Maximilian is way down in the bottom of the orchestra pit posing as the C-melody saxophone player, complete with Closet Intellectual Book, The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots, with illustrations by Walt Disney—screaming, hairy-nosed, front teeth in white dihedral, slant-eyed (long, elaborate curlicued shapes) round black licorice dog-nosed Japs, zoomin’ through ev’ry page! and any time he’s not playing that saxophone, you can be sure Maximilian will be, to the casual observer, immersed in this diffuse, though rewarding, work. Myrtle meantime is back in the candycane control room, manning the switchboard and ready to swoop in at any time to save the others, who are sure (through their own folly if nothing else) to be in deep trouble soon. And Slothrop himself lurks in the Transvestites’ Toilet, in the smoke, the crowds, the buzzing fluorescent lights, piss hot as melted butter, making notes of all the dealing going on among the stalls, bowls ’n’ urinals (you’ve got to look butch but not that butch and another thing no metal showing at any vital spots, she’ll knock off ten marks for every one she sees, and the only bonuses she gives are spelled out here: blood drawn on first try, that’s an extra 20—) wondering if the cigarette-pack message got through and if they’ll come in person or if Pop’ll send a hit man to try for a first-round KO.
Well, there is the heart of it: the monumental yellow structure, out there in the slum-suburban night, the never-sleeping percolation of life and enterprise through its shell, Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely labyrinthine, for either category to have much hegemony any more. The nonstop revue crosses its stage, crowding and thinning, surprising and jerking tears in an endless ratchet:
THE LOW-FREQUENCY LISTENER
The German U-boats communicated on a wave length of 28,000 meters, which is down around 10 kc. A half-wave antenna for that’d halfta be 9 miles high, or long, and even folded here and there it is still some antenna. It is located at Magdeburg. So is the headquarters of the German branch of Jehovah’s Witnesses. So, for a time, is Slothrop, attempting to get through to the Argentine anarchist U-boat, now in unknown waters. The reason why is no longer clear to him. He was either visited again in some way by Squalidozzi, or he came upon Squalidozzi one day by accident, or he found, in some lint-picking attentionless search through pockets, rags or bedroll, the message he was given, back at the green edge of Aries, at the Café l’Éclipse long ago in Geneva. All he knows is that finding Squalidozzi, right now, is his overriding need.
The Keeper of the Antenna is a Jehovah’s witness named Rohr. He’s just out of the Ravensbrück camp after being in since ’36 (or ’37, he can’t remember). With that much camp time in, he’s politically reliable enough for the local G-5 to put him, nights, in control of the network of longest wavelength in the Zone. Although this could be accidental, more likely there is some eccentric justice lately begun to operate out here which it would behoove Slothrop to look into. There are rumors of a War Crimes Tribunal under way in Nürnberg. No one Slothrop has listened to is clear who’s trying whom for what, but remember that these are mostly brains ravaged by antisocial and mindless pleasures.
But the only people—if any—apt to be communicating these days on 28,000 meters (the distance from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde to the Hafenstraße in Greifswald, where Slothrop in early August may see a particular newspaper photo), except for freak Argentine anarchists, are the undenazified Nazis still wandering around in unaccounted-for submarines holding their own secret shipboard tribunals against enemies of the Reich. So the closest thing in the Zone to an early Christian is put on to listen for news of unauthorized crucifixions.
“Someone the other night was dying,” Rohr tells him, “I don’t know if he was inside the Zone or out at sea. He wanted a priest. Should I have got on and told him about priests? Would he’ve found any comfort in that? It’s so painful sometimes. We’re really trying to be Christians. . . .”
“My folks were Congregationalist,” Slothrop offers, “I think.” It’s getting harder to remember either of them, as Broderick progresses into Pernicious Pop and Nalline into ssshhhghhh . . . (into what? What was that word? Whatever it is, the harder he chases, the faster it goes away).
MOM SLOTHROP’S LETTER TO AMBASSADOR KENNEDY
Well hi Joe how’ve ya been. Listen: Jew-zeppy—we’re getting edgy about our youngest again. Would you try bothering a few of those jolly old London connections just once more? (Promise!!) Even if it’s old news it’ll be good news for Poppy and I. I still remember what you said when the awful word about the PT boat came in, before you knew how Jack was. I’ll never forget your words then. It’s every parent’s dream, Joe, that it is.
Oh, and Hozay (whoops, don’t mind that, the pen just skidded as you can see! Naughty Nalline’s on her third martini, we’ll have you know). Poppy and I heard your wonderful speech at the GE plant over in Pittsfield the other week. You’re in the groove, Mister K! How true! we’ve got to modernize in Massachusetts, or it’ll just keep getting worse and worse. They’re supposed to be taking a strike vote here next week. Wasn’t the WLB set up to prevent just that? It isn’t starting to break down, is it, Joe? Sometimes, you know these fine Boston Sundays, when the sky over the Hill is broken into clouds, the way white bread appears through a crust you hold at your thumbs and split apart. . . . You know, don’t you? Golden clouds? Sometimes I think—ah, Joe, I think they’re pieces of the Heavenly City falling down. I’m sorry—didn’t mean this to get so gloomy all so sudden, it’s just . . . but it isn’t beginning to fall apart, is it, my old fellow Harvard-parent? Sometimes things aren’t very clear, that’s all. Things look like they’re going against us, and though it always turns out fine at the end, and we can always look back and say oh of course it had to happen that way, otherwise so-and-so wouldn’t have happened—still, while it’s happening, in my heart I keep getting this terrible fear, this empty place, and it’s very hard at such times really to believe in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can see. . . .
Oh, anyway. Grumpy old thoughts away! Shoo! Martini Number Four, comin’ up!
Jack’s a fine boy. Really I love Jack like Hogan and Tyrone, just like a son, my own son. I even love him like I don’t love my sons, ha-ha! (she croaks) but then I’m a wicked old babe, you know that. No hope for the likes of me. . . .
ON THE PHRASE “ASS BACKWARDS”
“Something I have never understood about your language, Yankee pig.” Säure has been calling him “Yankee pig” all day now, a hilarious joke he will not leave alone, often getting no further than “Yank—” before collapsing into some horrible twanging phthisic wheeze of a laugh, coughing up alarming ropy lungers of many colors and marbling effects—green, for example, old-statue green at leafy dusk.
“Sure,” replies Slothrop, “you wanna learn English, me teachee you English. Ask me anything, kraut.” It is exactly the kind of blanket offer that’s always getting Slothrop in trouble.
“Why do you speak of certain reversals—machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being ‘ass backwards’? I can’t understand that. Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying ‘ass forwards,’ if backwards is what you mean.”
“Uh,” sez Slothrop.
“This is only one of many American Mysteries,” Säure sighs, “I wish somebody could clear up for me. Not you, obviously.”
Säure got a lotta gall picking on other people’s language like this. One night, back when he was a second-story man, he had the incredible luck to break into the affluent home of Minne Khlaetsch, an astrologer of the Hamburg School, who was, congenitally it seems, unable to pronounce, even perceive, umlauts over vowels. That night she was just coming on to what would prove to be an overdose of Hieropon, when Säure, who back in those days was a curly-haired and good-looking kid, surprised her in her own bedroom with his hand around an ivory chess Läufer with a sarcastic smile on its face, and filled with good raw Peruvian cocaine still full of
the Earth—“Don’t call for help,” advises Säure flashing his phony acid bottle, “or that pretty face goes flowing off of its bones like vanilla pudding.” But Minne calls his bluff, starts hollering for help to all the ladies of the same age in her building who feel that same motherly help-help-but-make-sure-there’s-time-for-him-to-rape-me ambivalence about nubile cat burglars. What she means to scream is “Hübsch Räuber! Hübsch Räuber!” which means “Cute-looking robber! Cute-looking robber!” But she can’t pronounce those umlauts. So it comes out “Hubschrauber! Hubschrauber!” which means “Helicopter! Helicopter!” well, it’s 1920-something, and nobody in earshot even knows what the word means, Liftscrewer, what’s that?—nobody except one finger-biting paranoid aerodynamics student in a tenement courtyard far away, who heard the scream late in Berlin night, over tramclashing, rifle shots in another quarter, a harmonica novice who has been trying to play “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles” for the past four hours, over and over missing notes, fucking up the time, the breathing ü . . . berall . . . es . . . indie . . . ie . . . then longlong pause, oh come on asshole, you can find it—Welt sour, ach, immediately corrected . . . through all this to him comes the cry Hubschrauber, lift-screwer, a helix through cork air over wine of Earth falling bright, yes he knows exactly—and can this cry be a prophecy? a warning (the sky full of them, gray police in the hatchways with ray-guns cradled like codpieces beneath each whirling screw we see you from above there is nowhere to go it’s your last alley, your last stormcellar) to stay inside and not interfere? He stays inside and does not interfere. He goes on to become “Spörri” of Horst Achtfaden’s confession to the Schwarzkommando. But he didn’t go to see what Minne was hollering about that night. She would’ve OD’d except for her boy friend Wimpe, an up-and-coming IG salesman covering the Eastern Territory, who’d blown into town after unexpectedly dumping all of his Oneirine samples on a party of American tourists back in hilltop Transylvania looking for a new kind of thrills—it’s me Liebchen, didn’t expect to be back so—but then he saw the sprawled satin creature, read pupil-size and skin-tint, swiftly went to his leather case for stimulant and syringe. That and an ice-filled bathtub got her back O.K.
“‘Ass’ is an intensifier,” Seaman Bodine now offers, “as in ‘mean ass,’ ‘stupid ass’—well, when something is very backwards, by analogy you’d say ‘backwards ass.’”
“But ‘ass backwards’ is ‘backwards ass’ backwards,” Säure objects.
“But gee that don’t make it mean forwards,” blinks Bodine with a sincere little break in his voice as if somebody’s just about to hit him—actually this is a bit of private fun for the spirited salt, it is a William Bendix imitation. Let the others do Cagney and Cary Grant, Bodine specializes in supporting roles, he can do a perfect Arthur Kennedy-as-Cagney’s-kid-brother, how about that? O-or Cary Grant’s faithful Indian water-bearer, Sam Jaffe. He is a white-hat in the navy of life, and that extends to vocal impressions of the fake film-lives of strangers.
Säure meantime is into something like this with instrumental soloists, or trying, teaching himself kind of by trial and error, currently ee-ee-aw-aw-ing his way through some hypothetical Joachim playing his own cadenza from the long-suppressed Rossini violin concerto (op. posth.), and in the process driving the household mad. One morning Trudi just goes stomping away into an 82nd Airborne mass jump over the conquered city, a million fleecy canopies in the sky, falling slow as white ash behind around the silhouette of her good-by stomp. “He’s driving me crazy.” “Hi Trudi, where you going?” “I just told you—crazy!” and don’t think this wretched old horny dopefiend doesn’t love her, because he does, and don’t think he isn’t praying, writing down his wishes carefully on cigarette papers, rolling up in them his finest sacramental kif and smoking them down to a blister on the lip, which is the dopefiend’s version of wishing on an evening star, hoping in his heart she’s just off on another stomp, please only a stomp, let it be over inside the day just one more time, he writes on each good-night’s reefer, that’s all, I won’t ask again, I’ll try not to, you know me, don’t judge me too hard, please . . . but how many more of these stomps can there be? One’s going to be the last. Still he keeps on ee-ee-aw-aw-ing with the Rossini, radiating his mean, lean, living-at-the-edge street-longevity, no he can’t seem to stop it, it’s an old man’s habit, he hates himself but it just comes on him, no matter what attention he brings to the problem, he can’t stop drifting back into the catchy cadenza. . . . Seaman Bodine understands, and is trying to help. To set up a useful interference, he has composed his own counter-cadenza, along the lines of those other pop tunes with classical names big around 1945 (“My Prelude to a Kiss,” “Tenement Symphony”)—every chance he gets, Bodine will croon it to the new weekly arrivals, Lalli just in from Lübeck, Sandra who’s run away from the Kleinbürgerstrasse, here’s vile Bodine with his guitar ambling pelvis-wiggling down the hallway after each naughty defector, each choice little sexcrime fantasy made flesh, singing and picking a moving rendition of:
MY DOPER’S CADENZA
If you hear, a “box” so sweet,
Play-in’ tunes-with, a peppy beat,
That’s just MY DOPER’S, CADEN-ZA-A-A-A!
Mel-o-dees, that getcha so,
Where’d they come from? I don’t know!
(h-ha) It’s just MY DOPER’S CADEN-ZA(A)A-A-A!
This is
the “cadenza”
part—
Now I know it’s not as keen as old Rossini
[snatch of La Gazza Ladra here],
Nor as grand as Bach, or Beethoven-or-Brahms
(bubububoo[oo] oo [sung to opening of Beethoven 5th, with full band]),
But I’d give away the fames, of a hundred Harry James
. . . wait, fame? of a hundred Jame? Jameses . . .
uh . . . fameses? Hmm . . .
[scherzoso]
I-hi-hif this little-song, can-bring, you-to-my arms!
Dum de dum, de-dum de dee,
Oh, it’s better than a symphonee—
It’s MY DOPER’S CADENZA, to yoooouuu!
These days, the tenement is known as “Der Platz,” and is nearly filled up, all the way in to the last central courtyard, with friends of Säure’s. The change is unexpected—a lot more vegetation seems to be growing now in the tenement dirt, an ingenious system of home-carpentered light ducts and mirrors adjusted throughout the day send sunlight, for the first time, down into these back courts, revealing colors never seen before . . . there’s also a rain-structure, to route the rain among flumes, funnels, splash-reflectors, waterwheels, nozzles, and weirs to make a system of rivers and waterfalls to play in this summer . . . the only rooms that can still be locked from the inside are reserved for isolates, fetishists, lost stumblers-in out of the occupation who need loneliness like the dopefiend needs his dope . . . speaking of which, everywhere in the complex now you can find army dope of all kinds stashed, from cellars to mansarde floors are littered with wire loops and plastic covers from ½-grain syrettes of morphine tartrate squeezed toothpaste-tube empty, broken amyl nitrite containers looted from anti-gas kits, olive-drab tins of Benzedrine . . . work is proceeding on an anti-police moat around the entire tenement: to keep from drawing attention, this moat here is the first in history being dug from inside out, the space directly below the Jacobistrasse, slowly, paranoiacally, is hollowed, sculpted, carefully shored up under the thin crust of street so the odd tram won’t find itself in unscheduled plunge—though it has been known to happen, out in the late night with interior tram-lights warm-colored as clear broth, out on the Peripheral runs through long stretches of unlighted park or along singing fences of storage depots all at once like a mouth pursing MF the blacktop buckles and yo
u’re down in some dripping paranoids’ moat, the night-shift staring in with huge denizen-of-the-underground eyes, faced not with you so much as with the agonizing problem of deciding is this a real bus, or are these “passengers” really police agents in disguise well it’s a touchy business, touchy.
Somewhere in Der Platz now, early morning, somebody’s two-year-old, a baby as fat as a suckling pig, has just learned the word “Sonnenschein.” “Sunshine,” sez the baby, pointing. “Sunshine,” running into the other room.
“Sunshine,” croaks some grownup morning-voice.
“Sunshine!” hollers the baby, tottering off.
“Sunshine,” a smiling-girl voice, maybe his mother.
“Sunshine!” the baby at the window, showing her, showing anybody else who’ll look, exactly.
SHIT ’N’ SHINOLA
“Now,” Säure wants to know, “you will tell me about the American expression ‘Shit from Shinola.’”
“What is this,” screams Seaman Bodine, “I’m being set tasks now? This is some Continuing Study of American Slang or some shit? Tell me you old fool,” grabbing Säure by throat and lapel and shaking him asymmetrically, “you’re one of Them too, right? Come on,” the old man Raggedy Andy in his hands, a bad morning of suspicion here for the usually mellow Bodine, “Stop, stop,” snivels the amazed Säure, amazement giving way, that is, to a sniveling conviction that the hairy American gob has lost his mind. . . .
Well. You’ve heard the expression “Shit from Shinola.” As in, “Aw, he don’t know Shit from Shinola! ’bout that.” Or, “Marine—you don’t know Shit from Shinola!” And you get sent to the Onion Room, or worse. One implication is that Shit and Shinola are in wildly different categories. You would envision—maybe just because they smell different—no way for Shit and Shinola to coexist. Simply impossible. A stranger to the English language, a German dopefiend such as Säure, not knowing either word, might see “Shit” as a comical interjection, one a lawyer in a bowler hat, folding up papers tucking them in a tan briefcase might smiling use, “Schitt, Herr Bummer,” and he walks out of your cell, the oily bastard, forever . . . or Scchhit! down comes a cartoon guillotine on one black & white politician, head bouncing downhill, lines to indicate amusing little spherical vortex patterns, and you thought yes, like to see that all right, yes cut it off, one less rodent, schitt ja! As for Shinola, we pass to universitarians Franz Pökier, Kurt Mondaugen, Bert Fibel, Horst Achtfaden and others, their Schein-Aula is a shimmering, Albert Speer-style alabaster open-air stadium with giant cement birds of prey up at each corner, wings shrugged forward, sheltering under each wing-shadow a hooded German face . . . from the outside, the Hall is golden, the white gold precisely of one lily-of-the-valley petal in 4 o’clock sunlight, serene, at the top of a small, artificially-graded hill. It has a talent, this Seeming-Hall, for posing up there in attractive profiles, in front of noble clouds, to suggest persistence, through returns of spring, hopes for love, meltings of snow and ice, academic Sunday tranquillities, smells of grass just crushed or cut or later turning to hay . . . but inside the Schein-Aula all is blue and cold as the sky overhead, blue as a blueprint or a planetarium. No one in here knows which way to look. Will it begin above us? Down there? Behind us? In the middle of the air? and how soon. . . .
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