Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  For 15 minutes the two of them run screaming all over the suite, staggering around in circles, lined up with the rooms’ diagonals. There is in Laszlo Jamf’s celebrated molecule a particular twist, the so-called “Pökler singularity,” occurring in a certain crippled indole ring, which later Oneirinists, academician and working professional alike, are generally agreed is responsible for the hallucinations which are unique to this drug. Not only audiovisual, they touch all senses, equally. And they recur. Certain themes, “mantic archetypes” (as Jollifox of the Cambridge School has named them), will find certain individuals again and again, with a consistency which has been well demonstrated in the laboratory (see Wobb and Whoaton, “Mantic Archetype Distribution Among Middle-Class University Students,” J. Oneir. Psy. Pharm., XXIII, pg. 406–453). Because analogies with the ghost-life exist, this recurrence phenomenon is known, in the jargon, as “haunting.” Whereas other sorts of hallucinations tend to flow by, related in deep ways that aren’t accessible to the casual dopefiend, these Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader’s Digest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional—Jeaach calls them “the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology”—that they are only recognized as hauntings through some radical though plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead, journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out later but arrive earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable. . . . On recognizing that he is being haunted, the subject enters immediately into “phase two,” which, though varying in intensity from subject to subject, is always disagreeable: often sedation (0.6 mg atropine subcut.) will be necessary, even though Oneirine is classified as a CNS depressant.

  About the paranoia often noted under the drug, there is nothing remarkable. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge. . . .

  TCHITCHERINE’S HAUNTING

  As to whether the man is or isn’t Nikolai Ripov: he does arrive the way Ripov is said to: heavy and inescapable. He wants to talk, only to talk. But somehow, as they progress, into the indoor corridor-confusions of words, again and again he will trick Tchitcherine into uttering heresy, into damning himself.

  “I’m here to help you see clearly. If you have doubts, we should air them, honestly, man to man. No reprisals. Hell, don’t you think I’ve had doubts? Even Stalin’s had them. We all have.”

  “It’s all right though. It isn’t anything I can’t handle.”

  “But you’re not handling it, or they wouldn’t have sent me out here. Don’t you think they know when someone they care for is in trouble?”

  Tchitcherine doesn’t want to ask. He strains against it with the muscles of his heart-cage. The pain of cardiac neurosis goes throbbing down his left arm. But he asks, feeling his breath shift a little, “Was I supposed to die?”

  “When, Vaslav?”

  “In the War.”

  “Oh, Vaslav.”

  “You wanted to hear what was troubling me.”

  “But don’t you see how they’ll take that? Come, bring it all the way out. We lost twenty million souls, Vaslav. It’s not an accusation you can make lightly. They’d want documentation. Even your life might be in danger—”

  “I’m not accusing anyone . . . please don’t . . . I only want to know if I am supposed to die for them.”

  “No one wants you to die.” Soothing. “Why do you think that?”

  So it is coaxed out of him by the patient emissary, whining, desperate, too many words—paranoid suspicions, unappeasable fears, damning himself, growing the capsule around his person that will isolate him from the community forever. . . .

  “Yet that’s the very heart of History,” the gentle voice talking across twilight, neither man having risen to light a lamp. “The inmost heart. How could everything you know, all you’ve seen and touched of it, be fed by a lie?”

  “But life after death . . .”

  “There is no life after death.”

  Tchitcherine means he’s had to fight to believe in his mortality. As his body fought to accept its steel. Fight down all his hopes, fight his way into that bitterest of freedoms. Not till recently did he come to look for comfort in the dialectical ballet of force, counterforce, collision, and new order—not till the War came and Death appeared across the ring, Tchitcherine’s first glimpse after the years of training: taller, more beautifully muscled, less waste motion than he’d ever expected—only in the ring, feeling the terrible cold each blow brought with it, only then did he turn to a Theory of History—of all pathetic cold comforts—to try and make sense of it.

  “The Americans say, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes.’ You were never of the faith, Vaslav. You had a deathbed conversion, out of fear.”

  “Is that why you want me dead now?”

  “Not dead. You’re not much use dead.” Two more olive-drab agents have come in, and stand watching Tchitcherine. They have regular, unremarkable faces. This is, after all, an Oneirine haunting. Mellow, ordinary. The only tipoff to its unreality is—

  The radical-though-plausible-violation-of-reality—

  All three men are smiling at him now. There is no violation.

  It’s a scream, but it comes out as a roar. He leaps at Ripov, nearly nails him with his fist too, but the others, with faster reflexes than he counted on, have come up either side to hold him. He can’t believe their strength. Through the nerves of hip and ass he feels his Nagant being slid from its holster, and feels his own cock sliding out of a German girl he can’t remember now, on the last sweetwine morning he saw her, in the last warm bed of the last morning departure. . . .

  “You’re a child, Vaslav. Only making believe that you understand ideas which are really beyond you. We have to speak very simply for you.”

  In Central Asia he was told of the functions of Moslem angels. One is to examine the recently dead. After the last mourner has gone, angels come to the grave and interrogate the dead one in his faith. . . .

  There is another figure now, at the edge of the room. She is Tchitcherine’s age, and in uniform. Her eyes don’t want to say anything to Tchitcherine. She only watches. No music heard, no summer journey taken . . . no horse seen against the steppe in the last daylight. . . .

  He doesn’t recognize her. Not that it matters. Not at this level of things. But it’s Galina, come back to the cities, out of the silences after all, in again to the chain-link fields of the Word, shining, running secure and always close enough, always tangible. . . .

  “Why were you hunting your black brother?” Ripov manages to make the question sound courteous.

  Oh. Nice of you to ask, Ripov. Why was I? “When it began . . . a long time ago—at first . . . I thought I was being punished. Passed over. I blamed him.”

  “Now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What made you think he was your target?”

  “Who else’s would he be?”

  “Vaslav. Will you never rise above? These are old barbarisms. Blood lines, personal revenge. You think this has all been arranged for you, to ease your little, stupid lusts.”

  All right. All right. “Yes. Probably. What of it?”

  “He isn’t your target. Others want him.”

  “So you’ve been letting me—”

  “So far. Yes.”

  Džabajev could have told you. That sodden Asiatic is first and last an enlisted man. He knew. Officers. Fucking officer mentality. You do all the work, then they come in, to wrap it up, to get the glory.

  “You’re taking
it away from me.”

  “You can go home.”

  Tchitcherine has been watching the other two. He sees now that they are in American uniform, and probably haven’t understood a word. He holds out his empty hands, his sunburned wrists, for a last application of steel. Ripov, in the act of turning to leave, appears surprised. “Oh. No, no. You have thirty days’ survivor’s leave. You have survived, Vaslav. You’re to report to TsAGI when you get back to Moscow, that’s all. There’ll be another assignment. We’ll be taking German rocket personnel out to the desert. To Central Asia. I imagine they’ll need an old Central Asia hand out there.”

  Tchitcherine understands that in his dialectic, his own life’s unfolding, to return to Central Asia is, operationally, to die.

  They have gone. The woman’s iron face, at the very last, did not turn back. He is alone in a gutted room, with the plastic family toothbrushes still in their holders on the wall, melted, strung downward in tendrils of many colors, bristles pointing to every black plane and corner and soot-blinded window.

  • • • • • • •

  The dearest nation of all is one that will survive no longer than you and I, a common movement at the mercy of death and time: the ad hoc adventure.

  —Resolutions of the Gross Suckling Conference

  North? What searcher has ever been directed north? What you’re supposed to be looking for lies south—those dusky natives, right? For danger and enterprise they send you west, for visions, east. But what’s north?

  The escape route of the Anubis.

  The Kirghiz Light.

  The Herero country of death.

  Ensign Morituri, Carroll Eventyr, Thomas Gwenhidwy, and Roger Mexico are sitting at a table on the redbrick terrace of Der Grob Säugling, an inn by the edge of a little blue Holstein lake. The sun makes the water sparkle. The housetops are red, the steeples are white. Everything is miniature, neat, gently pastoral, locked into the rise and fall of seasons. Contrasting wood x s on closed doors. The brink of autumn. A cow sez moo. The milkmaid farts at the milk pail, which echoes with a very slight clang, and the geese honk or hiss. The four envoys drink watered Moselle and talk mandalas.

  The Rocket was fired southward, westward, eastward. But not northward—not so far. Fired south, at Antwerp, the bearing was about 173°. East, during testing at Peenemünde, 072°. Fired west, at London, about 260°. Working it out with the parallel rulers, the missing (or, if you want, “resultant”) bearing comes out to something like 354°. This would be the firing implied by all the others, a ghost-firing which, in the logic of mandalas, either has occurred, most-secretly, or will occur.

  So the conferees at the Gross Suckling Conference here, as it will come to be known, sit around a map with their instruments, cigarettes and speculations. Sneer not. Here is one of the great deductive moments in postwar intelligence. Mexico is holding out for a weighting system to make vector lengths proportional to the actual number of firings along each one. Thomas Gwenhidwy, ever sensitive to events in geographical space, wants to take the 1944 Blizna firings (also eastward) into account, which would pull the arrow northward from 354°—and even closer to true north if the firings at London and Norwich from Walcheren and Staveren are also included.

  Evidence and intuition—and maybe a residue of uncivilizable terror that lies inside us, every one—point to 000°: true North. What better direction to fire the 00000?

  Trouble is, what good’s a bearing, even a mythic-symmetric bearing, without knowing where the Rocket was fired from to begin with? You have a razor-edge, 280 km long, sweeping east/west across the Zone’s pocked face, endlessly sweeping, obsessive, dithering, glittering, unbearable, never coming to rest. . . .

  Well, Under The Sign Of The Gross Suckling. Swaying full-color picture of a loathsomely fat drooling infant. In one puddinglike fist the Gross Suckling clutches a dripping hamhock (sorry pigs, nothing personal), with the other he reaches out for a human Mother’s Nipple that emerges out into the picture from the left-hand side, his gaze arrested by the approaching tit, his mouth open—a gleeful look, teeth pointed and itching, a glaze of FOODmunchmunchyesgobblemmm over his eyes. Der Grob Säugling, 23rd card of the Zone’s trumps major. . . .

  Roger likes to think of it as a snap of Jeremy as a child. Jeremy, who Knows All, has forgiven Jessica her time with Roger. He’s had an outing or two himself, and can understand, he’s of liberal mind, the War after all has taken down certain barriers, Victorianisms you might say (a tale brought to you by the same jokers who invented the famous Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat) . . . and what’s this, Roger, he’s trying to impress you? his eyelids make high, amiable crescents as he leans forward (smaller chap than Roger thought) clutching his glass, sucking on the most tasteless Pipe Roger has ever seen, a reproduction in brier of Winston Churchill’s head for a bowl, no detail is spared, even a cigar in its mouth with a little hole drilled down it so that some of the smoke can actually seep out the end . . . it is a servicemen’s pub in Cuxhaven here, the place used to be a marine salvage yard, so the lonesome soldiers sit dreaming and drinking among all that nautical junk, not at the same level as in one’s usual outdoor café, no, some are up in tilted hatchways, or dangling in boatswain’s chairs, crow’s-nests, sitting over their bitter among the chain, tackle, strakework, black iron fittings. It’s night. Lanterns have been brought out to the tables. Soft little nocturnal waves hush on the shingle. Late waterfowl cry out over the lake.

  “But will it ever get us, Jeremy, you and me, that’s the quesshun. . . .” Mexico has been uttering these oracular—often, as at the Club today for lunch, quite embarrassing—bits of his ever since he showed up.

  “Er, will what ever get me, old chap?” It’s been old chap all day.

  “Haven’t—ch’ever felt something wanted to gesh you, Jeremy?”

  “Get me.” He’s drunk. He’s insane. I obviously can’t let him near Jessica these math chaps they’re like oboe players it affects the brain or something. . . .

  Aha, but, once a month, Jeremy, even Jeremy, dreams: about a gambling debt . . . different sorts of Collectors keep arriving . . . he cannot remember the debt, the opponent he lost to, even the game. He senses a great organization behind these emissaries. Its threats are always left open, left for Jeremy to complete . . . each time, terror has come welling up through the gap, crystal terror. . . .

  Good, good. The other sure-fire calibration test has already been sprung on Jeremy—at a prearranged spot in a park, two unemployed Augustes leap out in whiteface and working-clothes, and commence belting each other with gigantic (7 or 8 feet long) foam rubber penises, cunningly detailed, all in natural color. These phancy phalli have proven to be a good investment. Roger and Seaman Bodine (when he’s in town) have outdrawn the ENSA shows. It is a fine source of spare change—multitudes will gather at the edges of these north German villages to watch the two zanies whack away. Granaries, mostly empty, poke up above the rooftops now and then, stretching a wood gallows-arm against the afternoon sky. Soldiers, civilians, and children. There is a lot of laughter.

  Seems people can be reminded of Titans and Fathers, and laugh. It isn’t as funny as a pie in the face, but it’s at least as pure.

  Yes, giant rubber cocks are here to stay as part of the arsenal. . . .

  What Jessica said—hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of different outline, harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of letters between them—was: “We’re going to be married. We’re trying very hard to have a baby.”

  All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity and Roger. “I don’t care. Have his baby. I’ll love you both—just come with me Jess, please . . . I need you. . . .”

  She flips a red lever on her intercom. Far away a buzzer goes off. “Security.” Her voice is perfectly hard, the word still clap-echoing in the air as in through the screen door
of the Quonset office with a smell of tide flats come the coppers, looking grim. Security. Her magic word, her spell against demons.

  “Jess—” shit is he going to cry? he can feel it building like an orgasm—

  Who saves him (or interferes with his orgasm)? Why, Jeremy himself. Old Beaver shows up and waves off the heat, who go surly, fangflashing back to masturbating into Crime Does Not Pay Comics, gazing dreamy at guardroom pinups of J. Edgar Hoover or whatever it was they were up to, and the romantic triangle are suddenly all to have lunch together at the Club. Lunch together? Is this Noel Coward or some shit? Jessica at the last minute is overcome by some fictitious female syndrome which both men guess to be morning-sickness, Roger figuring she’ll do the most spiteful thing she can think of, Jeremy seeing it as a cute little private yoo-hoo for 2-hoo. So that leaves the fellas alone, to talk briskly about Operation Backfire, which is the British program to assemble some A4s and fire them out into the North Sea. What else are they going to talk about?