GRAVITY RAINBOW (64 page)

A cry from down in the marsh. Birds swirl upward, round and black, grains of coarse-cut pepper on this bouillabaisse sky. Little kids come skidding to a halt, and the brass band fall silent in mid-bar. En-zian is on his feet and loping down to where the others are gathering.

"Was ist los, meinen Sumpfmenschen?" The others, laughing, scoop up fistfuls of mud and start throwing them at their Nguarore-rue, who ducks, dodges, grabs him some of that mud and starts flinging it back. The Germans on shore stand blinking, politely aghast at this lack of discipline.

Down in the plank enclosure, a couple of muddy trim-tabs poke up now out of the marsh, with twelve feet of mud between them. Enzian, spattered and dripping, his white grin preceding him by several meters, vaults over the shoring and into the hole, and grabs a shovel. The moment has become roughly ceremonial: Andreas and Christian have moved up to either side to help him scrape and dig till about a foot of one fin-surface is exposed. The Determination of the Number. The Nguarorerue crouches and brushes away mud, revealing part of a slashmark, a white 2, and a 7.

"Outase." And glum faces on the others.

Slothrop's got a hunch. "You expected der Funffachnullpunkt," he proposes to Enzian a little later, "the quintuple zero, right? Haa-
aaah!"
Gotcha, gotcha-

Throwing up his hands, "It's insane. I don't believe there is one."

"Zero probability?"

"I think it will depend on the number of searchers. Are your people after it?"

"I don't know. I only heard by accident. I don't have any people."

"Schwarzgerat, Schwarzkommando. Scuffling: suppose somewhere there were an alphabetical list, someone's list, an input to some intelligence arm, say. Some country, doesn't matter. But suppose that on this list, the two names, Blackinstrument, Blackcommand, just happened to be there, juxtaposed. That's all, an alphabetical coincidence. We wouldn't have to be real, and neither would it, correct?"

The marshes streak away, patched with light under the milk overcast. Negative shadows flicker white behind the edges of everything. "Well, this is all creepy enough here, Oberst," sez Slothrop. "You're not helping."

Enzian is staring into Slothrop's face, with something like a smile under his beard.

"O.K. Who
is
after it, then?" Being enigmatic, won't answer-is this bird
looking
to be needled? "That Major Marvy," opines Slothrop, "a-and that Tchitcherine, too!"

Ha! That did it. Like a salute, a boot-click, Enzian's face snaps into perfect neutrality. "You would oblige me," he begins, then settles for changing the subject. "You were down in the Mittelwerke. How did Marvy's people seem to be getting along with the Russians?"

"Ace buddies, seemed like."

"I have the feeling that the occupying Powers have just about reached agreement on a popular front against the Schwarzkommando. I don't know who you are, or how your lines are drawn. But they're trying to shut us down. I'm just back from Hamburg. We had trouble. It was made to look like a DP raid, but the British military government was behind it, and they had Russian cooperation."

"I'm sorry. Can I help?"

"Don't be reckless. Let's all wait and see. All anyone knows about you is that you keep showing up."

Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening,

deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message…

Later in Berlin, down in the cellar among fever-dreams with shit leaking out of him at gallons per hour, too weak to aim more than token kicks at the rats running by with eyes fixed earnestly noplace, trying to make believe they don't have a newer and dearer status among the Berliners, at minimum points on his mental health chart, when the sun is gone so totally it might as well be for good, Slothrop's dumb idling heart sez: The Schwarzgerat is no Grail, Ace, that's not what the G in Imipolex G stands for. And you are no knightly hero. The best you can compare with is Tannhauser, the Singing Nincompoop- you've been under one mountain at Nordhausen, been known to sing a song or two with uke accompaniment, and don'tcha feel you're in a sucking marshland of sin out here, Slothrop? maybe not the same thing William Slothrop, vomiting a good part of 1630 away over the side of that
Arbella,
meant when he said "sin."… But what you've done is put yourself on somebody else's voyage-some Frau Holda, some Venus in some mountain-playing her, its, game… you know that in some irreducible way it's an evil game. You play because you have nothing better to do, but that doesn't make it right. And where is the Pope whose staff's gonna bloom for you?

As a matter of fact, he is also just about to run into his Lisaura: someone he will be with for a while and then leave again. The Minnesinger abandoned his poor woman to suicide. What Slothrop will be leaving Greta Erdmann to is not so clear. Along the Havel in Neuba-belsberg she waits, less than the images of herself that survive in an indeterminate number of release prints here and there about the Zone, and even across the sea… Every kind technician who ever threw a magenta gel across her key light for her has gone to war or death, and she is left nothing but God's indifferent sunlight in all its bleaching and terror… Eyebrows plucked to pen-strokes, long hair streaked with gray, hands heavy with rings of all colors, opacities and uglinesses, wearing her dark prewar Chanel suits, no hat, scarves, always a flower, she is haunted by Central European night-whispers that blow, like the skin curtains of Berlin, more ghostly around her fattening, wrecked beauty the closer she and Slothrop draw…

This is how they meet. One night Slothrop is out raiding a vegetable garden in the park. Thousands of people living in the open. He skirts their fires, stealthy- All he wants is a handful of greens here, a carrot or mangel-wurzel there, just to keep him going. When they see

him they throw rocks, lumber, once not long ago an old hand-grenade that didn't go off but made him shit where he stood.

This evening he is orbiting someplace near the Grosser Stern. It is long after curfew. Odors of woodsmoke and decay hang over the city. Among pulverized heads of stone margraves and electors, reconnoiter-ing a likely-looking cabbage patch, all of a sudden Slothrop picks up the scent of an unmistakable no it can't be yes it is it's a REEFER! A-and it's burning someplace close by. Goldshot green of the Rif's slant fields here, vapor-blossoms resinous and summery, charm his snoot on through bushes and matted grass, under the blasted trees and whatever sits in their branches.

Sure enough, in the hollow of an upended trunk, long roots fringing the scene like a leprechaun outpost, Slothrop finds one Emil ("Saure") Bummer, once the Weimar Republic's most notorious cat burglar and doper, flanked by two beautiful girls, handing around a cheerful little orange star. The depraved old man. Slothrop's on top of them before they notice. Bummer smiles, reaches up an arm, offering the remainder of what they've been smoking to Slothrop, who receives it in long dirty fingernails. Oboy. He hunkers down.

"Was ist los?" sez Saure. "We've had a windfall of kif. Allah has smiled on us, well actually he was smiling at everybody, we just happened to be in his direct line of sight…" His nickname, which means "acid" in German, developed back in the twenties, when he was carrying around a little bottle of schnapps which, if he got in a tight spot, he would bluff people into thinking was fuming nitric acid. He comes out now with another fat Moroccan reefer. They light up off of Slothrop's faithful Zippo.

Trudi, the blonde, and Magda, the sultry Bavarian, have spent the day looting a stash of Wagnerian opera costumes. There is a pointed helmet with horns, a full cape of green velvet, a pair of buckskin trousers.

"Saaaay," sez Slothrop,
"that
rig looks pretty
sharp!"

"They're for you," Magda smiles.

"Aw… no. You'd get a better deal at the Tauschzentrale…"

But Saure insists. "Haven't you ever noticed, when you're this Blitzed and you want somebody to show up, they always do?"

The girls are moving the coal of the reefer about, watching its reflection in the shiny helmet changing shapes, depths, grades of color

… hmm. It occurs to Slothrop here that without those horns on it,

why this helmet would look just like the nose assembly of the Rocket. And if he could find a few triangular scraps of leather, figure a way to sew them on to Tchitcherine's boots… yeah, a-and on the back of the cape put a big, scarlet, capital R- It is as pregnant a moment as when Ton to, after the legendary ambush, attempts to-

"Raketemensch!" screams Saure, grabbing the helmet and unscrewing the horns oif of it. Names by themselves may be empty, but the
act of naming…

"You
had the same idea?" Oh, strange. Saure carefully reaches up and places the helmet on Slothrop's head. Ceremonially the girls drape the cape around his shoulders. Troll scouting parties have already sent runners back to inform their people.

"Good. Now listen, Rocketman, I'm in a bit of trouble."

"Hah?" Slothrop has been imagining a mil-scale Rocketman Hype, in which the people bring him food, wine and maidens in a four-color dispensation in which there is a lot of skipping and singing "La, la, la, la," and beefsteaks blossoming from these strafed lindens, and roast turkeys thudding down like soft hail on Berlin, sweet potatoes a-and melted marshmallows, bubbling up out of the ground…

"Do you have any armies?" Trudi wants to know. Slothrop, or Rocketman, hands over half a withered pack.

The reefer keeps coming around: darts and stabs through this root shelter. Everybody forgets what it is they've been talking about. There's the smell of earth. Bugs rush through, aerating. Magda has lit one of Slothrop's cigarettes for him and he tastes raspberry lipstick. Lipstick? Who's got lipstick these days? What are all these people here
into,
anyway?

Berlin is dark enough for stars, the accustomed stars but never so clearly arranged. It is possible also to make up your own constellations. "Oh," Saure recalls, "I had this problem…"

"I'm really hungry," it occurs to Slothrop.

Trudi is telling Magda about her boy friend Gustav, who wants to live inside the piano. "All you could see was his feet sticking out, he kept saying, 'You all hate me, you hate this piano!' " They're giggling now.

"Plucking on the strings," sez Magda, "right? He's
so paranoid.'"

Trudi has these big, blonde Prussian legs. Tiny blonde hairs dance up and down in the starlight, up under her skirt and back, all through the shadows of her knees, around under the hollows behind them, this starry jittering… The stump towers above and cups them all, a giant nerve cell, dendrites extended into the city, the night. Signals coming

in from all directions, and from back in time too, probably, if not indeed forward…

Saure, who is never able entirely to lay off business, rolls, flows to his feet, clutching on to a root till his head decides where it is going to come to rest. Magda, her ear at its entrance, is banging on Rocket-man's helmet with a stick. It gongs in chords. The separate notes aren't right on pitch, either: they sound
very odd
together…

"I don't know what time it is," Saure Bummer gazing around. "Weren't we supposed to be at the Chicago Bar? Or was that last night?"

"I forget," Trudi giggles.

"Listen, Kerl, I really have to talk to that American."

"Dear Emil," Trudi whispers, "don't worry. He'll be at the Chicago."

They decide on an intricate system of disguise. Saure gives Slothrop his jacket. Trudi wears the green cape. Magda puts on Slothrop's boots, and he goes in his socks, carrying her own tiny shoes in his pockets. They spend some time gathering plausible items, kindling and greens, to fill the helmet with, and Saure carries that. Magda and Trudi help stuff Slothrop into the buckskin pants, both girls down on pretty knees, hands caressing his legs and ass. Like the ballroom in St. Patrick's Cathedral, there is none in these trousers here, and Slothrop's hardon, enlarging, aches like thunder.

"Fine for you folks." The girls are laughing. Grandiose Slothrop limps along after everybody, a network of clear interweaving ripples now like rain all through his vision, hands turning to stone, out of the Tiergarten, past shellstruck lime and chestnut trees, into the streets, or what is serving for them. Patrols of all nations keep coming by, and this mindless quartet have to hit the dirt often, trying not to laugh too much. Slothrop's sox are sodden with dew. Tanks manoeuvre in the street, chewing parallel ridges of asphalt and stonedust. Trolls and dryads play in the open spaces. They were blasted back in May out of bridges, out of trees into liberation, and are now long citified. "Oh, that drip," say the subdeb trolls about those who are not as hep, "he just isn't out-of-the-tree about
anything.'"
Mutilated statues lie under mineral sedation: frock-coated marble torsos of bureaucrats fallen pale in the gutters. Yes, hmm, here we are in the heart of downtown Berlin, really, uh, a little, Jesus Christ what's
that
-

"Better watch it," advises Saure, "it's kind of rubbery through here."

"What
is
that?"

Well, what it is-is? what's "is"?-is that King Kong, or some creature closely allied, squatting down, evidently just, taking a shit, right in the street! and everything! a-and being ignored, by truckload after truckload of Russian enlisted men in pisscutter caps and dazed smiles, grinding right on by-"Hey!" Slothrop wants to shout, "hey lookit that giant
ape!
or whatever it is. You guys? Hey…" But he doesn't, luckily. On closer inspection, the crouching monster turns out to be the Reichstag building, shelled out, airbrushed, fire-brushed powdery black on all blastward curves and projections, chalked over its hard-echoing carbon insides with Cyrillic initials, and many names of comrades killed in May.