Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  Yup, still thinking there’s a way to get back. He’s been changing, sure, changing, plucking the albatross of self now and then, idly, half-conscious as picking his nose—but the one ghost-feather his fingers always brush by is America. Poor asshole, he can’t let her go. She’s whispered love me too often to him in his sleep, vamped insatiably his waking attention with come-hitherings, incredible promises. One day—he can see a day—he might be able finally to say sorry, sure and leave her . . . but not just yet. One more try, one more chance, one more deal, one more transfer to a hopeful line. Maybe it’s just pride. What if there’s no place for him in her stable any more? If she has turned him out, she’ll never explain. Her “stallions” have no rights. She is immune to their small, stupid questions. She is exactly the Amazon Bitch your fantasies have called her to be.

  Then there’s Jamf, the coupling of “Jamf” and “I” in the primal dream. Who can he go to with it? it will not bear that much looking into, will it? If he gets too close, there will be revenge. They might warn him first, They might not.

  Omens grow clearer, more specific. He watches flights of birds and patterns in the ashes of his fire, he reads the guts of trout he’s caught and cleaned, scraps of lost paper, graffiti on the broken walls where facing has been shot away to reveal the brick underneath—broken in specific shapes that may also be read. . . .

  One night, on the wall of a public shithouse stinking and ripe with typhoid, he finds among initials, dates, hasty pictures of penises and mouths open to receive them, Werewolf stencils of the dark man with the high shoulders and the Homburg hat, an official slogan: WILLST DU V-2, DANN ARBEITE. If you want the V-2, then work. Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop . . . no, no, wait, it’s O.K., over on the other wall they’ve also painted WILLST DU V-4, DANN ARBEITE. Lucky. The brimming voices recede, the joke clarifies, he is only back with Goebbels and the man’s inability to let a good thing be. But it had taken an effort to walk around and look at that other wall. Anything could’ve been back there. It was dusk. Plowed fields, power lines, ditches and distant windbreaks went for miles. He felt brave and in control. But then another message caught his eye:

  ROCKETMAN WAS HERE

  His first thought was that he’d written it himself and forgot. Odd that that should’ve been his first thought, but it was. Might be he was starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himself, in the Combination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred.

  Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious host. They were the fifth-columnists, well inside his head, waiting the moment to deliver him to the four other divisions outside, closing in. . . .

  So, next to the other graffiti, with a piece of rock, he scratches this sign:

  Slothrop besieged. Only after he’d left it half a dozen more places did it dawn on him that what he was really drawing was the A4 rocket, seen from below. By which time he had become tuned to other fourfold expressions—variations on Frans Van der Groov’s cosmic windmill—swastikas, gymnastic symbols FFFF in a circle symmetrically upside down and backward, Frisch Fromm Frölich Frei over neat doorways in quiet streets, and crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from the Other Side, hearing about the future (no serial time over there: events are all there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don’t always “make sense” back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane).

  The sand-colored churchtops rear up on Slothrop’s horizons, apses out to four sides like rocket fins guiding the streamlined spires . . . chiseled in the sandstone he finds waiting the mark of consecration, a cross in a circle. At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon. Black hounds and fanged little hunters slick as weasels, dogs whose breeds have been lost for 700 years, chase a female in heat as the spectators gather, it’s the fourth hanging this spring and not much spectacle here except that this one, dreaming at the last instant of who can say what lifted smock, what fat-haunched gnädige Frau Death may have come sashaying in as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple swelling, and just as his neck breaks, he actually comes in his ragged loin-wrapping creamy as the skin of a saint under the purple cloak of Lent, and one drop of sperm succeeds in rolling, dripping hair to hair down the dead leg, all the way down, off the edge of the crusted bare foot, drips to earth at the exact center of the crossroad where, in the workings of the night, it changes into a mandrake root. Next Friday, at dawn, the Magician, his own moving Heiligenschein rippling infrared to ultraviolet in spectral rings around his shadow over the dewy grass, comes with his dog, a coal-black dog who hasn’t been fed for a few days. The Magician digs carefully all around the precious root till it’s held only by the finest root-hairs—ties it to the tail of his black dog, stops his own ears with wax then comes out with a piece of bread to lure the unfed dog rrrowf! dog lunges for bread, root is torn up and lets loose its piercing and fatal scream. The dog drops dead before he’s halfway to breakfast, his holy-light freezes and fades in the million dewdrops. Magician takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little white outfit and leaves money with it overnight: in the morning the cash has multiplied tenfold. A delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes comes to visit. “Inflation?” the Magician tries to cover up with some flowing hand-moves.” ‘Capital’? Never heard of that.” “No, no,” replies the visitor, “not at the moment. We’re trying to think ahead. We’d like very much to hear about the basic structure of this. How bad was the scream, for instance?” “Had m’ears plugged up, couldn’t hear it.” The delegate flashes a fraternal business smile. “Can’t say as I blame you. . . .”

  Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop? He’s sat in Säure Bummer’s kitchen, the air streaming with kif moirés, reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of himself . . . news flashes, names of wheelhorses that will pay him off enough for a certain getaway. . . . He used to pick and shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, April afternoons he’s lost, “Chapter 81 work,” they called it, following the scraper that clears the winter’s crystal attack-from-within, its white necropolizing . . . picking up rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when in superstition and fright he could make it all fit, seeing clearly in each an entry in a record, a history: his own, his winter’s, his country’s . . . instructing him, dunce and drifter, in ways deeper than he can explain, have been faces of children out the train windows, two bars of dance music somewhere, in some other street at night, needles and branches of a pine tree shaken clear and luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the early morning as he was walking to school, the idling of a motorcycle at one dusk-heavy hour of the summer . . . and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural. . . .

  • • • • • • •

  Double-declutchingly, heel-and-toe, away goes Roger Mexico. Down the summer Autobahn, expansion joints booming rhythmic under his wheels, he highballs a pre-Hitler Horch 870B through the burnt-purple rolling of the Lüneburg Heath. Over the windscreen mild winds blow down on him, smelling of junipers. Heidschnucken sheep out there rest as still as fallen clouds. The bogs and broom go speeding by. Overhead the sky is busy, streaming, a living plasma.


  The Horch, army-green with one discreet daffodil painted halfway up its bonnet, was lurking inside a lorry at the Elbeward edge of the Brigade pool at Hamburg, shadowed except for its headlamps, stalked eyes of a friendly alien smiling at Roger. Welcome there, Earthman. Once under way, he discovered the floor strewn with rolling unlabeled glass jars of what seems to be baby food, weird unhealthy-colored stuff no human baby could possibly eat and survive, green marbled with pink, vomit-beige with magenta inclusions, all impossible to identify, each cap adorned with a smiling, fat, cherubic baby, seething under the bright glass with horrible botulism toxins ’n’ ptomaines . . . now and then a new jar will be produced, spontaneously, under the seat, and roll out, against all laws of acceleration, among the pedals for his feet to get confused by. He knows he ought to look back underneath there to find out what’s going on, but can’t quite bring himself to.

  Bottles roll clanking on the floor, under the bonnet a hung-up tappet or two chatters its story of discomfort. Wild mustard whips past down the center of the Autobahn, perfectly two-tone, just yellow and green, a fateful river seen only by the two kinds of rippling light. Roger sings to a girl in Cuxhaven who still carries Jessica’s name:

  I dream that I have found us both again,

  With spring so many strangers’ lives away,

  And we, so free,

  Out walking by the sea,

  With someone else’s paper words to say. . . .

  They took us at the gates of green return,

  Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why—

  Do children meet again?

  Does any trace remain,

  Along the superhighways of July?

  Driving now suddenly into such a bright gold bearding of slope and field that he nearly forgets to steer around the banked curve. . . .

  A week before she left, she came out to “The White Visitation” for the last time. Except for the negligible rump of PISCES, the place was a loony bin again. The barrage-balloon cables lay rusting across the sodden meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth—tendons that sang in the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old, in hard twists of metal ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants crowd, bustling with a sense of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs. Jessica has cut fringes since Roger saw her last, and is going through the usual anxiety—“It looks utterly horrible, you don’t have to say it. . . .”

  “It’s utterly swoony,” sez Roger, “I love it.”

  “You’re making fun.”

  “Jess, why are we talking about haircuts for God’s sake?”

  While somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face of the Zone. Roger doesn’t want to give him up: Roger wants to do what’s right. “I just can’t leave the poor twit out there, can I? They’re trying to destroy him—”

  But, “Roger,” she’d smile, “it’s spring. We’re at peace.”

  No, we’re not. It’s another bit of propaganda. Something the P.W.E. planted. Now gentlemen as you’ve seen from the studies our optimum time is 8 May, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus, schools letting out, weather projections for an excellent growing season, coal requirements beginning their seasonal decline, giving us a few months’ grace to get our Ruhr interests back on their feet—no, he sees only the same flows of power, the same impoverishments he’s been thrashing around in since ’39. His girl is about to be taken away to Germany, when she ought to be demobbed like everyone else. No channel upward that will show either of them any hope of escape. There’s something still on, don’t call it a “war” if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago . . . but Their enterprise goes on.

  The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is that Jessica believes Them. “The War” was the condition she needed for being with Roger. “Peace” allows her to leave him. His resources, next to Theirs, are too meager. He has no words, no technically splendid embrace, no screaming fit that can ever hold her. Old Beaver, not surprisingly, will be doing air-defense liaison over there, so they’ll be together in romantic Cuxhaven. Ta-ta mad Roger, it’s been grand, a wartime fling, when we came it was utterly incendiary, your arms open wide as a Fortress’s wings, we had our military secrets, we fooled the fat old colonels right and left but stand-down time must come to all, yikes! I must run sweet Roger really it’s been dreamy. . . .

  He would fall at her knees smelling of glycerine and rose-water, he would lick sand and salt from her ATS brogans, offer her his freedom, his next 50 years’ pay from a good steady job, his poor throbbing brain. But it’s too late. We’re at Peace. The paranoia, the danger, the tuneless whistling of busy Death next door, are all put to sleep, back in the War, back with her Roger Mexico Years. The day the rockets stopped falling, it began to end for Roger and Jessica. As it grew clear, day after safe day, that no more would fall ever again, the new world crept into and over her like spring—not so much the changes she felt in air and light, in the crowds at Woolworth’s, as a bad cinema spring, full of paper leaves and cotton-wool blossoms and phony lighting . . . no, never again will she stand at their kitchen sink with a china cup squeaking in her fingers, its small crying-child sound defenseless, meekly resonating BLOWN OUT OF ATTENTION AS THE ROCKET FELL smashing to a clatter of points white and blue across the floor. . . .

  Those death-rockets now are in the past. This time she’ll be on the firing end, she and Jeremy—isn’t that how it was always meant to be? firing them out to sea: no death, only the spectacle, fire and roar, the excitement without the killing, isn’t that what she prayed for? back in the fading house, derequisitioned now, occupied again by human extensions of ball-fringe, dog pictures, Victorian chairs, secret piles of News of the World in the upstairs closet.

  She’s meant to go. The orders come from higher than she can reach. Her future is with the World’s own, and Roger’s only with this strange version of the War he still carries with him. He can’t move, poor dear, it won’t let him go. Still passive as he’d been under the rockets. Roger the victim. Jeremy the firer. “The War’s my mother,” he said the first day, and Jessica has wondered what ladies in black appeared in his dreams, what ash-white smiles, what shears to come snapping through the room, through their winter . . . so much of him she never got to know . . . so much unfit for Peace. Already she’s beginning to think of their time as a chain of explosions, craziness ganged to the rhythms of the War. Now he wants to go rescue Slothrop, another rocket-creature, a vampire whose sex life actually fed on the terror of that Rocket Blitz—ugh, creepy, creepy. They ought to lock him up, not set him free. Roger must care more about Slothrop than about her, they’re two of a kind, aren’t they, well—she hopes they’ll be happy together. They can sit and drink beer, tell rocket stories, scribble equations for each other. How jolly. At least she won’t be leaving him in a vacuum. He won’t be lonely, he’ll have something to occupy the time. . . .

  She has wandered away from him, down the beach. The sun is so bright today that the shadows by her Achilles tendon are drawn sharp and black as seams up the heel of a silk stocking. Her head, as always, is bent forward, away, the bare nape he’s never stopped loving, will never see again, unprotected as her beauty, her innocence of how forever in peril it moves through the World. She may know a little, may think of herself, face and body, as “pretty” . . . but he could never tell her all the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to him. Was. He is losing more than single Jessica: he’s losing a full range of life, of being for th
e first time at ease in the Creation. Going back to winter now, drawing back into his single envelope. The effort it takes to extend any further is more than he can make alone.

  He hadn’t thought he’d cry when she left. But he cried. Snot by the cubic yard, eyes like red carnations. Presently, every time his left foot hit the ground walking he’d get a jolt of pain through half his skull. Ah, this must be what they mean by the “pain of separation!” Pointsman kept showing up with armloads of work. Roger found himself unable to forget Jessica, and caring less about Slothrop.

  But one day Milton Gloaming popped in to deliver him from his unmoving. Gloaming was just back from a jaunt through the Zone. He’d found himself on a task force with one Josef Schleim, a defector of secondary brilliance, who had once worked for the IG out of Dr. Reithinger’s office, VOWI—the Statistical Department of NW7. There, Schleim had been assigned to the American desk, gathering for the IG economic intelligence, through subsidiaries and licensees like Chemnyco, General Aniline and Film, Ansco, Winthrop. In ’36 he came to England to work for Imperial Chemicals, in a status that was never to be free from ambiguities. He’d heard of Slothrop, yes indeed . . . recalled him from the old days. When Lyle Bland went out on his last transmural journey, there’d been Green Reports flapping through the IG offices for weeks, Geheime Kommandosache, rumors coupling and uncoupling like coal-tar molecules under pressure, all to do with who was likely to take over the Slothrop surveillance, now that Bland was gone.