Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  A pin? not even that, a pinhole in paper that someday will be taken down, when the rockets have stopped their falling, or when the young statistician chooses to end his count, paper to be hauled away by the charwomen, torn up, burned. . . . Pointsman alone, sneezing helplessly in his dimming bureau, the barking from the kennels flat now and diminished by the cold, shaking his head no . . . inside me, in my memory . . . more than an “event” . . . our common mortality . . . these tragic days. . . . But by now he is shivering, allowing himself to stare across his office space at the Book, to remind himself that of an original seven there are now only two owners left, himself and Thomas Gwenhidwy tending his poor out past Stepney. The five ghosts are strung in clear escalation: Pumm in a jeep accident, Easterling taken early in a raid by the Luftwaffe, Dromond by German artillery on Shellfire Corner, Lamplighter by a flying bomb, and now Kevin Spectro . . . auto, bomb, gun, V-1, and now V-2, and Pointsman has no sense but terror’s, all his skin aching, for the mounting sophistication of this, for the dialectic it seems to imply. . . .

  “Ah, yes indeed. The mummy’s curse, you idiot. Christ, Christ, I’m ready for D Wing.”

  Now D Wing is “The White Visitation” ’s cover, still housing a few genuine patients. Few of the PISCES people go near it. The skeleton of regular hospital staff have their own canteen, W.C.s, sleeping quarters, offices, carrying on as under the old peace, suffering the Other Lot in their midst. Just as, for their part, PISCES staff suffer the garden or peacetime madness of D Wing, only rarely finding opportunity to swap information on therapies or symptoms. Yes, one would expect more of a link. Hysteria is, after all, is it not, hysteria. Well, no, come to find out, it’s not. How does one feel legitimist and easy for very long about the transition? From conspiracies so mild, so domestic, from the serpent coiled in the teacup, the hand’s paralysis or eye’s withdrawal at words, words that could frighten that much, to the sort of thing Spectro found every day in his ward, extinguished now . . . to what Pointsman finds in Dogs Piotr, Natasha, Nikolai, Sergei, Katinka—or Pavel Sergevich, Varvara Nikolaevna, and then their children, and—When it can be read so clearly in the faces of the physicians . . . Gwenhidwy inside his fluffy beard never as impassive as he might have wished, Spectro hurrying away with a syringe for his Fox, when nothing can really stop the Abreaction of the Lord of the Night unless the Blitz stops, rockets dismantle, the entire film runs backward: faired skin back to sheet steel back to pigs to white incandescence to ore, to Earth. But the reality is not reversible. Each firebloom, followed by blast then by sound of arrival, is a mockery (how can it not be deliberate?) of the reversible process: with each one the Lord further legitimizes his State, and we who cannot find him, even to see, come to think of death no more often, really, than before . . . and, with no warning when they will come, and no way to bring them down, pretend to carry on as in Blitzless times. When it does happen, we are content to call it “chance.” Or we have been persuaded. There do exist levels where chance is hardly recognized at all. But to the likes of employees such as Roger Mexico it is music, not without its majesty, this power series

  terms numbered according to rocketfalls per square, the Poisson dispensation ruling not only these annihilations no man can run from, but also cavalry accidents, blood counts, radioactive decay, number of wars per year. . . .

  Pointsman stands by a window, his own vaguely reflected face blown through with the driven snow outside in the darkening day. Far across the downs cries a train whistle, grainy as late fog: a cock-crow— ·—·——, a long whistle, another crow, fire at trackside, a rocket, another rocket, in the woods or valley . . .

  Well . . . Why not renounce the Book then Ned, give it up that’s all, the obsolescent data, the Master’s isolated moments of poetry, it’s paper that’s all, you don’t need it, the Book and its terrible curse . . . before it’s too late. . . . Yes, recant, grovel, oh fabulous—but before whom? Who’s listening? But he has crossed back to the desk and actually laid hands on it. . . .

  “Ass. Superstitious ass.” Wandering, empty-headed . . . these episodes are coming more often now. His decline, creeping on him like the cold. Pumm, Easterling, Dromond, Lamplighter, Spectro . . . what should he’ve done then, gone down to Psi Section, asked Eventyr to get up a séance, try to get on to one of them at least . . . perhaps . . . yes . . . What holds him back? “Have I,” he whispers against the glass, the aspirate, the later plosives clouding the cold pane in fans of breath, warm and disconsolate breath, “so much pride?” One cannot, he cannot walk down that particular corridor, cannot even suggest, no not even to Mexico, how he misses them . . . though he hardly knew Dromond, or Easterling . . . but . . . misses Allen Lamplighter, who would bet on anything, you know, on dogs, thunderstorms, tram numbers, on street-corner wind and a likely skirt, on how far a given doodle would get, perhaps . . . oh God . . . even the one that fell on him. . . . Pumm’s arranger-style piano and drunken baritone, his adventuring among the nurses. . . . Spectro . . . Why can’t he ask? When there are a hundred ways to put it. . . .

  I should . . . should have. . . . There are, in his history, so many of these unmade moves, so many “should haves”—should have married her, let her father steer him, should have stayed in Harley Street, been kinder, smiled more at strangers, even smiled back this afternoon at Maudie Chilkes . . . why couldn’t he? A silly bleeding smile, why not, what inhibits, what snarl of the mosaic? Pretty, amber eyes behind those government spectacles . . . Women avoid him. He knows in a general way what it is: he’s creepy. He’s even aware, usually, of the times when he’s being creepy—it’s a certain set to his face-muscles, a tendency to sweat . . . but he can’t seem to do anything about it, can’t ever concentrate for long enough, they distract him so—and next thing he knows he’s back to radiating the old creepiness again . . . and their response to it is predictable, they run uttering screams only they, and he, can hear. Oh but how he’d like someday to give them something really to scream about. . . .

  Here’s an erection stirring, he’ll masturbate himself to sleep again tonight. A joyless constant, an institution in his life. But goading him, just before the bright peak, what images will come whirling in? Why, the turrets and blue waters, the sails and churchtops of Stockholm—the yellow telegram, the face of a tall, cognizant, and beautiful woman turned to watch him as he passes in the ceremonial limousine, a woman who will later, hardly by chance, visit him in his suite at the Grand Hotel . . . it’s not all ruby nipples and black lace cami-knickers, you know. There are hushed entrances into rooms that smell of paper, satellite votes on this Committee or that, the Chairs, the Prizes . . . what could compare! Later, when you’re older, you’ll know, they said. Yes and it grows upon him, each war year equal to a dozen of peacetime, oh my, how right they were.

  As his luck has always known, his subcortical, brute luck, his gift of survival while other and better men are snatched away into Death, here’s the door, one he’s imagined so often in lonely Thesean brushings down his polished corridors of years: an exit out of the orthodox-Pavlovian, showing him vistas of Norrmalm, Södermalm, Deer Park and Old City. . . .

  One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living . . . and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he’s been now losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry. . . .

  Kevin Spectro did not differentiate as much as he between Outside and Inside. He saw the cortex as an interface organ, mediating between the two, but part of them both. “When you’ve looked at how it really is,” he asked once, “how can we, any of us, be separate?” He is my Pierre Janet, Pointsman thought. . . .

  Soon, by the dialectic of the Book, Pointsman will be alone, in a black field lapsing to isotropy, to the zero, waiting to be last to go. . . . Will there be time? He has to survive
. . . to try for the Prize, not for his own glory, no—but to keep a promise, to the human field of seven he once was, the ones who didn’t make it. . . . Here’s a medium shot, himself backlit, alone at the high window in the Grand Hotel, whisky glass tipped at the bright subarctic sky and here’s to you then, chaps, it’ll be all of us up there onstage tomorrow, Ned Pointsman only happened to survive that’s all . . . TO STOCKHOLM his banner and cry, and after Stockholm a blur, a long golden twilight. . . .

  Oh yes once you know, he did believe in a Minotaur waiting for him: used to dream himself rushing into the last room, burnished sword at the ready, screaming like a Commando, letting it all out at last—some true marvelous peaking of life inside him for the first and last time, as the face turned his way, ancient, weary, seeing none of Pointsman’s humanity, ready only to assume him in another long-routinized nudge of horn, flip of hoof (but this time there would be struggle, Minotaur blood the fucking beast, cries from far inside himself whose manliness and violence surprise him). . . . This was the dream. The settings, the face changed, little of it past the structure survived the first cup of coffee and flat beige Benzedrine pill. It might be a vast lorry-park just at dawn, the pavement newly hosed, mottled in grease-browns, the hooded olive trucks standing each with a secret, each waiting . . . but he knows that inside one of these . . . and at last, sifting among them, finds it, the identifying code beyond voicing, climbs up into the back, under the canvas, waits in the dust and brown light, until through the cloudy oblong of the cab window a face, a face he knows begins to turn . . . but the underlying structure is the turning face, the meeting of eyes . . . stalking Reichssieger von Thanatz Alpdrucken, that most elusive of Nazi hounds, champion Weimaraner for 1941, bearing studbook number 416832 tattooed inside his ear along through a Londonized Germany, his liver-gray shape receding, loping at twilit canalsides strewn with debris of war, rocket blasts each time missing them, their chase preserved, a plate etched in firebursts, the map of a sacrificial city, of a cortex human and canine, the dog’s ear-leather mildly aswing, top of his skull brightly reflecting the winter clouds, into a shelter lying steel-clad miles below the city, an opera of Balkan intrigue, in whose hermetic safety, among whose clusters of blue dissonance unperiodically stressed he’s unable to escape completely because of how always the Reichssieger persists, leading, serene, uncancelable, and to the literal pursuit of whom he thus returns, must return time and again in a fever-rondo, until at last they are on some hillside at the end of a long afternoon of dispatches from Armageddon, among scarlet banks of bougainvillea, golden pathways where dust is rising, pillars of smoke far away over the spidery city they’ve crossed, voices in the air telling of South America burned to cinders, the sky over New York glowing purple with the new all-sovereign death-ray, and here at last is where the gray dog can turn and the amber eyes gaze into Ned Pointsman’s own. . . .

  Each time, each turning, his own blood and heart are stroked, beaten, brought jubilantly high, and triggered to the icy noctiluca, to flare and fusing Thermite as he begins to expand, an uncontainable light, as the walls of the chamber turn a blood glow, orange, then white and begin to slip, to flow like wax, what there is of labyrinth collapsing in rings outward, hero and horror, engineer and Ariadne consumed, molten inside the light of himself, the mad exploding of himself. . . .

  Years ago. Dreams he hardly remembers. The intermediaries come long since between himself and his final beast. They would deny him even the little perversity of being in love with his death. . . .

  But now with Slothrop in it—sudden angel, thermodynamic surprise, whatever he is . . . will it change now? Might Pointsman get to have a go at the Minotaur after all?

  Slothrop ought to be on the Riviera by now, warm, fed, well-fucked. But out in this late English winter the dogs, thrown over, are still ranging the back-streets and mews, sniffing the dustbins, skidding on carpets of snow, fighting, fleeing, shivering in their wet pools of Prussian blue . . . seeking to avoid what cannot be smelled or seen, what announces itself with the roar of a predator so absolute they sink to the snow whining and roll over to give It their soft and open bellies. . . .

  Has Pointsman renounced them in favor of one untried human subject? Don’t think he hasn’t doubts as to the validity of this scheme, at least. Let Vicar de la Nuit worry about its “rightness,” he’s the staff chaplain. But . . . what about the dogs? Pointsman knows them. He’s deftly picked the locks of their awareness. They have no secrets. He can drive them mad, and with bromides in adequate doses he can bring them back. But Slothrop . . .

  So the Pavlovian dithers about his office, feeling restless and old. He should sleep but he can’t. It has to be more than the simple conditioning of a child, once upon a time. How can he’ve been a doctor this long and not developed reflexes for certain conditions? He knows better: he knows it is more. Spectro is dead, and Slothrop (sentiments d’emprise, old man, softly now) was with his Darlene, only a few blocks from St. Veronica’s, two days before.

  When one event happens after another with this awful regularity, of course you don’t automatically assume that it’s cause-and-effect. But you do look for some mechanism to make sense of it. You probe, you design a modest experiment. . . . He owes Spectro that much. Even if the American’s not legally a murderer, he is sick. The etiology ought to be traced, the treatment found.

  There is to this enterprise, Pointsman knows, a danger of seduction. Because of the symmetry. . . . He’s been led before, you know, down the garden path by symmetry: in certain test results . . . in assuming that a mechanism must imply its mirror image—“irradiation,” for example, and “reciprocal induction” . . . and who’d ever said that either had to exist? Perhaps it will be so this time, too. But how it haunts him, the symmetry of these two secret weapons, Outside, out in the Blitz, the sounds of V-1 and V-2, one the reverse of the other. . . . Pavlov showed how mirror-images Inside could be confused. Ideas of the opposite. But what new pathology lies Outside now? What sickness to events—to History itself—can create symmetrical opposites like these robot weapons?

  Sign and symptoms. Was Spectro right? Could Outside and Inside be part of the same field? If only in fairness . . . in fairness . . . Pointsman ought to be seeking the answer at the interface . . . oughtn’t he . . . on the cortex of Lieutenant Slothrop. The man will suffer—perhaps, in some clinical way, be destroyed—but how many others tonight are suffering in his name? For pity’s sake, every day in Whitehall they’re weighing and taking risks that make his, in this, seem almost trivial. Almost. There’s something here, too transparent and swift to get a hold on—Psi Section might speak of ectoplasms—but he knows that the time has never been better, and that the exact experimental subject is in his hands. He must seize now, or be doomed to the same stone hallways, whose termination he knows. But he must remain open—even to the possibility that the Psi people are right. “We may all be right,” he puts in his journal tonight, “so may be all we have speculated, and more. Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically, historically, a monster. We must never lose control. The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I cannot extinguish. . . .”

  • • • • • • •

  More and more, these days of angelic visit and communiqué, Carroll Eventyr feels a victim of his freak talent. As Nora Dodson-Trucks once called it, his “splendid weakness.” It showed late in life: he was 35 when out of the other world, one morning on the Embankment, between strokes of a pavement artist’s two pastels, salmon darkening to fawn, and a score of lank human figures, rag-sorrowful in the distances interlacing with ironwork and river smoke, all at once someone was speaking through Eventyr, so quietly that Nora caught hardly any of it, not even the identity of the soul that took and used him. Not then. Some of it was in German, some of the words she remembered. She would ask her husband, whom she was to meet that afternoon out in Surrey—arriving lat
e though, all the shadows, men and women, dogs, chimneys, very long and black across the enormous lawn, and she with a dusting of ocher, barely noticeable in the late sun, making a fan shape near the edge of her veil—it was that color she’d snatched from the screever’s wood box and swiftly, turning smoothly, touching only at shoe tip and the creamy block of yellow crumbling onto the surface, never leaving it, drew a great five-pointed star on the pavement, just upriver from an unfriendly likeness of Lloyd George in heliotrope and sea-green: pulling Eventyr by the hand to stand inside the central pentagon, seagulls in a wailing diadem overhead, then stepping in herself, an instinctive, a motherly way, her way with anyone she loved. She’d drawn her pentagram not even half in play. One couldn’t be too safe, there was always evil. . . .