Gravity's Rainbow (32 page)

“You’re right, Gwenhidwy,” judicious, sipping his tea, “that is very paranoid.”

“It’s true.” He is out with the festive bottle of Vat 69 now, and about to pour them
a toast.

“To the babies.” Grinning, completely mad.

“Babies, Gwenhidwy?”

“Ah. I’ve been keep-ing my
own
map? Plot-ting da-ta from the maternity wards. The ba-bies born during this Blitz
are al-so fol-lowing a Poisson distribution, you see.”

“Well—to the oddness of it, then. Poor little bastards.”

Later, toward dusk, several enormous water bugs, a very dark reddish brown, emerge
like elves from the wainscoting, and go lumbering toward the larder—pregnant mother
bugs too, with baby translucent outrider bugs flowing along like a convoy escort.
At night, in the very late silences between bombers, ack-ack fire and falling rockets,
they can be heard, loud as mice, munching through Gwenhidwy’s paper sacks, leaving
streaks and footprints of shit the color of themselves behind. They don’t seem to
go in much for soft things, fruits, vegetables, and such, it’s more the solid lentils
and beans they’re into, stuff they can gnaw at, paper and plaster barriers, hard interfaces
to be pierced, for they are agents of unification, you see. Christmas bugs. They were
deep in the straw of the manger at Bethlehem, they stumbled, climbed, fell glistening
red among a golden lattice of straw that must have seemed to extend miles up and downward—an
edible tenement-world, now and then gnawed through to disrupt some mysterious sheaf
of vectors that would send neighbor bugs tumbling ass-over-antennas down past you
as you held on with all legs in that constant tremble of golden stalks. A tranquil
world: the temperature and humidity staying nearly steady, the day’s cycle damped
to only a soft easy sway of light, gold to antique-gold to shadows, and back again.
The crying of the infant reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible
distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see. . . .

• • • • • • •

Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail and very
still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little sunken galleon,
a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she and her sisters have
brought back from the sea.

Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and kissing. Elizabeth
is teasing Claire in the hallway. Their mother is in the W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps
in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now
to look like a cat. It’s Boxing Day. The evening’s very still. The last rocket bomb
was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth
a frock that Penelope will grow into.

The pantomime Roger took them all to see this afternoon was
Hansel and Gretel.
Claire immediately took off under the seats where others were moving about by secret
paths, a flash of braid or of white collar now and then among the tall attentive uncles
in uniform, the coat-draped backs of seats. On stage Hansel, who was supposed to be
a boy but was really a tall girl in tights and smock, cowered inside the cage. The
funny old Witch foamed at the mouth and climbed the scenery. And pretty Gretel waited
by the Oven for her chance. . . .

Then the Germans dropped a rocket just down the street from the theatre. A few of
the little babies started crying. They were scared. Gretel, who was just winding up
with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped: put the broom down, in
the gathering silence stepped to the footlights, and sang:

Oh, don’t let it get you,

It will if they let you, but there’s

Something I’ll bet you can’t see—

It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s right over there,

It’s waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!

Oh, the greengrocer’s wishing on a rainbow today,

And the dustman is tying his tie . . .

And it all goes along to the same jolly song,

With a peppermint face in the sky!

“Now sing along,” she smiled, and actually got the audience, even Roger, to sing:

With a peppermint face in the sky-y,

And a withered old dream in your heart,

You’ll get hit with a piece of the pie-ie,

With the pantomime ready to start!

Oh, the Tommy is sleeping in a snowbank tonight,

And the Jerries are learning to fly—

We can fly to the moon, we’ll be higher than noon,

In our polythene home in the sky. . . .

Pretty polythene home in the sky,

Pretty platinum pins in your hand—

Oh your mother’s a big fat machine gun,

And your father’s a dreary young man. . . .

(Whispered and staccato):

Oh, the, man-a-ger’s suck-ing on a corn-cob, pipe,

And the bank-ers are, eat-ing their, wives,

All the world’s in a daze, while the orchestra plays,

So turn your pockets and get your surprise—

Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-ise,

There was nobody there af-ter all!

And the lamps up the stairway are dying,

It’s the season just after the ball . . .

Oh the palm-trees whisper on the beach somewhere,

And the lifesaver’s heaving a sigh,

And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,

Are of children who are learning to die. . . .

Penelope’s father’s chair, in the corner, next to the table with the lamp, is empty.
It faces her now. She can see the crocheted shawl over the back, many knots of gray,
tan, black, and brown, with amazing clarity. In the pattern, or in front of it, something
is stirring: at first no more than refraction, as if there were a source of heat directly
in front of the empty chair.

“No,” she whispers out loud. “I don’t want to. You’re not him. I don’t know who you
are but you’re not my father. Go away.”

Its arms and legs are silent and rigid. She stares into it.

I only want to visit you.

“You want to possess me.”

Demonic possessions in this house are not unknown. Is this really Keith, her father?
taken when she was half her present age, and returned now as not the man she knew,
but only the shell—with the soft meaty slug of soul that smiles and loves, that feels
its mortality, either rotted away or been picked at by the needle mouths of death-by-government—a
process by which living souls unwillingly become the demons known to the main sequence
of Western magic as the Qlippoth, Shells of the Dead. . . . It is also what the present
dispensation often does to decent men and women entirely on this side of the grave.
In neither process is there any dignity, or any mercy. Mothers and fathers are conditioned
into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways: giving themselves cancer and heart
attacks, getting into motor accidents, going off to fight in the War—leaving their
children alone in the forest. They’ll always tell you fathers are “taken,” but fathers
only leave—that’s what it really is. The fathers are all covering for each other,
that’s all. Perhaps it’s even better to have this presence, rubbing the room dry as
glass, slipping in and out of an old chair, than a father who still hasn’t died yet,
a man you love and have to watch it happening to. . . .

In the kitchen, the water in the kettle shakes, creaks toward boiling, and outside
the wind blows. Somewhere, in another street, a roofslate slides and falls. Roger
has taken Jessica’s cold hands in to warm against his breast, feeling them, icy, through
his sweater and shirt, folded in against him. Yet she stands apart, trembling. He
wants to warm all of her, not just comic extremities, wants beyond reasonable hope.
His heart shakes like the boiling kettle.

It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first time he understands
why this is the same as mortality, and why he will cry when she leaves. He is learning
to recognize the times when nothing really holds her but his skinny, 20-pushup arms. . . .
If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall. But the coincidence
of maps, girls, and rocketfalls has entered him silently, silent as ice, and Quisling
molecules have shifted in latticelike ways to freeze him. If he could be with her
more . . . if it happened when they were together—in another time that might have
sounded romantic, but in a culture of death, certain situations are just more hep
to the jive than others—but they’re apart so much. . . .

If the rockets don’t get her there’s still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy
is
the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for
work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams,
the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the
idle and mindless hours of the day. . . . Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane.
Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along,
and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized
power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband’s orders, she
will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all,
as a mistake thank God she didn’t make. . . . Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how
the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects
his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is
his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate
name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy,
beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that
is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and
there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the words,
images, dreams or ghosts are “yours” and which are “mine.” It’s past sorting out.
We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible. . . .

His act of faith. In the street the children are singing:

Hark, the herald angels sing:

Mrs. Simpson’s pinched our King . . .

Up on the mantelpiece Sooty’s son Kim, an alarmingly fat crosseyed Siamese, lurks
waiting to do the only thing he enjoys these days. Beyond eating, sleeping or fucking
his chief obsession is to jump, or topple, on his mother, and lie there laughing while
she runs screaming around the room. Jessica’s sister Nancy comes out of the loo to
break up what’s becoming a full-scale row between Elizabeth and Claire. Jessica steps
away from Roger to blow her nose. The sound is as familiar to him as a bird’s song,
ip-ip-ip-ip NGUNNGG as the handkerchief comes away . . . “Oh sooper dooper,” she says,
“think I’m catching a cold.”

You’re catching the War. It’s infecting you and I don’t know how to keep it away.
Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don’t leave me. . . .

2

Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering

You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.

—M
ERIAN
C. C
OOPER
to Fay Wray

• • • • • • •

T
HIS
MORNING’S STREETS
are already clattering, near and far, with wood-soled civilian feet. Up in the wind
is a scavenging of gulls, sliding, easy, side to side, wings hung out still, now and
then a small shrug, only to gather lift for this weaving, unweaving, white and slow
faro shuffle off invisible thumbs. . . . Yesterday’s first glance, coming along the
esplanade in the afternoon, was somber: the sea in shades of gray under gray clouds,
the Casino Hermann Goering flat white and the palms in black sawtooth, hardly moving. . . .
But this morning the trees in the sun now are back to green. Leftward, far away, the
ancient aqueduct loops crumbling, dry yellow, out along the
Cap
, the houses and villas there baked to warm rusts, gentle corrosions all through Earth’s
colors, pale raw to deeply burnished.

The sun, not very high yet, will catch a bird by the ends of his wings, turning the
feathers brightly there to curls of shaved ice. Slothrop rattles his teeth at the
crowd of birds aloft, shivering down on his own miniature balcony, electric fire deep
in the room barely touching the backs of his legs. They have filed him high on the
white sea-façade, in a room to himself. Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and his friend Teddy
Bloat are sharing one down the hall. He takes back his hands into ribbed cuffs of
a sweatshirt, crosses his arms, watches the amazing foreign morning, the ghosts of
his breathing into it, feeling first sunwarmth, wanting a first cigarette—and perversely
he waits for a sudden noise to begin his day, a first rocket. Aware all the time he’s
in the wake of a great war gone north, and that the only explosions around here will
have to be champagne corks, motors of sleek Hispano-Suizas, the odd amorous slap,
hopefully. . . . No London? No Blitz? Can he get used to it? Sure, and by then it’ll
be just time to head back.

“Well, he’s awake.” Bloat in uniform, sidling into the room gnawing on a smoldering
pipe, Tantivy behind in a pin-striped lounge suit. “Up at the crack, reconnoitering
the beach for the unattached mamzelle or two, no doubt . . .”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Slothrop yawning back down into the room, birds in the sunlight
kiting behind him.

“Nor we,” from Tantivy. “It must take years to adjust.”

“God,” Bloat really pushing the forced enthusiasm this morning, pointing theatrically
at the enormous bed, collapsing onto it, bouncing vigorously. “They must have had
advance word about you, Slothrop! Luxury! They gave us some disused closet, you know.”

“Hey, what are you telling him?” Slothrop forages around for cigarettes. “I’m some
kind of a Van Johnson or something?”

“Only that, in the matter of,” Tantivy from the balcony tossing his green pack of
Cravens, “girls, you know—”

“Englishmen being rather reserved,” Bloat explains, bouncing for emphasis.

“Oh, raving maniacs,” Slothrop mumbles, heading for his private lavatory, “been invaded
by a gang of those section 8s, all right. . . .” Stands pleased, pissing no-hands,
lighting up, but wondering a little about that Bloat. Supposed to be oldtime pals
with Tantivy. He snaps the match into the toilet, a quick hiss: yet something about
the way he talks to Slothrop, patronizing? maybe nervous . . .

“You’re expecting
me
to fix you guys up?” he yells over the crash of the toilet flushing, “I thought the
minute you guys get across that Channel, set foot on that France, you all turn into
Valentinos.”

“I hear there was some prewar tradition,” Tantivy hanging plaintive now in the doorway,
“but Bloat and I are members of the New Generation, we have to depend on Yank expertise. . . .”

Whereupon Bloat leaps from the bed and seeks to enlighten Slothrop with a song:

T
HE
E
NGLISHMAN’S
V
ERY
S
HY
(F
OX-TROT
)

(
Bloat
): The Englishman’s very shy,

He’s none of your Ca-sa-no-va,

At bowling the ladies o-ver,

A-mericans lead the pack—

(
Tantivy
): —You see, your Englishman tends to lack

That recklessness transatlantic,

That women find so romantic

Though frankly I can’t see why . . .

(
Bloat
): The polygamous Yank with his girls galore

Gives your Brit-ish rake or carouser fits,

(
Tantivy
): Though he’s secretly held in re-ve-rent awe

As a sort of e-rot-ic Clausewitz. . . .

(
Together
): If only one could al-ly

A-merican bedroom know-how

With British good looks, then
oh
how

Those lovelies would swoon and sigh,

Though you and I know the Englishman’s very shy.

“Well you’ve sure come to the right place,” nods Slothrop, convinced. “Only don’t
expect me to put it in for you.”

“Just the initial approach,” Bloat says.

“Moi,” Tantivy has meanwhile been screaming down from the balcony, “Moi Tantivy, you
know. Tantivy.”

“Tantivy,” replies a dim girl-chorus from outside and below.

“J’ai deux amis, aussi, by an odd coincidence. Par un bizarre coincidence, or something,
oui?”

Slothrop, at this point shaving, wanders out with the foamy badger brush in his fist
to see what’s happening, and collides with Bloat, who’s dashing to peer down over
his compatriot’s left epaulet at three pretty girls’ faces, upturned, straw-haloed
each by a giant sun-hat, smiles all dazzling, eyes mysterious as the sea behind them.

“I say où,” inquires Bloat, “où, you know, déjeuner?”

“Glad I could help you out,” Slothrop mutters, lathering Tantivy between the shoulderblades.

“But come with us,” the girls are calling above the waves, two of them holding up
an enormous wicker basket out of which lean sleek green wine bottles and rough-crusted
loaves still from under their white cloth steaming in little wisps feathering off
of chestnut glazes and paler split-streaks, “come—sur la plage . . .”

“I’ll just,” Bloat half out the door, “keep them company, until you . . .”

“Sur la plage,” Tantivy a bit dreamy, blinking in the sun, smiling down at their good-morning’s
wishes come true, “oh, it sounds like a painting. Something by an Impressionist. A
Fauve. Full of light. . . .”

Slothrop goes flicking witch hazel off his hands. The smell in the room brings back
a moment of Berkshire Saturdays—bottles of plum and amber tonics, fly-studded paper
twists swayed by the overhead fan, twinges of pain from blunt scissors. . . . Struggling
out of his sweatshirt, lit cigarette in his mouth, smoke coming out the neck like
a volcano, “Hey could I bum one of your—”

“You’ve already got the pack,” cries Tantivy—“God almighty, what is
that
supposed to be?”

“What’s what?” Slothrop’s face nothing but innocent as he slips into and begins to
button the object in question.

“You’re joking, of course. The young ladies are waiting, Slothrop, do put on something
civilized, there’s a good chap—”

“All set,” Slothrop on the way past the mirror combing his hair into the usual sporty
Bing Crosby pompadour.

“You can’t expect us to be
seen
with—”

“My brother Hogan sent it to me,” Slothrop lets him know, “for my birthday, all the
way from the Pacific. See on the back? under the fellows in that outrigger canoe there,
to the left of those hibiscus blossoms, it se
Z SOUVENIR OF HONOLULU?
This is the authentic item, Mucker-Maffick, not some cheap imitation.”

“Dear God,” moans Tantivy, trailing him forlornly out of the room, shading his eyes
from the shirt, which glows slightly in the dimness of the corridor. “At least tuck
it in and cover it with something. Here, I’ll even lend you this Norfolk jacket. . . .”
Sacrifice indeed: the coat is from a Savile Row establishment whose fitting rooms
are actually decorated with portraits of all the venerable sheep—some nobly posed
up on crags, others in pensive, soft close-ups—from whom the original fog-silvered
wool was sheared.

“Must be woven out of that barbed wire,” is Slothrop’s opinion, “what girl’d want
to get near anything like that?”

“Ah, but, but would any woman in her right mind want to be within ten miles of that-that
ghastly shirt, eh?”

“Wait!” From someplace Slothrop now produces a gaudy yellow, green and orange display
handkerchief, and over Tantivy’s groans of horror arranges it in his friend’s jacket
pocket so as to stick out in three points. “There!” beaming, “that’s what you call
real sharp!
”

They emerge into sunlight. Gulls begin to wail, the garment on Slothrop blazes into
a refulgent life of its own. Tantivy squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them, the
girls are all attached to Slothrop, stroking the shirt, nibbling at its collar-points,
cooing in French.

“Of course.” Tantivy picks up the basket. “Right.”

The girls are dancers. The manager of the Casino Hermann Goering, one César Flebótomo,
brought in a whole chorus-line soon as the liberators arrived, though he hasn’t yet
found time to change the place’s occupation name. Nobody seems to mind it up there,
a pleasant mosaic of tiny and perfect seashells, thousands of them set in plaster,
purple, pink and brown, replacing a huge section of roof (the old tiles still lie
in a heap beside the Casino), put up two years ago as recreational therapy by a Messerschmitt
squadron on furlough, in German typeface expansive enough to be seen from the air,
which is what they had in mind. The sun now is still too low to touch the words into
any more than some bare separation from their ground, so that they hang suppressed,
no relation any more to the men, the pain in their hands, the blisters that grew black
under the sun with infection and blood—only receding as the party now walk down past
sheets and pillowcases of the hotel, spread to dry on the slope of the beach, fine
wrinkles edged in blue that will flow away as the sun climbs, six pairs of feet stirring
debris never combed for, an old gambling chip half bleached by the sun, translucent
bones of gulls, a drab singlet, Wehrmacht issue, torn and blotted with bearing grease. . . .

They move along the beach, Slothrop’s amazing shirt, Tantivy’s handkerchief, girls’
frocks, green bottles all dancing, everyone talking at once, boy-and-girl lingua franca,
the girls confiding quite a lot to each other with side glances for their escorts.
This ought to be good for a bit of the, heh, heh, early paranoia here, a sort of pick-me-up
to help face what’s sure to come later in the day. But it isn’t. Much too good a morning
for that. Little waves are rolling in, breaking piecrust-wise along a curve of dark
shingle, farther off foaming among the black rocks that poke up along the
Cap.
Out at sea wink twin slivers of a boat’s sails being sucked along in the sun and
distance, over toward Antibes, the craft tacking gradual, cockle-frail among low swells
whose touch and rowdy hiss along the chines Slothrop can feel this morning, reminded
of prewar Comets and Hamptons sighted from the beach at Cape Cod, among land odors,
drying seaweed, summer-old cooking oil, the feel of sand on sunburn, the sharp-pointed
dune grass under bare feet. . . . Closer to shore a
pédalo
full of soldiers and girls moves along—they dangle, splash, sprawl in green and white
striped lounge chairs back aft. At the edge of the water small kids are chasing, screaming,
laughing in that hoarse, helplessly tickled little-kid way. Up on the esplanade an
old couple sit on a bench, blue and white and a cream-colored parasol, a morning habit,
an anchor for the day. . . .

They go as far as the first rocks, finding there an inlet partly secluded from the
rest of the beach, and from the looming Casino. Breakfast is wine, bread, smiling,
sun diffracting through the fine gratings of long dancers’ hair, swung, flipped, never
still, a dazzle of violet, sorrel, saffron, emerald. . . . For a moment you can let
the world go, solid forms gone a-fracturing, warm inside of bread waiting at your
fingertips, flowery wine in long, easy passage streaming downward around the root
of your tongue. . . .

Bloat cuts in. “I say Slothrop, is she a friend of yours too?”

Hmm? what’s happening . . . she, what? Here sits Bloat, smug, gesturing over at the
rocks and a tide pool nearby. . . .

“You’re getting ‘the eye,’ old man.”

Well . . . she must have come out of the sea. At this distance, some 20 meters, she
is only a dim figure in a black bombazine frock that reaches to her knees, her bare
legs long and straight, a short hood of bright blonde hair keeping her face in shadow,
coming up in guiches to touch her cheeks. She’s looking at Slothrop, all right. He
smiles, sort of waves. She only continues to stand, the breeze pushing at her sleeves.
He turns back to draw the cork from a wine bottle, and its pop arrives as a grace
note for a scream from one of the dancers. Tantivy’s already halfway to his feet,
Bloat gaping out in the girl’s direction, the danseuses snapshot in defense reflexes,
hair flying, frocks twisted, thighs flashing—

Holy shit it’s
moving
—an octopus? Yes it is the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen outside
of the movies, Jackson, and it has just risen up out of the water and squirmed halfway
onto one of the black rocks. Now, cocking a malignant eye at the girl, it reaches
out, wraps one long sucker-studded tentacle around her neck as everyone watches, another
around her waist and begins to drag her, struggling, back under the sea.

Slothrop’s up, bottle in hand, running down past Tantivy who’s doing a hesitant dance
step, hands patting lounge-suit pockets for weapons that aren’t there, more and more
of the octopus revealed the closer he comes and wow it’s a
big
one, holycow—skids to a halt alongside, one foot in the tide pool, and commences
belting the octopus in the head with the wine bottle. Hermit crabs slide in death-struggle
around his foot. The girl, already half in the water, is trying to cry out, but the
tentacle, flowing and chilly, barely allows her windway enough to breathe. She reaches
out a hand, a soft-knuckled child’s hand with a man’s steel ID bracelet on the wrist,
and clutches at Slothrop’s Hawaiian shirt, begins tightening her own grip there, and
who was to know that among her last things would be vulgar-faced hula girls, ukuleles,
and surfriders all in comic-book colors . . .
oh God God please
, the bottle thudding again and again wetly into octopus flesh, no fucking use, the
octopus gazes at Slothrop, triumphant, while he, in the presence of certain death,
can’t quit staring at her hand, cloth furrowing in tangents to her terror, a shirt
button straining at a single last thread—he sees the name on the bracelet, scratched
silver letters each one clear but making no sense to him before the slimy gray stranglehold
that goes tightening, liquid, stronger than he and she together, framing the poor
hand its cruel tetanus is separating from Earth—