GRAVITY RAINBOW (65 page)

Berlin proves to be full of these tricks. There's a big chromo of Stalin that Slothrop could swear is a girl he used to date at Harvard, the mustache and hair only incidental as makeup,
damn
if that isn't what's her name… but before he can quite hear the gibbering score of little voices-hurry, hurry, get it in place, he's almost around the corner-here, laid side by side on the pavement, are these enormous loaves of bread dough left to rise under clean white cloths-boy, is everybody hungry: the same thought hits them all at once, wow!
Raw dough!
loaves of bread for that
monster
back there… oh, no that's right, that was a building, the Reichstag, so these aren't bread… by now it's clear that they're human bodies, dug from beneath today's rubble, each inside its carefully tagged GI fartsack. But it was more than an optical mistake. They are rising, they are transubstantiated, and who knows, with summer over and hungry winter coming down, what we'll be feeding on by Xmas?

What the notorious Femina is to cigarette-jobbing circles in Berlin, the Chicago is to dopers. But while dealing at the Femina usually gets under way around noon, the Chicago here only starts jiving after the 10:00 curfew. Slothrop, Saure, Trudi and Magda come in a back entrance, out of a great massif of ruins and darkness lit only here and there, like the open country. Inside, M.O.s and corpsmen run hither and thither clutching bottles of fluffy white crystalline substances, small pink pills, clear ampoules the size of pureys. Occupation and Reichsmarks ruffle and flap across the room. Some dealers are all chemical enthusiasm, others all business. Oversize photos of John Dillinger, alone or posed with his mother, his pals, his tommygun, decorate the walls. Lights and arguing are kept low, should the military police happen by.

On a wire-backed chair, blunt hair hands picking quietly at a gui-

tar, sits an American sailor with an orangutan look to him. In 3/4 time and shit-kicking style, he is singing:

the doper's dream

Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in

To a bubblin' hookah so high,

When all of a sudden some Arab jinni

Jump up just a-winkin' his eye.

"I'm here to obey all your wishes," he told me,

As for words I was trying to grope.

"Good buddy," I cried, "you could surely oblige me

By turnin' me on to some
dope!"

With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand,

And we flew down the sky in a flash,

And the first thing I saw in the land where he took me

Was a whole solid mountain of hash!

All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills,

Whur the Romilar River flowed by,

To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow,

So pretty that I wanted to cry.

All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion,

Morning glories woven into their hair,

Bringin'great big handfuls of snowy cocaine,

All their dope they were eager to share.

Well we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin',

In the flowering Panama Red,

Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea,

And those brownies so kind to your head.

Now I could've passed that good time forever,

And I really was fixing to stay,

But you know that

jinni turned out, t'be a narco man, And he busted me right whur I lay. And he took me back, to this cold, cold world, 'N' now m' prison's whurever I be… And I dream of the days back in Doperland And I wonder, will I ever go free?

The singer is Seaman Bodine, of the U.S. destroyer
John E. Badass,
and he's the contact Saure is here to see. The
Badass
is docked in Cux-haven and Bodine is semi-AWOL, having hit Berlin night before last

for the first time since the early weeks of American occupation. "Things are so tight, man," he's groaning, "Potsdam, I couldn't believe it over there. Remember how the Wilhelmplatz used to be? Watches, wine, jewels, cameras, heroin, iiir coats, everything in the world. Nobody
gave
a shit, right? You ought to see it now. Russian security all over the place. Big mean customers. You couldn't get near it."

"Isn't there supposed to be something going on over there?" sez Slothrop. He's heard scuttlebutt. "A conference or some shit?"

"They're deciding how to cut up Germany," sez Saure. "All the Powers. They should call in the Germans, Kerl, we've been doing
that
for centuries."

"You couldn't get a gnat in there now, man," Seaman Bodine shaking his head, dexterously rolling a reefer one-handed on a cigarette paper he has first torn, with straightfaced bravura, in half.

"Ah," smiles Saure, flinging an arm over Slothrop, "but what if
Rocketman
can?"

Bodine looks over, skeptical. "That's Rocketman?"

"More or less," sez Slothrop, "but I'm not sure I want to go into that Potsdam, right now…"

"If you only knew!" cries Bodine. "Listen, Ace, right this minute, hardly 15 miles away, there is six
kilos!
of pure, top-grade Nepalese hashish! Scored it from my buddy in the CBI, government seals 'n' everything, buried it myself back in May, so safe nobody'll ever find it without a map. All you got to do is fly over there or whatever it is you do, just go in and get it."

"That's all."

"A kilo for you," offers Saure.

"They can cremate it with me. All those Russians can stand around the furnace and get loaded."

"Perhaps," the most decadent young woman Slothrop has ever seen in his life, wearing fluorescent indigo eye-shadow and a black leather snood, comes slithering past, "the pretty American is not a devotee of the Green Hershey Bar, mm? ha-ha-ha…"

"A million marks," Saure sighs.

"Where are you going to get-"

Holding up an elfin finger, leaning close, "I print it."

Sure enough, he does. They all troop out of the Chicago, half a mile down through rubble piles, over pathways twisting invisible in the dark to all but Saure, down at last into a houseless cellar with filing cabinets, a bed, an oil-lamp, a printing-press. Magda cuddles close to

Slothrop, her hands dancing over his erection. Trudi has formed an inexplicable attachment to Bodine. Saure begins to crank his clattering wheel, and sheets of Reichsmarks do indeed come fluttering off into the holder, thousands on thousands. "All authentic plates and paper, too. The only detail missing is a slight ripple along the margins. There was a special stamp-press nobody managed to loot."

"Uh," Slothrop sez.

"Aw, come on," sez Bodine. "Rocketman, jeepers. You don't want to do nothing no more."

They help jog and square the sheets while Saure chops them up with a long glittering cutter blade. Holding out a fat roll of 100s, "You could be back tomorrow. No job is too tough for Rocketman."

A day or two later, it will occur to Slothrop that what he should have said at that point was, "But I wasn't Rocketman, until just a couple hours ago." But right now he is beguiled at the prospect of 2.2 pounds of hashish and a million nearly-real marks. Nothing to walk away from, or fly or whatever it is, right? So he takes a couple thousand in front and spends the rest of the night with round and moaning Magda on Saure's bed, while Trudi and Bodine lark in the bathtub, and Saure slips back on some other mission, out into the three-o'clock waste that presses, oceanic, against their buoyed inner space…

Saure to and fro, bloodshot and nagging, with a wreathing pot of tea. Slothrop's alone in bed. The Rocketman costume waits on a table, along with Seaman Bodine's treasure map-oh. Oh, boy. Is Slothrop really going to have to go through with this?

Outside, birds whistle arpeggios up the steps, along the morning. Trucks and jeeps sputter in the distances. Slothrop sits drinking tea and trying to scrape dried sperm off of his trousers while Saure explains the layout. The package is stashed under an ornamental bush outside a villa at 2 Kaiserstrasse, in Neubabelsberg, the old movie capital of Germany. That's across the Havel from Potsdam. It seems prudent to stay off the Avus Autobahn. "Try to get past the checkpoint just after Zehlendorf instead. Come up on Neubabelsberg by canal."

"How come?"

"No civilians allowed on VIP Road-here, this one, that runs on across the river to Potsdam."

"Come on. I'll need a boat, then.":•.

"Ha! You expect improvisation from a German? No, no, that's- that's
Rocketman's problem!
ha-ha!"

"Unnhh." Seems the villa fronts on the Griebnitz See. "Why don't I hit it from that side?"

"You'll have to go under a couple of bridges first, if you do. Heavily guarded. Plunging fire. Maybe-maybe even mortars. It gets very narrow opposite Potsdam. You won't have a chance." Oh, German humor's a
fine
way to start the morning. Saure hands Slothrop an AGO card, a trip ticket, and a pass printed in English and Russian. "The man who forged these has been in and out of Potsdam on them a dozen times since the Conference began. That's how much faith he has in them. The bilingual pass is special, just for the Conference. But you mustn't spend time gawking like a tourist, asking celebrities for autographs-"

"Well say look Emil, if you've got one of these and they're so good, why
don't you
go?"

"It's not my
specialty.
I stick to dealing. Just an old bottle of acid- and even that's make-believe. Buccaneering is for
Rocketmen.
"

"Bodine, then."

"He's already on his way back to Cuxhaven. Won't he be upset, when he comes back next week, only to find that Rocketman, of all people, has shown the white feather."

"Oh." Shit. Slothrop stares awhile at that map, then tries to memorize it. He puts on his boots, groaning. He bundles his helmet in that cape, and the two, Conner and connee, set out through the American sector.

Mare's-tails are out seething across the blue sky, but down here the Berliner Luft hangs still, with the odor of death inescapable. Thousands of corpses fallen back in the spring still lie underneath these mountains of debris, yellow mountains, red and yellow and pale.

Where's the city Slothrop used to see back in those newsreels and that National Geographic? Parabolas weren't all that New German Architecture went in for-there were the spaces-the necropolism of blank alabaster in the staring sun, meant to be filled with human harvests rippling out of sight, making no sense without them. If there is such a thing as the City Sacramental, the city as outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual illness or health, then there may have been, even here, some continuity of sacrament, through the terrible surface of May. The emptiness of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping of the white and geometric capital before the destruction-

the fallow and long-strewn fields of rubble, the same weight of too much featureless concrete… except that here everything's been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is outside. Ceilingless rooms open to the sky, wall-less rooms pitched out over the sea of ruins in prows, in crow's-nests… Old men with their tins searching the ground for cigarette butts wear their lungs on their breasts. Advertisements for shelter, clothing, the lost, the taken, once classified, folded burgerlich inside newspapers to be read at one's ease in the lacquered and graceful parlors are now stuck with Hitler-head stamps of blue, orange, and yellow, out in the wind, when the wind comes, stuck to trees, door-frames, planking, pieces of wall-white and fading scraps, writing spidery, trembling, smudged, thousands unseen, thousands unread or blown away. At the Winterhilfe one-course Sundays you sat outside at long tables under the swastika-draped winter trees, but outside has been brought inside and that kind of Sunday lasts all week long. Winter is coming again. All Berlin spends the daylight trying to make believe it isn't. Scarred trees are back in leaf, baby birds hatched and learning to fly, but winter's here behind the look of summer-Earth has turned over in its sleep, and the tropics are reversed…

Like the walls of the Chicago Bar brought outside, giant photographs are posted out in the Friedrichstrasse-faces higher than a man. Slothrop recognizes Churchill and Stalin all right, but isn't sure about the other one. "Emil, who's that guy in the glasses?"

"The American president. Mister Truman."

"Quit fooling. Truman is vice-president. Roosevelt is president."

Saure raises an eyebrow. "Roosevelt died back in the spring. Just before the surrender."

They get tangled in a bread queue. Women in worn plush coats, little kids holding on to frayed hems, men in caps and dark double-breasted suits, unshaven old faces, foreheads white as a nurse's leg… Somebody tries to grab Slothrop's cape, and there's brief tugging match.

"I'm sorry," Saure offers, when they're clear again.

"Why didn't anybody tell me?" Slothrop was going into high school when FDR was starting out in the White House. Broderick

Slothrop professed to hate the man, but young Tyrone thought he was brave, with that polio and all. Liked his voice on the radio. Almost saw him once too, in Pittsfield, but Lloyd Nipple, the fattest kid in Minge-borough, was standing in the way, and all Slothrop got to see was a couple wheels and the feet of some guys in suits on a running-board. Hoover he'd heard of, dimly-something to do with shack towns or vacuum cleaners-but Roosevelt was
his
president, the only one he'd known. It seemed he'd just keep getting elected, term after term, forever. But somebody had decided to change that. So he was put to sleep, Slothrop's president, quiet and neat, while the kid who once imaged his face on Lloyd's t-shirted shoulderblades was jiving on the Riviera, or in Switzerland someplace, only half aware of being extinguished himself…