GRAVITY RAINBOW (38 page)

"Hey," getting himself threaded among the legs of a chair, angling his head up to locate Dodson-Truck's face, haloed by a hanging fringe-shaded lamp. "Can you walk?"

Carefully swinging his eyes down on Slothrop, "Not sure, actually, that I can stand…" They spend some time at the business of untangling Slothrop from the chair, then standing up, which is not without its complications-locating the door, aiming for it… Staggering, propping each other up, they push through a bottle-wielding, walleyed, unbuttoned, roaring, white-faced and stomach-clutching mob, in among the lithe and perfumed audience of girls at the exit, all sweetly high, a decompression lock for the outside.

"Holy shit." This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted… of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?

But out at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who are these visitors standing… these robed figures-perhaps, at this distance, hundreds of miles tall-their faces, serene, unattached, like the Buddha's, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed, as the Angel that stood over Lubeck during the Palm Sunday raid, come that day neither to destroy nor to protect, but to bear witness to a game of seduction. It was the next-to-last step London took before her submission, before that liaison that would bring her at length to the eruption and scarring of the wasting pox noted on Roger Mexico's map, latent in this love she shares with the night-going rake Lord Death… because sending the RAF to make a terror raid against civilian Lubeck was the unmistakable long look that said
hurry up and fuck me,
that brought the rockets hard and screaming, the A4s, which were to've been fired anyway, a bit sooner instead…

What have the watchmen of world's edge come tonight to look for? deepening on now, monumental beings, stoical, on toward slag,

toward ash the color the night will stabilize at, tonight… what is there grandiose enough to witness? only Slothrop here, and Sir Stephen, blithering along, crossing shadow after long prison-bar shadow cast by the tall trunks of palms lining the esplanade. The spaces between the shadows are washed a very warm sunset-red now, across grainy chocolate beach. There seems to be nothing happening of any moment. No traffic whispering in the circular driveways, no milliards of francs being wagered because of a woman or an entente of nations at any of the tables inside. Only the somewhat formal weeping of Sir Stephen, down now on one knee in the sand still warm from the day: soft and strangled cries of despair held in, so testifying to all the repression he ever underwent that even Slothrop can feel, in his own throat, sympathetic flashes of pain for the effort it is clearly costing the man…

"Oh yes, yes you know, I, I, I can't. No. I assumed that you knew- but then why should they tell you?
They
all know. I'm an office joke. The people even know. Nora's been the sweetheart of the psychic crowd for years and years. That's always good for some bit of copy in the
News of the World-

"Oh! Yeah! Nora-that's that dame that was caught that time with that kid who-who can
change his color,
right? Wow! Sure, that Nora Dodson-Truck! I knew your name was familiar-"

But Sir Stephen has gone on: "… had a son, yes we came complete with sensitive son, boy about your age. Frank… I think they sent him to Indo-China. They're very polite when I ask, very polite but, they won't let me find out where he is… They're good chaps at Fitzmau-rice House, Slothrop. They mean well. It's been, most of it's been my fault… I did love Nora. I did. But there were other things… Important things. I believed they were. I still do. I must. As she got along, you know… they do get that way. You know how they are, demanding, always trying to-to drag you into bed. I couldn't," shaking his head, his hair now incandescent orange in this twilight, "I couldn't. I'd climbed too far. Another branch. Couldn't climb back down to her. She-she might even have been happy with a, even a
touch
now and then… Listen Slothrop, your girl, your Katje, sh-she's very
lovely,
you know."

"I know."

"Th-they think I don't
care,
any more. 'You can observe without passion.' Bastards… No I didn't mean that… Slothrop, we're all such mechanical men. Doing our jobs. That's all we are. Listen-how do you think
I feel?
When you're off with her after every lesson. I'm an impotent
man
-all I have to look forward to is a book, Slothrop. A report to write…"

"Hey, Ace-"

"Don't get angry. I'm harmless. Go ahead hit me, I'll only fall over and bounce right up again. Watch." He demonstrates. "I care about you, both of you. I do care, believe me, Slothrop."

"O.K. Tell me what's going on."

"I
care!"

"Fine, fine…"

"My 'function' is to observe you. That's my function. You like my function? You like it?
Your
'function'… is, learn the rocket, inch by inch, /have… to send in a daily log of your progress. And that's all I know."

But that's not all. He's holding something back, something deep, and fool Slothrop is too drunk to get at it with any kind of style. "Me and Katje too? You looking through the keyhole?"

Sniffling, "What difference's it make? I'm the perfect man for it. Perfect. I can't even masturbate half the time… no nasty jissom getting all over their reports, you know. Wouldn't want that. Just a neuter, just a recording eye… They're so cruel. I don't think they even know, really… They aren't even sadists… There's just
no pas
sion at all.
…"

Slothrop puts a hand on his shoulder. The suit padding shifts and bunches over the warm bone beneath it. He doesn't know what to say, what to do: himself, he feels empty, and wants to sleep… But Sir Stephen is on his knees, just about, quaking at the edge of it, to tell Slothrop a terrible secret, a fatal confidence concerning:

the penis he thought
was
His own

(lead tenor): 'Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own- Just a big playful boy of a bone… With a stout purple head, Sticking up from the bed, Where the girlies all played Telephone-

(bass): Te-le-phone…

(inner voices): But They came through the hole in the night,

(bass): And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight-

(inner voices): Out of sight…

(tenor): Now he sighs all alone,

With a heartbroken moan,

For the pe-nis, he thought-was, his, owwwwn! (inner voices): Was, his, own!

The figures out to sea have been attending, growing now even more windy and remote as the light goes cold and out… They are so difficult to reach across to-difficult to grasp. Carroll Eventyr, trying to confirm the Lubeck angel, learned how difficult-he and his control Peter Sachsa both, floundering in the swamp between the worlds. Later on, in London, came the visit from that most ubiquitous of double agents, Sammy Hilbert-Spaess, whom everyone had thought in Stockholm, or was it Paraguay?

"Here then," the kindly scombroid face scanning Eventyr, quick as a fire-control dish antenna and even less mercy, "I thought I'd-

"You thought you'd just check in."

"Telepathic too, God he's amazing i'n't he." But the fishy eyes will not let up. It is a rather bare room, the address behind Gallaho Mews ordinarily reserved for cash transactions. They have summoned Eventyr up from "The White Visitation." They know in London how to draw pentacles too, and cry conjurations, how to bring in exactly the ones they want… The tabletop is crowded with glasses, smudged, whitish, emptied or with residues of deep brown and red drinks, with ashtrays and with debris from artificial flowers which old Sammy here has been plucking, unpeeling, twisting into mysterious curves and knots. Trainsmoke blows in a partly opened window. One wall of the room, though blank, has been eroded at, over years, by shadows of operatives, as certain mirrors in public eating-places have been by the images of customers: a surface gathering character, like an old face…

"But then you don't actually
talk
to him," ah, Sammy's so good at this, softly-softly, "I mean it's none of your telegraphers in the middle of the night having a bit of a chat sort of thing…"

"No. No." Eventyr understanding now that they've been seeing transcripts of everything that comes through from Peter Sachsa-that what Eventyr himself gets to read is already censored. And that it may have been this way for a while now… So relax, grow passive, watch for a shape to develop out of Sammy's talking, a shape that really Eventyr knows already, as we do working out acrostics-he's called up to London, but they aren't asking to be put in touch with anyone, so it's Sachsa himself they're interested in, and the purpose of this meeting is not to commission Eventyr, but to warn him. To put a part of his own hidden life under interdiction. Bits, tones of voice, choices of phrasing now come flying together: "… must've been quite a shock to find himself over there… had a Zaxa or two of me own to worry about… keep
you
out of the street at least… see how you're holding

up, old Zaxa too of course, need to filter out
personalities
you see from the data, easier for us that way…"

Out of the street?
Everyone knows how Sachsa died. But no one knows why he was out there that day, what led up to it. And what Sammy is telling Eventyr here is:
Don't ask.

Then will they try to get to Nora too? If there are analogies here, if Eventyr does, somehow, map on to Peter Sachsa, then does Nora Dodson-Truck become the woman Sachsa loved, Leni Pokier? Will the interdiction extend to Nora's smoky voice and steady hands, and is Eventyr to be kept, for the duration, perhaps for his life, under some very sophisticated form of house arrest, for crimes that will never be told him?

Nora still carries on her Adventure, her "Ideology of the Zero," firm among the stoneswept hair of the last white guardians at the last stepoff into the black, into the radiant… But where will Leni be now? Where will she have wandered off to, carrying her child, and her dreams that will not grow up? Either we didn't mean to lose her-either it was an ellipsis in our care, in what some of us will even swear is our love, or someone has taken her, deliberately, for reasons being kept secret, and Sachsa's death is part of it too. She has swept with her wings another life-not husband Franz, who dreamed of, prayed for exactly such a taking but instead is being kept for something quite different-Peter Sachsa, who was passive in a different way… is there some mistake? Do They never make mistakes, or… why is he here rushing with her toward her own end (as indeed Eventyr has been sucked along in Nora's furious wake) her body blocking from his sight everything that lies ahead, the slender girl strangely grown oaken, broad, maternal… all he has to go by is the debris of their time sweeping in behind from either side, looping away in long helices, into the dusty invisible where a last bit of sunlight lies on the stones of the road… Yes: however ridiculously, he is acting out Franz Pokler's fantasy for him, here crouched on her back, very small, being
taken:
taken forward into an aether-wind whose smell… no
not that
smell
last encountered just before his birth… the void long before he ought to be remembering… which means, if it's here again… then…
then…

They are being pushed backward by a line of police. Peter Sachsa is jammed inside it, trying to keep his footing, no escape possible… Leni's face moving, restless, against the window of the Hamburg Flyer, concrete roads, pedestals, industrial towers of the Mark flying away at over a hundred miles an hour the perfect background, brown,

blurred, any least mistake, in the points, in the roadbed at this speed and they're done for… her skirt is pulled up in back, the bare bottoms of her thighs, marked red from the train seat, turn toward him… yes… in the imminence of disaster, yes, whoever's watching yes… "Leni, where are you?" She was at his elbow not ten seconds ago. They'd agreed beforehand to try and keep together. But there are two sorts of movement out here-as often as the chance displacements of strangers, across a clear skirmish-line from the Force, will bring together people who'll remain that way for a time, in love that can even make the oppression seem a failure, so too love, here in the street, can be taken centrifugally apart again: faces seen for the last time here, words spoken idly, over your shoulder, taking for granted she's there, already last words-"Will Walter be bringing wine tonight? I forgot to-" it's a private joke, his forgetting, going around in some adolescent confusion, hopelessly in love too by now with the little girl, Use. She is his refuge from society, parties, clients… often she is his sanity. He's taken to sitting for a little while each night beside her bed, late at night, watching her sleep, with her bottom up in the air and face in the pillow… the purity, the
Tightness
of it… But her mother, in her own sleep, grinds her teeth often these nights, frowns, talks in a tongue he cannot admit he might, some time or place, know and speak fluently. Just in this past week… what does he know of politics? but he can see that she has crossed a threshold, found a branching of the time, where he might not be able to follow-

"You're her mother… what if they arrest you, what happens to her?"

"That's what they-Peter can't you see, they
tuant
a great swollen tit with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere in its shadows. How can I be
human
for her? Not her
mother.
'Mother,' that's a civil-service category, Mothers work for
Them!
They're the policemen of the soul…" her face darkened, Judaized by the words she speaks, not because it's out loud but because she means it, and she's right. Against her faith, Sachsa can see the shallows of his own life, the bathtub stagnancy of those soirees where for years not even the faces changed… too many tepid years…