Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  “He said you’d have to think about it.”

  “Sa-a-a-ay.” It’s just occurred to him. “Why are all you folks helping me like this? For free and all?”

  “Who knows? We have to play the patterns. There must be a pattern you’re in, right now.”

  “Uh . . .”

  But she’s already left. Slothrop looks around the place: in the daylight it’s mean and anonymous. Even the roaches must be uncomfortable here. . . . Is he off so quickly, like Katje on her wheel, off on a ratchet of rooms like this, to be in each one only long enough to gather wind or despair enough to move on to the next, but no way backward now, ever again? No time even to get to know the Rue Rossini, which faces holler from the windows, where’s a good place to eat, what’s the name of the song everybody’s whistling these premature summer days. . . .

  A week later he’s in Zürich, after a long passage by train. While the metal creatures in their solitude, days of snug and stable fog, pass the hours at mime, at playing molecules, imitating industrial synthesis as they are broken up, put together, coupled and recoupled, he dozes in and out of a hallucination of Alps, fogs, abysses, tunnels, bone-deep laborings up impossible grades, cowbells in the darkness, in the morning green banks, smells of wet pasture, always out the windows an unshaven work crew on the way to repair some stretch of track, long waits in marshaling-yards whose rails run like layers of an onion cut end to end, gray and desolate places, nights of whistles, coupling, crashes, sidings, staring cows on the evening hillsides, army convoys waiting at the crossings as the train puffs by, never a clear sense of nationality anywhere, nor even of belligerent sides, only the War, a single damaged landscape, in which “neutral Switzerland” is a rather stuffy convention, observed but with as much sarcasm as “liberated France” or “totalitarian Germany,” “Fascist Spain,” and others. . . .

  The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges of. . . .

  He checks in to the Hotel Nimbus, in an obscure street in the Niederdorf or cabaret section of Zürich. The room’s in an attic, and is reached by ladder. There’s also a ladder outside the window, so he reckons it’ll be O.K. When night comes down he goes out looking for the local Waxwing rep, finds him farther up the Limmatquai, under a bridge, in rooms full of Swiss watches, clocks and altimeters. He’s a Russian named Semyavin. Outside boats hoot on the river and the lake. Somebody upstairs is practicing on a piano: stumbling, sweet lieder. Semyavin pours gentian brandy into cups of tea he’s just brewed. “First thing you have to understand is the way everything here is specialized. If it’s watches, you go to one café. If it’s women, you go to another. Furs are subdivided into Sable, Ermine, Mink, and Others. Same with dope: Stimulants, Depressants, Psychomimetics. . . . What is it you’re after?”

  “Uh, information?” Gee, this stuff tastes like Moxie. . . .

  “Oh. Another one.” Giving Slothrop a sour look. “Life was simple before the first war. You wouldn’t remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items. Currency in those days was no more than a sideline, and the term ‘industrial espionage’ was unknown. But I’ve seen it change—oh, how it’s changed. The German inflation, that should’ve been my clue right there, zeros strung end to end from here to Berlin. I would have stern talks with myself. ‘Semyavin, it’s only a temporary lapse away from reality. A small aberration, nothing to worry about. Act as you always have—strength of character, good mental health. Courage, Semyavin! Soon all will be back to normal.’ But do you know what?”

  “Let me guess.”

  A tragic sigh. “Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?”

  “I thought it was cigarettes.”

  “You dream.” He brings out a list of Zürich cafés and gathering spots. Under Espionage, Industrial, Slothrop finds three. Ultra, Lichtspiel, and Sträggeli. They are on both banks of the Limmat, and widely spaced.

  “Footwork,” folding the list in an oversize zoot-suit pocket.

  “It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are the wave of the future.”

  Begins a period of shuttling among the three cafés, sitting a few hours over coffee at each one, eating once a day, Zürich baloney and rösti at the People’s Kitchens . . . watching crowds of businessmen in blue suits, sun-black skiers who’ve spent the duration schussing miles of glacier and snow hearing nothing of campaigns or politics, reading nothing but thermometers and weathervanes, finding their atrocities in avalanches or toppling séracs, their victories in layers of good powder . . . ragged foreigners in oil-stained leather jackets and tattered fatigues, South Americans bundled in fur coats and shivering in the clear sunlight, elderly hypochondriacs who were caught out lounging at some spa when the War began and have been here since, women in long black dresses who don’t smile, men in soiled overcoats who do . . . and the mad, down from their fancy asylums on weekend furlough—oh, the mental cases of Switzerland: Slothrop is known to them, all right, among all the somber street faces and colors only he is wearing white, shoes zoot ’n’ hat, white as the cemetery mountains here. . . . He’s also the New Mark In Town. It’s difficult for him to sort out the first wave of corporate spies from the

  LOONIES ON LEAVE!

  (The Chorus line is divided not into the conventional Boys and Girls but into Keepers and Nuts, without regard to sex, though all four possibilities are represented on stage. Many are wearing sunglasses with black lenses and white rims, not so much to be fashionable as to suggest snow-blindness, the antiseptic white of the Clinic, perhaps even the darkness of the mind. But all seems happy, relaxed, informal . . . no sign of repression, not even a distinction in costume so that at first there is some problem telling Nuts from Keepers as they all burst in from the wings dancing and singing):

  Here we come foax—ready or not!

  Put your mask on, and plot your plot,

  We’re just laughin’ and droolin’, all—over the sleigh,

  Like a buncha happy midgets on a holiday!

  Oh we’re the LOONIES ON LEAVE, and

  We haven’t a care—

  Our brains at the cleaners, our souls at the Fair,

  Just freaks on a fur-lough, away from the blues,

  As daffy and sharp as—the taps on our shoes!

  Hey, we’re passin’ the hat for—your frowns and your tears,

  And the fears you thought’d never go ’way—

  Oh take it from a loony, life’s so dear and swoony,

  So just hug it and kiss it to-day!

  La-da-da, ya-ta ya-ta ta-ta &c . . . (They go on humming the tune behind what follows):

  First Nut (or maybe Keeper): Got an amazing deal for you here, American? I thought so, always tell a face from home, saaay, like your suit there, go far enough up the glacier ’n’ nobody’d be able to see ya! Well yes now, I know how you feel about these street-vendors keep coming by, it’s the old three-card monte on the sidewalk [trucks across the stage for a while, back and forth, waving his finger in the air, singing “Three-card monte on-the side, walk,” over and over in the same obsessive monotone, for as many repetitions as he can get away with] and you can spot right away what’s wrong, every one promises ya somethin’ fer nothin’, right? yes now oddly enough, that’s the main objection engineers and scientists have always had to the idea of [lowering his voice] perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management—here, here’s our card—well, sure, they’ve got a point. At least they had a point. Up till now. . . .

  Second Nut or Keeper: Now you’ve heard about the two-hundred-mile-pe
r-gallon carburetor, the razor edge that never gets dull, the eternal bootsole, the mange pill that’s good to your glands, engine that’ll run on sand, ornithopters and robobopsters—you heard me, got a little goatee made out of steel wool—jivey, that’s fine, but here’s one for yo’ mind! Are you ready? It’s Lightning-Latch, The Door That Opens You!

  Slothrop: Think I’ll go take my nap now. . . .

  Third N. or K.: Transmogrify common air into diamonds through Cataclysmic Carbon Dioxide Reducti-o-o-o-o-n-n-n. . . .

  If he were sensitive about such things, it’d all be pretty insulting, this first wave. It passes, gesturing, accusative, pleading. Slothrop manages to stay calm. There is a pause—then on come the real ones, slowly at first but gathering, gathering. Synthetic rubber or gasoline, electronic calculators, aniline dyes, acrylics, perfumes (stolen essences in vials in sample cases), sexual habits of a hundred selected board members, layouts of plants, codebooks, connections and payoffs, ask for it, they can get it.

  At last, one day at the Sträggeli, Slothrop eating on a bratwurst and hunk of bread he’s been toting around all morning in a paper bag, suddenly from noplace appears one Mario Schweitar in a green frogged waistcoat, just popped out of the echoing cuckoo clock of Dubya Dubya Two here, the endless dark corridors at his back, with a change of luck for Slothrop. “Pssst, Joe,” he begins, “hey, mister.”

  “Not me,” replies Slothrop with his mouth full.

  “You interested in some L.S.D.?”

  “That stands for pounds, shillings, and pence. You got the wrong café, Ace.”

  “I think I’ve got the wrong country,” Schweitar a little mournful. “I’m from Sandoz.”

  “Aha, Sandoz!” cries Slothrop, and pulls out a chair for the fella.

  Turns out Schweitar is very tight indeed with Psychochemie AG, being one of those free-floating trouble-shooters around the Cartel, working for them on a per diem basis and spying on the side.

  “Well,” Slothrop sez, “I’d sure like anything they got on L. Jamf, a-and on that Imipolex G.”

  “Gaaah—”

  “Pardon me?”

  “That stuff. Forget it. It’s not even our line. You ever try to develop a polymer when there’s nothing but indole people around? With our giant parent to the north sending in ultimatums every day? Imipolex G is the company albatross, Yank. They have vice-presidents whose only job is to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf’s grave. You haven’t spent much time with the indole crowd. They’re very elitist. They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain that haven’t known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years—keepers of a tradition, aristocrats—”

  “Wait a minute. . . .” Jamf dead? “You say Jamf’s grave, now?” It ought to be making more of a difference to him, except that the man was never really alive so how can he be really—

  “Up in the mountains, toward the Uetliberg.”

  “You ever—”

  “What?”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Before my time. But I know that there’s a lot of data on him in the classified files at Sandoz. It would be some job getting you what you want. . . .”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Five hundred what?”

  Swiss francs. Slothrop hasn’t got 500 anything, unless it’s worries. The money from Nice is almost gone. He heads toward Semyavin’s, across the Gemüse-Brücke, deciding he’ll walk everywhere from now on, chewing his white sausage and wondering when he’ll see another.

  “First thing you want to do,” Semyavin advises him, “is go to a pawnshop and raise a few francs on that, ah,” pointing at the suit. Aw no, not the suit. Semyavin goes rummaging in a back room, comes out with a bundle of workmen’s clothes. “You should start thinking more about your visibility. Come back tomorrow, I’ll see what else I can find.”

  White zoot in a bundle under his arm, a less visible Ian Scuffling goes back outside, down into the mediaeval afternoon of the Niederdorf, stone walls now developing like baking bread in the failing sun, oboy oboy he can see it now: gonna turn into another of them Tamara/Italo drills here, ’n’ then he’ll be in so deep he’ll just never get out. . . .

  At the entrance to his street, in the wells of shadow, he notes a black Rolls parked, motor idling, its glass tinted and afternoon so dark he can’t see inside. Nice car. First one he’s seen in a while, should be no more than a curiosity, except for

  Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.

  Zunnggg! diddilung, diddila-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta William Tell Overture here, back in the shadows, hope nobody was looking through that one-way glass—zoom, zoom, dodging around corners, scooting down alleys, no sound of pursuit but then it’s the quietest engine on the road except for the King Tiger tank. . . .

  Forget that Hotel Nimbus, he reckons. His feet are already starting to bother him. He gets to the Luisenstrasse and the hockshop just before closing time, and manages to raise a little, baloney for a day or two maybe, on the zoot. So long zoot.

  This town sure closes up early. What does Slothrop do tonight for a bed? He has a moment’s relapse into optimism: ducks in a restaurant and rings up the desk at the Hotel Nimbus. “Ah, yes,” English English, “can you possibly tell me if the British chap who’s been waiting in the foyer is still there, you know . . .”

  In a minute on comes a pleasant, awkward voice with an are-you-there. Oh, so seraphic. Slothrop funks, hangs up, stands looking at all the people at dinner staring at him—blew it, blew it, now They know he’s on to Them. There is the usual chance his paranoia’s just out of hand again, but the coincidences are running too close. Besides, he knows the sound of Their calculated innocence by now, it’s part of Their style. . . .

  Out again in the city: precision banks, churches, Gothic doorways drilling by . . . he must avoid the hotel and the three cafés now, right, right. . . . The permanent Zürchers in early-evening blue stroll by. Blue as the city twilight, deepening blue. . . . The spies and dealers have all gone indoors. Semyavin’s place is out, the Waxwing circle have been kind, no point bringing any heat down on them. How much weight do the Visitors have in this town? Can Slothrop risk checking in to another hotel? Probably not. It’s getting cold. A wind is coming in now off the lake.

  He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the great world cafés, whose specialty is not listed anywhere—indeed has never been pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out at these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever they’d come to this vantage to score . . . perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street . . . dialectics, matrices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the West’s ancient curse. . . .

  Slothrop finds he has enough spare change for coffee. He goes sits inside, choosing a seat that’ll face the entrance. Fifteen minutes and he’s getting the spy-sign from a swarthy, curly-headed alien in a green suit a couple tables away. Another front-facer. On his table is an old newspaper that appears to be in Spanish. It is open to a peculiar political cartoon of a line of middle-aged men wearing dresses and wigs, inside the police station where a cop is holding a loaf of white . . . no it’s a baby, with a label on its diaper sez LA REVOLUCIÓN . . . oh, they’re all claiming the infant revolution as their own, all these politicians bickering like a bunch of putative mothers, and somehow this cartoon here is supposed to be some kind of a touchstone, this fella in the green suit, who turns out to b
e an Argentine named Francisco Squalidozzi, is looking for a reaction . . . the key passage is at the very end of the line where the great Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones is saying, “Now I’m going to tell you, in verse, how I conceived her free from the stain of Original Sin. . . .” It is the Uriburu revolution of 1930. The paper is fifteen years old. There is no telling what Squalidozzi is expecting from Slothrop, but what he gets is pure ignorance. This seems to be acceptable, and presently the Argentine has loosened up enough to confide that he and a dozen colleagues, among them the international eccentric Graciela Imago Portales, hijacked an early-vintage German U-boat in Mar de Plata a few weeks ago, and have sailed it back across the Atlantic now, to seek political asylum in Germany, as soon as the War’s over there. . . .

  “You say Germany? You gone goofy? It’s a mess there, Jackson!”

  “Not nearly the mess we left back home,” the sad Argentine replies. Long lines have appeared next to his mouth, lines learned from living next to thousands of horses, watching too many doomed colts and sunsets south of Rivadavia, where the true South begins. . . . “It’s been a mess since the colonels took over. Now, with Perón on his way . . . our last hope was Acción Argentina,” what’s he talking about, Jesus I’m hungry, “. . . suppressed it a month after the coup . . . now everybody waits. Attending the street actions out of habit. No real hope. We decided to move before Perón got another portfolio. War, most likely. He already has the descamisados, this will give him the Army too you see . . . it’s only a matter of time . . . we could have gone to Uruguay, waited him out—it’s a tradition. But perhaps he will be in for a long time. Montevideo is swarming with failed exiles, and failed hopes. . . .”

  “Yeah, but Germany—that’s the last place you want to go.”

  “Pero ché, no sós argentino. . . .” A long look away, down the engineered scars of Swiss avenues, looking for the South he left. Not the same Argentine, Slothrop, that that Bob Eberle’s seen toasts to Tangerine raised in ev-ry bar across, now. . . . Squalidozzi wants to say: We of all magical precipitates out of Europe’s groaning, clouded alembic, we are the thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses. . . . We tried to exterminate our Indians, like you: we wanted the closed white version of reality we got—but even into the smokiest labyrinths, the furthest stacked density of midday balcony or courtyard and gate, the land has never let us forget. . . . But what he asks aloud is: “Here—you look hungry. Have you eaten? I was about to go to supper. Would you do me the honor?”