GRAVITY RAINBOW (122 page)

Strips of insulation hang up in the morning fog, after a night of moon brightening and darkening as if by itself, because the blowing fog was so smooth, so hard to see. Now, when the wind blows, yellow sparks will spill away with a rattlesnake buzz from the black old fraying wires, against a sky gray as a hat. Green glass insulators go cloudy and blind in the day. Wood poles lean and smell old: thirty-year-old wood. Tarry transformers hum aloft. As if it will really be a busy day. In the middle distance poplars just emerge out of the haze.

It could have been Semlower Strasse, in Stralsund. The windows have the same ravaged look: the insides of all the rooms seem to've been gutted black. Perhaps there is a new bomb that can destroy only the
insides
of structures… no… it was in Greifswald. Across some wet railroad tracks were derricks, superstructure, tackle, smells of canalside… Hafenstrasse in Greifswald, down over his back fell the cold shadow of some massive church. But isn't that the Petritor, that stunted brick tower-arch straddling the alleyway ahead… it could be the Sluterstrasse in the old part of Rostock… or the Wandfarber-strasse in Luneburg, with pulleys high up on the brick gables, openwork weathercocks up at the very peaks… why was he looking
upward?
Upward from any of a score of those northern streets, one morning, in the fog. The farther north, the plainer things grow. There's one gutter, down the middle of the alley, where the rain runs off. Cobbles are laid straighter and there aren't as many cigarettes to be had. Garrison-churches echo with starlings. To come into a northern Zone town is to enter a strange harbor, from the sea, on a foggy day.

But in each of these streets, some vestige of humanity, of Earth, has to remain. No matter what has been done to it, no matter what it's been used for…

There were men called "army chaplains." They preached inside some of these buildings. There were actually soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened. Holding on to what they could. Then they went out, and some died before they got back inside a garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption, salvation. It really happened. It was quite common.

Even in a street used for that, still there will be one time, one dyed afternoon (coaltar-impossible orange-brown, clear all the way through), or one day of rain and clearing before bedtime, and in the

yard one hollyhock, circling in the wind, fresh with raindrops fat enough to be chewed… one face by a long sandstone wall and the scuffle of all the doomed horses on the other side, one hair-part thrown into blue shadows at a turn of her head-one busful of faces passing through in the middle of the night, no one awake in the quiet square but the driver, the Ortsschutz sentry in some kind of brown, official-looking uniform, old Mauser at sling arms, dreaming not of the enemy outside in the swamp or shadow but of home and bed, strolling now with his civilian friend who's off-duty, can't sleep, under the trees full of road-dust and night, through their shadows on the sidewalks, playing a harmonica… down past the row of faces in the bus, drowned-man green, insomniac, tobacco-starved, scared, not of tomorrow, not yet, but of this pause in their night-passage, of how easy it will be to lose, and how much it will hurt…

At least one moment of passage, one it will hurt to lose, ought to be found for every street now indifferently gray with commerce, with war, with repression… finding it, learning to cherish what was lost, mightn't we find some way back?

In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush. The letters

appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning glamour girl riding astraddle the cannon of a tank, steel penis with slotted serpent head, 3rd Armored treads 'n' triangle on a sweater rippling across her tits. The white image has the same coherence, the hey-lookit-me smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden white genital onset in the sky-it is also, perhaps, a Tree…

Slothrop sits on a curbstone watching it, and the letters, and girl with steel cock waving hi fellas, as the fog whitens into morning, and figures with carts, or dogs, or bicycles go by in brown-gray outlines, wheezing, greeting briefly in fog-flattened voices, passing. He doesn't remember sitting on the curb for so long staring at the picture. But he did.

At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the east, head, shoulders, breasts, 17° 36' down to her maidenhead at the horizon. A few doomed Japanese knew of her as some Western deity. She loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be sacri-

ficed. The sun was in Leo. The fireburst came roaring and sovereign…

listening to the toilet

The basic idea is that They will come and shut off the water first. The cryptozoa who live around the meter will be paralyzed by the great inbreak of light from overhead… then scatter like hell for lower, darker, wetter. Shutting the water off interdicts the toilet: with only one tankful left, you really can't get rid of much of anything any more, dope, shit, documents, They've stopped the inflow/outflow and here you are trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up, ass hanging out all over Their Movieola viewer, waiting for Their editorial blade. Reminded, too late, of how dependent you are on Them, for neglect if not good will: Their neglect is your freedom. But when They do come on it's like society-gig Apollos, striking the lyre

Everything freezes. The sweet, icky chord hangs in the air… there is no way to be at ease with it. If you try the "Are you quite finished, Superintendent?" gambit, the man will answer, "No, as a matter of fact… no, you nasty little wet-mouthed prig, I'm not
half finished,
not with you…"

So it's good policy always to have the toilet valve cracked a bit, to maintain some flow through the toilet so when it
stops
you'll have that extra minute or two. Which is not the usual paranoia of waiting for a knock, or a phone to ring: no, it takes a particular kind of mental illness to sit and listen for a cessation of noise. But-

Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that sound cannot travel through outer space. Well, but suppose it
can.
Suppose They don't want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether," which can carry sound to every part of the Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years, the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93 millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody know?

Except that at night now and then, in some part of the dark hemisphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there will come to pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a few seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in the World, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the sun
stops.
For its brief life, the point of sound-shadow may come to rest a thousand feet above a desert, between floors in an empty office building, or exactly around a

seated individual in a working-class restaurant where they hose the place out at 3 every morning… it's all white tile, the chairs and tables riveted solid into the floor, food covered with rigid shrouds of clear plastic… soon, from outside, rrrnnn! clank, drag, squeak of valve opening oh yes, ah yes, Here Are The Men With The Hoses To Hose The Place Out-

At which instant, with no warning, the arousing feather-point of the Sound-Shadow has touched you, enveloping you in sun-silence for oh, let us say 2:36:18 to 2:36:24, Central War Time, unless the location is Dungannon, Virginia, Bristol, Tennessee, Asheville or Franklin, North Carolina, Apalachicola, Florida, or conceivably in Murdo Mackenzie, South Dakota, or Phillipsburg, Kansas, or Stockton, Plainville, or Ellis, Kansas-yes sounds like a Roll of Honor don't it, being read off someplace out on the prairie, foundry colors down the sky in long troughs, red and purple, darkening crowd of civilians erect and nearly-touching as wheat stalks, and the one old man in black up at the microphone, reading off the towns of the war dead, Dungannon… Bristol… Murdo Mackenzie… his white hair blown back by a sculpting thine-alabaster-cities wind into leonine wreathing, his stained pored old face polished by wind, sandy with light, earnest outboard corners of his eyelids folding down as one by one, echoing out over the anvil prairie, the names of death-towns unreel, and surely Bleicherode or Blicero will be spoken any minute now…

Well, you're
wrong,
champ-these happen to be towns all located on the borders of
Time Zones,
is all. Ha, ha! Caught
you
with your hand in your pants! Go on, show us
all
what you were doing or leave the area, we don't need your kind around. There's nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

"Now-the eastern towns we've listed are on Eastern War Time. All the other towns along the interface are on Central. The western towns just read off are on Central, while the other towns along
that
interface are on Mountain…"

Which is all our Sentimental Surrealist, leaving the area, gets to hear. Just as well. He is more involved, or "unhealthily obsessed," if you like, with the moment of sun-silence inside the white tile greasy-spoon. It seems like a place he has been (Kenosha, Wisconsin?) already, though he can't remember in what connection. They called him "the Kenosha Kid," though this may be apocryphal. By now, the only other room he can remember being in was a two-color room, nothing but the two exact colors, for all the lamps, furniture, drapes, walls, ceiling, rug, radio, even book jackets in the shelves-
everything
was ei-

ther (1) Deep Cheap-Perfume Aquamarine, or (2) Creamy Chocolate FBI-Shoe Brown. That may've been in Kenosha, may not. If he tries he will remember, in a minute, how he got to the white tiled room half an hour before hose-out time. He is sitting with a coffee cup half full, heavy sugar and cream, crumbs of a pineapple Danish under the saucer where his fingers can't reach. Sooner or later he'll have to move the saucer to get them. He's just holding off. But it isn't sooner and it isn't later, because

the sound-shadow comes down on him,

settles around his table, with the invisible long vortex surfaces that brought it here swooping up away like whorls of an Aetheric Danish, audible only by virtue of accidental bits of sound-debris that may happen to be caught in the eddying, voices far away out at sea
our posi
tion is two seven degrees two six minutes north,
a woman crying in some high-pitched language, ocean waves in gale winds, a voice reciting in Japanese,

Hi wa Ri ni katazu,

Ri wa Ho ni katazu,

Ho wa Ken ni katazu,

Ken wa Ten ni katazu,

which is the slogan of a Kamikaze unit, an Ohka outfit-it means

Injustice cannot conquer Principle, Principle cannot conquer Law, Law cannot conquer Power, Power cannot conquer Heaven.

Hi, Ri, Ho, Ken, Ten go Jap-gibbering away on the long solar eddy and leave the Kenosha Kid at the riveted table, where the roaring of the sun has stopped. He is hearing, for the first time, the mighty river of his blood, the Titan's drum of his heart.

Come into the bulbshine and sit with him, with the stranger at the small public table. It's almost hosing-out time. See if you can sneak in under the shadow too. Even a partial eclipse is better than never finding out-better than cringing the rest of your life under the great Vacuum in the sky they have taught you, and a sun whose silence you never get to hear.

What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is-what if They're
using
it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own indi-

vidual life in time? What if it's
in Their interest
to have you believing that?

"He won't bother us for a while," They tell each other. "I just put him on the Dark Dream." They drink together, shoot very very synthetic drugs into skin or blood, run incredible electronic waveforms into Their skulls, directly into the brainstem, and backhand each other, playfully, with openmouth laugh-
-you know, don't you
is in those ageless eyes… They speak of taking So-and-So and "putting him on the Dream." They use the phrase for each other too, in sterile tenderness, when bad news is passed, at the annual Roasts, when the endless mind-gaming catches a colleague unprepared-"Boy, did we put
him
on the Dream."
You
know, don't you?

witty repartee

Ichizo comes out of the hut, sees Takeshi in a barrel under some palm leaves taking a bath and singing "Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo," some koto tune, twanging through his nose-Ichizo screams runs back inside reemerging with a Japanese Hotchkiss machine gun, a Model 92, begins setting it up with a lot of jujitsu grunting and eyepopping. About the time he's got the ammo belt poised, ready to riddle Takeshi in the tub,

takeshi: Wait a minute, wait a minute! What's all this?

ICHIZO: Oh, it's
you! I
-thought it was General MacArthur, in his-rowboat!

Interesting weapon, the Hotchkiss. Comes in many nationalities, and manages to fit in ethnically wherever it goes. American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee. On the lighter side, the racy 8 mm French Hotchkiss when fired goes haw-haw-haw-haw, just as nasal and debonair as a movie star. As for our cousin John Bull, a lot of British Hotchkiss heavies were either resold privately after World War I, or blow-torched. These melted machine guns will show up now and then in the strangest places. Pirate Prentice saw one in 1936, during his excursion with Scorpia Mossmoon, at the Chelsea home of James Jello, that year's king of Bohemian clowns-but a minor king, from a branch prone to those loathsome inbred diseases, idiocy in the family, sexual peculiarities surfacing into public view at most inappropriate times (a bare penis dangling out of a dumpster one razor-clear and rainwashed morning, in an industrial back-street about to be swarmed up by a crowd of angry workers in buttontop baggy caps carrying spanners