Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  “He—” and this hesitation may be (a) in consideration of her feelings, or (b) for reasons of Schwarzkommando security, or (c) both of the above . . . but then, hell, the Principle of Maximizing Risk takes over again: “he got as far as the Lüneberg Heath. If you didn’t know, you ought to.”

  “You’ve been looking for him.”

  “Yes. So has Slothrop been, though I don’t think Slothrop knows that.”

  “Slothrop and I—” she looks around the room, her eyes skitter off metal surfaces, papers, facets of salt, cannot come to rest anywhere. As if making a desperate surprise confession: “Everything is so remote now. I don’t really know why they sent me out here. I don’t know any more who Slothrop really was. There’s a failure in the light. I can’t see. It’s all going away from me. . . .”

  It isn’t yet time to touch her, but Enzian reaches out gives a friendly chin-up tap on the back of her hand, a military now-see-here. “There are things to hold to. None of it may look real, but some of it is. Really.”

  “Really.” They both start laughing. Hers is weary-European, slow, head-shaking. Once she would have been asessing as she laughed, speaking of edges, deeps, profit and loss, H-hours and points of no return—she would have been laughing politically, in response to a power-predicament, because there might be nothing else to do. But now she’s only laughing. As she once laughed with Slothrop, back at the Casino Hermann Goering.

  So she’s only been talking with Enzian about a common friend. Is this how the Vacuum feels?

  “Slothrop and I” didn’t work too well. Should she have said “Blicero and I”? What would that have got her into with the African?

  “Blicero and I,” he begins softly, watching her over burnished cheekbones, cigarette smoldering in his curled right hand, “we were only close in certain ways. There were doors I did not open. Could not. Around here, I play an omniscient. I’d say don’t give me away, but it wouldn’t matter. Their minds are made up. I am the Berlin Snoot supreme, Oberhauptberlinerschnauze Enzian. I know it all, and they don’t trust me. They gossip in a general way about me and Blicero, as yarns to be spun—the truth wouldn’t change either their distrust or my Unlimited Access. They’d only be passing a story along, another story. But the truth must mean something to you.

  “The Blicero I loved was a very young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance. Those all must have been important to me once. What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he’s still human, you’d no more turn him out than you’d turn out any other kind of cripple, would you?”

  He seems to be asking her for real advice. Are these the sorts of problems that occupy his time? What about the Rocket, the Empty Ones, the perilous infancy of his nation?

  “What can Blicero matter to you?” is what she finally asks.

  He doesn’t have to think for long. He has often imagined the coming of a Questioner. “At this point, I would take you to a balcony. An observation deck. I would show you the Raketen-Stadt. Plexiglass maps of the webs we maintain across the Zone. Underground schools, systems for distributing food and medicine. . . . We would gaze down on staff-rooms, communications centers, laboratories, clinics. I would say—”

  “All this will I give you, if you will but—”

  “Negative. Wrong story. I would say: This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance . . .” who looks out over the Raketen-Stadt in the amber evenings, with washed and darkening cloud sheets behind him—“who has lost everything else but this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels like?”

  He is a lion, this man, ego-mad—but despite everything, Katje likes him. “But if he were still alive—”

  “No way to know. I have letters he wrote after he left your city. He was changing. Terribly. You ask what he could matter to me. My slender white adventurer, grown twenty years sick and old—the last heart in which I might have been granted some being—was changing, toad to prince, prince to fabulous monster. . . . ‘If he is alive,’ he may have changed by now past our recognition. We could have driven under him in the sky today and never seen. Whatever happened at the end, he has transcended. Even if he’s only dead. He’s gone beyond his pain, his sin—driven deep into Their province, into control, synthesis and control, further than—” well, he was about to say “we” but “I” seems better after all, “I haven’t transcended. I’ve only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it’s worse than being told you won’t have to die by someone you can’t believe in. . . .

  “Yes he matters to me, very much. He is an old self, a dear albatross I cannot let go.”

  “And me?” She gathers that he expects her to sound like a woman of the 1940s. “And me,” indeed. But she can think of no other way offhand to help him, to allow him a moment of comfort. . . .

  “You, poor Katje. Your story is the saddest of all.” She looks up to see exactly how his face will be mocking her. She is stunned to see tears instead running, running over his cheeks. “You’ve only been set free,” his voice then breaking on the last word, his face brushing forward a moment into a cage of hands, then uncaging again for a try at her own gay waltztime gallows laugh. Oh, no, is he about to go goofy on her too? What she needs right now in her life, from some man in her life, is stability, mental health and strength of character. Not this. “I told Slothrop he was free, too. I tell anybody who might listen. I will tell them as I tell you: you are free. You are free. You are free. . . .”

  “How can my story be sadder than that?” Shameless girl, she isn’t humoring him, she’s actually flirting with him now, any technique her crepe-paper and spider-italics young ladyhood ever taught her, to keep from having to move into his blackness. Understand it isn’t his blackness, but her own—an inadmissible darkness she is making believe for the moment is Enzian’s, something beyond even the center of Pan’s grove, something not pastoral at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground and come out very like the malignant dead: the Qlippoth that Weissmann has “transcended,” souls whose journey across was so bad that they lost all their kindness back in the blue lightning (the long sea-furrows of it rippling), and turned to imbecile killers and jokers, making unintelligible honks in the emptiness, sinewed and stripped thin as rats—a city-darkness that is her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends. But as time passes things get louder there. It is shaking itself into her consciousness.

  “Flirt if you want,” Enzian now just as smooth as that Cary Grant, “but expect to be taken seriously.” Oh, ho. Here’s whatcha came for, folks.

  Not necessarily. His bitterness (all properly receipted in German archives which may, however, be destroyed now) runs too deep for her, really. He must have learned a thousand masks (as the City will continue to mask itself against invasions we often do not see, whose outcomes we never learn, silent and unnoticed revolutions in the warehouse districts where the walls are blank, in the lots where the weeds grow thick), and this, no doubt, this Suave Older Exotic, is one of them.

  “I don’t know what to do.” She gets up in a long, long shrug and begins to stalk gracefully in the room. Her old style: a girl about 16 who thinks everyone is staring at her. Her hair falls like a hood. Her arms often touch.

  “You don’t have to come into this any further than locating Slothrop,” he finally gets around to telling her. “All you have to do is tag along with us, and wait till he shows up again. Why bother yourself with the rest?”

  “Because I feel,” her voice, perhaps by design, very small, “that ‘the rest’ is exactly what I ought to be doing. I don’t want to get away with some shallow win. I don’t just want to—I don’t know, pay him back for the octopus,
or something. Don’t I have to know why he’s out here, what I did to him, for Them? How can They be stopped? How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn’t I be going all the way in?”

  Her masochism [Weissmann wrote from The Hague] is reassurance for her. That she can still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because, often, she will forget. I can only try to guess how terrible that must be. . . . So, she needs the whip. She raises her ass not in surrender, but in despair—like your fears of impotence, and mine: can it still . . . will it fail. . . . But of true submission, of letting go the self and passing into the All, there is nothing, not with Katje. She is not the victim I would have chosen to end this with. Perhaps, before the end, there will be another. Perhaps I dream. . . . I am not here, am I, to devote myself to her fantasies!

  “You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you want to make it for yourself, still you’re always going to come through. You’re free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be. Usually it’s given as a reward. I won’t ask for what. I’m sorry, but you seem really not to know. That’s why your story is saddest of all.”

  “Reward—” she’s getting mad. “It’s a life-sentence. If you call that a reward, then what are you calling me?”

  “Nothing political.”

  “You black bastard.”

  “Exactly.” He has allowed her to speak the truth. A clock chimes in the stone corner. “We have someone who was with Blicero in May. Just before the end. You don’t have to—”

  “Come and listen, yes, Oberst. But I will.”

  He rises, crooks her his official and gentlemanly arm, smiling sideways and feeling like a clown. Her own smiling is upward like mischievous Ophelia just having glimpsed the country of the mad and itching now to get away from court.

  Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out to is we will never know each other. Beaming, strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both loved and we’re strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings.

  Far away in another corridor a loud drill-bit strains, smokes, just before snapping. Cafeteria trays and steelware rattle, an innocent and kind sound behind familiar regions of steam, fat at the edge of souring, cigarette smoke, washwater, disinfectant—a cafeteria in the middle of the day.

  There are things to hold on to. . . .

  • • • • • • •

  You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis. He was rescued by a Polish undertaker in a rowboat, out in the storm tonight to see if he can get struck by lightning. The undertaker is wearing, in hopes it will draw electricity, a complicated metal suit, something like a deep-sea diver’s, and a Wehrmacht helmet through which he has drilled a couple of hundred holes and inserted nuts, bolts, springs and conductive wands of many shapes so that he jingles whenever he nods or shakes his head, which is often. He’s a digital companion all right, everything gets either a yes or a no, and two-tone checkerboards of odd shape and texture indeed bloom in the rainy night around him and Thanatz. Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt. All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived. What stories they could tell!

  What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one.

  Well, it’s a matter of continuity. Most people’s lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They’re the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life—do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that’s what! A-and right across the point, it’s minus infinity! How’s that for sudden change, eh? Infinite miles per hour changing to the same speed in reverse, all in the gnat’s-ass or red cunt hair of the Δt across the point. That’s getting hit by lightning, folks. You’re way up there on the needle-peak of a mountain, and don’t think there aren’t lammergeiers cruising there in the lurid red altitudes around, waiting for a chance to snatch you off. Oh yes. They are piloted by bareback dwarves with little plastic masks around their eyes that happen to be shaped just like the infinity symbol: ∞. Little men with wicked eyebrows, pointed ears and bald heads, although some of them are wearing outlandish headgear, not at all the usual Robin Hood green fedoras, no these are Carmen Miranda hats, for example, bananas, papayas, bunches of grapes, pears, pineapples, mangoes, jeepers even watermelons—and there are World War I spiketop Wilhelmets, and baby bonnets and crosswise Napoleon hats with and without Ns on them, not to mention little red suits and green capes, well here they are leaning forward into their cruel birds’ ears, whispering like jockeys, out to nab you, buster, just like that sacrificial ape off of the Empire State Building, except that they won’t let you fall, they’ll carry you away, to the places they are agents of. It will look like the world you left, but it’ll be different. Between congruent and identical there seems to be another class of look-alike that only finds the lightning-heads. Another world laid down on the previous one and to all appearances no different. Ha-ha! But the lightning-struck know, all right! Even if they may not know they know. And that’s what this undertaker tonight has set out into the storm to find.

  Is he interested in all those other worlds who send their dwarf reps out on the backs of eagles? Nope. Nor does he want to write a classic of anthropology, with the lightning-struck grouped into a subculture, even secretly organized, handshakes with sharp cusp-flicks of fingernails, private monthly magazine A Nickel Saved (which looks perfectly innocent, old Ben Franklin after inflation, unless you know the other half of the proverb: “. . . is a stockpile of nickel.” Making the real quote nickel-magnate Mark Hanna’s: “You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public office owes the public anything.” So the real title is Long Enough, which Those Who Know, know. The text of each issue of the magazine, when transformed this way, yields many interesting messages). To outsiders it’s just a pleasant little club newsletter—Jed Plunkitt held a barbecue for the Iowa Chapter the last weekend in April. Heard about the Amperage Contest, Jed. Tough luck! But come next Barbecue, you’ll be back good as new. . . . Minnie Calkins (Chapter 1.793) got married Easter Sunday to a screen-door salesman from California. Sorry to say he’s not eligible for Membership—at least not yet. But with all those screen doors around, we’ll sure keep our fingers crossed! . . . Your Editor has been receiving many, many “Wha hoppen?” ’s concerning the Spring Convention in Decatur when all the lights failed during the blessing. Glad to report now that trouble was traced finally to a giant transient in the line, “Kind of an electrical tidal wave,” sez Hank Faffner, our engineer-on-the-scene. “Every bulb in the place burned out, a ceilingful of sooty, sterile eggs.” Quite a poet, Hank! Now if you can only find out where that spike came from—

  But does the Polish undertaker in the rowboat care about busting this code, about secret organizations or recognizable subcultures? No, he doesn’t. The reason he is seeking these people out is that he thinks it will help him in his job. Can you dig that, gates? He wants to know how people behave before and after lightning bolts, so he’ll know better how to handle bereaved families.

  “You are perverting a great discovery to the uses of commerce,” sez Thanatz, stepping ashore. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” He is no more than five minutes into the empty town at the edge of the marsh when nockle KKAHH-UH
NN! nocklenockle nockle an enormous blast of light and sound hits the water back where the undertaker, peeved at what he takes to be no gratitude, is hauling away.

  “Oh,” comes his faint voice. “Oh, ho. Oh-ho-ho-ho!”

  “Nobody lives here but us.” A solid figure, a whispering silhouette, charcoal-colored, has materialized in Thanatz’s path. “We do not harm visitors. But it would be better if you took another way.”

  They are 175s—homosexual prison-camp inmates. They have come north from the Dora camp at Nordhausen, north till the land ended, and have set up an all-male community between this marsh and the Oder estuary. Ordinarily, this would be Thanatz’s notion of paradise, except that none of the men can bear to be out of Dora—Dora was home, and they are homesick. Their “liberation” was a banishment. So here in a new location they have made up a hypothetical SS chain of command—no longer restricted to what Destiny allotted then for jailers, they have now managed to come up with some really mean ass imaginary Nazi playmates, Schutzhäftlingsführer to Blockführer, and chosen an internal hierarchy for themselves too: Lager and Blockältester, Kapo, Vorarbeiter, Stubendienst, Läufer (who is a runner or messenger, but also happens to be the German name for a chess bishop . . . if you have seen him, running across the wet meadows in very early morning, with his red vestments furling and fluttering darkened almost to tree-bark color among the watery downs, you will have some notion of his real purpose here inside the community—he is carrier of holy strategies, memoranda of conscience, and when he approaches over the reedy flats of morning you are taken by your bowed nape and brushed with the sidebands of a Great Moment—for the Läufer is the most sacred here, it is he who takes messages out to the ruinous interface between the visible Lager and the invisible SS).