Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  There is a possibility, among the dogs, latent so far because it’s never been seriously tested, of a crystallizing into sects, each around the image of its trainer. A feasibility study, in fact, is going on even now at staff level in G-5, to see whether original trainers might not be located, and this crystallizing begun. One sect might try to protect its trainer against attacks from others. Given the right combinations and an acceptable trainer-loss figure, it might be cheaper to let the dogs finish themselves off than to send in combat troops. The study has been contracted to, of all people, Mr. Pointsman, who is now restricted to one small office at Twelfth House, the rest of the space having been taken over by an agency studying options for nationalizing coal and steel—given him more out of sympathy than anything else. Since the castrating of Major Marvy, Pointsman has been officially in disgrace. Clive Mossmoon and Sir Marcus Scammony sit in their club, among discarded back copies of British Plastics, drinking the knight’s favorite, Quimporto—a weird prewar mixture of quinine, beef-tea and port—with a dash of Coca-Cola and a peeled onion. Ostensibly the meeting is to finalize plans for the Postwar Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat, a source of great corporate fun these days (“Imagine the look on some poor bastard’s face when the whole sleeve simply falls out of the shoulder—” “O-or how about mixing in something that will actually dissolve in the rain?”). But Mossmoon really wants to discuss Pointsman: “What shall we do with Pointsman?”

  “I found the most darling boots in Portobello Road,” pipes Sir Marcus, whom it’s always hard to get around to talking business. “They’ll look stunning on you. Blood-red cordovan and halfway up your thighs. Your naked thighs.”

  “We’ll give it a go,” replies Clive, neutral as can be (though it’s a thought, old Scorpia’s been so damned bitchy lately). “I could use a spot of relaxation after trying to explain Pointsman away to the Higher Levels.”

  “Oh, the dog chap. I say, have you ever thought about a Saint Bernard? Big, shaggy darlings.”

  “On occasion,” Clive keeps at it, “but mostly I think about Pointsman.”

  “Not your sort, darling. Not at all. And he is getting on, poor chap.”

  “Sir Marcus,” last resort, usually the willowy knight demands to be called Angelique, and there seems no other way to get his attention, “if this show prangs, we’re going to see a national crisis. I’ve got Ginger Groupers jamming my switchboard and my mailbox day and night—”

  “Mm, I’d like to jam your male box, Clivey—”

  “—and 1922 Committee coming in the windows. Bracken and Beaverbrook go on, you know, it isn’t as if the election put them out of a job or something—”

  “Dear chap,” smiling angelically, “there isn’t going to be any crisis. Labour wants the American found as much as we do. We sent him out to destroy the blacks, and it’s obvious now he won’t do the job. What harm can he cause, roaming around Germany? For all we know he’s taken ship for South America and all those adorable little mustachios. Let it be for a while. We’ve got the Army, when the time is right. Slothrop was a good try at a moderate solution, but in the end it’s always the Army, isn’t it?”

  “How can you be so sure the Americans will ever condone that?”

  A long disagreeable giggle. “Clive, you’re such a little boy. You don’t know the Americans. I do. I deal with them. They’ll want to see how we do with our lovely black animals—oh dear, ex Africa semper aliquid novi, they’re just so big, so strong—before they try it on their own, ah, target groups. They may say a good many harsh things if we fail, but there’ll be no sanctions.”

  “Are we going to fail?”

  “We’re all going to fail,” Sir Marcus primping his curls, “but the Operation won’t.”

  Yes. Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frustrations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a petty indulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But here there is no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower self. The issues are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. Even in the chastisement room at Sir Marcus’s estate, “The Birches,” the foreplay is a game about who has the real power, who’s had it all along, chained and corseted though he be, outside these shackled walls. The humiliations of pretty “Angelique” are calibrated against their degree of fantasy. No joy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of us has his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain. . . .

  It wasn’t always so. In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat. . . . It was the end of the world, it was total revolution (though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): every day thousands of the aristocracy new and old, still haloed in their ideas of right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine of Flanders, run day in and out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those of the people—an English class was being decimated, the ones who’d volunteered were dying for those who’d known something and hadn’t, and despite it all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper. . . .

  4

  The Counterforce

  What?

  — RICHARD M. NIXON

  • • • • • • •

  BETTE DAVIS AND MARGARET DUMONT are in the curly-Cuvilliés drawing-room of somebody’s palatial home. From outside the window, at some point, comes the sound of a kazoo, playing a tune of astounding tastelessness, probably “Who Dat Man?” from A Day at the Races (in more ways than one). It is one of Groucho Marx’s vulgar friends. The sound is low, buzzing, and guttural. Bette Davis freezes, tosses her head, flicks her cigarette, “What,” she inquires, “is that?” Margaret Dumont smiles, throws out her chest, looks down her nose. “Well it sounds,” she replies, “like a kazoo.”

  For all Slothrop knows, it was a kazoo. By the time he’s awake, the racket has faded in the morning. Whatever it was, it woke him up. What it was, or is, is Pirate Prentice, in a more or less hijacked P-47, on route to Berlin. His orders are terse and clear, like those of the others, agents of the Pope, Pope got religion, go out ’n’ find that minnesinger, he’s a good guy after all. . . .

  Well, it’s an older Jug, one with a greenhouse canopy. The barred field of sight gives Pirate twinges of memory in his neck muscles. The plane seems permanently out of trim to him, though he still fiddles now and then with different tabs. Right now he’s trying the War Emergency Power to see how it works, even though there seems to be no War, no Emergency, keeping an eye on the panel, where RPMs, manifold pressure, and cylinder-head temperature are all nudging their red lines. He eases it down and flies on, and presently is trying a slow roll over Celle, then a loop over Brunswick, then, what the hell, an Immelmann over Magdeburg. On his back, molars aching in a grin, he starts his roll a hair too slow, just this side of one-thirty, and nearly stalls it, jolts over a set of surprise points—finish it as an ordinary loop or go for the Immelmann?—already reaching for ailerons, forget the damn rudder, a spin isn’t worth worrying about . . . but at the last second does give the pedal just a touch anyway, a minor compromise (I’m nearly forty, good God, is it happening to me too?) and rolls himself upright again. It had to be the Immelmann.

  Oh I’m the Eagle of Tooting,

  Bombing and shooting,

  And nobodee ca
n bring me down!

  Old Kaiser Bill, you’re over the hill,

  Cause I’m comin’ into your home town!

  Tell all the fräuleins and mademoiselles

  To keep a light in the window for me . . .

  Cause I’m the Eagle of Tooting, just rooty-toot-tooting.

  And flyin’ on to victo-ree!

  By now, Osbie Feel ought to be in Marseilles, already trying to contact Blodgett Waxwing. Webley Silvernail is on route to Zürich. Katje will be going to Nordhausen . . . Katje. . . .

  No, no, she hasn’t told him everything she’s been up to. It’s none of his business. However much she told him, there’d always be the bit of mystery to her. Because of what he is, because of directions he can’t move in. But how is it both of them kept from vanishing from each other, into the paper cities and afternoons of this strange peace, and the coming Austerity? Could it be there’s something about ad hoc arrangements, like the present mission, that must bring you in touch with the people you need to be with? that more formal adventures tend, by their nature, to separation, to loneliness? Ah, Prentice. . . . What’s this, a runaway prop? no, no, check the fuel-pressure—here’s the gauge needle wobbling, rather low, tank’s run dry—

  Little in-flight annoyance for Pirate here, nothing serious. . . . Out of his earphones now and then, ghost-voices will challenge or reprimand him: air traffic people down in their own kingdom, one more overlay on the Zone, antennas strung in the wilderness like redoubts, radiating half-spheres of influence, defining invisible corridors-in-the-sky that are real only for them. The Thunderbolt is painted Kelly green. Hard to miss. Pirate’s idea. Gray was for the War. Let them chase. Catch me if you can.

  Gray was for the War. So, it seems, was Pirate’s odd talent for living the fantasies of others. Since V-E Day, nothing. But it’s not the end of his psychic difficulties. He is still being “haunted,” in the same marginal and uncertain way, by Katje’s ancestor Frans van der Groov, dodo killer and soldier of fortune. The man never quite arrives, nor quite leaves. Pirate is taking it personally. He is the Dutchman’s compatible host, despite himself. What does Frans see in him? Has it to do—of course it does—with the Firm?

  He has warped a skein of his dreams into Pirate’s own, heretical dreams, exegeses of windmills that turned in shadow at the edges of dark fields, each arm pointing at a spot on the rim of a giant wheel that turned through the sky, stop and go, always exactly with the spinning cross: “wind” was a middle term, a convention to express what really moved the cross . . . and this applied to all wind, everywhere on Earth, shrieking between the confectionery pink and yellow mountains of Mauritius or stirring the tulips at home, red cups in the rain filling bead by clear bead with water, each wind had its own cross-in-motion, materially there or implied, each cross a unique mandala, bringing opposites together in the spin (and tell me now, Frans, what’s this wind I’m in, this 25,000-foot wind? What mill’s that, grinding there below? What does it grind, Frans, who tends the stone?).

  Far beneath the belly of the Thunderbolt, brushed on the green countryside, pass the time-softened outlines of ancient earthworks, villages abandoned during the Great Dying, fields behind cottages whose dwellers were scythed down without mercy by the northward march of black plague. Behind a scrim, cold as sheets over furniture in a forbidden wing of the house, a soprano voice sings notes that never arrange themselves into a melody, that fall apart in the same way as dead proteins. . . .

  “It’s as clear as the air,” rants Gustav the composer, “if you weren’t an old fool you’d see it—I know, I know, there’s an Old Fools’ Benevolent Association, you all know each other, you vote censures against the most troublesome under-70s and my name’s at the head of the list. Do you think I care? You’re all on a different frequency. There’s no way you’ll get interference from us. We’re too far separated. We have our own problems.”

  Cryptozoa of many kinds scurry through crumbs, pubic hairs, winesplashes, tobacco ash and shreds, a litter of dram cocaine vials, each with a red Bakelite top bearing the seal of Merck of Darmstadt. The bugs’ atmosphere ends about an inch from the floor, an ideal humidity, darkness, stability of temperature. Nobody bothers them. There is an unspoken agreement about not stomping on bugs in Säure’s place.

  “You’re caught in tonality,” screams Gustav. “Trapped. Tonality is a game. All of them are. You’re too old. You’ll never move beyond the game, to the Row. The Row is enlightenment.”

  “The Row is a game too.” Säure sits grinning with an ivory spoon, shoveling incredible piles of cocaine into his nose, going through his whole repertoire: arm straight out swinging in in a giant curve zoom precisely to the nostril he’s aiming at, then flicking in the lot from two feet away without losing a crystal . . . then a whole bunch gets tossed up in the air like a piece of popcorn and nose-gobbled ngkok on target, inside where it’s smooth as a Jo block, not a cilium in sight there since the Liebknecht funeral, if not before . . . hand-to-hand shifts of spoon two or three times, faster than ivory ever moved in air . . . rails disappearing in a wink without benefit of a tube to guide them. “Sound is a game, if you’re capable of moving that far, you adenoidal closet-visionary. That’s why I listen to Spohr, Rossini, Spontini, I’m choosing my game, one full of light and kindness. You’re stuck with that stratosphere stuff and rationalize its dullness away by calling it ‘enlightenment.’ You don’t know what enlightenment is, Kerl, you’re blinder than I am.”

  Slothrop moseys down the trail to a mountain stream where he’s left his harp to soak all night, wedged between a couple of rocks in a quiet pool.

  “Your ‘light and kindness’ are the jigging of the doomed,” sez Gustav. “You can smell mortality in every one of those bouncy little tunes.” Surly, he decapitates a vial of cocaine with his teeth, and spits the red debris in among the shimmering bugs.

  Through the flowing water, the holes of the old Hohner Slothrop found are warped one by one, squares being bent like notes, a visual blues being played by the clear stream. There are harpmen and dulcimer players in all the rivers, wherever water moves. Like that Rilke prophesied,

  And though Earthliness forget you,

  To the stilled Earth say: I flow.

  To the rushing water speak: I am.

  It is still possible, even this far out of it, to find and make audible the spirits of lost harpmen. Whacking the water out of his harmonica, reeds singing against his leg, picking up the single blues at bar 1 of this morning’s segment, Slothrop, just suckin’ on his harp, is closer to being a spiritual medium than he’s been yet, and he doesn’t even know it.

  The harp didn’t show up right away. His first days in these mountains, he came across a set of bagpipes, left behind in April by some Highland unit. Slothrop has a knack for doping things out. The Imperial instrument was a cinch. In a week he mastered that dreamy tune Dick Powell sang in the movies, “In the Shadows Let Me Come and Sing to You,” and spent most of his time playing that, WHANGde-diddle de-dee, WHANG de dum—de-doooooo . . . over and over, on the bagpipes. By and by he began to notice that offerings of food were being left near the lean-to he’d put up. Mangel-wurzels, a basket of cherries, even fresh fish. He never saw who was leaving them. Either he was supposed to be a bagpiper’s ghost, or just purely sound itself, and he knew enough about solitudes and night-voices to figure what was going on. He quit playing the bagpipes, and next day he found the harp. It happens to be the same one he lost in 1938 or -9 down the toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, but that’s too long ago for him to remember.

  He’s kept alone. If others have seen him or his fire, they haven’t tried to approach. He’s letting hair and beard grow, wearing a dungaree shirt and trousers Bodine liberated for him from the laundry of the John E. Badass. But he likes to spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his legs, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the mo
untain, getting to know shrikes and capercaillie, badgers and marmots. Any number of directions he ought to be moving in, but he’d rather stay right here for now. Everyplace he’s been, Cuxhaven, Berlin, Nice, Zürich, must be watched now. He could still make a try at finding Springer, or Blodgett Waxwing. Why does he have this obsession with getting papers? What th’ fuck are papers, anyhow? He could try one of the Baltic ports, wait around for Frau Gnahb to put in, and get over to that Denmark or that Sweden. DPs, offices burned, records lost forever—papers might not mean so much in Europe . . . waitaminute, so much as where, Slothrop? Huh? America? Shit. C’mon—