“I’m afraid I am.” With everything else, these are, after all, people who kill each other: and Pirate has always been one of them. “I’d been hoping for—oh, it’s foolish, a bit of mercy . . . but I was at the all-night cinema, around the corner from Gallaho Mews, the intersection with the extra street, the one you can’t always see because it comes in at such a strange angle . . . I had a bad stretch of time to get through, poison, metallic time . . . it smelled as sour as a burned pot . . . all I wanted was a place to sit for a while, and they don’t care who you are really, what you eat or how long you sleep or who—whom you get together with. . . .”
“Prentice, really it’s all right,” it’s St.-Just Grossout, whom the others call “Sam Juiced” when they want to shout him down, during the passages in here when there is nothing for it but a spot of rowdyism.
“I . . . just can’t . . . I mean if it is true, then,” a laugh it hurts him, deep in his windpipe, to make, “then I defected for nothing, didn’t I? I mean, if I haven’t really defected at all. . . .”
The word reached him during a government newsreel. FROM CLOAK-AND-DAGGER TO CROAK-AND-STAGGER, the sequin title twinkled to all the convalescent souls gathered for another long night of cinema without schedule—shot of a little street-crowd staring in a dusty show-window, someplace so far into the East End that no one except those who lived there had ever heard of it . . . bomb-tilted ballroom floor of the ruin slipping uphill behind like a mountain meadow, but dodgy as a trampoline to walk upon, conch-twisting stucco columns tilted inward, brass elevator cage drooping from the overhead. Right out in front was a half-naked, verminous and hairy creature, approximately human, terribly pale, writhing behind the crumbled remains of plate glass, tearing at sores on his face and abdomen, drawing blood, scratching and picking with dirt-black fingernails. “Every day in Smithfield Market, Lucifer Amp makes a spectacle of himself. That’s not so surprising. Many a demobilized soldier and sailor has turned to public service as a means of keeping at least body and soul together, if nothing else. What is unusual is that Mr. Amp used to work for the Special Operations Executive. . . .”
“It’s quite good fun, actually,” as the camera moves in for a close-up of this individual, “only took me a week to pick up the knack of it. . . .”
“Do you feel a sense of belonging now, that you hadn’t when you came, or—have they still not accepted you out here?”
“They—oh the people, the people have been just wonderful. Just grand. No, no problems there at all.”
At which point, from the bishopwise seat behind Pirate, came an alcohol smell, and warm breath, and a pat on the shoulder. “You hear? ‘Used to work.’ That’s rich, that is. No one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history—and no one ever will.” It was an upper-class accent, one Pirate might have aspired to once in his rambling youth. By the time he decided to look back, though, his visitor was gone.
“Think of it as a handicap, Prentice, like any other, like missing a limb or having malaria . . . one can still live . . . one learns to get round it, it becomes part of the day—”
“Being a d—”
“It’s all right. ‘Being a—’?”
“Being a double agent? ‘Got round’?” He looks at the others, computing. Everyone here seems to be at least a double agent.
“Yes . . . you’re down here now, down here with us,” whispers Sammy. “Get your shame and your sniffles all out of the way, young fellow, because we don’t make a practice of indulging that for too long.”
“It’s a shadow,” cries Pirate, “it’s working under a shadow, forever.”
“But think of the free-dom?” sez Merciful Evans. “I can’t even trust myself? can I. How much freer than that can a man be? If he’s to be sold out by anyone? even by himself you see?”
“I don’t want that—”
“You don’t have a choice,” Dodson-Truck replies. “The Firm know perfectly well that you’ve come here. They’ll expect a full report from you now. Either voluntary or some other way.”
“But I wouldn’t . . . I’d never tell them—” The smiles they are putting on for him now are deliberately cruel, to help him through it a bit. “You don’t, you really don’t trust me?”
“Of course not,” Sammy sez. “Would you—really—trust any of us?”
“Oh, no,” Pirate whispers. This is one of his own in progress. Nobody else’s. But it’s still a passage They can touch quite as easily as that of any client. Without expecting to, it seems Pirate has begun to cry. Odd. He has never cried in public like this before. But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem.
He is crying for persons, places, and things left behind: for Scorpia Mossmoon, living in St. John’s Wood among sheet-music, new recipes, a small kennel of Weimaraners whose racial purity she will go to extravagant lengths to preserve, and husband Clive who shows up now and then, Scorpia living only a few minutes away by Underground but lost to Pirate now for good, no chance for either of them to turn again . . . for people he had to betray in the course of business for the Firm, Englishmen and foreigners, for Ion so naïve, for Gongylakis, for the Monkey Girl and the pimps in Rome, for Bruce who got burned . . . for nights up in partisan mountains when he was one with the smell of living trees, in full love with the at last undeniable beauty of the night . . . for a girl back in the Midlands named Virginia, and for their child who never came to pass . . . for his dead mother, and his dying father, for the innocent and the fools who are going to trust him, poor faces doomed as dogs who have watched us so amiably from behind the wire fences at the city pounds . . . cries for the future he can see, because it makes him feel so desperate and cold. He is to be taken from high moment to high moment, standing by at meetings of the Elect, witnessing a test of the new Cosmic Bomb—“Well,” a wise old face, handing him the black-lensed glasses, “there’s your Bomb . . .” turning then to see its thick yellow exploding down the beach, across the leagues of Pacific waves . . . touching famous assassins, yes actually touching their human hands and faces . . . finding out one day how long ago, how early in the game the contract on his own life was let. No one knows exactly when the hit will come—every morning, before the markets open, out before the milkmen, They make Their new update, and decide on what’s going to be sufficient unto the day. Every morning Pirate’s name will be on a list, and one morning it will be close enough to the top. He tries to face it, though it fills him with a terror so pure, so cold, he thinks for a minute he’ll pass out. Later, having drawn back a bit, gathering heart for the next sortie, it seems to him he’s done with the shame, just as Sir Stephen said, yes past the old shame and scared now, full of worry for nothing but his own ass, his precious, condemned, personal ass. . . .
“Is there room here for the dead?” He hears the question before he can see her asking it. He isn’t sure how she came into this room. From all the others now flow impressions of male jealousy, a gruff sort of women-on-ships-is-bad-luck chill and withdrawal. And here’s Pirate left alone with her and her question. He holds out to her the ball of taffy he’s been carrying, boobish as young Porky Pig holding out the anarchist’s ticking bomb to him. But there’s to be no sweetness. They are here instead to trade some pain and a few truths, but all in the distracted style of the period:
“Come now,” what sort of idiotic trouble does she think she’s in now? “you’re not dead. I’ll wager not even figuratively so.”
“I meant, would I be allowed to bring my dead in with me,” Katje explains. “They are my credentials, after all.”
“I rather liked Frans van der Groov. Your ancestor. The dodo chap.”
It’s not quite what she meant by her dead. “I mean
the ones who owe their deadness directly to me. Besides, if Frans were ever to walk in here you’d only stand around, all of you, making sure he understood just how guilty he was. The poor man’s world held an inexhaustible supply of dodoes—why teach him about genocide?”
“You could tell him a thing or two about that, couldn’t you, girly?” sneers Evans, the tone-deaf Welsh stoolie.
Pirate is moving against Evans, forearms out from his sides saloon-fighter-style, when Sir Stephen intervenes: “There’ll be talk like this all the time, Prentice, we’re a case-hardened lot. You’d better start learning to make it work for you here. No telling how long we’re in for, is there? The young woman has grown herself all the protection she needs, it seems to me. She doesn’t want you to fight for her.”
Well, he’s right. She’s put her warm hand on Pirate’s arm, shaking her head twice with embarrassed small laughs, “I’m glad to see you anyway, Captain Prentice.”
“No one else is. Think about it.”
She only raises her eyebrows. It was a shitty thing to say. Remorse, or some late desire to be pure, rush into his blood like dope.
“But—” astonished to feel himself beginning to collapse, like a stack of rifles, around her feet, caught in her gravitation, distances abolished, waveforms unmeasurable, “Katje . . . if I could never betray you—”
He has fallen: she has lost her surface. She is staring at him amazed.
“Even if the price for that were . . . betraying others, hurting . . . or killing others—then it wouldn’t matter who, or how many, no, not if I could be your safety, Katje, your perfect—”
“But those, those are the sins that might never happen.” Here they are bargaining like a couple of pimps. Do they have any idea what they sound like? “That’s easy enough to pledge, doesn’t cost you a thing.”
“Then even the sins I did commit,” he protests, “yes I’d do them over—”
“But you can’t do that, either—so you get off just as cheap. Hm?”
“I can repeat patterns,” more grim than she really wants him to be.
“Oh, think . . .” her fingers are lightly in his hair, “think of the things you’ve done. Think of all your ‘credentials,’ and all of mine—”
“But that’s the only medium we’ve got now,” he cries, “our gift for bad faith. We’ll have to build everything with it . . . deal it, as the prosecutors deal you your freedom.”
“Philosopher.” She is smiling. “You were never like that.”
“It must have come from always being in motion. I’ve never felt this stillness. . . .” They are touching now, without urgency, still, neither of them, quite over the surprise. . . . “My little brother” (Pirate understands the connection she has made) “left home at 18. I liked to watch him sleeping at night. His long eyelashes . . . so innocent . . . I watched for hours. . . . He got as far as Antwerp. Before long he was loitering around parish churches with the rest of them. Do you know what I mean? Young, Catholic males. Camp followers. They got to depend on alcohol, many of them, at an early age. They would choose a particular priest, and become his faithful dog—literally wait all night at his doorstep in order to talk to him fresh from his bed, his linen, the intimate smells that had not yet escaped the folds of his garment . . . insane jealousies, daily jostling for position, for the favors of this Father or that. Louis began to attend Rexist meetings. He went out to a soccer field and heard Degrelle tell the crowd that they must let themselves be swept away by the flood, they must act, act, and let the rest take care of itself. Soon my brother was out in the street with his broom, along with the other guilty sarcastic young men with their brooms in their hands . . . and then he had joined Rex, the ‘realm of total souls,’ and the last I heard he was in Antwerp living with an older man named Philippe. I lost track of him. We were very close at one time. People took us for twins. When the heavy rocket attacks began against Antwerp I knew it could not be an accident. . . .”
Yes well Pirate’s Chapel himself. “But I’ve wondered about the solidarity of your Church . . . you kneel, and she takes care of you . . . when you are acting politically, to have all that common momentum, taking you upward—”
“You never had that either, did you.” She’s been looking really at him—“none of the marvelous excuses. We did everything ourselves.”
No, there’s no leaving shame after all—not down here—it has to be swallowed sharp-edged and ugly, and lived with in pain, every day.
Without considering, he is in her arms. It isn’t for comfort. But if he is to keep dragging himself up the ratchet’s teeth one by one he does need to pause in human touch for a bit. “What did it look like out there, Katje? I saw an organized convention. Someone else saw it as a garden. . . .” But he knows what she’ll say.
“There was nothing out there. It was a barren place. I’d been most of the day looking for a sign of life. Then at last I heard you all in here.” So they have wandered to a balcony, a graceful railing, no one can see them from inside or out: and below them in the streets, streets they have both lost now, are the People. There passes for Pirate and Katje a brief segment of a much longer chronicle, the anonymous How I Came to Love the People. “Her name was Brenda, her face was the bird under the protecting grin of the car in the rain that morning, she knelt and performed fellatio on me, and I ejaculated on her breasts. Her name was Lily, she was 67 last August, she reads off the labels of beer bottles to herself out loud, we coupled in the standard English position, and she patted me on the back and whispered, ‘Good friend.’ His name was Frank, his hair curled away from his face, his eyes were rather sharp but pleasant, he stole from American Army depots, he bum-fucked me and when he came inside me, so did I. Her name was Frangibella, she was black, her face was broken out, she wanted money for dope, her openness was a viper writhing in my heart, I performed cunnilingus upon her. His name was Allan, his buttocks were tanned, I said, where did you find the sun, he answered, the sun is just around the corner, I held him over the pillow and buggered him and he cried with love till I, my piston pungently greased, exploded at last. Her name was Nancy, she was six, we went behind a wall near a crater full of ruins, she rubbed and rubbed against me, her milky little thighs reaching in and out of my own, her eyes were closed, her fair little nostrils moved upward, backward forever, the slope of debris rushed down, steeply, just beside us, we teetered at the edge, on and on, exquisitely. Her name was—” well, all these and many more pass for our young couple here, enough to make them understand that horny Anonymous’s intentions are nothing less than a megalomaniac master plan of sexual love with every individual one of the People in the World—and that when every one, somewhat miraculously, is accounted for at last, that will be a rough definition of “loving the People.”
“Take that, you frauds out there in the Branches,” Pirate wants to strike a humorous note, but doesn’t. He is holding Katje now as if, in a moment, music will start, and they would dance.
“But the People will never love you,” she whispers, “or me. However bad and good are arranged for them, we will always be bad. Do you know where that puts us?”
He does smile, crookedly as a man being theatrical about something for the very first time. Knowing it for a move there’s to be no going back from, in the same terminal class as reaching for a gun, he turns his face upward, and looks up through all the faintly superimposed levels above, the milieux of every sort of criminal soul, every unpleasant commercial color from aquamarine to beige, desolate as sunlight on a day when you’d rather have rain, all the clanging enterprise and bustle of all those levels, extending further than Pirate or Katje can see for the moment, he lifts his long, his guilty, his permanently enslaved face to the illusion of sky, to the reality of pressure and weight from overhead, the hardness and absolute cruelty of it, while she presses her own face into the easy lowland between his shoulder and pectoral,
a look on her face of truce, of horror come to a détente with, and as a sunset proceeds, the kind that changes the faces of buildings to light gray for a while, to an ashy soft chaff of light bleating over their outward curves, in the strangely forgelike glow in the west, the anxiety of pedestrians staring in the tiny storefront window at the dim goldsmith behind his fire at his work and paying them no attention, afraid because the light looks like it’s going to go away forever this time, and more afraid because the failure of light is not a private thing, everyone else in the street has seen it too . . . as it grows darker, the orchestra inside this room does, as a matter of fact, strike up a tune, dry and astringent . . . and candelabra have been lighted after all . . . there is Veal Florentine ripening in the ovens tonight, there are drinks on the House, and drunks in the hammocks,
And all the world’s busy, this twi-light!
Who knows what morning-streets, our shoes have known?
Who knows, how many friends, we’ve left, to cry alone?
We have a moment together,
We’ll hum this tune for a day . . .
Ev’ryone’s dancing, in twi-light,
Dancing the bad dream a-way. . . .
And they do dance: though Pirate never could before, very well . . . they feel quite in touch with all the others as they move, and if they are never to be at full ease, still it’s not parade rest any longer . . . so they dissolve now, into the race and swarm of this dancing Preterition, and their faces, the dear, comical faces they have put on for this ball, fade, as innocence fades, grimly flirtatious, and striving to be kind. . . .
• • • • • • •
Fog thickens down the throats of the narrow gassen. In the air is a smell of salt water. The cobbled streets are wet with last night’s rain. Slothrop wakes up in a burned-out locksmith’s shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost. He stumbles out, finds a pump in a courtyard between brick walls and casement windows nobody stares out of, puts his head under the spout and pumps the pump, soaking his head for as long as he thinks he needs to. A ginger cat, meowing for breakfast, comes stalking him, doorway to doorway. “Sorry, Ace.” Doesn’t look like breakfast for either of them.
Gravity's Rainbow Page 75