Gravity's Rainbow (103 page)

On the way home, by tram and foot, his wife bitched at Pökler for dozing off, ridiculed
his engineer’s devotion to cause-and-effect. How could he tell her that the dramatic
connections were really all there, in his dreams? How could he tell her anything?

Klein-Rogge is remembered most of all for his role as Dr. Mabuse. You were meant to
think of Hugo Stinnes, the tireless operator behind the scenes of apparent Inflation,
apparent history: gambler, financial wizard, archgangster . . . a fussy bürgerlich
mouth, jowls, graceless moves, a first impression of comic technocracy . . . and yet,
when the rages came over him, breaking through from beneath the rationalized look,
with his glacial eyes become windows into the bare savanna, then the real Mabuse surfaced,
vital and proud against the gray forces surrounding him, edging him toward the doom
he must’ve known he couldn’t escape, the silent inferno of guns, grenades, streets
full of troops attacking his headquarters, and his own madness at the end of the secret
tunnel. . . . And who brought him down but matinee idol Bernhardt Goetzke as State
Prosecutor von Wenk, Goetzke who played tender, wistful bureaucratic Death in
Der Müde Tod
, here too running true to form, too tame, too gentle for the jaded Countess he coveted—but
Klein-Rogge
jumped in
, with all claws out, drove her effeminate husband to suicide, seized her, threw her
on his bed, the languid bitch—
took her!
while gentle Goetzke sat in his office, among his papers and sybarites—Mabuse trying
to hypnotize him, drug him, bomb him to death in his own office—nothing worked, each
time the great Weimar inertia, files, hierarchies, routines, kept saving him. Mabuse
was the savage throwback, the charismatic flash no Sunday-afternoon Agfa plate could
ever bear, the print through the rippling solution each time flaring up to the same
annihilating white (Piscean depths Pökler has cruised dream and waking, beneath him
images of everyday Inflation dreariness, queues, stockbrokers, boiled potatoes in
a dish, searching with only gills and gut—some nervous drive toward myth he doesn’t
even know if he believes in—for the white light, ruins of Atlantis, intimations of
a truer kingdom). . . .

Metropolitan inventor Rothwang, King Attila, Mabuse der Spieler, Prof.-Dr. Laszlo
Jamf, all their yearnings aimed the same way, toward a form of death that could be
demonstrated to hold joy and defiance, nothing of bourgeois Goetzkian death, of self-deluding,
mature acceptance, relatives in the parlor, knowing faces the children can always
read. . . .

“You have the two choices,” Jamf cried, his last lecture of the year: outside were
the flowery strokings of wind, girls in pale-colored dresses, oceans of beer, male
choruses intensely, movingly lifted as they sang
Semper sit in flores/
Semper sit in flo-ho-res . . . “stay behind with carbon and hydrogen, take your lunch-bucket
in to the works every morning with the faceless droves who can’t wait to get in out
of the sunlight—or move
beyond.
Silicon, boron, phosphorus—these can replace carbon, and can bond to nitrogen instead
of hydrogen—” a few snickers here, not unanticipated by the playful old pedagogue,
be he always in flower: his involvement in getting Weimar to subsidize the IG’s Stickstoff
Syndikat was well known—“move beyond life, toward the inorganic. Here is no frailty,
no mortality—here is Strength, and the Timeless.” Then his well-known finale, as he
wiped away the scrawled C—H on his chalkboard and wrote, in enormous letters, Si—N.

The wave of the future. But Jamf himself, oddly, did
not
move on. He never synthesized those new inorganic rings or chains he had prophesied
so dramatically. Had he only remained behind in the trough, academic generations swelling
away just ahead, or had he known something Pökler and the others didn’t? Were his
exhortations in the lecture hall some kind of eccentric joke? He stayed with C—H,
and took his lunchbucket to America. Pökler lost touch with him after the Technische
Hochschule—so did all his old pupils. He was now under the sinister influence of Lyle
Bland, and if he was still seeking to escape the mortality of the covalent bond, Jamf
was doing it in the least obvious way there was.

• • • • • • •

If that Lyle Bland hadn’t joined the Masons, he’d still probably be up to those nefarious
tricks of his. Just as there are, in the World, machineries committed to injustice
as an enterprise, so too there seem to be provisions active for balancing things out
once in a while. Not as an enterprise, exactly, but at least in the dance of things.
The Masons, in the dance of things, turned out to be one of these where Bland was
concerned.

Imagine the fellow’s plight—got so much money he don’t know what to do with it all.
Don’t go screaming, “Give it to me!” either. He’s given it to you, though in roundabout
ways you might need a good system of search to unsnarl. Oh, has he given it to you.
By way of the Bland Institute and the Bland Foundation, the man has had his meathooks
well into the American day-to-day since 1919. Who do you think sat on top of the patent
for that 100-miles-per-gallon carburetor, eh? sure you’ve heard that story—maybe even
snickered along with paid anthropologists who called it Automotive Age Myth or some
shit—well, turns out the item was real, all right, and it was Lyle Bland who sprang
for those academic hookers doing the snickering and the credentialed lying. Or how
about the great Killer Weed advertising campaign of the thirties, who do you think
worked hand-in-glove (or, as grosser individuals have put it, penis-in-mouth) with
the FBI on that one? And remember all those guy-goes-to-the-doctor-can’t-get-a-hardon
jokes? Planted by Bland, yup—half a dozen basic variations, after having done depth
studies for the National Research Council that indicated an unacceptable 36% of the
male work force weren’t paying enough attention to their cocks—not enough genital
obsession there, and it was undermining the efficiency of the organs doing the
real work.

Psychological studies became, in fact, a Bland specialty. His probe into the subconscious
of early-Depression America is considered a classic, and widely credited with improving
the plausibility of Roosevelt’s “election” in 1932. Though many of his colleagues
found a posture of hatred for FDR useful, Bland was too delighted to go through the
motions. For him, FDR was exactly the man: Harvard, beholden to all kinds of money
old and new, commodity and retail, Harriman and Weinberg: an American synthesis which
had never occurred before, and which opened the way to certain grand possibilities—all
grouped under the term “control,” which seemed to be a private code-word—more in line
with the aspirations of Bland and others. A year later Bland joined the Business Advisory
Council set up under Swope of General Electric, whose ideas on matters of “control”
ran close to those of Walter Rathenau, of German GE. Whatever Swope’s outfit did,
it did in secret. Nobody got to see its files. Bland wasn’t about to tell anybody,
either.

He had gotten to be buddies, after World War I, with the office of the Alien Property
Custodian. Their job was to dispose of confiscated German interests in the U.S. A
lot of Midwestern money was involved here, which is what got Bland embroiled in the
Great Pinball Difficulty, and so into the Masons. Seems that through something called
the Chemical Foundation—cover names in those days had no style to them—the APC had
sold Bland a few of Laszlo Jamf’s early patents, along with the U.S. agency of Glitherius
Paint & Dye, a Berlin firm. A few years later, in 1925, in the course of being put
together, the IG bought back 50% of American Glitherius from Bland, who was using
his end of it as a patent-holding company. Bland got cash, securities, and controlling
interest in a Glitherius subsidiary in Berlin being run by a Jew named Pflaumbaum,
yesyes, the same Pflaumbaum Franz Pökler worked for till the place burned down and
Pökler went back out on the streets. (Indeed, there were those who could see Bland’s
hand in that disaster, though the Jew got blamed, fucked under by the courts, attached
till he was bankrupt, and, in the fullness of time, sent east along with many others
of his race. We would also have to show some interlock between Bland and the Ufa movie-distribution
people who sent Pökler out with his advertising bills to Reinickendorf that night,
to his fateful meeting with Kurt Mondaugen and the Verein für Raumschiffahrt—not to
mention
separate
connections for Achtfaden, Närrisch, and the other S-Gerät people—before we’d have
a paranoid structure worthy of the name. Alas, the state of the art by 1945 was nowhere
near adequate to that kind of data retrieval. Even if it had been, Bland, or his successors
and assigns, could’ve bought programmers by the truckload to come in and make sure
all the information fed out was harmless. Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest
in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies,
drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.)

After the Pflaumbaum fire, lines of power among Bland and his German colleagues had
to be renegotiated. It dragged on for a few years. Bland found himself in Depression
St. Louis, talking with one Alfonso Tracy, Princeton ’06, St. Louis Country Club,
moving into petrochemicals in a big way, Mrs. Tracy dithering in and out of the house
with yardage and armloads of flowers, preparing for the annual Veiled Prophet Ball,
Tracy himself preoccupied with the appearance of some individuals down from Chicago
in flashy pinstripe suits, two-tone shoes and snap-brim fedoras, all talking in accents
staccato as a Thompson.

“Oh, do I need a good electronics man,” Tracy moaned. “What do you do with these wops?
The whole shipment was bad, and now they won’t take it back. If I step out of line,
they’ll murder me. They’ll rape Mabel, they’ll go back to Princeton some dark night
a-and
castrate
my
kid!
You know what I think it is, Lyle? A
plot!”

Vendettas, jeweled gauntlets, subtle poisons come infiltrating this well-mannered
parlor with the picture of Herbert Hoover on the piano, the pinks in the Nieman-Marcus
bowl, the Bauhaus-style furniture like alabaster slabs of a model city (you expect
little HO trains to come whirring out from under the davenport, cans ’n’ reefers on
and on across the carpet’s ash-colored lowland . . .). Alfonso Tracy’s long face,
creased either side of the nose and on around the mustache line, dragged down by worries,
thirty years without a genuine smile (“Even Laurel & Hardy doesn’t work for me any
more!”), morose with fright in his easy chair. How could Lyle Bland not be touched?

“Got just the fella,” sez he, touching Tracy’s arm, compassionate. Always good to
have an engineer on tap. This one did some just top-notch electronic-surveillance
designs once for the then-fledgling FBI, on a contract the Bland Institute landed
a few years ago and subbed part of out to Siemens over there in Germany. “Have him
in tomorrow on the Silver Streak. No problem, Al.”

“Come on out and have a look,” sighs Tracy. They hop in the Packard and drive out
to the green little river town of Mouthorgan, Missouri, which is a railroad station,
a tanning factory, a few frame houses, and dominating the area a gigantic Masonic
hall, not a window on the whole massive monolith.

After a lot of rigmarole at the door, Bland is finally allowed in and led through
velvet poolrooms, elaborate polished-wood gambling setups, chrome bars, soft bedrooms,
on to a large warehouse section in back, which is crammed ten high with more pinball
machines than Bland’s ever seen in one place in his
life
, Oh Boys, Grand Slams, World Serieses, Lucky Lindies as far as the eye can reach.

“And every one is fucked up,” sez melancholy Tracy. “Look at this.” It’s a Folies-Bergères:
four-color lovelies doing the cancan all over it, zeros happening to coincide with
eyes, nipples, and cunts, one of your racy-type games here, a little hostile toward
the ladies but
all in fun!
“You got a nickel?”
Chungg
, boing there goes the ball just missing a high-scoring hole, hmm looks like a permanent
warp there
ahnnnggghk
knocks a flasher worth 1000 but only 50 lights up on the board—“You
see?
” Tracy screams as the ball heads like a rock for the bottom, outside chance get it
with a flipper
zong
flipper flips the other fucking
way
, and the board lights up
TILT
.

“Tilt?” Bland scratching his head. “You didn’t even—”

“They’re
all
like that,” Tracy watering with frustration. “You try it.”

The second ball isn’t even out of the chute before Bland gets another
TILT
, again without having applied any English. Third ball gets
stuck
somehow against a solenoid and (helphelp, it’s hollering, wounded high little voice,
oh I’m being
electrocuted . . .)
dingdingding, gongs and racing numbers up on the board, 400,000, 675,000
bong
a million! greatest Folies-Bergères score in history and climbing, the poor spherical
soul against the solenoid thrashing, clonic, horrible (yes they’re sentient all right,
beings from the planetoid Katspiel, of veryvery elliptical orbit—which is to say it
passed by Earth only once, a long time ago, nearly back at the grainy crepuscular
Edge, and nobody knows where Katspiel is now or when, or if, it’ll be back. It’s that
familiar division between return and one-shot visitation. If Katspiel had enough energy
to leave the sun’s field forever, then it has left these kind round beings in eternal
exile, with no chance of ever being gathered back home, doomed to masquerade as ball
bearings, as steelies in a thousand marble games—to know the great thumbs of Keokuk
and Puyallup, Oyster Bay, Inglewood—Danny D’Allesandro and Elmer Ferguson, Peewee
Brennan and Flash Womack . . . where are they now? where do you think? they all got
drafted, some are dead on Iwo, some gangrenous in the snow in the forest of Arden,
and their thumbs, first rifle inspection in Basic, GI’d, driven deep back into childhood
as little finger sweat-cams off M-1 operating handle, thumb pushing down follower
still deep in breech, bolt sshhOCK! whacks thumb oh shit yes it hurts and good-by
to another unbeatable and legendary thumb, gone for good back to the summer dust,
bags of chuckling glass, bigfooted basset hounds, smell of steel playground slides
heating in the sun), well here come these cancan girls now, Folies-Bergères maenads,
moving in for the kill, big lipstick smiles around blazing choppers, some Offenbach
galop come jigging in now out of the loudspeakers that are implicit in this machine’s
design, long gartered legs kicking out over the agony of this sad spherical permanent
AWOL, all his companions in the chute vibrating their concern and love, feeling his
pain but helpless, inert without the spring, the hustler’s hand, the drunk’s masculinity
problems, the vacuum hours of a gray cap and an empty lunchbox, needing these to run
their own patterns down the towering coils, the deep holes with their promises of
rest that only kick you wobbling out again, always at the mercy of gravity, finding
now and then the infinitesimally shallow grooves of other runs, great runs (twelve
heroic minutes in Virginia Beach, Fourth of July, 1927, a drunken sailor whose ship
went down at Leyte Gulf . . . flipped up off the board, your first three-dimensional
trip is always your best, when you came down again it wasn’t the same, and every time
you’d pass anywhere near the micro-dimple you made when you fell, you’d get a rush . . .
sobered, a few, having looked into the heart of the solenoid, seen the magnetic serpent
and energy in its nakedness, long enough to be changed, to bring back from the writhing
lines of force down in that pit an intimacy with power, with glazed badlands of soul,
that set them apart forever— check out the portrait of Michael Faraday in the Tate
Gallery in London, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick did once, to fill up a womanless and dreary
afternoon, and wondered then how eyes of men could grow so lambent, sinister, so educated
among the halls of dread and the invisible . . .) but now the voices of the murder-witness
coquettes grow shrill, with more of a blade’s edge, the music changes key, pitching
higher and higher, the ruffled buttocks bumping backward more violently, the skirts
flipping redder and deeper each time, covering more of the field, eddying to blood,
to furnace finale, and how’s the Katspiel Kid gonna get out of this one?