Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  “There never was a Dr. Jamf,” opines world-renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry—“Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky . . . to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death.

  “These early Americans, in their way, were a fascinating combination of crude poet and psychic cripple. . . .”

  “We were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop,” a spokesman for the Counterforce admitted recently in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

  INTERVIEWER: You mean, then, that he was more a rallying-point.

  SPOKESMAN: No, not even that. Opinion even at the start was divided. It was one of our fatal weaknesses. [I’m sure you want to hear about fatal weaknesses.] Some called him a “pretext.” Others felt that he was a genuine, point-for-point microcosm. The Microcosmists, as you must know from the standard histories, leaped off to an early start. We—it was a very odd form of heretic-chasing, really. Across the Low Countries, in the summer. It went on in fields of windmills, marshlands where it was almost too dark to get a decent sight. I recall the time Christian found an old alarm clock, and we salvaged the radium, to coat our plumb-bob strings with. They shone in the twilight. You’ve seen them holding bobs, hands characteristically gathered near the crotch. A dark figure with a stream of luminescent piss falling to the ground fifty meters away . . . “The Presence, pissing,” that became a standard joke on the apprentices. A Raketen-Stadt Charlie Noble, you might say. . . . [Yes. A cute way of putting it. I am betraying them all . . . the worst of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus. Spread by your tireless Typhoid Marys, cruising the markets and the stations. We did manage to ambush some of them. Once we caught some in the Underground. It was terrible. My first action, my initiation. We chased them down the tunnels. We could feel their fright. When the tunnels branched, we had only the treacherous acoustics of the Underground to go on. Chances were good for getting lost. There was almost no light. The rails gleamed, as they do aboveground on a rainy night. And the whispers then—the shadows who waited, hunched in angles at the maintenance stations, lying against the tunnel walls, watching the chase. “The end is too far,” they whispered. “Go back. There are no stops on this branch. The trains run and the passengers ride miles of blank mustard walls, but there are no stops. It’s a long afternoon run. . . .” Two of them got away. But we took the rest. Between two station-marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my first blood. Do you want to put this part in?] We drank the blood of our enemies. That’s why you see Gnostics so hunted. The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the blood of the enemy. The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire, stone night and winter day, if it’s only for the touch of sweet lips on a humble bowl? No, it’s mortal sin they’re carrying: to swallow the enemy, down into the slick juicery to be taken in by all the cells. Your officially defined “mortal sin,” that is. A sin against you. A section of your penal code, that’s all. [The true sin was yours: to interdict that union. To draw that line. To keep us worse than enemies, who are after all caught in the same fields of shit—to keep us strangers.

  We drank the blood of our enemies. The blood of our friends, we cherished.]

  Item S-1706.31, Fragment of Undershirt, U.S. Navy issue, with brown stain assumed to be blood in shape of sword running lower left to upper right.

  Not included in the Book of Memorabilia is this footnote. The piece of cloth was given to Slothrop by Seaman Bodine, one night in the Chicago Bar. In a way, the evening was a reprise of their first meeting. Bodine, smoldering fat reefer stuck in under the strings at the neck of his guitar, singing mournfully a song that’s part Roger Mexico’s and part some nameless sailor stuck in wartime San Diego:

  Last week I threw a pie at someone’s Momma,

  Last night I threw a party for my mind,

  Last thing I knew that 6:02 was screamin’ over my head,

  Or it might’ve been th’ 11:59 . . .

  [Refrain]:

  Too many chain-link fences in the evening,

  Too many people shiverin’ in the rain,

  They tell me that you finally got around to have your baby,

  And it don’t look like I’ll see your face again.

  Sometimes I wanna go back north, to Humboldt County—

  Sometimes I think I’ll go back east, to see my kin . . .

  There’s times I think I almost could be happy,

  If I knew you thought about me, now and then. . . .

  Bodine has a siren-ring, the kind kids send away cereal boxtops for, cleverly arranged in his asshole so it can be operated at any time by blowing a fart of a certain magnitude. He’s gotten pretty good at punctuating his music with these farted WHEEEEeeee’s, working now at getting them in the right key, a brand-new reflex arc, ear-brain-hands-asshole, and a return toward innocence too. The merchants tonight are all dealing a bit slower. Sentimental Bodine thinks it’s because they’re listening to his song. Maybe they are. Bales of fresh coca leaves just in from the Andes transform the place into some resonant Latin warehouse, on the eve of a revolution that never will come closer than smoke dirtying the sky above the cane, sometimes, in the long lace afternoons at the window. . . . Street urchins are into a Busy Elf Routine, wrapping each leaf around a betel nut, into a neat little packet for chewing. Their reddened fingers are living embers in the shadow. Seaman Bodine looks up suddenly, canny, unshaven face stung by all the smoke and unawareness in the room. He’s looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept—“It’s just got too remote” ’s what they usually say). Does Bodine now feel his own strength may someday soon not be enough either: that soon, like all the others, he’ll have to let go? But somebody’s got to hold on, it can’t happen to all of us—no, that’d be too much . . . Rocketman, Rocketman. You poor fucker.

  “Here. Listen. I want you to have it. Understand? It’s yours.”

  Does he even hear any more? Can he see this cloth, this stain?

  “Look, I was there, in Chicago, when they ambushed him. I was there that night, right down the street from the Biograph, I heard the gunfire, everything. Shit, I was just a boot, I thought this was what liberty was all about, so I went running. Me and half Chicago. Out of the bars, the toilets, the alleys, dames holding their skirts up so they could run faster, Missus Krodobbly who’s drinking her way through the Big Depression, waitin’ till the sun shines thru, and whatta you know, there’s half my graduating class from Great Lakes, in dress blues with the same bedspring marks as mine, and there’s longtime hookers and pockmark fags with breath smelling like the inside of a motorman’s glove, old ladies from Back of the Yards, subdebs just out the movies with the sweat still cold on their thighs, gate, everybody was there. They were taking off clothes, tearing checks out of checkbooks, ripping off pieces of each others’ newspaper, just so they could soak up some of John Dillinger’s blood. We went crazy. The Agents didn’t stop us. Just stood with smoke still curling out of their muzzles while the people all went down on that blood in the street. Maybe I went along without thinking. But there was something else. Something I must’ve needed . . . if you can hear me . . . that’s why I’m giving this to you. O.K.? That’s Dillinger’s blood there. Still warm when I got to it. They wouldn’t want you thinking he was anything but a ‘common criminal’—but Their head’s so far up Their ass—he still did what he did. He went out socked Them right in the toilet privacy of Their banks. Who car
es what he was thinking about, long as it didn’t get in the way? A-and it doesn’t even matter why we’re doing this, either. Rocky? Yeah, what we need isn’t right reasons, but just that grace. The physical grace to keep it working. Courage, brains, sure, O.K., but without that grace? forget it. Do you—please, are you listening? This thing here works. Really does. It worked for me, but I’m out of the Dumbo stage now, I can fly without it. But you. Rocky. You. . . .”

  It wasn’t their last meeting, but later on there were always others around, doper-crises, resentments about burns real or intended, and by then, as he’d feared, Bodine was beginning, helpless, in shame, to let Slothrop go. In certain rushes now, when he sees white network being cast all directions on his field of vision, he understands it as an emblem of pain or death. He’s begun to spend more of his time with Trudi. Their friend Magda was picked up on first-degree mopery and taken back to Leverkusen, and an overgrown back court where electric lines spit overhead, the dusty bricks sprout weeds from the cracks, shutters are always closed, grass and weeds turn to bitterest autumn floor. On certain days the wind brings aspirin-dust from the Bayer factory. The people inhale it, and grow more tranquil.

  They both feel her absence. Bodine finds presently that his characteristic gross laugh, hyeugh, hyeugh, has grown more German, tjachz, tjachz. He’s also taking on some of Magda’s old disguises. Good-natured and penetrable disguises, as at a masked ball. It is a transvestism of caring, and the first time in his life it’s happened. Though nobody asks, being too busy dealing, he reckons it’s all right.

  Light in the sky is stretched and clear, exactly like taffy after no more than the first two pulls.

  “Dying a weird death,” Slothrop’s Visitor by this time may be scrawled lines of carbon on a wall, voices down a chimney, some human being out on the road, “the object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it will find you under very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life. . . .”

  Item S-1729.06, Bottle containing 7 cc. of May wine. Analysis indicates presence of woodruff herb, lemon and orange peel.

  Sprigs of woodruff, also known as Master of the Woods, were carried by the early Teutonic warriors. It gives success in battle. It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There’s supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop’s: the only printed credit that might apply to him is “Harmonica, kazoo—a friend.” But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . . )

  Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of darker gray. It is displayed above, more than looking down on, this gathering of Džabajev and his friends. Inside the town, a strange convention is under way. Village idiots from villages throughout Germany are streaming in (streaming from mouth as well as leaving behind high-pitched trails of color for the folks to point at in their absence). They are expected to pass a resolution tonight asking Great Britain for Commonwealth status, and perhaps even to apply for membership in the UNO. Children in the parish schools are being asked to pray for their success. Can 13 years of Vatican collaboration have clarified the difference between what’s holy and what is not? Another State is forming in the night, not without theatre and festivity. So tonight’s prevalence of Maitrinke, which Džabajev has managed to score several liters of. Let the village idiots celebrate. Let their holiness ripple into interference-patterns till it clog the lantern-light of the meeting hall.

  Let the chorus line perform heroically: 16 ragged staring oldtimers who shuffle aimlessly about the stage, jerking off in unison, waggling penises in mock quarterstaffing, brandishing in twos and threes their green-leaved poles, exposing amazing chancres and lesions, going off in fountains of sperm strung with blood that splash over glazed trouser-pleats, dirt-colored jackets with pockets dangling like 60-year-old breasts, sockless ankles permanently stained with the dust of the little squares and the depopulated streets. Let them cheer and pound their seats, let the brotherly spit flow. Tonight the Džabajev circle have acquired, through an ill-coordinated smash-and-grab at the home of Niederschaumdorf’s only doctor, a gigantic hypodermic syringe and needle. Tonight they will shoot wine. If the police are on the way, if far down the road certain savage ears can already pick up the rumble of an occupation convoy across the night kilometers, signaling past sight, past the first headlamp’s faintest scattering, the approach of danger, still no one here is likely to break the circle. The wine will operate on whatever happens. Didn’t you wake up to find a knife in your hand, your head down a toilet, the blur of a long sap about to smash your upper lip, and sink back down to the old red and capillaried nap where none of this could possibly be happening? and wake again to a woman screaming, again to the water of the canal freezing your drowned eye and ear, again to too many Fortresses diving down the sky, again, again. . . . But no, never real.

  A wine rush: a wine rush is defying gravity, finding yourself on the elevator ceiling as it rockets upward, and no way to get down. You separate in two, the basic Two, and each self is aware of the other.

  THE OCCUPATION OF MINGEBOROUGH

  The trucks come rolling down the hill, where the State highway narrows, at about three in the afternoon. All their headlights are on. Electric stare after stare topping the crest of the hill, between the maple trees. The noise is terrific. Gearboxes chatter as each truck hits the end of the grade, weary cries of “Double-clutch it, idiot!” come from under the canvas. An apple tree by the road is in blossom. The limbs are wet with this morning’s rain, dark and wet. Sitting under it, with anyone else but Slothrop, is a barelegged girl, blonde and brown as honey. Her name is Marjorie. Hogan will come home from the Pacific and court her, but he’ll lose out to Pete Dufay. She and Dufay will have a daughter named Kim, and Kim will have her braids dipped in the school ink-wells by young Hogan, Jr. It will all go on, occupation or not, with or without Uncle Tyrone.

  There’s more rain in the air. The soldiers are mustering by Hicks’s Garage. In the back lot is a greasy dump, a pit, full of ball-bearings, clutch plates, and pieces of transmission. In the parking lot below—shared with the green-trimmed candy store, where he waited for the first slice of very yellow schoolbus to appear each 3:15 around the corner, and knew which high-school kids were easy marks for pennies—are six or seven old Cord automobiles, in different stages of dustiness and breakdown. Souvenirs of young empire, they shine like hearses now in the premonition of rain. Work details are already putting up barricades, and a scavenging party has invaded the gray clapboards of Pizzini’s Store, standing big as a barn on the corner. Kids hanging around the loading platform, eating sunflower seeds out of burlap sacks, listen to the soldiers liberating sides of beef from Pizzini’s freezer. If Slothrop wants to get home from here, he has to slide into a pathway next to the two-story brick wall of Hicks’s Garage, a green path whose entrance is concealed behind the trash-fire of the store, and the frame shed where Pizzini keeps his delivery truck. You cut through two lots which aren’t platted exactly back to back, so that actually you’re skirting one fence and using a driveway. They are both amber and black old ladies’ houses, full of cats alive or stuffed, stained lampshades,
antimacassars and doilies on all the chairs and tables, and a terminal gloom. You have to cross a street then, go down Mrs. Snodd’s driveway beside the hollyhocks, through a wire gate and Santora’s back yard, over the rail fence where the hedge stops, across your own street, and home. . . .

  But there is the occupation. They may already have interdicted the kids’ short cuts along with the grown-up routes. It may be too late to get home.

  BACK IN DER PLATZ

  Gustav and André, back from Cuxhaven, have unscrewed the reed-holder and reed from André’s kazoo and replaced them with tinfoil—punched holes in the tinfoil, and are now smoking hashish out of the kazoo, finger-valving the small end pa-pa-pah to carburete the smoke—turns out sly Säure has had ex-Peenemünde engineers, propulsion-group people, working on a long-term study of optimum hashpipe design, and guess what—in terms of flow rate, heat-transfer, control of air-to-smoke ratio, the perfect shape turns out to be that of the classical kazoo!