GRAVITY RAINBOW (113 page)

Each long haircut is a passage. Hair is yet another kind of modulated frequency. Assume a state of grace in which all hairs were once distributed perfectly even, a time of innocence when they fell perfectly straight, all over the colonel's head. Winds of the day, gestures of distraction, sweat, itchings, sudden surprises, three-foot falls at the edge of sleep, watched skies, remembered shames, all have since written on that perfect grating. Passing through it tonight, restructuring it, Eddie Pensiero is an agent of History. Along with the reworking of the colonel's head runs the shiver-borne blues-long runs in number 2 and 3 hole correspond, tonight anyway, to passages in the deep reaches of hair, birch trunks in a very humid summer night, approaches to a stone house in a wooded park, stags paralyzed beside the high flagged walks…

Blues is a matter of lower sidebands-you suck a clear note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of your face. Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight with pain, often trying not to betray
any
emotion, all your life. Where you send the pure note is partly a function of that. There's that secular basis for blues, if the spiritual angle bothers you…

"I didn't know where I was," relates the colonel. "I kept climbing downward, along these big sheared chunks of concrete. Black reinforcing rod poking out… black rust. There were touches of royal purple in the air, not bright enough to blur out over their edges, or change the substance of the night. They dribbled down, lengthening out, one by one-ever seen a chicken fetus, just beginning? oh of course not, you're a city boy. There's a lot to learn, out on the farm. Teaches you what a chicken fetus looks like, so that if you happen to be climbing around a concrete mountain in the dark, and see one, or several, up in the sky reproduced in purple, you'll know what they look like-that's a heap better than the city, son, there you just move from crisis to crisis, each one brand-new, nothing to couple it back onto…"

Well, there he is, cautiously edging along the enormous ruin, his

hair at the moment looking
very
odd-brushed forward from one occipital spot, forward and up in great long points, forming a black sunflower or sunbonnet around his face, in which the prominent feature is the colonel's long, crawling magenta lips. Things grab up for him out of crevices among the debris, sort of fast happy lunge out and back in, thin pincer arms, nothing personal, just thought I'd
grab a little night
air,
ha, ha! When they miss the colonel-as they always seem to do- why they just zip back in with a gambler's ho-hum, well, maybe next time…

Dammit, cut off from my regiment here, gonna be captured and cremated by dacoits!
Ob Jesus there they are now,
unthinkable Animals running low in the light from the G-5 version of the city, red and yellow turbans, scarred dope-fiend faces, faired as the front end of a '37 Ford, same undirected eyes, same exemption from the Karmic Hammer-

A '37 Ford, exempt from the K.H.? C'mon quit fooling. They'll all end up in junkyards same as th' rest!

Oh,
will they,
Skippy? Why are there so many on the roads, then?

W-well gee, uh, Mister Information, th-th' War, I mean there's no new cars being built right now so we all have to keep our Old Reliable in tiptop shape cause there's not too many mechanics left here on the home front, a-and we shouldn't hoard gas, and we should keep that A-sticker prominently displayed in the lower right-

Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and retrograde journeys. Come back, here, to the points. Here is where the paths divided. See the man back there. He is wearing a white hood. His shoes are brown. He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice man. He is the pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes the points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or "Der Leid-Stadt," that's what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. But we will not read it, because
we
are going to Happyville. The pointsman has made sure we'll go there. He hardly has to work at all. The lever is very smooth, and easy to push. Even you could push it, Skippy. If you knew where it was. But look what a lot of work he has done, with just one little push. He has sent us all the way to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. That is because he knows just where the points and the lever are. He is the only kind of man who puts in very little work and makes big things happen, all over the world. He could have sent you on the right trip back there, Skippy. You can have
your
fantasy if you want, you probably don't deserve anything better, but Mister Information tonight is in a kind mood. He will show you Happyville. He will begin by reminding you of the 1937 Ford. Why is that dacoit-faced auto still on the roads? You said "the War," just as you rattled over the points onto the wrong track. The War
was
the set of points. Eh? Yesyes, Skippy, the truth is that the War is keeping things alive.
Things.
The Ford is only one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even
know
they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. That would be fun, wouldn't it, Sldppy?

Jeepers, it sure
would,
Mister Information! Wow, I-I can't wait to see Happyville!

Happily, he doesn't have to wait at all. One of the dacoits comes leaping with a whistling sound, ecru silk cord strung buzzing tight between his fists, eager let's-get-to-it grin, and just at the same moment a pair of arms comes pincering up out of a fissure in the ruins, and gathers the colonel down to safety just in time. The dacoit falls on his ass, and sits there trying to pull the cord apart, muttering oh shit, which even dacoits do too.

"You are under the mountain," a voice announces. Stony cave-acoustics in here. "Please remember from this point on to obey all pertinent regulations."

His guide is a kind of squat robot, dark gray plastic with rolling headlamp eyes. It is shaped something like a crab. "That's Cancer in Latin," sez the robot, "and in Kenosha, too!" It will prove to be addicted to one-liners that never quite come off for anyone but it.

"Here is Muffin-tin Road," announces the robot, "note the smiling faces on all the houses here." Upstairs windows are eyes, picket fence is teeth. Nose is the front door.

"Sa-a-a-y," asks the colonel, taken by a sudden thought, "does it ever
snoiv
here in Happyville?"

"Does what ever snow?"

"You're evading."

"I'm evading-room vino from Visconsin," sings this boorish machine, "and you oughta see the nurses run! So what else is new, Jackson?" The squat creature is actually
chewing gum,
a Laszlo Jamf variation on polyvinyl chloride, very malleable, even sending out detachable molecules which, through an ingenious Osmo-elektrische Schalterwerke, developed by Siemens, is transmitting, in code, a damn fair approximation of Beeman's licorice flavor to the robot crab's brain.

"Mister Information
always
answers questions."

"For what he's making, I'd even question answers. Does it ever snow? Of
course
it snows in Happyville. Lotta snowmen'd sure be sore if it didn't!"

"I recall, back in Wisconsin, the wind used to blow right up the walk, like a visitor who expects to be let in. Sweeps the snow up against the front door, leaves it drifted there… Ever get that in Happyville?"

"Old stuff," sez the robot.

"Anybody ever open his front door, while the wind was doing that, eh?"

"Thousands of times."

"Then,"
pounces the colonel, "if the door is the house's
nose,
and the door is open, a-and all of those snowy-white crystals are blowing up from Muffin-tin Road in a big cloud right into the-"

"Aagghh!"
screams the plastic robot, and scuttles away into a narrow alley. The colonel finds himself alone in a brown and wine-aged district of the city: sandstone and adobe colors sweep away in a progress of walls, rooftops, streets, not a tree in sight, and who's this come strolling down the Schokoladestrasse? Why, it's Laszlo Jamf himself, grown to a prolonged old age, preserved like a '37 Ford against the World's ups and downs, which are never more than damped-out changes in smile, wide-pearly to wistfully gauze, inside Happyville here. Dr. Jamf is wearing a bow tie of a certain limp grayish lavender, a color for long dying afternoons through conservatory windows, minor-keyed lieder about days gone by, plaintive pianos, pipesmoke in a stuffy parlor, overcast Sunday walks by canals… here the two men are, dry-scratched precisely, attentively on this afternoon, and the bells across the canal are tolling the hour: the men have come

from very far away, after a journey neither quite remembers, on a mission of some kind. But each has been kept ignorant of the other's role…

Now it turns out that this light bulb over the colonel's head here is the same identical Osram light bulb that Franz Pokier used to sleep next to in his bunk at the underground rocket works at Nordhausen. Statistically (so Their story goes), every n-thousandth light bulb is gonna be perfect, all the delta-q's piling up just right, so we shouldn't be surprised that this one's still around, burning brightly. But the truth is even more stupendous. This bulb is
immortal!
It's been around, in fact, since the twenties, has that old-timery point at the tip and is less pear-shaped than more contemporary bulbs. Wotta history, this bulb, if only it could speak-well, as a matter of fact, it
can
speak. It is dictating the muscular modulations of Paddy McGonigle's cranking tonight, this is a loop here, with feedback through Paddy to the generator again. Here it is,

the story of byron the bulb

Byron was to've been manufactured by Tungsram in Budapest. He would probably have been grabbed up by the ace salesman Geza Rozsavolgyi's father Sandor, who covered all the Transylvanian territory and had begun to go native enough to where the home office felt vaguely paranoid about him throwing some horrible spell on the whole operation if they didn't give him what he wanted. Actually he was a salesman who wanted his son to be a doctor, and that came true. But it may have been the bad witch-leery auras around Budapest that got the birth of Byron reassigned at the last minute to Osram, in Berlin. Reassigned, yes. There is a Bulb Baby Heaven, amiably satirized as if it was the movies or something, well Big
Business,
ha, ha! But don't let Them fool you, this
is
a bureaucracy first, and a Bulb Baby Heaven only as a sort of sideline. All overhead-yes, out of its own pocket the Company is springing for square leagues of organdy, hogsheads of IG Farben pink and blue Baby Dye, hundredweights of clever Siemens Electric Baby Bulb Pacifiers, giving the suckling Bulb the shape of a 110-volt current without the least trickle of power. One way or another, these Bulb folks are in the business of providing the appearance of power, power against the night, without the reality.

Actually, B.B.H. is rather shabby. The brown rafters drip cobwebs. Now and then a roach shows up on the floor, and all the Babies try to roll over to look (being Bulbs they
seem
perfectly symmetrical, Skippy, but don't forget the contact at the top of the thread) going uh-guh!

uhhhh-
guh!
, glowing feebly at the bewildered roach sitting paralyzed and squashable out on the bare boards, rushing, reliving the terror of some sudden blast of current out of nowhere and high overhead the lambent, all-seeing Bulb. In their innocence, the Baby Bulbs don't know what to make of this roach's abreaction-they feel his fright, but don't know what it is. They just want to be his friend. He's interesting and has good moves. Everybody's excited except for Byron, who considers the other Bulb Babies a bunch of saps. It is a constant struggle to turn their thoughts on anything meaningful. Hi there Babies, I'm Byron-the-Bulb! Here to sing a little song to you, that goes-

Light-up, and-shine, you-in-cande-scent Bulb Ba-bies!

Looks-like ya got ra-bies

Just lay there foamin' and a-screamin' like a buncha

little demons,

I'm deliv'rin' unto you a king-dom of roa-ches, And no-thin' ap-proaches

That joyful feelin' when-you're up-on the ceilin' Lookin' down-night and day-on the king-dom you sur-vey, They'll come out 'n' love ya till the break of dawn, But they run like hell when that light comes on! So shine on, Baby Bulbs, you're the wave of the fu-ture, And I'm here to recruit ya, In m'great crusade, Just sing along Babies-come-on-and-join-the-big-pa-rade!

Trouble with Byron's he's an old, old soul, trapped inside the glass prison of a Baby Bulb. He hates this place, lying on his back waiting to get manufactured, nothing to listen to on the speakers but Charleston music, now and then an address to the Nation, what kind of a setup's that? Byron wants to get out of here and
into it,
needless to say he's been developing all kinds of nervous ailments, Baby Bulb Diaper Rash, which is a sort of corrosion on his screw threads, Bulb Baby Colic, a tight spasm of high resistance someplace among the deep loops of tungsten wire, Bulb Baby Hyperventilation, where it actually feels like his vacuum's been broken though there is no organic basis…