rigid white throat. "You are constrained, over there, to follow it in time, one step after another. But here it's possible to see the whole shape at once- not for me, I'm not that far along-but many know it as a clear presence… 'shape' isn't really the right word… Let me be honest with you. I'm finding it harder to put myself in your shoes. Problems you may be having, even those of global implication, seem to many of us here only trivial side-trips. You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.

"All right. Mauve: that's in the pattern. The invention of mauve, the coming to your level of the color mauve. Are you listening, Generaldirektor?"

"I am listening, Herr Rathenau," replies Smaragd of IG Farben.

"Tyrian purple, alizarin and indigo, other coal-tar dyes are here, but the important one is mauve. William Perkin discovered it in England, but he was trained by Hofmann, who was trained by Liebig. There is a succession involved. If it is karmic it's only in a very limited sense… another Englishman, Herbert Canister, and the generation of chemists he trained… Then the discovery of Oneirine. Ask your man Wimpe. He is the expert on cyclized benzylisoquinilines. Look into the clinical effects of the drug. I don't know. It seems that you might look in that direction. It converges with the mauve-Perkin-Canister line. But all I have is the molecule, the sketch… Methoneirine, as the sulfate. Not in Germany, but in the United States. There is a link to the United States. A link to Russia. Why do you think von Maltzan and I saw the Rapallo treaty through? It was necessary to move to the east. Wimpe can tell you. Wimpe, the V-Mann, was always there. Why do you think we wanted Krupp to sell them agricultural machinery so badly? It was also part of the process. At the time I didn't understand it as clearly as I do now. But I knew what I had to do.

"Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet. The interface between coal and steel is coal-tar. Imagine coal, down in the earth, dead black, no light, the very substance of death. Death ancient, prehistoric, species
we will never see again.
Growing older, blacker, deeper, in layers of perpetual night. Above ground, the steel rolls out fiery, bright. But to make steel, the coal tars, darker and heavier, must be taken from the original coal. Earth's excrement, purged out for the ennoblement of shining steel. Passed over.

"We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed over the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth's light from its grave miles and aeons below. There is the other meaning… the succession… I can't see that far yet…

"But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not resurrection. I mean your IG, Generaldirektor."

"
'Our
IG, I should have thought," replies Smaragd with more than the usual ice and stiffness.

"That's for you to work out. If you prefer to call this a liaison, do. I am here for as long as you need me. You don't have to listen. You think you'd rather hear about what you call 'life': the growing, organic Kartell. But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion-even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs"- a bit of a murmur around the table at this-"as you all must know. The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows

denser, and overlaid with more strata-epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator.

"These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth-I know I presume-you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules-it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers…

"You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?

"You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go…"

A silence, which prolongs itself. There is some shifting in the seats around the table, but the sets of little fingers stay in touch.

"Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?" It is Heinz Rip-penstoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. "Is God really Jewish?"

Pumm, Easterling, Dromond, Lamplighter, Spectro are stars on the doctor's holiday tree. Shining down on this holiest of nights. Each is a cold announcement of dead ends, suns that will refuse to stand, but flee south, ever south, leaving us to north-without-end. But Kevin Spectro is brightest, most distant of all. And the crowds they swarm in Knightsbridge, and the wireless carols drone, and the Underground's a mob-scene, but Pointsman's all alone. But he's got his Xmas present, fa la la, he won't have to settle for any Spam-tin dog this year mates, he's got his own miracle and human child, grown to manhood but carrying, someplace on the Slothropian cortex now a bit of Psychology's own childhood, yes pure history, inert, encysted, unmoved by jazz, depression, war-a survival, if you will, of a piece of the late Dr. Jamf himself, past death, past the reckoning of the, the old central chamber you know…

He has no one to ask, no one to tell. My heart, he feels, my heart floods now with such virility and hope… News from the Riviera is

splendid. Experiments
here
begin to run smoothly for a change. From some dark overlap, a general appropriation or sinking fund someplace, Brigadier Pudding has even improved the funding for ARE Does he feel Pointsman's power too? Is he buying some insurance?

At odd moments of the day Pointsman, fascinated, discovers himself with an erect penis. He begins making jokes, English Pavlovian jokes, nearly all of which depend on one unhappy accident: the Latin
cortex
translates into English as "bark," not to mention the well-known and humorous relation between dogs and trees (these are bad enough, and most PISCES folk have the good sense to avoid them, but they are dazzling witticisms compared with jokes
out
of the mainstream, such as the extraordinary "What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?"). Sometime during the annual PISCES Christmas Party, Pointsman is led by Maudie Chilkes to a closet full of belladonna, gauze, thistle tubes, and the scent of surgical rubber, where in a flash she's down on her red knees, unbuttoning his trousers, as he, confused, good God, strokes her hair, clumsily shaking much of it loose from its wine-colored ribbon-here what's this, an actual, slick and crimson, hot, squeak-stockinged slavegirl "gam" yes right among these winter-pale clinical halls, with the distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses, woodblocks, wearied blown sheets of tropic string cadences audible as everyone dances back there on the uncar-peted floors, and the old Palladian shell, conch of a thousand rooms, gives, resonates, shifting stresses along walls and joists… bold Maud, this is incredible, taking the pink Pavlovian cock in as far as it will go, chin to collarbone vertical as a sword-swallower, releasing him each time with some small ladylike choking sound, fumes of expensive Scotch rising flowerlike, and her hands up grabbing the loose wool seat of his pants, pleating, unpleating-it's happening so fast that Pointsman only sways, blinks a bit drunkenly you know, wondering if he's dreaming or has found the perfect mixture, try to remember, amphetamine sulphate, 5 mg q 6 h, last night amobarbital sodium 0.2 Gm. at bedtime, this morning assorted breakfast vitamin capsules, alcohol an ounce, say, per hour, over the past… how many cc.s is that and oh, Jesus I'm coming. Am I? yes… well… and Maud, dear Maudie, swallowing, wastes not a drop… smiling quietly, unplugged at last, she returns the unstiffening hawk to its cold bachelor nest but kneels still a bit longer in the closet of this moment, the drafty, white-lit moment, some piece by Ernesto Lecuona, "Siboney" perhaps, now reaching them down corridors long as the sea-lanes back to the green shoals, slime stone battlements, and palm evenings of Cuba… a Vic-

torian pose, her cheek against his leg, his high-veined hand against her face. But no one saw them, then or ever, and in the winter ahead, here and there, her look will cross his and she'll begin to blush red as her knees, she'll come to his room off the lab once or twice perhaps, but somehow they're never to have this again, this sudden tropics in the held breath of war and English December, this moment of perfect peace…

No one to tell. Maud knows something's up all right, the finances of PISCES pass through her hands, nothing escapes her. But he
can't
tell her… or not everything, not the
exact terms of his hope,
he's never, even to himself… it lies ahead in the dark, denned inversely, by horror, by ways all hopes might yet be defeated and he find only his death, that dumb, empty joke, at the end of this Pavlovian's Progress.

Now Thomas Gwenhidwy too senses change fibrillating in the face and step of his colleague. Fat, prematurely white Santa Claus beard, a listing, rumpled showman, performing every instant, trying to speak a double language, both Welsh comic-provincial and hard diamond gone-a-begging truth, hear what you will. His singing voice is incredible, in his spare time he strolls out past the wire-mesh fighter runways looking for bigger planes-for he loves to practice the bass part to "Diadem" as the Flying Fortresses take off at full power, and even so you can hear him, bone-vibrating and pure above the bombers, all the way to Stoke Poges, you see. Once a lady even wrote in to the
Times
from Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, asking who was the man with the lovely deep voice singing "Diadem^" A Mrs. Snade. Gwenhidwy likes to drink a lot, grain alcohol mostly, mixed in great strange mad-scientist concoctions with beef tea, grenadine, cough syrup, bitter belch-gathering infusions of blue scullcap, valerian root, motherwort and lady's-slipper, whatever's to hand really. His is the hale alcoholic style celebrated in national legend and song. He is descended directly from the Welshman in
Henry V
who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek. None of your sedentary drinkers though. Pointsman has never seen Gwenhidwy off of his feet or standing still- he fusses endlessly pitch-and-roll avast you scum down the long rows of sick or dying faces, and even Pointsman has noted rough love in the minor gestures, changes of breathing and voice. They are blacks, Indians, Ashkenazic Jews speaking dialects you never heard in Harley Street: they have been bombed out, frozen, starved, meanly sheltered, and their faces, even the children's, all possess some ancient intimacy with pain and reverse that amazes Pointsman, who is more polarized upon West End catalogues of genteel signs and symptoms, headborn anorexias and constipations the Welshman could have little patience with. On Gwenhidwy's wards some BMRs run low as ~35, ~40. The white lines go thickening across the X-ray ghosts of bones, gray scrapings from underneath tongues bloom beneath his old wrinkle-black microscope into clouds of Vincentesque invaders, nasty little fangs achop and looking to ulcerate the vitamin-poor tissue they came from. A quite different domain altogether, you see.

"I don't know, man-no, I don't," flinging a fat slow-motion arm out of his hedgehog-colored cape, back at the hospital, as they walk in the falling snow-to Pointsman a clear separation, monks here and cathedral there, soldiers and garrison-but not so to Gwenhidwy, part of whom remains behind, hostage. The streets are empty, it's Christmas day, they are tramping uphill to Gwenhidwy's rooms as the quiet snow curtains fall on and on between themselves and the pierced walls of the institution marching in stone parallax away into a white gloom. "How
they persist.
The poor, the black. And the Jews! The Welsh, the Welsh once upon a time were
Jewish
too? one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a black tribe, who wandered overland, centuries? oh an incredible journey. Until at last they reached Wales, you see."

"Wales…"

"Stayed on, and became the Cymri. What if we're all Jews, you see? all scattered like seeds? still flying outward from the primal fist so long ago. Man, I believe that."

"Of course you do, Gwenhidwy."

"Aren't we then? What about you?"