GRAVITY RAINBOW (102 page)

beerhalls back at the T.H… and wake again-it went on for hours- into some further progression of carnage, of fire and smashing…

On the way home, by tram and foot, his wife bitched at Pokier for dozing off, ridiculed his engineer's devotion to cause-and-effect. How could he tell her that the dramatic connections were really all there, in his dreams? How could he tell her anything?

Klein-Rogge is remembered most of all for his role as Dr. Mabuse. You were meant to think of Hugo Stinnes, the tireless operator behind the scenes of apparent Inflation, apparent history: gambler, financial wizard, archgangster… a fussy burgerlich mouth, jowls, graceless moves, a first impression of comic technocracy… and yet, when the rages came over him, breaking through from beneath the rationalized look, with his glacial eyes become windows into the bare savanna, then the real Mabuse surfaced, vital and proud against the gray forces surrounding him, edging him toward the doom he must've known he couldn't escape, the silent inferno of guns, grenades, streets full of troops attacking his headquarters, and his own madness at the end of the secret tunnel… And who brought him down but matinee idol Bernhardt Goetzke as State Prosecutor von Wenk, Goetzke who played tender, wistful bureaucratic Death in
Der Mude Tod,
here too running true to form, too tame, too gentle for the jaded Countess he coveted-but Klein-Rogge
jumped in,
with all claws out, drove her effeminate husband to suicide, seized her, threw her on his bed, the languid bitch-
took her!
while gentle Goetzke sat in his office, among his papers and sybarites-Mabuse trying to hypnotize him, drug him, bomb him to death in his own office-nothing worked, each time the great Weimar inertia, files, hierarchies, routines, kept saving him. Mabuse was the savage throwback, the charismatic flash no Sunday-afternoon Agfa plate could ever bear, the print through the rippling solution each time flaring up to the same annihilating white (Piscean depths Pokier has cruised dream and waking, beneath him images of everyday Inflation dreariness, queues, stockbrokers, boiled potatoes in a dish, searching with only gills and gut-some nervous drive toward myth he doesn't even know if he believes in-for the white light, ruins of Atlantis, intimations of a truer kingdom)…

Metropolitan inventor Rothwang, King Attila, Mabuse der Spieler, Prof.-Dr. Laszlo Jamf, all their yearnings aimed the same way, toward a form of death that could be demonstrated to hold joy and defiance, nothing of bourgeois Goetzkian death, of self-deluding, mature acceptance, relatives in the parlor, knowing faces the children can always read…

"You have the two choices," Jamf cried, his last lecture of the year: outside were the flowery strokings of wind, girls in pale-colored dresses, oceans of beer, male choruses intensely, movingly lifted as they sang
Semper sit in flores/
Semper sit in flo-ho-res… "stay behind with carbon and hydrogen, take your lunch-bucket in to the works every morning with the faceless droves who can't wait to get in out of the sunlight-or move
beyond.
Silicon, boron, phosphorus-these can replace carbon, and can bond to nitrogen instead of hydrogen-" a few snickers here, not unanticipated by the playful old pedagogue, be he always in flower: his involvement in getting Weimar to subsidize the IG's Stickstoff Syndikat was well known-"move beyond life, toward the inorganic. Here is no frailty, no mortality-here is Strength, and the Timeless." Then his well-known finale, as he wiped away the scrawled C-H on his chalkboard and wrote, in enormous letters, Si-N.

The wave of the future. But Jamf himself, oddly, did
not
move on. He never synthesized those new inorganic rings or chains he had prophesied so dramatically. Had he only remained behind in the trough, academic generations swelling away just ahead, or had he known something Pokier and the others didn't? Were his exhortations in the lecture hall some kind of eccentric joke? He stayed with C-H, and took his lunchbucket to America. Polder lost touch with him after the Technische Hochschule-so did all his old pupils. He was now under the sinister influence of Lyle Bland, and if he was still seeking to escape the mortality of the covalent bond, Jamf was doing it in the least obvious way there was.

If that Lyle Bland hadn't joined the Masons, he'd still probably be up to those nefarious tricks of his. Just as there are, in the World, machineries committed to injustice as an enterprise, so too there seem to be provisions active for balancing things out once in a while. Not as an enterprise, exactly, but at least in the dance of things. The Masons, in the dance of things, turned out to be one of these where Bland was

concerned.

Imagine the fellow's plight-got so much money he don't know what to do with it all. Don't go screaming, "Give it to me!" either. He's given it to you, though in roundabout ways you might need a good system of search to unsnarl. Oh, has he given it to you. By way of

the Bland Institute and the Bland Foundation, the man has had his meathooks well into the American day-to-day since 1919. Who do you think sat on top of the patent for that 100-miles-per-gallon carburetor, eh? sure you've heard that story-maybe even snickered along with paid anthropologists who called it Automotive Age Myth or some shit-well, turns out the item was real, all right, and it was Lyle Bland who sprang for those academic hookers doing the snickering and the credentialed lying. Or how about the great Killer Weed advertising campaign of the thirties, who do you think worked hand-in-glove (or, as grosser individuals have put it, penis-in-mouth) with the FBI on that one? And remember all those guy-goes-to-the-doctor-can't-get-a-hardon jokes? Planted by Bland, yup-half a dozen basic variations, after having done depth studies for the National Research Council that indicated an unacceptable 36% of the male work force weren't paying enough attention to their cocks-not enough genital obsession there, and it was undermining the efficiency of the organs doing the
real work.

Psychological studies became, in fact, a Bland specialty. His probe into the subconscious of early-Depression America is considered a classic, and widely credited with improving the plausibility of Roosevelt's "election" in 1932. Though many of his colleagues found a posture of hatred for FDR useful, Bland was too delighted to go through the motions. For him, FDR was exactly the man: Harvard, beholden to all kinds of money old and new, commodity and retail, Harrirnan and Weinberg: an American synthesis which had never occurred before, and which opened the way to certain grand possibilities-all grouped under the term "control," which seemed to be a private code-word-more in line with the aspirations of Bland and others. A year later Bland joined the Business Advisory Council set up under Swope of General Electric, whose ideas on matters of "control" ran close to those of Walter Rathenau, of German GE. Whatever Swope's outfit did, it did in secret. Nobody got to see its files. Bland wasn't about to tell anybody, either.

He had gotten to be buddies, after World War I, with the office of the Alien Property Custodian. Their job was to dispose of confiscated German interests in the U.S. A lot of Midwestern money was involved here, which is what got Bland embroiled in the Great Pinball Difficulty, and so into the Masons. Seems that through something called the Chemical Foundation-cover names in those days had no style to them-the APC had sold Bland a few of Laszlo Jamf's early patents, along with the U.S. agency of Glitherius Paint Dye, a Berlin firm. A

few years later, in 1925, in the course of being put together, the IG bought back 50% of American Glitherius from Bland, who was using his end of it as a patent-holding company. Bland got cash, securities, and controlling interest in a Glitherius subsidiary in Berlin being run by a Jew named Pflaumbaum, yesyes, the same Pflaumbaum Franz Pokier worked for till the place burned down and Pokier went back out on the streets. (Indeed, there were those who could see Eland's hand in that disaster, though the Jew got blamed, fucked under by the courts, attached till he was bankrupt, and, in the fullness of time, sent east along with many others of his race. We would also have to show some interlock between Bland and the Ufa movie-distribution people who sent Pokier out with his advertising bills to Reinickendorf that night, to his fateful meeting with Kurt Mondaugen and the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt-not to mention
separate
connections for Achtfaden, Narrisch, and the other S-Gerat people-before we'd have a paranoid structure worthy of the name. Alas, the state of the art by 1945 was nowhere near adequate to that kind of data retrieval. Even if it had been, Bland, or his successors and assigns, could've bought programmers by the truckload to come in and make sure all the information fed out was harmless. Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.)

After the Pflaumbaum fire, lines of power among Bland and his German colleagues had to be renegotiated. It dragged on for a few years. Bland found himself in Depression St. Louis, talking with one Alfonso Tracy, Princeton '06, St. Louis Country Club, moving into petrochemicals in a big way, Mrs. Tracy dithering in and out of the house with yardage and armloads of flowers, preparing for the annual Veiled Prophet Ball, Tracy himself preoccupied with the appearance of some individuals down from Chicago in flashy pinstripe suits, two-tone shoes and snap-brim fedoras, all talking in accents staccato as a Thompson.

"Oh, do I need a good electronics man," Tracy moaned. "What do you do with these wops? The whole shipment was bad, and now they won't take it back. If I step out of line, they'll murder me. They'll rape Mabel, they'll go back to Princeton some dark night a-and
castrate
my
kid!
You know what I think it is, Lyle? A
plot!"

Vendettas, jeweled gauntlets, subtle poisons come infiltrating this well-mannered parlor with the picture of Herbert Hoover on the piano, the pinks in the Nieman-Marcus bowl, the Bauhaus-style furniture like alabaster slabs of a model city (you expect little HO trains to come whirring out from under the davenport, cans 'n' reefers on and on across the carpet's ash-colored lowland…). Alfonso Tracy's long face, creased either side of the nose and on around the mustache line, dragged down by worries, thirty years without a genuine smile ("Even Laurel Hardy doesn't work for me any more!"), morose with fright in his easy chair. How could Lyle Bland not be touched?

"Got just the fella," sez he, touching Tracy's arm, compassionate. Always good to have an engineer on tap. This one did some just top-notch electronic-surveillance designs once for the then-fledgling FBI, on a contract the Bland Institute landed a few years ago and subbed part of out to Siemens over there in Germany. "Have him in tomorrow on the Silver Streak. No problem, Al."

"Come on out and have a look," sighs Tracy. They hop in the Packard and drive out to the green little river town of Mouthorgan, Missouri, which is a railroad station, a tanning factory, a few frame houses, and dominating the area a gigantic Masonic hall, not a window on the whole massive monolith.

After a lot of rigmarole at the door, Bland is finally allowed in and led through velvet poolrooms, elaborate polished-wood gambling setups, chrome bars, soft bedrooms, on to a large warehouse section in back, which is crammed ten high with more pinball machines than Eland's ever seen in one place in his
life,
Oh Boys, Grand Slams, World Serieses, Lucky Lindies as far as the eye can reach.

"And every one is fucked up," sez melancholy Tracy. "Look at this." It's a Folies-Bergeres: four-color lovelies doing the cancan all over it, zeros happening to coincide with eyes, nipples, and cunts, one of your racy-type games here, a little hostile toward the ladies but
all
in fun!
"You got a nickel?"
Chungg,
boing there goes the ball just missing a high-scoring hole, hmm looks like a permanent warp there
ahnnnggghk
knocks a flasher worth 1000 but only 50 lights up on the board-"You
see?"
Tracy screams as the ball heads like a rock for the bottom, outside chance get it with a flipper
zong
flipper flips the other fucking
way,
and the board lights up TILT.

"Tilt?" Bland scratching his head. "You didn't even-"

"They're
all
like that," Tracy watering with frustration. "You try it."

The second ball isn't even out of the chute before Bland gets another tilt, again without having applied any English. Third ball gets
stuck
somehow against a solenoid and (helphelp, it's hollering, wounded high little voice, oh I'm being
electrocuted…
) dingdingding,

gongs and racing numbers up on the board, 400,000, 675,000
bong
a million! greatest Folies-Bergeres score in history and climbing, the poor spherical soul against the solenoid thrashing, clonic, horrible (yes they're sentient all right, beings from the planetoid Katspiel, of veryvery elliptical orbit-which is to say it passed by Earth only once, a long time ago, nearly back at the grainy crepuscular Edge, and nobody knows where Katspiel is now or when, or if, it'll be back. It's that familiar division between return and one-shot visitation. If Katspiel had enough energy to leave the sun's field forever, then it has left these kind round beings in eternal exile, with no chance of ever being gathered back home, doomed to masquerade as ball bearings, as steelies in a thousand marble games-to know the great thumbs of Keokuk and Puyallup, Oyster Bay, Inglewood-Danny D'Allesandro and Elmer Ferguson, Peewee Brennan and Flash Womack… where are they now? where do you think? they all got drafted, some are dead on Iwo, some gangrenous in the snow in the forest of Arden, and their thumbs, first rifle inspection in Basic, Gl'd, driven deep back into childhood as little finger sweat-cams off M-l operating handle, thumb pushing down follower still deep in breech, bolt sshhOCK! whacks thumb oh shit yes it hurts and good-by to another unbeatable and legendary thumb, gone for good back to the summer dust, bags of chuckling glass, bigfooted basset hounds, smell of steel playground slides heating in the sun), well here come these cancan girls now, Folies-Bergeres maenads, moving in for the kill, big lipstick smiles around blazing choppers, some Offenbach galop come jigging in now out of the loudspeakers that are implicit in this machine's design, long gartered legs kicking out over the agony of this sad spherical permanent AWOL, all his companions in the chute vibrating their concern and love, feeling his pain but helpless, inert without the spring, the hustler's hand, the drunk's masculinity problems, the vacuum hours of a gray cap and an empty lunchbox, needing these to run their own patterns down the towering coils, the deep holes with their promises of rest that only kick you wobbling out again, always at the mercy of gravity, finding now and then the infinitesimally shallow grooves of other runs, great runs (twelve heroic minutes in Virginia Beach, Fourth of July, 1927, a drunken sailor whose ship went down at Leyte Gulf… flipped up off the board, your first three-dimensional trip is always your best, when you came down again it wasn't the same, and every time you'd pass anywhere near the micro-dimple you made when you fell, you'd get a rush… sobered, a few, having looked into the heart of the solenoid, seen the magnetic serpent and energy in its nakedness, long enough to be changed, to bring back from the writhing lines of force down in that pit an intimacy with power, with glazed badlands of soul, that set them apart forever- check out the portrait of Michael Faraday in the Tate Gallery in London, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick did once, to fill up a womanless and dreary afternoon, and wondered then how eyes of men could grow so lambent, sinister, so educated among the halls of dread and the invisible…) but now the voices of the murder-witness coquettes grow shrill, with more of a blade's edge, the music changes key, pitching higher and higher, the ruffled buttocks bumping backward more violently, the skirts flipping redder and deeper each time, covering more of the field, eddying to blood, to furnace finale, and how's the Katspiel Kid gonna get out of this one?