Yes, well, he’s an ex-scientist now, one who’ll never get Into It far enough to start talking about God, apple-cheeked lovable white-haired eccentric gabbing from the vantage of his Laureate—no he’ll be left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium . . . his mineral corridors do not shine. They will stay the same neutral nameless tone from here in to the central chamber, and the perfectly rehearsed scene he is to play there, after all. . . .
COUNTDOWN
The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond. He put it into the launch scene to heighten the suspense. “It is another of my damned ‘touches,’” Fritz Lang said.
“At the Creation,” explains Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman, “God sent out a pulse of energy into the void. It presently branched and sorted into ten distinct spheres or aspects, corresponding to the numbers 1–10. These are known as the Sephiroth. To return to God, the soul must negotiate each of the Sephiroth, from ten back to one. Armed with magic and faith, Kabbalists have set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many Kabbalist secrets have to do with making the trip successfully.
“Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called ‘Major Arcana’ in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.
“Some Sephiroth are active or masculine, others passive or feminine. But the Tree itself is a unity, rooted exactly at the Bodenplatte. It is the axis of a particular Earth, a new dispensation, brought into being by the Great Firing.”
“But but with a new axis, a newly spinning Earth,” it occurs to the visitor, “what happens to astrology?”
“The signs change, idiot,” snaps Edelman, reaching for his family-size jar of Thorazine. He has become such a habitual user of this tranquilizing drug that his complexion has deepened to an alarming slate-purple. It makes him an oddity on the street here, where everybody else walks around suntanned, and red-eyed from one irritant or another. Edelman’s children, mischievous little devils, have lately taken to slipping wafer capacitors from junked transistor radios into Pop’s Thorazine jar. To his inattentive eye there was hardly any difference: so, for a while, Edelman thought he must be developing a tolerance, and that the Abyss had crept intolerably close, only an accident away—a siren in the street, a jet plane rumbling in a holding pattern—but luckily his wife discovered the prank in time, and now, before he swallows, he is careful to scrutinize each Thorazine for leads, mu’s, numbering.
“Here—” hefting a fat Xeroxed sheaf, “the Ephemeris. Based on the new rotation.”
“You mean someone’s actually found the Bodenplatte? The Pole?”
“The delta-t itself. It wasn’t made public, naturally. The ‘Kaisersbart Expedition’ found it.”
A pseudonym, evidently. Everyone knows the Kaiser has no beard.
STRUNG INTO THE APOLLONIAN DREAM . . .
When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.
Here in the tail section of the 00000, Gottfried has found this clear surface before him in fact, literal: the Imipolex shroud. Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He’s remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space. His eyes taken on and on, and further. . . . The plastic surface flutters minutely: gray-white, mocking, an enemy of color.
The day outside is raw and the victim lightly dressed, but he feels warm in here. His white stockings stretch nicely from his suspender-tabs. He has found a shallow bend in a pipe where he can rest his cheek as he gazes into the shroud. He feels his hair tickling his back, his bared shoulders. It’s a dim, whited room. A room for lying in, bridal and open to the pallid spaces of the evening, waiting for whatever will fall on him.
Phone traffic drones into his wired ear. The voices are metal and drastically filtered. They buzz like the voices of surgeons, heard as you’re going under ether. Though they now only speak the ritual words, he can still tell them apart.
The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a smell he knows. It doesn’t frighten him. It was in the room when he fell asleep so long ago, so deep in sweet paralyzed childhood . . . it was there as he began to dream. Now it is time to wake, into the breath of what was always real. Come, wake. All is well.
ORPHEUS PUTS DOWN HARP
LOS ANGELES (PNS)—Richard M. Zhlubb, night manager of the Orpheus Theatre on Melrose, has come out against what he calls “irresponsible use of the harmonica.” Or, actually, “harbodica,” since Manager Zhlubb suffers from a chronic adenoidal condition, which affects his speech. Friends and detractors alike think of him as “the Adenoid.” Anyway, Zhlubb states that his queues, especially for midnight showings, have fallen into a state of near anarchy because of the musical instrument.
“It’s been going on ever since our Bengt Ekerot / Maria Casarès Film Festival,” complains Zhlubb, who is fiftyish and jowled, with a permanent five-o’clock shadow (the worst by far of all the Hourly Shadows), and a habit of throwing his arms up into an inverted “peace sign,” which also happens to be semaphore code for the letter U, exposing in the act uncounted yards of white French cuff.
“Here, Richard,” jeers a passerby, “I got your French cuff, right here,” meanwhile exposing himself in the grossest possible way and manipulating his foreskin in a manner your correspondent cannot set upon his page.
Manager Zhlubb winces slightly. “That’s one of the ringleaders, definitely,” he confides. “I’ve had a lot of trouble with him. Him and that Steve Edelman.” He pronounces it “Edelbid.” “I’b dot afraid to dabe dabes.”
The case he refers to is still pending. Steve Edelman, a Hollywood businessman, accused last year of an 11569 (Attempted Mopery with a Subversive Instrument), is currently in Atascadero under indefinite observation. It is alleged that Edelman, in an unauthorized state of mind, attempted to play a chord progression on the Department of Justice list, out in the street and in the presence of a whole movie-queue of witnesses.
“A-and now they’re all doing it. Well, not ‘all,’ let me just clarify that, of course the actual lawbreakers are only a small but loud minority, what I meant to say was, all those like Edelman. Certainly not all those good folks in the queue. A-ha-ha. Here, let me show you something.”
He ushers you into the black Managerial Volkswagen, and before you know it, you’re on the freeways. Near the interchange of the San Diego and the Santa Monica, Zhlubb points to a stretch of pavement: “Here’s where I got my first glimpse of one. Driving a VW, just like mine. Imagine. I couldn’t believe my eyes.” But it is difficult to keep one’s whole attention centered on Manager Zhlubb. The Santa Monica Freeway is traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man. It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously engineered as the Pasadena, nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor. No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks, and they are all out today, making it difficult for you to follow the Manager’s entertaining story. You cannot repress a certain shudder of distaste, almost a reflexive Consciousness of Kind, in their presence. They come gibbering in at you from all sides, swarming in, rolling their eyes through the side windows, playing harmonicas and even kazoos, in full disrespect for the Prohibitions.
“Relax,” the Manager’s eyes characteristically aglitter. “There’ll be a nice secure home for them all, down in Orange County. Right next to Disneyland,” pau
sing then exactly like a nightclub comic, alone in his tar circle, his chalk terror.
Laughter surrounds you. Full, faithful-audience laughter, coming from the four points of the padded interior. You realize, with a vague sense of dismay, that this is some kind of a stereo rig here, and a glance inside the glove compartment reveals an entire library of similar tapes: CHEERING (AFFECTIONATE), CHEERING (AROUSED), HOSTILE MOB in an assortment of 22 languages, YESES, NOES, NEGRO SUPPORTERS, WOMEN SUPPORTERS, ATHLETIC—oh, come now—FIRE-FIGHT (CONVENTIONAL), FIRE-FIGHT (NUCLEAR), FIRE-FIGHT (URBAN), CATHEDRAL ACOUSTICS. . . .
“We have to talk in some kind of code, naturally,” continues the Manager. “We always have. But none of the codes is that hard to break. Opponents have accused us, for just that reason, of contempt for the people. But really we do it all in the spirit of fair play. We’re not monsters. We know we have to give them some chance. We can’t take hope away from them, can we?”
The Volkswagen is now over downtown L.A., where the stream of traffic edges aside for a convoy of dark Lincolns, some Fords, even GMCs, but not a Pontiac in the lot. Stuck on each windshield and rear window is a fluorescent orange strip that reads FUNERAL.
The Manager’s sniffling now. “He was one of the best. I couldn’t go myself, but I did send a high-level assistant. Who’ll ever replace him, I wonder,” punching a sly button under the dash. The laughter this time is sparse male oh-hoho’s with an edge of cigar smoke and aged bourbon. Sparse but loud. Phrases like “Dick, you character!” and “Listen to him,” can also be made out.
“I have a fantasy about how I’ll die. I suppose you’re on their payroll, but that’s all right. Listen to this. It’s 3 a.m., on the Santa Monica Freeway, a warm night. All my windows are open. I’m doing about 70, 75. The wind blows in, and from the floor in back lifts a thin plastic bag, a common dry-cleaning bag: it comes floating in the air, moving from behind, the mercury lights turning it white as a ghost . . . it wraps around my head, so superfine and transparent I don’t know it’s there really until too late. A plastic shroud, smothering me to my death. . . .”
Heading up the Hollywood Freeway, between a mysteriously-canvased trailer rig and a liquid-hydrogen tanker sleek as a torpedo, we come upon a veritable caravan of harmonica players. “At least it’s not those tambourines,” Zhlubb mutters. “There aren’t as many tambourines as last year, thank God.”
Quilted-steel catering trucks crisscross in the afternoon. Their ripples shine like a lake of potable water after hard desert passage. It’s a Collection Day, and the garbage trucks are all heading north toward the Ventura Freeway, a catharsis of dumpsters, all hues, shapes and batterings. Returning to the Center, with all the gathered fragments of the Vessels. . . .
The sound of a siren takes you both unaware. Zhlubb looks up sharply into his mirror. “You’re not holding, are you?”
But the sound is greater than police. It wraps the concrete and the smog, it fills the basin and mountains further than any mortal could ever move . . . could move in time. . . .
“I don’t think that’s a police siren.” Your guts in a spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio. “I don’t think—”
THE CLEARING
“Räumen,” cries Captain Blicero. Peroxide and permanganate tanks have been serviced. The gyros are run up. Observers crouch down in the slit trenches. Tools and fittings are stashed rattling in the back of an idling lorry. The battery-loading crew and the sergeant who screwed in the percussion pin climb in after, and the truck hauls away down the fresh brown ruts of earth, into the trees. Blicero remains for a few seconds at launch position, looking around to see that all is in order. Then he turns away and walks, with deliberate speed, to the fire-control car.
“Steuerung klar?” he asks the boy at the steering panel.
“Ist klar.” In the lights from the panel, Max’s face is hard, stubborn gold.
“Treibwerk klar?”
“Ist klar,” from Moritz at the rocket motor panel. Into the phone dangling at his neck, he tells the Operations Room, “Luftlage klar.”
“Schlüssel auf SCHIESSEN,” orders Blicero.
Moritz turns the main key to FIRE. “Schlüssel steht auf SCHIESSEN.”
Klar.
There ought to be big dramatic pauses here. Weissmann’s head ought to be teeming with last images of creamy buttocks knotted together in fear (not one trickle of shit, Liebchen?) the last curtain of gold lashes over young eyes pleading, gagged throat trying to say too late what he should have said in the tent last night . . . deep in the throat, the gullet, where Blicero’s own cock’s head has burst for the last time (but what’s this just past the spasming cervix, past the Curve Into The Darkness The Stink The . . . The White . . . The Corner . . . Waiting . . . Waiting For—). But no, the ritual has its velvet grip on them all. So strong, so warm. . . .
“Durchschalten.” Blicero’s voice is calm and steady.
“Luftlage klar,” Max calls from the steering panel.
Moritz presses the button marked VORSTUFE. “Ist durchgeschaltet.”
A pause of 15 seconds while the oxygen tank comes up to pressure.
A light blazes up on Moritz’s panel.
Entlüftung. “Beluftung klar.”
The ignition lamp lights: Zundung. “Zundung klar.”
Then, “Vorstufe klar.” Vorstufe is the last position from which Moritz can still switch backward. The flame grows at the base of the Rocket. Colors develop. There is a period of four seconds here, four seconds of indeterminacy. The ritual even has a place for that. The difference between a top-grade launch officer and one doomed to mediocrity is in knowing exactly when, inside this chiming and fable-crowded passage, to order Hauptstufe.
Blicero is a master. He learned quite early to fall into a trance, to wait for the illumination, which always comes. It is nothing he’s ever spoken of aloud.
“Hauptstufe.”
“Hauptstufe ist gegeben.”
The panel is latched forever.
Two lights wink out. “Stecker 1 und 2 gefallen,” Moritz reports. The Stotz plugs lie blasted on the ground, tossing in the splash of flame. On gravity feed, the flame is bright yellow. Then the turbine begins to roar. The flame suddenly turns blue. The sound of it grows to full cry. The Rocket stays a moment longer on the steel table, then slowly, trembling, furiously muscular, it begins to rise. Four seconds later it begins to pitch over. But the flame is too bright for anyone to see Gottfried inside, except now as an erotic category, hallucinated out of that blue violence, for purposes of self-arousal.
ASCENT
This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape. . . .
Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple. Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly. Pressed down-and-aft in his elastic bonds, pressed painfully (his pectorals ache, an inner thigh has frozen numb) till his forehead is bent to touch one knee, where his hair rubs in a touch crying or submissive as a balcony empty in the rain, Gottfried does not wish to cry out . . . he knows they can’t hear him, but still he prefers not to . . . no radio back to them . . . it was done as a favor, Blicero wanted to make it easier for me, he knew I’d try to hold on—hold each voice, each hum or crackle—
He thinks of their love in illustrations for children, in last thin pages fluttering closed, a line gently, passively unfinished, a pastel hesitancy: Blicero’s hair is darker, shoulder-length and permanently waved, he is an adolescent squire or page looking into an optical device and beckoning the child Gottfried with a motherly or eager-to-educate look . . . n
ow he is far away, seated, at the end of an olive room, past shapes going out of focus, shapes Gottfried can’t identify as friend or enemy, between him and—where did he—it’s already gone, no . . . they’re beginning to slide away now faster than he can hold, it’s like falling to sleep—they begin to blur CATCH you can hold it steady enough to see a suspender-belt straining down your thighs, white straps as slender as the legs of a fawn and the points of the black . . . the black CATCH you’ve let a number of them go by, Gottfried, important ones you didn’t want to miss . . . you know this is the last time . . . CATCH when did the roaring stop? Brennschluss, when was Brennschluss it can’t be this soon . . . but the burnt-out tail-opening is swinging across the sun and through the blonde hair of the victim here’s a Brocken-specter, someone’s, something’s shadow projected from out here in the bright sun and darkening sky into the regions of gold, of whitening, of growing still as underwater as Gravity dips away briefly . . . what is this death but a whitening, a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite, what is it but bleaches, detergents, oxidizers, abrasives—Streckefuss he’s been today to the boy’s tormented muscles, but more appropriately is he Blicker, Bleicheröde, Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying the Caucasian pallor to an abolition of pigment, of melanin, of spectrum, of separateness from shade to shade, it is so white that CATCH the dog was a red setter, the last dog’s head, the kind dog come to see him off can’t remember what red meant, the pigeon he chased was slateblue, but they’re both white now beside the canal that night the smell of trees oh I didn’t want to lose that night CATCH a wave between houses, across a street, both houses are ships, one’s going off on a long, an important journey, and the waving is full of ease and affection CATCH last word from Blicero: “The edge of evening . . . the long curve of people all wishing on the first star. . . . Always remember those men and women along the thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the Shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep . . .”
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