Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Why?” Roger keeps asking, trying to piss Jeremy off. “Why do you want to put them together and fire them?”

  “We’ve captured them, haven’t we? What does one do with a rocket?”

  “But why?”

  “Why? Damn it, to see, obviously. Jessica tells me you’re—ah—a math chap?”

  “Little sigma, times P of s-over-little-sigma, equals one over the square root of two pi, times e to the minus s squared over two little-sigma squared.”

  “Good Lord.” Laughing, hastily checking out the room.

  “It is an old saying among my people.”

  Jeremy knows how to handle this. Roger is invited to dinner in the evening, an intimate informal party at the home of Stefan Utgarthaloki, an ex-member of management at the Krupp works here in Cuxhaven. “You’re welcome to bring a guest, of course,” gnaws the eager Beaver, “there’re a lot of snazzy NAAFIs about, it wouldn’t be too difficult for you to—”

  “Informal means lounge suit, eh?” interrupts Roger. Too bad, he hasn’t got one. The prospects of being nabbed tonight are good. A party that includes (a) an Operation Backfire figure, (b) a Krupp executive, must necessarily then include (c) at least one ear to the corporate grapevine that’s heard of the Urinating Incident in Clive Mossmoon’s office. If Roger only knew what Beaver and his friends really have in mind!

  He does take a guest: Seaman Bodine, who has caused to be brought him from the Panama Canal Zone (where the lock workers wear them as a uniform, in amazing tropical-parrot combinations of yellow, green, lavender, vermilion) a zoot suit of unbelievable proportions—the pointed lapels have to be reinforced with coat-hanger stays because they extend so far outboard of the rest of the suit—underneath his purple-on-purple satin shirt the natty tar is actually wearing a corset, squeezing his waist in to a sylphlike 42 inches to allow for the drastic suppression of the jacket, which then falls to Bodine’s knees quintuple-vented in yards of kilt-style pleats that run clear back up over his ass. The pants are belted under his armpits and pegged down to something like ten inches, so he has to use hidden zippers to get his feet through. The whole suit is blue, not suit-blue, no—really BLUE: paint-blue. It is immediately noticed everywhere it goes. At gatherings it haunts the peripheral vision, making decent small-talk impossible. It is a suit that forces you either to reflect on matters as primary as its color, or feel superficial. A subversive garment, all right.

  “Just you and me, podner?” sez Bodine. “Ain’t that kind of cutting it a little close?”

  “Listen,” Roger chuckling unhealthily at what’s also just occurred to him, “we can’t even bring those big rubber cocks along. Tonite, we’re going to have to use our wits!”

  “Tell you what, I’ll just send a motorcycle out to Putzi’s, round us up a goon squad, and—”

  “You know what? You’ve lost your sense of adventure. Yeh. You didn’t use to be like this, you know.”

  “Look old buddy,” pronouncing it in Navy Dialect: buddih, “c’mon, buddih. Putcherself in my shoes.”

  “I might, if they weren’t . . . that. . . shade of yellow—”

  “Just a humble guy,” the swarthy doughboy of the deep scratching in his groin after an elusive crab with a horn finger, rippling the ballooning pleats and fabric of his trousers, “just a freckleface kid from Albert Lea, Minnesota, down there on Route 69 where the speed limit’s lickety-split all night long, just tryin’ t’ make it in the Zone here, kind of a freckleface kid used a safety pin through a cork for a catwhisker and stayed up listened to the voices coast to coast before I was 10 and none of them ever recommended gettin’ into any of them gang wars, buddih. Be glad you’re still so fuckin’ naïve, Rog, wait’ll you see your first European-gangster hit, they like to use 3 rounds: head, stomach, and heart. You dig that stomach? Over here stomach’s no second-class organ, podner ’n’ that’s a good autumn kind of thought to keep in mind.”

  “Bodine, didn’t you desert? That’s a death-sentence, isn’t it?”

  “Shit, I can square that. But I’m only a cog. Don’t go thinking I know everything. All I know is my trade. I can show you how to wash coke and assay it, I can feel a gem and tell you from the temperature if it’s a fake—the fake won’t suck as much heat from your body, ‘glass is a reluctant vampire,’ ancient dealers’ saying, a-and I can spot funny-money easy as E on an eye chart, I got one of the best visual memories in the Zone—” So, Roger drags him off, monologuing, in his zoot suit, to the Krupp wingding.

  Coming in the door, first thing Bodine notices is this string quartet that’s playing tonight. The second violin happens to be Gustav Schlabone, Säure Bummer’s frequent unwelcome doping partner, “Captain Horror,” as he is affectionately but not inaccurately known around Der Platz—and playing viola is Gustav’s accomplice in suicidally depressing everybody inside 100 meters’ radius wherever they drop in (who’s that tapping and giggling at your door, Fred and Phyllis?), André Omnopon, of the feathery Rilke mustaches and Porky Pig tattoo on stomach (which is becoming the “hep” thing lately: even back in the Zone of the Interior the American subdebs all think it’s swoony). Gustav and André are the Inner Voices tonight. Which is especially odd because on the program is the suppressed quartet from the Haydn Op. 76, the so-called “Kazoo” Quartet in G-Flat Minor, which gets its name from the Largo, cantabile e mesto movement, in which the Inner Voices are called to play kazoos instead of their usual instruments, creating problems of dynamics for cello and first violin that are unique in the literature. “You actually need to shift in places from a spiccato to a détaché,” Bodine rapidly talking a Corporate Wife of some sort across the room toward the free-lunch table piled with lobster hors d’oeuvres and capon sandwiches—“less bow, higher up you understand, soften it—then there’s also about a thousand ppp-to-fff blasts, but only the one, the notorious One, going the other way. . . .” Indeed, one reason for the work’s suppression is this subversive use of sudden fff quieting to ppp. It’s the touch of the wandering sound-shadow, the Brennschluss of the Sun. They don’t want you listening to too much of that stuff—at least not the way Haydn presents it (a strange lapse in the revered composer’s behavior): cello, violin, alto and treble kazoos all rollicking along in a tune sounds like a song from the movie Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, “You Should See Me Dance the Polka,” when suddenly in the middle of an odd bar the kazoos just stop completely, and the Outer Voices fall to plucking a non-melody that tradition sez represents two 18th-century Village Idiots vibrating their lower lips. At each other. It goes on for 20, 40 bars, this feeb’s pizzicato, middle-line Kruppsters creak in the bowlegged velvet chairs, bibuhbuhbibuhbuh this does not sound like Haydn, Mutti! Reps from ICI and GE angle their heads trying to read in the candlelight the little programs lovingly hand-lettered by Utgarthaloki’s partner in life, Frau Utgarthaloki, nobody is certain what her first name is (which is ever so much help to Stefan because it keeps them all on the defensive with her). She is a blonde image of your mother dead: if you have ever seen her travestied in beaten gold, the cheeks curving too far, deformed, the eyebrows too dark and whites too white, some zero indifference that in the end is truly evil in the way They’ve distorted her face, then you know the look: Nalline Slothrop just before her first martini is right here, in spirit, at this Kruppfest. So is her son Tyrone, but only because by now—early Virgo—he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell—stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It’s doubtful if he can ever be “found” again, in the conventional sense of “positively identified and detained.” Only feathers . . . redundant or regenerable organs, “which we would be tempted to classify under the ‘Hydra-Phänomen’ were it not for the complete absence of hostility. . . . “—Natasha Raum, “Regions of Indeterminacy in Albatross Anatomy,” Proceedings of the International Society of Confessors to an Enthusiasm for Albatross Nosology, Winter 1936, great little magazine, they actually sent a co
rrespondent to Spain that winter, to cover that, there are issues devoted entirely to analyses of world economics, all clearly relevant to problems of Albatross Nosology—does so-called “Night Worm” belong among the Pseudo-Goldstrassian Group, or is it properly considered—indications being almost identical—a more insidious form of Mopp’s Hebdomeriasis?

  Well, if the Counterforce knew better what those categories concealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dismantle the Man. But they don’t. Actually they do, but they don’t admit it. Sad but true. They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that’s the hard fact. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And how they know it—how often, under what conditions. . . . We ought to be seeing much popular-magazine coverage on the order of The Night Rog and Beaver Fought Over Jessica While She Cried in Krupp’s Arms, and drool over every blurry photo—

  Roger must have been dreaming for a minute here of the sweaty evenings of Thermidor: the failed Counterforce, the glamorous ex-rebels, half-suspected but still enjoying official immunity and sly love, camera-worthy wherever they carry on . . . doomed pet freaks.

  They will use us. We will help legitimize Them, though They don’t need it really, it’s another dividend for Them, nice but not critical. . . .

  Oh yes, isn’t that exactly what They’ll do. Bringing Roger now, at a less than appropriate time and place here in the bosom of the Opposition, while his life’s first authentic love is squirming only to get home and take another wad of Jeremy’s sperm so they’ll make their day’s quota—in the middle of all that he has to walk (ow, fuck) right into the interesting question, which is worse: living on as Their pet, or death? It is not a question he has ever imagined himself asking seriously. It has come by surprise, but there’s no sending it away now, he really does have to decide, and soon enough, plausibly soon, to feel the terror in his bowels. Terror he cannot think away. He has to choose between his life and his death. Letting it sit for a while is no compromise, but a decision to live, on Their terms. . . .

  The viola is a ghost, grainy-brown, translucent, sighing in and out of the other Voices. Dynamic shifts abound. Imperceptible lifts, platooning notes together or preparing for changes in loudness, what the Germans call “breath-pauses,” skitter among the phrases. Perhaps tonight it is due to the playing of Gustav and André, but after a while the listener starts actually hearing the pauses instead of the notes—his ear gets tickled the way your eye does staring at a recco map until bomb craters flip inside out to become muffins risen above the tin, or ridges fold to valleys, sea and land flicker across quicksilver edges—so the silences dance in this quartet. A-and wait’ll those kazoos come on!

  That’s the background music for what is to transpire. The plot against Roger has been formulated with shivering and giddy glee. Seaman Bodine is an unexpected bonus. Going in to dinner becomes a priestly procession, full of secret gestures and understandings. It is a very elaborate meal, according to the menu, full of relevés, poissons, entremets. “What’s this ‘Überraschungbraten’ here?” Seaman Bodine asks righthand dinner companion Constance Flamp, loose-khakied newshound and toughtalkin’ sweetheart of ev’ry GI from Iwo to Saint-Lô.

  “Why, just what it sez, Boats,” replies “Commando Connie,” “that’s German for ‘surprise roast.’”

  “I’m hep,” sez Bodine. She has—maybe not meaning to—gestured with her eyes—perhaps, Pointsman, there is such a thing as the kindness-reflex (how many young men has she seen go down since ’42?) that now and then, also beyond the Zero, survives extinction. . . . Bodine looks down at the far end of the table, past corporate teeth and polished fingernails, past heavy monogrammed eating-tools, and for the first time notices a stone barbecue pit, with two black iron hand-operated spits. Servants in their prewar livery are busy layering scrap paper (old SHAEF directives, mostly), kindling, quartered pine logs, and coal, luscious fist-sized raven chunks of the kind that once left bodies up and down the sides of the canals, once, during the Inflation, when it was actually held that mortally dear, imagine. . . . At the edge of the pit, with Justus about to light the taper, as Gretchen daintily laces the fuel with GI xylene from down in the dockyards, Seaman Bodine observes Roger’s head, being held by four or six hands upside down, the lips being torn away from the teeth and the high gums already draining white as a skull, while one of the maids, a classic satin-and-lace, impish, torturable young maid, brushes the teeth with American toothpaste, carefully scrubbing away the nicotine stains and tartar. Roger’s eyes are so hurt and pleading. . . . All around, guests are whispering. “How quaint, Stefan’s even thought of head cheese!” “Oh, no, it’s another part I’m waiting to get my teeth in . . .” giggles, heavy breathing, and what’s that pair of very blue peg pants all ripped . . . and what’s this staining the jacket, and what, up on the spit, reddening to a fat-glazed crust, is turning, whose face is about to come rotating around, why it’s—

  “No ketchup, no ketchup,” the hirsute bluejacket searching agitatedly among the cruets and salvers, “seems to be no . . . what th’ fuck kind of a place is this, Rog,” yelling down slantwise across seven enemy faces, “hey, buddih you find any ketchup down there?”

  Ketchup’s a code word, okay—

  “Odd,” replies Roger, who clearly has seen exactly the same thing down at the pit, “I was just about to ask you the same question!”

  They are grinning at each other like fools. Their auras, for the record, are green. No shit. Not since winter of ’42, in convoy in a North Atlantic gale, with accidental tons of loose 5-inch ammo rolling all over the ship, the German wolf pack invisibly knocking off sister ships right and left, at Battle Stations inside mount 51 listening to Pappy Hod tell disaster jokes, really funny ones, the whole gun crew clutching their stomachs hysterically, gasping for air—not since then has Seaman Bodine felt so high in the good chances of death.

  “Some layout, huh?” he calls. “Pretty good food!” Conversation has fallen nearly silent. Politely curious faces are turning. Flames leap in the pit. They are not “sensitive flames,” but if they were they might be able now to detect the presence of Brigadier Pudding. He is now a member of the Counterforce, courtesy of Carroll Eventyr. Courtesy is right. Séances with Pudding are at least as trying as the old Weekly Briefings back at “The White Visitation.” Pudding has even more of a mouth on him than he did alive. The sitters have begun to whine: “Aren’t we ever to be rid of him?” But it is through Pudding’s devotion to culinary pranksterism that the repulsive stratagem that follows was devised.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Roger elaborately casual, “I can’t seem to find any snot soup on the menu. . . .”

  “Yeah, I could’ve done with some of that pus pudding, myself. Think there’ll be any of that?”

  “No, but there might be a scum soufflé!” cries Roger, “with a side of—menstrual marmalade!”

  “Well I’ve got eyes for some of that rich, meaty smegma stew!” suggests Bodine. “Or howbout a clot casserole?”

  “I say,” murmurs a voice, indeterminate as to sex, down the table.

  “We could plan a better meal than this,” Roger waving the menu. “Start off with afterbirth appetizers, perhaps some clever little scab sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off of course . . . o-or booger biscuits! Mmm, yes, spread with mucus mayonnaise? and topped with a succulent bit of slime sausage. . . .”

  “Oh I see,” sez Commando Connie, “it has to be alliterative. How about . . . um . . . discharge dumplings?”

  “We’re doing the soup course, babe,”
sez cool Seaman Bodine, “so let me just suggest a canker consommé, or perhaps a barf bouillon.”

  “Vomit vichysoisse,” sez Connie.

  “You got it.”

  “Cyst salad,” Roger continues, “with little cheery-red squares of abortion aspic, tossed in a subtle dandruff dressing.”

  There is a sound of well-bred gagging, and a regional sales manager for ICI leaves hurriedly, spewing a long crescent of lumpy beige vomit that splatters across the parquetry. Napkins are being raised to faces all down the table. Silverware is being laid down, silver ringing the fields of white, a puzzling indecision here again, the same as at Clive Mossmoon’s office. . . .

  On we go, through fart fondue (skillfully placed bubbles of anal gas rising slowly through a rich cheese viscosity, yummm), boil blintzes, Vegetables Venereal in slobber sauce. . . .

  A kazoo stops playing. “Wart waffles!” Gustav screams.

  “Puke pancakes, with sweat syrup,” adds André Omnopon, as Gustav resumes playing, the Outer Voices meantime having broken off in confusion.

  “And spread with pinworm preserves,” murmurs the cellist, who is not above a bit of fun.

  “Hemorrhoid hash,” Connie banging her spoon in delight, “bowel burgers!”

  Frau Utgarthaloki jumps to her feet, upsetting a platter of stuffed sores—beg pardon, no they’re deviled eggs—and runs from the room, sobbing tragically. Her suave metal husband also rises and follows, casting back at the troublemakers virile stares that promise certain death. A discreet smell of vomit has begun to rise through the hanging tablecloth. Nervous laughter has long embrittled to badmouth whispering.

  “A choice of gangrene goulash, or some scrumptious creamy-white leprosy loaf,” Bodine in a light singsong “le-pro-sy [down a third to] loaf,” playfully hounding the holdouts, shaking a finger, c’mon ya little rascals, vomit for the nice zootster. . . .