“But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not resurrection. I mean your IG, Generaldirektor.”
“Our IG, I should have thought,” replies Smaragd with more than the usual ice and stiffness.
“That’s for you to work out. If you prefer to call this a liaison, do. I am here for as long as you need me. You don’t have to listen. You think you’d rather hear about what you call ‘life’: the growing, organic Kartell. But it’s only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion—even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs”—a bit of a murmur around the table at this—“as you all must know. The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata—epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator.
“These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth—I know I presume—you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules—it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers. . . .
“You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?
“You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go. . . .”
A silence, which prolongs itself. There is some shifting in the seats around the table, but the sets of little fingers stay in touch.
“Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?” It is Heinz Rippenstoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. “Is God really Jewish?”
• • • • • • •
Pumm, Easterling, Dromfond, Lamplighter, Spectro are stars on the doctor’s holiday tree. Shining down on this holiest of nights. Each is a cold announcement of dead ends, suns that will refuse to stand, but flee south, ever south, leaving us to north-without-end. But Kevin Spectro is brightest, most distant of all. And the crowds they swarm in Knightsbridge, and the wireless carols drone, and the Underground’s a mob-scene, but Pointsman’s all alone. But he’s got his Xmas present, fa la la, he won’t have to settle for any Spam-tin dog this year mates, he’s got his own miracle and human child, grown to manhood but carrying, someplace on the Slothropian cortex now a bit of Psychology’s own childhood, yes pure history, inert, encysted, unmoved by jazz, depression, war—a survival, if you will, of a piece of the late Dr. Jamf himself, past death, past the reckoning of the, the old central chamber you know. . . .
He has no one to ask, no one to tell. My heart, he feels, my heart floods now with such virility and hope. . . . News from the Riviera is splendid. Experiments here begin to run smoothly for a change. From some dark overlap, a general appropriation or sinking fund someplace, Brigadier Pudding has even improved the funding for ARF. Does he feel Pointsman’s power too? Is he buying some insurance?
At odd moments of the day Pointsman, fascinated, discovers himself with an erect penis. He begins making jokes, English Pavlovian jokes, nearly all of which depend on one unhappy accident: the Latin cortex translates into English as “bark,” not to mention the well-known and humorous relation between dogs and trees (these are bad enough, and most PISCES folk have the good sense to avoid them, but they are dazzling witticisms compared with jokes out of the mainstream, such as the extraordinary “What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?”). Sometime during the annual PISCES Christmas Party, Pointsman is led by Maudie Chilkes to a closet full of belladonna, gauze, thistle tubes, and the scent of surgical rubber, where in a flash she’s down on her red knees, unbuttoning his trousers, as he, confused, good God, strokes her hair, clumsily shaking much of it loose from its wine-colored ribbon—here what’s this, an actual, slick and crimson, hot, squeak-stockinged slavegirl “gam” yes right among these winter-pale clinical halls, with the distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses, woodblocks, wearied blown sheets of tropic string cadences audible as everyone dances back there on the uncarpeted floors, and the old Palladian shell, conch of a thousand rooms, gives, resonates, shifting stresses along walls and joists . . . bold Maud, this is incredible, taking the pink Pavlovian cock in as far as it will go, chin to collarbone vertical as a sword-swallower, releasing him each time with some small ladylike choking sound, fumes of expensive Scotch rising flowerlike, and her hands up grabbing the loose wool seat of his pants, pleating, unpleating—it’s happening so fast that Pointsman only sways, blinks a bit drunkenly you know, wondering if he’s dreaming or has found the perfect mixture, try to remember, amphetamine sulphate, 5 mg q 6 h, last night amobarbital sodium 0.2 Gm. at bedtime, this morning assorted breakfast vitamin capsules, alcohol an ounce, say, per hour, over the past . . . how many cc.s is that and oh, Jesus I’m coming. Am I? yes . . . well . . . and Maud, dear Maudie, swallowing, wastes not a drop . . . smiling quietly, unplugged at last, she returns the unstiffening hawk to its cold bachelor nest but kneels still a bit longer in the closet of this moment, the drafty, white-lit moment, some piece by Ernesto Lecuona, “Siboney” perhaps, now reaching them down corridors long as the sea-lanes back to the green shoals, slime stone battlements, and palm evenings of Cuba . . . a Victorian pose, her cheek against his leg, his high-veined hand against her face. But no one saw them, then or ever, and in the winter ahead, here and there, her look will cross his and she’ll begin to blush red as her knees, she’ll come to his room off the lab once or twice perhaps, but somehow they’re never to have this again, this sudden tropics in the held breath of war and English December, this moment of perfect peace. . . .
No one to tell. Maud knows something’s up all right, the finances of PISCES pass through her hands, nothing escapes her. But he can’t tell her . . . or not everything, not the exact terms of his hope, he’s never, even to himself . . . it lies ahead in the dark, defined inversely, by horror, by ways all hopes might yet be defeated and he find only his death, that dumb, empty joke, at the end of this Pavlovian’s Progress.
Now Thomas Gwenhidwy too senses change fibrillating in the face and step of his colleague. Fat, prematurely white Santa Claus beard, a listing, rumpled showman, performing every instant, trying to speak a double language, both Welsh comic-provincial and hard diamond gone-a-begging truth, hear what you will. His singing voice is incredible, in his spare time he strolls out past the wire-mesh fighter runways looking for bigger planes—for he loves to practice the bass part to “Diadem” as the Flying Fortresses take off at full power, and even so you can hear him, bone-vibrating and pure above the bombers, all the way to Stoke Poges, you see. Once a lady even wrote in to the Times from Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, asking who was the man with the lovely deep voice singing “Diadem.” A Mrs. Snade. Gwenhidwy likes to drink a lot, grain alcohol mostly, mixed in great strange mad-scientist concoctions with beef tea, grenadine, cough syrup, bitter belch-gathering infusions of blue scullcap, valerian root, motherwort and lady’s-slipper, whatever’s to hand really. His is the hale alcoholic style celebrated in national legend and song. He is descended directly from the Welshman in Henry V who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek. None of your sedentary drinkers though. Pointsman has never seen Gwenhidwy off of his feet or standing still�
��he fusses endlessly pitch-and-roll avast you scum down the long rows of sick or dying faces, and even Pointsman has noted rough love in the minor gestures, changes of breathing and voice. They are blacks, Indians, Ashkenazic Jews speaking dialects you never heard in Harley Street: they have been bombed out, frozen, starved, meanly sheltered, and their faces, even the children’s, all possess some ancient intimacy with pain and reverse that amazes Pointsman, who is more polarized upon West End catalogues of genteel signs and symptoms, headborn anorexias and constipations the Welshman could have little patience with. On Gwenhidwy’s wards some BMRs run low as -35, -40. The white lines go thickening across the X-ray ghosts of bones, gray scrapings from underneath tongues bloom beneath his old wrinkle-black microscope into clouds of Vincentesque invaders, nasty little fangs achop and looking to ulcerate the vitamin-poor tissue they came from. A quite different domain altogether, you see.
“I don’t know, man—no, I don’t,” flinging a fat slow-motion arm out of his hedgehog-colored cape, back at the hospital, as they walk in the falling snow—to Pointsman a clear separation, monks here and cathedral there, soldiers and garrison—but not so to Gwenhidwy, part of whom remains behind, hostage. The streets are empty, it’s Christmas day, they are tramping uphill to Gwenhidwy’s rooms as the quiet snow curtains fall on and on between themselves and the pierced walls of the institution marching in stone parallax away into a white gloom. “How they persist. The poor, the black. And the Jews! The Welsh, the Welsh once upon a time were Jewish too? one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a black tribe, who wandered overland, centuries? oh an incredible journey. Until at last they reached Wales, you see.”
“Wales . . .”
“Stayed on, and became the Cymri. What if we’re all Jews, you see? all scattered like seeds? still flying outward from the primal fist so long ago. Man, I believe that.”
“Of course you do, Gwenhidwy.”
“Aren’t we then? What about you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel Jewish today.”
“I meant flying outward?” He means alone and forever separate: Pointsman knows what he means. So, by surprise, something in him is touched. He feels the Christmas snow now at crevices of his boots, the bitter cold trying to get in. The brown wool flank of Gwenhidwy moves at the edge of his sight, a pocket of color, a holdout against this whitening day. Flying outward. Flying . . . Gwenhidwy, a million ice-points falling at a slant across his caped immensity, looking so improbable of extinction that now, from where it’s been lying, the same yawing-drunk chattering fear returns, the Curse of the Book, and here is someone he wants, truly, with all his mean heart, to see preserved . . . though he’s been too shy, or proud, ever to’ve smiled at Gwenhidwy without some kind of speech to explain and cancel out the smile. . . .
Dogs run barking at their approach. They get the Professional Eye from Pointsman. Gwenhidwy is humming “Aberystwyth.” Out comes the doorkeeper’s daughter Estelle with a shivering kid or two underfoot and a Christmas bottle of something acrid but very warming inside the breast after about the first minute it’s down. Smells of coal smoke, piss, garbage, last night’s bubble-and-squeak, fill the hallways. Gwenhidwy is drinking from the bottle, carrying on a running slap-and-tickle with Estelle and getting in a fast game of where’d-he-go-there-he-is with Arch her youngest around the broad mouton hipline of his mother who keeps trying to smack him but he’s too fast.
Gwenhidwy breathes upon a gas meter which is frozen all through, too tight to accept coins. Terrible weather. He surrounds it, curses it, bending like a screen lover, wings of his cape reaching to enfold—Gwenhidwy, radiating like a sun. . . .
Out the windows of the sitting-room are a row of bare Army-colored poplars, a canal, a snowy trainyard, and beyond it a long sawtooth pile of scrap coal, still smoldering from a V-bomb yesterday. Ragged smoke is carried askew, curling, broken and back to earth by the falling snow.
“It’s the closest yet,” Gwenhidwy at the kettle, the sour smell of a sulfur match in the air. After a moment, still on watch over the gas ring, “Pointsman, do you want to hear something really paranoid?”
“You too?”
“Have you consulted a map of London lately? All this great meteoric plague of V-weapons, is being dumped out here, you see. Not back on Whitehall, where it’s supposed to be, but on me, and I think it is beast-ly?”
“What a damned unpatriotic thing to say.”
“Oh,” hawking and spitting into the washbowl, “you don’t want to believe it. Why should you? Harley Street lot, my good Jesus Christ.”
It’s an old game with Gwenhidwy, Royal Fellow–baiting. Some unaccustomed wind or thermocline along the sky is bringing them down the deep choral hum of American bombers: Death’s white Gymanfa Ganu. A switching-locomotive creeps silently across the web of tracks below.
“They’re falling in a Poisson distribution,” says Pointsman in a small voice, as if it was open to challenge.
“No doubt man, no doubt—an excellent point. But all over the fucking East End, you see.” Arch, or someone, has drawn a brown, orange, and blue Gwenhidwy carrying a doctor’s bag along a flat horizon-line past a green gasworks. The bag’s full of gin bottles, Gwenhidwy is smiling, a robin is peeking out from its nest in his beard, and the sky is blue and the sun yellow. “But have you ever thought of why? Here is the City Paranoiac. All these long centuries, growing over the country-side? like an intelligent creature. An actor, a fantastic mimic, Pointsman! Count-erfeiting all the correct forces? the eco-nomic, the demographic? oh yes even the ran-dom, you see.”
“What do you mean ‘I see’? I don’t see.” Against the window, backlit by the white afternoon, Pointsman’s face is invisible except for a tiny bright crescent glowing off each eyeball. Should he fumble behind him for the window catch? Is the woolly Welshman gone raving mad, then?
“You don’t see them,” steam in tight brocade starting to issue from the steel-blotched swan’s mouth, “the blacks and Jews, in their darkness. You can’t. You don’t hear their silence. You became so used to talking, and to light.”
“To barking, anyway.”
“Nothing comes through my hos-pital but fail-ure, you see.” Staring with a fixed, fool-alcoholic smile. “What can I cure? I can only send them back, outside again? Back to that? It might as well be Europe here, com-bat, splint-ing and drug-ging them all into some mini-mum condition to get on with the kill-ing?”
“Here, don’t you know there’s a war on?” Thus Pointsman receives, with his cup, a terrible scowl. In truth, he is hoping with nitwit irrelevancies to discourage Gwenhidwy from going on about his City Paranoiac. Pointsman would rather talk about the rocket victims admitted today to the hospital down there. But this is exorcism man, it is the poet singing back the silence, adjuring the white riders, and Gwenhidwy knows, as Pointsman cannot, that it’s part of the plan of the day to sit inside this mean room and cry into just such a deafness: that Mr. Pointsman is to play exactly himself—stylized, irritable, uncomprehending. . . .
“In some cities the rich live upon the heights, and the poor are found below. In others the rich occupy the shoreline, while the poor must live inland. Now in London, here is a gra-dient of wretchedness? increasing as the river widens to the sea. I am only ask-ing, why? Is it because of the ship-ping? Is it in the pat-terns of land use, especially those relating to the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an-cient tribal tabu, surviving down all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From The East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly. The people out here were meant to go down first. We’re expendable: those in the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don’t mean the Threat has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Paranoiac dreams, it’s not accessible to us. Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of another, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary . . . or of waves of darkness . . .
waves of fire. . . . Perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It’s none of my business, city dreams. . . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing. It was known, don’t deny it—known, Pointsman! that the front in Eu-rope someday must develop like this? move away east, make the rock-ets necessary, and known how, and where, the rockets would fall short. Ask your friend Mexico? look at the densities on his map? east, east, and south of the river too, where all the bugs live, that’s who’s getting it thick-est, my friend.”
“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. . . .
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