Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  “My clothes!” running back out past Katje now emerging from the damask and making a grab for his feet. Slothrop flings open the door, runs out in the hall, recollects that he is naked here, spots a laundry cart and grabs a purple satin bedsheet off of it, drapes it around him in a sort of toga. From the stairway comes a snicker and the pad-pad of crepe soles. “Aha!” cries Slothrop charging down the hall. The slippery sheet will not stay on. It flaps, slides off, gets underfoot. Up the stairs two at a time, only to find at the top another corridor, just as empty. Where is everybody?

  From way down the hall, a tiny head appears around a corner, a tiny hand comes out and gives Slothrop the tiny finger. Unpleasant laughter reaches him a split second later, by which time he’s sprinting toward it. At the stairs, he hears footsteps heading down. The Great Purple Kite races cursing down three flights, out a door and onto a little terrace, just in time to see somebody hop over a stone balustrade and vanish into the upper half of a thick tree, growing up from somewhere below. “Treed at last!” cries Slothrop.

  First you have to get into the tree, then you can climb it easy as a ladder. Once inside, surrounded by pungent leaflight, Slothrop can’t see farther than a couple of limbs. The tree is shaking though, so he reckons that that thief is in here someplace. Industriously he climbs on, sheet catching and tearing, skin stuck by needles, scraped by bark. His feet hurt. He’s soon out of breath. Gradually the cone of green light narrows, grows brighter. Close to the top, Slothrop notes a saw-cut or something partway through the trunk, but doesn’t stop to ponder what it might mean till he’s reached the very top of the tree and clings swaying, enjoying the fine view of the harbor and headland, paint-blue sea, whitecaps, storm gathering off at the horizon, the tops of people’s heads moving around far below. Gee. Down the trunk he hears the sound of wood beginning to crack, and feels vibration here in his slender perch.

  “Aw, hey . . .” That sneak. He climbed down the tree, not up! He’s down there now, watching! They knew Slothrop would choose up, not down—they were counting on that damned American reflex all right, bad guy in a chase always heads up—why up? and they sawed the trunk nearly through, a-and now—

  They? They?

  “Well,” opines Slothrop, “I had better, uh . . .” About then the point of the tree cracks through, and with a great rustle and whoosh, a whirl of dark branches and needles breaking him up into a few thousand sharp falling pieces, down topples Slothrop, bouncing from limb to limb, trying to hold the purple sheet over his head for a parachute. Oof. Nnhh. About halfway to the ground, terrace-level or so, he happens to look down, and there observes many senior officers in uniform and plump ladies in white batiste frocks and flowered hats. They are playing croquet. It appears Slothrop will land somewhere in their midst. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine a tropical island, a secure room, where this cannot be happening. He opens them about the time he hits the ground. In the silence, before he can even register pain, comes the loud thock of wood hitting wood. A bright-yellow striped ball comes rolling past an inch from Slothrop’s nose and on out of sight, followed a second later by a burst of congratulations, ladies enthusiastic, footfalls heading his way. Seems he’s, unnhh, wrenched his back a little, but doesn’t much feel like moving anyhow. Presently the sky is obscured by faces of some General and Teddy Bloat, gazing curiously down.

  “It’s Slothrop,” sez Bloat, “and he’s wearing a purple sheet.”

  “What’s this my lad,” inquires the General, “costume theatricals, eh?” He is joined by a pair of ladies beaming at, or perhaps through, Slothrop.

  “Whom are you talking to, General?”

  “That blighter in the toga,” replies the General, “who is lying between me and my next wicket.”

  “Why how extraordinary, Rowena,” turning to her companion, “do you see a ‘blighter in a toga’?”

  “Goodness no, Jewel,” replies blithe Rowena. “I believe the General has been drinking.” The ladies begin to giggle.

  “If the General made all his decisions in this state,” Jewel gasping for breath, “why there’d, there’d be sauerkraut in the Strand!” The two of them shriek, very loudly, for an unpleasant length of time.

  “And your name would be Brunhilde,” the two faces now a strangled rose, “instead of—of Jewel!” They are clutching each other for dear life. Slothrop glares up at this spectacle, augmented now by a cast of dozens.

  “We-e-e-ell, you see, somebody swiped all my clothes, and I was just on my way to complain to the management—”

  “But decided to put on a purple bedsheet and climb a tree instead,” nods the General. “Well—I dare say we can fix you up with something. Bloat, you’re nearly this man’s size, aren’t you?”

  “Oh,” croquet mallet over his shoulder, posed like an advertising display for Kilgour or Curtis, smirking down at Slothrop, “I’ve a spare uniform somewhere. Come along, Slothrop, you’re all right, aren’t you. Didn’t break anything.”

  “Yaagghh.” Wrapped in his tattered sheet, helped to his feet by solicitous croqueteers, Slothrop goes limping after Bloat, off the turf and into the Casino. They stop first at Slothrop’s room. He finds it newly cleaned, perfectly empty, ready for new guests. “Hey . . .” Yanking out drawers empty as drums: every stitch of clothing he owns is gone, including his Hawaiian shirt. What the fuck. Groaning, he rummages in the desk. Empty. Closets empty. Leave papers, ID, everything, taken. His back muscles throb with pain. “What is this, Ace?” going to check out the number on the door again, everything now for form’s sake. He knows. Hogan’s shirt bothers him most of all.

  “First put on something respectable,” Bloat’s tone full of head-masterish revulsion. Two subalterns come crashing in carrying their valises. They halt goggling at Slothrop. “Here mate, you’re in the wrong theatre of operations,” cries one. “Show a bit of respect,” the other haw-haws, “it’s Lawrence of Arabia!”

  “Shit,” sez Slothrop. Can’t even lift his arm, much less swing it. They proceed to Bloat’s room, where they put together a uniform.

  “Say,” it occurs to Slothrop, “where’s that Mucker-Maffick this morning?”

  “I’ve no idea, really. Off with his girl. Or girls. Where’ve you been?”

  But Slothrop’s looking around, tightening rectal fear belatedly taking hold now, neck and face beading in a surge of sweat, trying to find in this room Tantivy shares with Bloat some trace of his friend. Bristly Norfolk jacket, pinstripe suit, anything. . . .

  Nothing. “Did that Tantivy move out, or what?”

  “He may have moved in, with Françoise or What’s-her-name. Even gone back to London early, I don’t keep a file on him, I’m not the missing-persons bureau.”

  “You’re his friend. . . .” Bloat, with an insolent shrug, for the very first time since they met, now looks Slothrop in the eyes. “Aren’t you? What are you?”

  The answer’s in Bloat’s stare, the dim room become rationalized, nothing to it of holiday, only Savile Row uniforms, silver hairbrushes and razor arranged at right angles, a shiny spike on an octagonal base impaling half an inch of pastel flimsies, all edges neatly squared . . . a piece of Whitehall on the Riviera.

  Slothrop drops his eyes away. “See if I can find him,” he mumbles, retreating out the door, uniform ballooning at the ass and too tight at the waist. Live wi’ the way it feels mate, you’ll be in it for a while. . . .

  He begins at the bar they talked in last night. It is empty except for a colonel with a great twisted mustache, with his hat on, sitting stiffly in front of something large, fizzing, opaque, and garnished with a white chrysanthemum. “Didn’t they teach you at Sandhurst to salute?” this officer screams. Slothrop, hesitating only a moment, salutes. “Damned O.C.T.U. must be full of Nazis.” No bartender in sight. Can’t remember what— “Well?”

  “Actually, what I am is, uh, i
s an American, I only borrowed the uniform, and well I was looking for a Lieutenant, or actually Leftenant, Mucker-Maffick. . . .”

  “You’re a what?” roars the colonel, pulling leaves from the chrysanthemum with his teeth. “What kind of Nazi foolishness is that, eh?”

  “Well, thank you,” Slothrop backing out of the room, saluting again.

  “This is incredible!” the echo following him down the corridors to the Himmler-Spielsaal. “It’s Nazi!”

  Deserted in noon’s lull, here are resonant reaches of mahogany, green baize, hanging loops of maroon velvet. Long-handled wood money rakes lie fanned out on the tables. Little silver bells with ebony handles are turned mouth-down on the russet veneer. Around the tables, Empire chairs are lined up precise and playerless. But some are taller than the rest. These are no longer quite outward and visible signs of a game of chance. There is another enterprise here, more real than that, less merciful, and systematically hidden from the likes of Slothrop. Who sits in the taller chairs? Do They have names? What lies on Their smooth baize surfaces?

  Brass-colored light seeps in from overhead. Murals line the great room: pneumatic gods and goddesses, pastel swains and shepherdesses, misty foliage, fluttering scarves. . . . Everywhere curlicued gilt festoonery drips—from moldings, chandeliers, pillars, window frames . . . scarred parquetry gleams under the skylight . . . From the ceiling, to within a few feet of the tabletops, hang long chains, with hooks at the ends. What hangs from these hooks?

  For a minute here, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of waking he has only lately begun to suspect.

  There may, for a moment, have been some golden, vaguely rootlike or manlike figure beginning to form among the brown and bright cream shadows and light here. But Slothrop isn’t to be let off quite so easy. Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room is really being used for something different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical . . . but, but . . .

  Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it’s

  So hard to explain!

  Just-like, a dream’s-got, lost in yer brain!

  Dancin’ like a fool through that Forbid-den Wing,

  Waitin’ fer th’ light to start shiver-ing—well,

  Who ev-ver said ya couldn’t move that way,

  Who ev-ver said ya couldn’t try?

  If-ya find-there’s-a-lit-tle-pain,

  Ya can al-ways-go-back-a-gain, cause

  Ya don’t-ev-er-real-ly-say, good-by!

  Why here? Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room? say why should walking in here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden itself—here are the same long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery, of condensations and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten corruptions, rooms full of upright gray-feathered statues with wings spread, indistinct faces in dust—rooms full of dust that will cloud the shapes of inhabitants around the corners or deeper inside, that will settle on their black formal lapels, that will soften to sugar the white faces, white shirt fronts, gems and gowns, white hands that move too quickly to be seen . . . what game do They deal? What passes are these, so blurred, so old and perfect?

  “Fuck you,” whispers Slothrop. It’s the only spell he knows, and a pretty good all-purpose one at that. His whisper is baffled by the thousands of tiny rococo surfaces. Maybe he’ll sneak in tonight—no not at night—but sometime, with a bucket and brush, paint FUCK YOU in a balloon coming out the mouth of one of those little pink shepherdesses there. . . .

  He steps back out, backward out the door, as if half, his ventral half, were being struck in kingly radiance: retreating from yet facing the Presence feared and wanted.

  Outside, he heads down toward the quay, among funseekers, swooping white birds, an incessant splat of seagull shit. As I walk along the Bwa-deboolong with an independent air . . . Saluting everybody in uniform, getting it to a reflex, don’t ask for extra trouble, try for invisible . . . bringing his arm each time a bit more stupidly to his side. Clouds now are coming up fast, out of the sea. No sign of Tantivy out here, either.

  Ghosts of fishermen, glassworkers, fur traders, renegade preachers, hilltop patriarchs and valley politicians go avalanching back from Slothrop here, back to 1630 when Governor Winthrop came over to America on the Arbella, flagship of a great Puritan flotilla that year, on which the first American Slothrop had been a mess cook or something—there go that Arbella and its whole fleet, sailing backward in formation, the wind sucking them east again, the creatures leaning from the margins of the unknown sucking in their cheeks, growing crosseyed with the effort, in to black deep hollows at the mercy of teeth no longer the milky molars of cherubs, as the old ships zoom out of Boston Harbor, back across an Atlantic whose currents and swells go flowing and heaving in reverse . . . a redemption of every mess cook who ever slipped and fell when the deck made an unexpected move, the night’s stew collecting itself up out of the planks and off the indignant shoes of the more elect, slithering in a fountain back into the pewter kettle as the servant himself staggers upright again and the vomit he slipped on goes gushing back into the mouth that spilled it . . . Presto change-o! Tyrone Slothrop’s English again! But it doesn’t seem to be redemption exactly that this They have in mind. . . .

  He’s on a broad cobbled esplanade, lined with palms shifting now to coarse-grained black as clouds begin to come over the sun. Tantivy isn’t out on the beach, either—nor are any of the girls. Slothrop sits on a low wall, feet swinging, watching the front, slate, muddy purple, advancing from the sea in sheets, in drifts. Around him the air is cooling. He shivers. What are They doing?

  He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn’t about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s end. He just runs. Rain grows in wet crescendo. His footfalls send up fine flowers of water, each hanging a second behind his flight. It is flight. He comes in speckled, pied with rain, begins a frantic search through the great inert Casino, starting again with the same smoky, hooch-fumed bar, proceeding through the little theatre, where tonight will play an abbreviated version of L’Inutil Precauzione (that imaginary opera with which Rosina seeks to delude her guardian in The Barber of Seville), into its green room where girls, a silkenness of girls, but not the three Slothrop wants most to see, tease hair, arrange garters, glue on eyelashes, smile at Slothrop. No one has seen Ghislaine, Françoise, Yvonne. From another room the orchestra rehearses a lively Rossini tarantella. The reeds are all something like a half tone flat. At once Slothrop understands that he is surrounded by women who have lived a good fraction of their lives at war and under occupation, and for whom people have been dropping out of sight every day . . . yes, in one or two pairs of eyes he finds an old and European pity, a look he will get to know, well before he loses his innocence and becomes one of them. . . .

  So he drifts, through the bright and milling gaming rooms, the dining hall and its smaller private satellites, busting up tête-à-têtes, colliding with waiters, finding only strangers wherever he looks. And if you need help, well, I’ll help you. . . . Voices, music, the shuffling of cards all grow louder, more oppressive, till he stands looking into the Himmler-Spielsaal again, crowded now, jewels flashing, leather gleaming, roulette spokes whirling blurring—it’s here that saturation hits him, it’s all this playing games, too much of it, too many games: the nasal, obsessive voice of a croupier he can’t see—messieurs, mesdames, les jeux sont faits—is suddenly speaking out of the Forbidden Wing directly to him, and about what Slothrop has been playing against the invisib
le House, perhaps after all for his soul, all day—terrified he turns, turns out into the rain again where the electric lights of the Casino, in full holocaust, are glaring off the glazed cobbles. Collar up, Bloat’s hat down over his ears, saying shit every few minutes, shivering, his back aching from that fall out of that tree, he goes stumbling along in the rain. He thinks he might begin to cry. How did this all turn against him so fast? His friends old and new, every last bit of paper and clothing connecting him to what he’s been, have just, fucking, vanished. How can he meet this with any kind of grace? Only much later, worn out, snuffling, cold and wretched in his prison of soggy Army wool, does he think of Katje.

  He gets back to the Casino near midnight, her hour, tramping upstairs leaving wet footprints behind, loud as a washing machine—stops at her door, rain pattering onto the carpet, afraid even to knock. Has she been taken too? Who’s waiting behind the door and what machinery have They brought with Them? But she’s heard him, and opens with a dimpled, chiding smile for being so wet. “Tyrone, I missed you.”

  He shrugs, convulsive, helpless, showering both of them. “It’s the only place I knew to come.” Her smile slowly unpurses. Gingerly he steps across the sill then, not sure if it’s door or high window, into her deep room.

  • • • • • • •

  Good mornings of good old lust, early shutters open to the sea, winds coming in with the heavy brushing of palm leaves, the wheezing break to surface and sun of porpoises out in the harbor.

  “Oh,” Katje groans, somewhere under a pile of their batistes and brocade, “Slothrop, you pig.”

  “Oink, oink, oink,” sez Slothrop cheerfully. Seaglare dances up on the ceiling, smoke curls from black-market cigarettes. Given the precisions of light these mornings, there are forms of grace to be found in the rising of the smoke, meander, furl, delicate fade to clarity. . . .

  At certain hours the harbor blue will be reflected up on the whitewashed sea-façade, and the tall windows will be shuttered again. Wave images will flicker there in a luminous net. By then Slothrop will be up, in British uniform, gobbling down croissants and coffee, already busy at a refresher course in technical German, or trying to dope out the theory of arrow-stable trajectories, or tracing nearly with the end of his nose some German circuit schematic whose resistors look like coils, and the coils like resistors—“What bizarre shit,” once he got hep to it, “why would they go and switch it around like that? Trying to camouflage it, or what?”