GRAVITY RAINBOW (85 page)

"They were very clever, sending you as poor Max. But it won't work now."

"I'm through with Them. I swear it. I need you, Greta." Bullshit. For what?

"They'll kill you, then. Go away."

"I know where Bianca is."

"What have you done with her?"

"Just-will you let me in?" After a full minute's silence, she does. A funseeker or two tries to push in, but he slams the door and locks it

again. Greta is wearing nothing but a black chemise. Strokes of black hair curl high on her thighs. Her face is white, old, strained.

"Where is she?"

"Hiding."

"From me?"

"From Them."

A quick look at him. Too many mirrors, razors, scissors, lights. Too white.
"
But
you're
one of Them."

"Quit it, you know I'm not."

"You are. You came up out of the river."

"Well, that's cause I fell
in,
Greta."

"Then They made you."

He watches her playing, nervous, with strands of her hair. The
Anubis
has begun to rock some, but the sickness rising in him is for his head, not his stomach. As she begins to talk, nausea begins to fill him: a glowing black mudslide of nausea…

It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be. Other girls of her generation grew up asking, "Who am I?" For them it was a question full of pain and struggle. For Gretel it was hardly even a question. She had more identities than she knew what to do with. Some of these Gretels have been only the sketchiest of surfaces-others are deeper. Many have incredible gifts, antigravity, dreams of prophecy… comatic images surround their faces, glowing in the air: the light itself is actually crying tears, weeping in this stylized way, as she is borne along through the mechanical cities, the meteorite walls draped in midair, every hollow and socket empty as a bone, and the failing shadow that shines black all around it… or is held in staring postures, long gowns, fringe and alchemical symbol, veils flowing from leather skullcaps padded concentric as a bike-racer's helmet, with crackling-tower and obsidian helix, with drive belts and rollers, with strange airship passages that thread underneath arches, solemnly, past louvers and giant fins in the city mist…

In
Weisse Sandwuste von Neumexiko
she played a cowgirl. First thing, they'd asked, "Can you ride?" "Of course," she'd answered. Never been closer than roadside ditches in time of war to any horse in her life, but she needed the work. When the moment came to saddle

up, it never occurred to her to be afraid of the beast pressing up between her thighs. It was an American horse named Snake. Trained or not, it could have run away with her, even killed her. But they pranced the screen full of the Sagittarian fire, Gretel and that colt, and her smile never drew back.

Here is one of the veils she has shed, a thin white scum, a caustic residue from one recent night in Berlin. "While you were asleep, I left the house. I went out in the street, without my shoes. I found a corpse. A man. A week's gray beard and old gray suit…" It was lying still and very white behind a wall. She lay down beside it and put her arms around it. There was frost. The body rolled toward her and the wrinkles stayed frozen in the cloth. She felt its bristled face rub her own cheek. The smell was no worse than cold meat from the icebox. She lay, holding it, till morning.

"Tell me how it is in your land." What woke her? Boots in the street, an early steamshovel. She can hardly hear her tired whispering.

Corpse answers: "We live very far beneath the black mud. Days of traveling." Though she couldn't move its limbs easily as a doll's, she could make it say and think exactly what she wished.

For an instant too she did wonder-not quite in words-if that's how her own soft mind might feel, under the fingers of Those who…

"Mm, it's snug down here. Now and then you can pick up something from Them-a distant rumbling, the implied silhouette of some explosion, conducted here through the earth overhead… but nothing, ever,
too close.
It's so dark that things glow. We have flight. There's no sex. But there are fantasies, even many of those we used to attach to sex-that we once modulated its energy with…"

As the dizzy debutante Lotte Lustig, she found herself during a flood, disguised as a scrubwoman, proceeding downriver in a bathtub with rich playboy Max Schlepzig. Every girl's dream. Name of the movie was
Jugend Herauf!
(a lighthearted pun, of course, on the then popular phrase "Juden heraus!"). Actually, all the bathtub scenes were process shots-she never did get to go out
on the river
in the bathtub with Max, all that was done with doubles, and in the final print it survives only as a very murky long shot. The figures are darkened and deformed, resembling apes, and the quality of the light is peculiar, as if the whole scene were engraved on a dark metal such as lead. Greta's double was actually an Italian stunt man named Blazzo in a long blonde wig. They carried on a romance

for a while. But Greta wouldn't go to bed with him, unless he wore that
wig!

Out on the river the rain lashes: the rapids can now be heard approaching, still impossible to see, but real, and inevitable. And the doubles both experience an odd, ticklish fear now that perhaps they are really lost, and that there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows… all the crew, sound-men, grips, gaffers have left… or never even arrived… and what was that the currents just brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? and what was that thud, so stiffened and so mute?

Bianca is usually silver, or of no color at all: thousands of times taken, strained through glass, warped in and out the violet-bleeding interfaces of Double and Triple Protars, Schneider Angulons, Voigtlander Collinears, Steinheil Orthostigmats, the Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895. For Greta it is her daughter's soul each time, an inexhaustible soul… This scarf of an only child, tucked in waist-high, always out vulnerable to the wind. To call her an extension of her mother's ego is of course to invite the bitterest sarcasm. But it's possible, now and then, for Greta to see Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure… clearly yes very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero.

"Pull down my straps for a moment. Is it dark enough? Look. Thanatz said they were luminous. That he knew each one by heart. They're very white today, aren't they? Hmm. Long and white, like cobwebs. They're on my ass too. Around the insides of my thighs…" Many times, afterward, after the blood had stopped and he had put on the alcohol, Thanatz would sit with her lying across his knees, and read the scars down her back, as a gypsy reads a palm. Life-scar, heart-scar. Croix mystique. What fortunes and fantasies! He was so exalted, after the whippings. So taken away by the idea that they
would
win out, escape. He'd fall asleep before the wildness and hope had quite left him. She loved him most at those moments, just before sleep, her own dorsal side aflame, his little head heavy on her breast, while scar-tissue formed silently on her, cell by cell, in the night. She felt almost safe…

Each time the lash struck, each attack, in her helplessness to escape, there would come to her a single vision, on]y one, for each peak of pain. The Eye at the top of the pyramid. The sacrificial city, with figures in rust-colored robes. The dark woman waiting at the end of

the street. The hooded face of sorrowing Denmark, leaning out over Germany. The cherry-red coals falling through the night. Bianca in a Spanish dancer's costume, stroking the barrel of a gun…

Out by one rocket site, in the pine woods, Thanatz and Gretel found an old road that no one used any more. Pieces of pavement were visible here and there among the green underbrush. It seemed that if they followed the road they would come to a town, a station or outpost… it wasn't at all clear what they would find. But the place would be long deserted.

They held hands. Thanatz wore an old jacket of green suede, with patches on the sleeves. Gretel wore her camel's-hair coat and a white kerchief. In places, pine needles were drifted across the old roadway, so deep as to silence their footsteps.

They came to a slide where years ago the road had been washed away. Gravel spilled salt-and-pepper downhill toward a river they heard but couldn't see. An old automobile, a Hannomag Storm, hung there, nose-down, one door smashed open. The lavender-gray metal shell had been picked clean as the skeleton of a deer. Somewhere in these woods was the presence that had done this. They skirted the wreck, afraid to come too near the spidered glass, the hard mortality in the shadows of the front seat.

Remains of houses could be glimpsed, back in the trees. There was now a retreat of the light, though it was still before noon, and the forest grew no thicker here. In the middle of the road, giant turds showed up, fresh, laid in twists like strands of rope-dark and knotted. What could have left them?

At the same instant, she and Thanatz both realized that for hours now they must have been walking through the ruin of a great city, not an ancient ruin, but brought down inside their lifetime. Ahead of them, the path curved on, into trees. But something stood now between them and whatever lay around the curve: invisible, impalpable… some
monitor.
Saying, "Not one step farther. That's all. Not one. Go back now."

It was impossible to move any farther into it. They were both terrified. They turned, feeling it at their backs, and moved away quickly.

Back at the Schu?stelle they found Blicero in his final madness. The trunks in the cold little clearing were stripped of bark, bleeding with beads of gum from the rocket blasts.

"He could have banished us. Blicero was a local deity. He wouldn't even have needed a piece of paper. But he wanted us all to stay. He gave us the best there was, beds, food, liquor, drugs. Something was being planned, it involved the boy Gottfried, that was as unmistakable as the smell of resin, first thing those blue hazy mornings. But Blicero would tell us nothing.

"We moved into the Heath. There were oilfields, and blackened earth.
Jabos
flew over in diamond shapes, hunting us. Blicero had grown on, into another animal… a werewolf… but with no humanity left in its eyes: that had faded out, day after day, and been replaced by gray furrows, red veins in patterns that weren't human.
Islands:
clotted islands in the sea. Sometimes even the topographic lines, nested on a common point. 'It is the map of my Ur-Heimat,' imagine a shriek so quiet it's almost a whisper, 'the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land.' I had a sudden understanding: he was seeing the world now in
mythical regions:
they had their maps, real mountains, rivers, and colors. It was not Germany he moved through. It was his own space. But he was taking
us
along with him! My cunt swelled with blood at the danger, the chances for our annihilation, delicious never knowing when it would come down because the space and time were Blicero's own… He did not fall back along roads, he did not cross bridges or lowlands. We sailed Lower Saxony, island to island. Each firing-site was another island, in a white sea. Each island had its peak in the center… was it the position of the Rocket itself? the moment of liftoff? A German Odyssey. Which one would be the last, the home island?

"I keep forgetting to ask Thanatz whatever became of Gottfried. Thanatz was allowed to stay with the battery. But I was taken away: driven in a Hispano-Suiza with Blicero himself, out through the gray weather to a petrochemical plant that for days had stalked us in a wheel at our horizon, black and broken towers in the distance, clustered together, a flame that always burned at the top of one stack. It was the Castle: Blicero looked over, about to speak, and I said, 'The Castle.' The mouth smiled quickly, but absent: the wrinkled wolf-eyes had gone even beyond these domestic moments of telepathy, on into its animal north, to a persistence on the hard edge of death I can't imagine, tough cells with the smallest possible flicker inside, running on nothing but ice, or less. He called me Katje. 'You'll see that your little trick won't work again. Not now, Katje.' I wasn't frightened. It was madness I could understand, or else the hallucinating of the very old. The silver stork flew wings-down into our wind, brow low and legs back, Prussian occipital knot behind: on its shiny surfaces now appeared black swirls of limousines and staff cars in the driveway of the main office. I saw a light plane, a two-seater, at the edge of the parking

lot. The faces of the men inside seemed familiar. I knew them from films, the power and the gravity were there-they were important men, but I only recognized one: Generaldirektor Smaragd, from Le-verkusen. An elderly man who used a cane, a notorious spiritualist before the War, and, it seemed, even now. 'Greta,' he smiled, groping for my hand. 'Ah, we're all here.' But his charm was shared by none of the others. They'd all been waiting for Blicero. A meeting of nobles in the Castle. They went into the board room. I was left with an assistant named Drohne, high forehead, graying hair, always fussing with his necktie. He'd seen every one of my films. We moved off into the machinery. Through the windows of the board room I saw them at a round conference table, with something in the center. It was gray, plastic, shining, light moving on its surfaces. 'What is it?' I asked, vamping Drohne. He took me out of earshot of the others. 'I think it's for the F-Gerat,'he whispered."

"F?"
sez Slothrop, "F-Gerat, you sure of that?"

"Some letter."

"All right, S. They are children at the threshold of language with these words they make up. It looked to me like an ectoplasm-something they had forced, by their joint will, to materialize on the table. No one's lips were moving. It was a seance. I understood then that Blicero had brought me across a frontier. Had injected me at last into his native space without a tremor of pain. I was free. Men crowded behind me in the corridor, blocking the way back. Drohne's hand was sweating on my sleeve. He was a plastics connoisseur. Flipping his fingernail against a large clear African mask, cocking his ear-'Can you hear it? The true ring of Polystyrene…' and going into raptures for me over a heavy chalice of methyl methacrylate, a replica of the San-graal… We were by a tower reactor. A strong paint-thinner smell was in the air. Clear rods of some plastic came hissing out through an extruder at the bottom of the tower, into cooling channels, or into a chopper. The heat was heavy in the room. I thought of something very deep, black and viscous, feeding this factory. From outside I heard motors. Were they all leaving? Why was I here? Plastic serpents crawled endlessly to left and right. The erections of my escort tried to crawl out the openings in their clothes. I could do whatever I wanted. Black radiant and deep. I knelt and began unbuttoning Drohne's trousers. But two others took me by the arms and dragged me off into a warehouse area. Others followed, or entered from other doors. Great curtains of styrene or vinyl, in all colors, opaque and transparent, hung