Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian death made none at all. It seemed an exercise they did not need. But to the Europeans, conned by their own Baby Jesus Con Game, what they were witnessing among these Hereros was a mystery potent as that of the elephant graveyard, or the lemmings rushing into the sea.

  Though they don’t admit it, the Empty Ones now exiled in the Zone, Europeanized in language and thought, split off from the old tribal unity, have found the why of it just as mysterious. But they’ve seized it, as a sick woman will seize a charm. They calculate no cycles, no returns, they are in love with the glamour of a whole people’s suicide—the pose, the stoicism, and the bravery. These Otukungurua are prophets of masturbating, specialists in abortion and sterilization, pitchmen for acts oral and anal, pedal and digital, sodomistical and zoophiliac—their approach and their game is pleasure: they are spieling earnestly and well, and Erdschweinhöhlers are listening.

  The Empty Ones can guarantee a day when the last Zone-Herero will die, a final zero to a collective history fully lived. It has appeal.

  There is no outright struggle for power. It is all seduction and counterseduction, advertising and pornography, and the history of the Zone-Hereros is being decided in bed.

  Vectors in the night underground, all trying to flee a center, a force, which appears to be the Rocket: some immachination, whether of journey or of destiny, which is able to gather violent political opposites together in the Erdschweinhöhle as it gathers fuel and oxidizer in its thrust chamber: metered, helmsmanlike, for the sake of its scheduled parabola.

  Enzian sits this evening under his mountain, behind him another day of schemes, expediting, newly invented paperwork—forms he manages to destroy or fold, Japanese style, before the day’s end, into gazelles, orchids, hunter-hawks. As the Rocket grows toward its working shape and fullness, so does he evolve, himself, into a new configuration. He feels it. It’s something else to worry about. Late last night, among the blueprints, Christian and Mieczislav looked up, abruptly smiled, and fell silent. A transparent reverence. They study the drawings as if they were his own, and revelations. This is not flattering to him.

  What Enzian wants to create will have no history. It will never need a design change. Time, as time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside this new one. The Erdschweinhöhle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same place, the only place. . . .

  He has thus himself found a strange rapprochement with the Empty Ones: in particular with Josef Ombindi of Hannover. The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero. Names and methods vary, but the movement toward stillness is the same. It has led to strange passages between the two men. “You know,” Ombindi’s eyes rolled the other way, looking up at a mirror-image of Enzian that only he can see, “there’s . . . well, something you ordinarily wouldn’t think of as erotic—but it’s really the most erotic thing there is.”

  “Really,” grins Enzian, flirting. “I can’t think of what that would be. Give me a clue.”

  “It’s a non-repeatable act.”

  “Firing a rocket?”

  “No, because there’s always another rocket. But there’s nothing—well, never mind.”

  “Ha! Nothing to follow it with, that’s what you were going to say.”

  “Suppose I give you another clue.”

  “All right.” But Enzian has already guessed: it’s there in the way he holds his jaw and is just about to laugh. . . .

  “It embraces all the Deviations in one single act.” Enzian sighs, irritated, but does not call him on this use of “Deviations.” Bringing up the past is part of Ombindi’s game. “Homosexuality, for example.” No rise. “Sadism and masochism. Onanism? Necrophilia. . . .”

  “All those in the same act?”

  All those, and more. Both know by now that what’s under discussion is the act of suicide, which also includes bestiality (“Think how sweet,” runs the pitch, “to show mercy, sexual mercy to that hurt and crying animal”), pedophilia (“It is widely reported that just at the edge you grow glaringly younger”), lesbianism (“Yes, for as the wind blows through all the emptying compartments the two shadow-women at last can creep out of their chambers in the dying shell, at the last ashen shoreline, to meet and embrace . . .”), coprophilia and urolagnia (“The final convulsions . . .”), fetishism (“A wide choice of death-fetishes, naturally . . .”). Naturally. The two of them sit there, passing a cigarette back and forth, till it’s smoked down to a very small stub. Is it idle talk, or is Ombindi really trying to hustle Enzian here? Enzian’s got to be sure before he moves. If he comes out sez, “This is a hustle, right?” and turns out it isn’t, well— But the alternative is so strange, that Enzian is, in some way, being

  SOLD ON SUICIDE

  Well I don’t care-for, th’ things I eat,

  Can’t stand that boogie-woogie beat—

  But I’m sold, on, suicide!

  You can keep Der Bingle too, a-

  And that darn “bu-bu-bu-boo,”

  Cause I’m sold on suicide!

  Oh! I’m not too keen on ration stamps,

  Or Mothers who used to be baby vamps,

  But I’m sold, on, suicide!

  Don’t like either, the Cards or Browns,

  Piss on the country and piss on the town,

  But I’m S.O.S., yes well actually this goes on, verse after verse, for quite some time. In its complete version it represents a pretty fair renunciation of the things of the world. The trouble with it is that by Gödel’s Theorem there is bound to be some item around that one has omitted from the list, and such an item is not easy to think of off the top of one’s head, so that what one does most likely is go back over the whole thing, meantime correcting mistakes and inevitable repetitions, and putting in new items that will surely have occurred to one, and—well, it’s easy to see that the “suicide” of the title might have to be postponed indefinitely!

  Conversations between Ombindi and Enzian these days are thus a series of commercial messages, with Enzian not so much mark as unwilling shill, standing in for the rest of the tip, who may be listening and maybe not.

  “Ahh, do I see your cock growing, Nguarorerue? . . . no, no, perhaps you are only thinking of someone you loved, somewhere, long ago . . . back in Südwest, eh?” To allow the tribal past to disperse, all memories ought to be public record, there’s no point in preserving history with that Final Zero to look forward to. . . . Cynically, though, Ombindi has preached this in the name of the old Tribal Unity, and it’s a weakness in his pitch all right—it looks bad, looks like Ombindi’s trying to make believe the Christian sickness never touched us, when everyone knows it has infected us all, some to death. Yes it is a little bit jive of Ombindi here to look back toward an innocence he’s really only heard about, can’t himself believe in—the gathered purity of opposites, the village built like a mandala. . . . Still he will profess and proclaim it, as an image of a grail slipping through the room, radiant, though the jokers around the table be sneaking Whoopee Cushions into the Siege Perilous, under the very descending arse of the grailseeker, and though the grails themselves come in plastic these years, a dime a dozen, penny a gross, still Ombindi, at times self-conned as any Christian, praises and prophesies that era of innocence he just missed living in, one of the last pockets of Pre-Christian Oneness left on the planet: “Tibet is a special case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition, and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate. . . . Switzerland and Tibet are linked along one of the true meridians of Earth, true a
s the Chinese have drawn meridians of the body. . . . We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we. . . .” And he tells too of Gondwanaland, before the continents drifted apart, when Argentina lay snuggled up to Südwest . . . the people listen, and filter back to cave and bed and family calabash from which the milk, unconsecrated, is swallowed in cold whiteness, cold as the north. . . .

  So, between these two, even routine greeting does not pass without some payload of meaningfulness and the hope of Blitzing the other’s mind. Enzian knows that he is being used for his name. The name has some magic. But he has been so unable to touch, so neutral for so long . . . everything has flowed away but the name, Enzian, a sound for chanting. He hopes it will be magic enough for one thing, one good thing when the time comes, however short of the Center. . . . What are these persistences among a people, these traditions and offices, but traps? the sexual fetishes Christianity knows how to flash, to lure us in, meant to remind us of earliest infant love. . . . Can his name, can “Enzian” break their power? Can his name prevail?

  The Erdschweinhöhle is in one of the worst traps of all, a dialectic of word made flesh, flesh moving toward something else. . . . Enzian sees the trap clearly, but not the way out. . . . Sitting now between a pair of candles just lit, his gray field-jacket open at the neck, beard feathering down his dark throat to shorter, sparser glossy black hairs that go running in a whirl, iron filings about the south pole of his Adam’s apple . . . pole . . . axis . . . axle-tree. . . . Tree . . . Omumborombanga . . . Mukuru . . . first ancestor . . . Adam . . . still sweating, hands from the working day gone graceless and numb, he has a minute to drift and remember this time of day back in Südwest, above ground, participating in the sunset, out watching the mist gather, part fog, part dust from the cattle returning to the kraals to milking and sleep . . . his tribe believed long ago that each sunset is a battle. In the north, where the sun sets, live the one-armed warriors, the one-legged and one-eyed, who fight the sun each evening, who spear it to death until its blood runs out over the horizon and sky. But under the earth, in the night, the sun is born again, to come back each dawn, new and the same. But we, Zone-Hereros, under the earth, how long will we wait in this north, this locus of death? Is it to be reborn? or have we really been buried for the last time, buried facing north like all the rest of our dead, and like all the holy cattle ever sacrificed to the ancestors? North is death’s region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern. Nordhausen means dwellings in the north. The Rocket had to be produced out of a place called Nordhausen. The town adjoining was named Bleicheröde as a validation, a bit of redundancy so that the message would not be lost. The history of the old Hereros is one of lost messages. It began in mythical times, when the sly hare who nests in the Moon brought death among men, instead of the Moon’s true message. The true message has never come. Perhaps the Rocket is meant to take us there someday, and then Moon will tell us its truth at last. There are those down in the Erdschweinhöhle, younger ones who’ve only known white autumn-prone Europe, who believe Moon is their destiny. But older ones can remember that Moon, like Ndjambi Karunga, is both the bringer of evil and its avenger. . . .

  And Enzian’s found the name Bleicheröde close enough to “Blicker,” the nickname the early Germans gave to Death. They saw him white: bleaching and blankness. The name was later Latinized to “Dominus Blicero.” Weissmann, enchanted, took it as his SS code name. Enzian was in Germany by then. Weissmann brought the new name home to his pet, not showing it off so much as indicating to Enzian yet another step to be taken toward the Rocket, toward a destiny he still cannot see past this sinister cryptography of naming, a sparse pattern but one that harshly will not be denied, that cries and nags him on stumbling as badly as 20 years ago. . . .

  Once he could not imagine a life without return. Before his conscious memories began, something took him, in and out of his mother’s circular village far out in the Kakau Veld, at the borders of the land of death, a departure and a return. . . . He was told about it years later. Shortly after he was born, his mother brought him back to her village, back from Swakopmund. In ordinary times she would have been banished. She’d had the child out of wedlock, by a Russian sailor whose name she couldn’t pronounce. But under the German invasion, protocol was less important than helping one another. Though the murderers in blue came down again and again, each time, somehow, Enzian was passed over. It is a Herod myth his admirers still like to bring up, to his annoyance. He had been walking only for a few months when his mother took him with her to join Samuel Maherero’s great trek across the Kalahari.

  Of the stories told about these years, this is the most tragic. The refugees had been on the desert for days. Khama, king of the Bechuanas, sent guides, oxen, wagons and water to help them. Those who arrived first were warned to take water only little by little. But by the time the stragglers arrived, everyone else was asleep. No one to warn them. Another lost message. They drank till they died, hundreds of souls. Enzian’s mother was among them. He had fallen asleep under a cowhide, exhausted from hunger and thirst. He woke among the dead. It is said that he was found there by a band of Ovatjimba, taken and cared for. They left him back at the edge of his mother’s village, to walk in alone. They were nomads, they could have taken any other direction in that waste country, but they brought him back to the place he’d left. He found hardly anyone remaining there. Many had gone on the trek, some had been taken away to the coast and herded into kraals, or to work on the railroad the Germans were building through the desert. Many others had died eating cattle dead of rinderpest.

  No return. Sixty per cent of the Herero people had been exterminated. The rest were being used like animals. Enzian grew up into a white-occupied world. Captivity, sudden death, one-way departures were the ordinary things of every day. By the time the question occurred to him, he could find no way to account for his own survival. He could not believe in any process of selection. Ndjambi Karunga and the Christian God were too far away. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weissmann, the European whose protégé he became, always believed he’d seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods had left the people. . . . He let Weissmann think what he wanted to. The man’s thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water.

  It’s been a long time now since the two men have seen each other. Last time they spoke was during the move from Peenemünde down here to the Mittelwerke. Weissmann is probably dead by now. Even in Südwest, 20 years ago, before Enzian could even speak his language, he’d seen that: a love for the last explosion—the lifting and the scream that peaks past fear. . . . Why should Weissmann want to survive the war? Surely he’d have found something splendid enough to match his thirst. It could not have ended for him rationalized and meek as his hundred glass bureaus about the SS circuit—located in time and space always just to miss grandeur, only to be in its vacuum, to be tugged slightly along by its slipstream but finally left to lie still again in a few tarnished sequins of wake. Bürgerlichkeit played to Wagner, the brasses faint and mocking, the voices of the strings drifting in and out of phase. . . .

  At night down here, very often lately, Enzian will wake for no reason. Was it really Him, pierced Jesus, who came to lean over you? The white faggot’s-dream body, the slender legs and soft gold European eyes . . . did you catch a glimpse of olive cock under the ragged loincloth, did you want to reach to lick at the sweat of his rough, his wooden bondage? Where is he, what part of our Zone tonight, damn him to the knob of that nervous imperial staff. . . .

  There are few such islands of down and velvet for him to lie and dream on, not in these marble passages of power. Enzian has grown cold: not so much a fire dying away as a positive coming on of col
d, a bitter taste growing across the palate of love’s first hopes. . . . It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket. . . . Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood. . . .

  “I used to imagine, in some naïve way I have lost now, that all the excitement of those days was being put on for me, somehow, as a gift from Weissmann. He had carried me over his threshold and into his house, and this was the life he meant to bring me to, these manly pursuits, devotion to the Leader, political intrigue, secret re-arming in naughty defiance of the aging plutocracies all around us . . . they were growing impotent, but we were young and strong . . . to be that young and strong, at such a time in the life of a nation! I could not believe so many fair young men, the way the sweat and dust lay on their bodies as they lengthened the Autobahns day into ringing day: we drove among trumpeters, silk banners impeccably tailored as suits of clothes . . . the women seemed to move all docile, without color . . . I thought of them in ranks, down on all fours, having their breasts milked into pails of shining steel. . . .”

  “Was he ever jealous of the other young men—the way you felt about them?”

  “Oh. It was still very physical for me then. But he had already moved past that part of it. No. No, I don’t think he minded. . . . I loved him then. I could not see into him, or the things he believed in, but I wanted to. If the Rocket was his life, then I would belong to the Rocket.”