“Recall your ancient German runes,” suggests Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, who is from the Foreign Office P.I.D. and speaks 33 languages including English with a strong Oxonian blither to it.
“My what?”
“Oh,” lips compressing, some kind of brain nausea here, “that coil symbol there happens to be very like the Old Norse rune for ‘S,’ sôl, which means ‘sun.’ The Old High German name for it is sigil.”
“Funny way to draw that sun,” it seems to Slothrop.
“Indeed. The Goths, much earlier, had used a circle with a dot in the center. This broken line evidently dates from a time of discontinuities, tribal fragmenting perhaps, alienation—whatever’s analogous, in a social sense, to the development of an independent ego by the very young child, you see. . . .”
Well, no, Slothrop doesn’t see, not exactly. He hears this sort of thing from Dodson-Truck nearly every time they get together. The man just materialized one day, out on the beach in a black suit, shoulders starred with dandruff from thinning carrot hair, coming into view against the white face of the Casino, which trembled over him as he approached. Slothrop was reading a Plasticman comic. Katje was dozing in the sun, face-up. But when his footpads reached her hearing, she turned on one elbow to wave hello. The peer flung himself at full length, Attitude 8.11, Torpor, Undergraduate. “So this is Lieutenant Slothrop.”
Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out of a keyhole, around a corner and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist’s lab, out of whose faucet Plas’s head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw, is just emerging. “Yeah. Who’re you, Ace?”
Sir Stephen introduces himself, freckles roused by the sun, eying the comic book curiously. “I gather this isn’t a study period.”
“Is he cleared?”
“He’s cleared,” Katje smiling/shrugging at Dodson-Truck.
“Taking a break from that Telefunken radio control. That ‘Hawaii I.’ You know anything about that?”
“Only enough to wonder where they got the name from.”
“The name?”
“There’s a poetry to it, engineer’s poetry . . . it suggests Haverie—average, you know—certainly you have the two lobes, don’t you, symmetrical about the rocket’s intended azimuth . . . hauen, too—smashing someone with a hoe or a club . . .” off on a voyage of his own here, smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression ab-hauen, quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient Greeks. . . . Slothrop’s first impulse is to get back to what that Plas is into, but something about the man, despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him listening . . . an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs him, a love for the Word.
“Well, it might be just Axis propaganda. Something to do with that Pearl Harbor.”
Sir Stephen considers this, seeming pleased. Did They choose him because of all those word-smitten Puritans dangling off of Slothrop’s family tree? Were They trying to seduce his brain now, his reading eye too? There are times when Slothrop actually can find a clutch mechanism between him and Their iron-cased engine far away up a power train whose shape and design he has to guess at, a clutch he can disengage, feeling then all his inertia of motion, his real helplessness . . . it is not exactly unpleasant, either. Odd thing. He is almost sure that whatever They want, it won’t mean risking his life, or even too much of his comfort. But he can’t fit any of it into a pattern, there’s no way to connect somebody like Dodson-Truck with somebody like Katje. . . .
Seductress-and-patsy, all right, that’s not so bad a game. There’s very little pretending. He doesn’t blame her: the real enemy’s somewhere back in that London, and this is her job. She can be versatile, gay, and kind, and he’d rather be warm here with her than freezing back under the Blitz. But now and then . . . too insubstantial to get a fix on, there’ll be in her face a look, something not in her control, that depresses him, that he’s even dreamed about and so found amplified there to honest fright: the terrible chance that she might have been conned too. As much a victim as he is—an unlucky, an unaccountably futureless look. . . .
One gray afternoon in where but the Himmler-Spielsaal, where else, he surprises her alone by a roulette wheel. She’s standing, head bent, gracefully hipshot, playing croupier. An employee of the House. She wears a white peasant blouse and a rainbow-striped dirndl skirt of satin, which shimmers underneath the skylight. The ball’s tattoo, against the moving spokes, gathers a long, scratchy resonance here in the muraled space. She doesn’t turn till Slothrop is beside her. To her breathing there is a grave slow-beating tremor: she nudges at the shutters of his heart, opening to him brief flashes of an autumn country he has only suspected, only feared, outside him, inside her. . . .
“Hey Katje . . .” Making a long arm, hooking a finger on a spoke to stop the wheel. The ball drops in a compartment whose number they never see. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.
She shakes her head. He understands that it’s something back in Holland, before Arnhem—an impedance permanently wired into the circuit of themselves. How many ears smelling of Palmolive and Camay has he crooned songs into, outside-the-bowling-alley songs, behind-the-Moxie-billboard songs, Saturday-night open-me-another-quart songs, all saying, honey, it don’t matter where you’ve been, let’s not live in the past, right now’s all there is. . . .
Fine for back there. But not in here, tapping on her bare shoulder, peering in at her European darkness, bewildered with it, himself with his straight hair barely combable and shaven face without a wrinkle such a chaste intrusion in the Himmler-Spielsaal all crowded with German-Baroque perplexities of shape (a sacrament of hands in every last turn each hand must produce, because of what the hand was, had to become, to make it all come out exactly this way . . . all the cold, the trauma, the departing flesh that has ever touched it. . . . ) In the twisted gilt playing-room his secret motions clarify for him, some. The odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only. Their odds were never probabilities, but frequencies already observed. It’s the past that makes demands here. It whispers, and reaches after, and, sneering disagreeably, gooses its victims.
When They chose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They mean by it? What Wheel did They set in motion?
Back in a room, early in Slothrop’s life, a room forbidden to him now, is something very bad. Something was done to him, and it may be that Katje knows what. Hasn’t he, in her “futureless look,” found some link to his own past, something that connects them closely as lovers? He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take—all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That’s all.
Naïve Slothrop never thought anybody’s life could end like that. Nothing so bleak. But by now it’s grown much less strange to him—he’s been snuggling up, masturbatorily scared-elated, to the disagreeable chance that exactly such Control might already have been put over him.
The Forbidden Wing. Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that touch on the sleeves of his dreams: all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to’ve been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel—where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit. . . .
“You were in London,” she will presently whisper, turning back to her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past, “while they were coming down. I was in ’s Gravenhage”—fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile’s lingering—“while they were goin
g up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us know. . .”
But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children. . . .
As the War’s front moves away from them, and the Casino becomes more and more a rear area, as the water grows more polluted and the prices rise, so the personnel coming down on leave get noisier and more dedicated to pure assholery—none of Tantivy’s style about them, his habit of soft-shoe dancing when drunk, his make-believe foppishness and shy, decent impulses to conspire, however marginally, whenever possible, against power and indifference. . . . There hasn’t been a word about him. Slothrop misses him, not just as an ally, but as a presence, a kindness. He continues to believe, here on his French leave, and at his ease, that the interference is temporary and paper, a matter of messages routed and orders cut, an annoyance that will end when the War ends, so well have They busted the sod prairies of his brain, tilled and sown there, and subsidized him not to grow anything of his own. . . .
No letters from London, not even news of ACHTUNG. All gone. Teddy Bloat one day just vanished: other conspirators, like a chorus line, will show up off and on behind Katje and Sir Stephen, dancing in, all with identical Corporate Smiles, the multiplication of whose glittering choppers is to dazzle him, they think, distract him from what they’re taking away, his ID, his service dossier, his past. Well, fuck . . . you know. He lets it happen. He’s more interested, and sometimes a little anxious, about what they seem to be adding on. At some point, apparently on a whim, though how can a fellow be sure, Slothrop decides to raise a mustache. Last mustache he had was at age 13, he sent away to that Johnson Smith for a whole Mustache Kit, 20 different shapes from Fu Manchu to Groucho Marx. They were made of black cardboard, with hooks that fit into your nose. After a while snot would soak into these hooks, and they’d grow limp, and the mustache would fall off.
“What kind?” Katje wants to know, soon as this one is visible.
“Bad-guy,” sez Slothrop. Meaning, he explains, trimmed, narrow, and villainous.
“No, that’ll give you a negative attitude. Why not raise a good-guy mustache instead?”
“But good guys don’t have—”
“Oh no? What about Wyatt Earp?”
To which one might’ve advanced the objection that Wyatt wasn’t all that good. But this is still back in the Stuart Lake era here, before the revisionists moved in, and Slothrop believes in that Wyatt, all right. One day a General Wivern, of SHAEF Technical Staff, comes in and sees it. “The ends droop down,” he observes.
“So did that Wyatt’s,” explains Slothrop.
“So did John Wilkes Booth’s,” replies the general. “Eh?”
Slothrop ponders. “He was a bad guy.”
“Precisely. Why don’t you twist the ends up?”
“You mean English style. Well, I tried that. It must be the weather or something, the old duster just keeps droopin’ down again, a-and I need to bite those ends off. It’s really annoying.”
“It’s disgusting,” sez Wivern. “Next time I come round I shall bring you some wax for it. They make it with a bitter taste to discourage, ah, end-chewers, you know.”
So as the mustache waxes, Slothrop waxes the mustache. Every day there’s something new like this. Katje’s always there, slipped by Them into his bed like nickels under the pillow for his deciduous Americanism, innocent incisors ’n’ Momworshiping molars just left in a clattering trail back down these days at the Casino. For some odd reason he finds himself with hardons right after study sessions. Hm, that’s peculiar. There is nothing specially erotic about reading manuals hastily translated from the German—brokenly mimeographed, even a few salvaged by the Polish underground from the latrines at the training site at Blizna, stained with genuine SS shit and piss . . . or memorizing conversion factors, inches to centimeters, horsepower to Pferdestärke, drawing from memory schematics and isometrics of the snarled maze of fuel, oxidizer, steam, peroxide and permanganate lines, valves, vents, chambers—what’s sexy about that? still he emerges from each lesson with great hardon, tremendous pressure inside . . . some of that temporary insanity, he reckons, and goes looking for Katje, hands to crabwalk his back and silk stockings squealing against his hipbones. . . .
During the lessons he will often look over and catch Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck consulting a stopwatch and taking notes. Jeepers. He wonders what that’s all about. Never occurs to him it might have to do with these mysterious erections. The man’s personality was chosen—or designed—to sidetrack suspicions before they have a chance to gather speed. Winter sunlight hitting half his face like a migraine, trouser cuffs out of press, wet and sandy because he’s up every morning at six to walk along the strand, Sir Stephen makes perfectly accessible his disguise, if not his function in the conspiracy. For all Slothrop knows he’s an agronomist, a brain surgeon, a concert oboist—in that London you saw all levels of command seething with these multidimensional geniuses. But as with Katje, there hangs about Dodson-Truck’s well-informed zeal an unmistakable aura of the employee and loser. . . .
One day Slothrop gets a chance to check this out. Seems Dodson-Truck is a chess fanatic. Down in the bar one afternoon he gets around to asking Slothrop if he plays.
“Nope,” lying, “not even checkers.”
“Damn. I’ve hardly had time till now for a good game.”
“I do know a game,” has something of Tantivy been sheltering inside all this time? “a drinking game, it’s called Prince, maybe the English even invented it, cause you have those princes, right? and we don’t, not that that’s wrong understand, but everybody takes a number, a-and you start off the Prince of Wales has lost his tails, no offense now, the numbers going clockwise around the table, and number two has found them, clockwise from that Prince, or whatever number he wants to call out actually, he, that’s the Prince, six or anything, see, you pick a Prince first, he starts it off, then that number two, or whoever that Prince called, sez, but first he goes, the Prince does, Wales, tails, two sir, after saying that about how that Prince of Wales has lost his tails, and number two answers, not I, sir—”
“Yes yes but—” giving Slothrop a most odd look, “I mean I’m not quite sure I really see, you know, the point to it all. How does one win?”
Ha! How does one win, indeed. “One doesn’t win,” easing into it, thinking of Tantivy, one small impromptu counter-conspiracy here, “one loses. One by one. Whoever’s left is the winner.”
“It sounds rather negative.”
“Garçon.” Drinks here are always on the house for Slothrop—They are springing for it, he imagines. “Some of that champagne! Wantcha to just keep it coming, and any time we run out, go get more, comprendez?” Any number of slack-jawed subalterns, hearing the magic word, drift over and take seats while Slothrop explains the rules.
“I’m not sure—” Dodson-Truck begins.
“Baloney. Come on, do you good to get outa that chess rut.”
“Right, right,” agree the others.
Dodson-Truck stays in his seat, a bit tense.
“Bigger glasses,” Slothrop hollers at the waiter. “How about those beer mugs over there! Yeah! They’d be just fine.” The waiter unblasts a jeroboam of Veuve Clicquot Brut, and fills everybody up.
“Well, the Prince o�
� Wales,” Slothrop commences, “has lost his tails, and number three has found them. Wales, tails, three sir!”
“Not I, sir,” replies Dodson-Truck, kind of defensive about it.
“Who, sir?”
“Five, sir.”
“Say what?” inquires Five, a Highlander in parade trews, with a sly look.
“You fucked up,” commands princely Slothrop, “so you got to drink up. All the way now, ’n’ no stopping to breathe or anything.”
On it goes. Slothrop loses Prince position to Four, and all the numbers change. The Scot is first to drop, making mistakes at first deliberate but soon inevitable. Jeroboams come and go, fat, green, tattered gray foil at the necks giving back the bar’s electric radiance. Corks grow straighter, less mushroomy, dates of degorgement move further into the war years as the company gets drunker. The Scot has rolled chuckling from his chair, remaining ambulatory for some ten feet, where he goes to sleep against a potted palm. At once another junior officer slides beaming into his place. The word has osmosed out into the Casino, and there is presently a throng of kibitzers gathered around the table, waiting for casualties. Ice is being hauled in by the giant block, fern-faulted inside, breathing white off of its faces, to be sledged and chipped into a great wet tub for the procession of bottles being run up from the cellar now in relays. It soon becomes necessary for the harassed waiters to stack empty tankards in pyramids and pour fountain-style from the top, the bubble-shot cascades provoking cheers from the crowd. Some joker is sure to reach in and grab one of the mugs on the bottom, sending the whole arrangement swaying, everybody else jumping to salvage what they can before it all comes down, crashing, soaking uniforms and shoes—so that it can be set up all over again. The game has switched to Rotating Prince, where each number called out immediately becomes Prince, and all the numbers shift accordingly. By this time it is impossible to tell who’s making mistakes and who isn’t. Arguments arise. Half the room are singing a vulgar song:
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