GRAVITY RAINBOW (127 page)

to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong.

Only nearly, because of the defection rate. A few keep going over to the Titans every day, in their striving subcreation (how can flesh tumble and flow so, and never be any less beautiful?), into the rests of the folksong Death (empty stone rooms), out, and through, and down under the net, down down to the uprising.

In harsh-edged echo, Titans stir far below. They are all the presences we are not supposed to be seeing-wind gods, hilltop gods, sunset gods-that we train ourselves away from to keep from looking further even though enough of us do, leave Their electric voices behind in the twilight at the edge of the town and move into the constantly parted cloak of our nightwalk till

Suddenly, Pan-leaping-its face too beautiful to bear, beautiful Serpent, its coils in rainbow lashings in the sky-into the sure bones of fright-

Don't walk home at night through the empty country. Don't go into the forest when the light is too low, even too late in the afternoon-it will get you. Don't sit by the tree like this, with your cheek against the bark. It is impossible in this moonlight to see if you are male or female now. Your hair spills, silver white. Your body under the gray cloth is so exactly vulnerable, so fated to degradation time and again. What if he wakes and finds you've gone? He is now always the same, awake or asleep-he never leaves the single dream, there are no more differences between the worlds: they have become one for him. Thanatz and Margherita may have been his last ties with the old. That may be why they stayed so long, it was his desperation, he wanted to hold on, he needed them… but when he looks at them now he doesn't see them as often any more. They are also losing what reality they brought here, as Gottfried lost all of his to Blicero long ago. Now the boy moves image to image, room to room, sometimes out of the action, sometimes part of it… whatever he has to do, he does. The day has its logic, its needs, no way for him to change it, leave it, or live outside it. He is helpless, he is sheltered secure.

It's only a matter of weeks, and everything will be over, Germany will have lost the War. The routines go on. The boy cannot imagine anything past the last surrender. If he and Blicero are separated, what will happen to the flow of days?

Will Blicero die
no please don't let him die…
(But he will.) "You're going to survive me," he whispers. Gottfried kneels at his feet, wearing the dog collar. Both are in army clothes. It's a long time since either of them dressed as a woman. It is important tonight that they both be men. "Ah, you're so smug, you little bastard…"

It is only another game isn't it, another excuse for a whipping? Gottfried keeps silent. When Blicero wants an answer, he says so. It happens often that he only wants to talk, and that may go on for hours. No one has ever talked to Gottfried before, not like this. His father uttered only commands, sentences, flat judgments. His mother was emotional, a great flow of love, frustration and secret terror passed into him from her, but they never really talked. This is so more-than-real… he feels he must keep every word, that none must be lost. Blicero's words have become precious to him. He understands that Blicero wants to give, without expecting anything back, give away what he loves. He believes that he exists for Blicero, even if the others have all ceased to, that in the new kingdom they pass through now, he is the only other living inhabitant. Was it this he expected to be taken by, taken into? Blicero's seed, sputtering into the poisoned manure of his bowels… it is waste, yes, futility… but… as man and woman, coupled, are shaken to the teeth at their approaches to the gates of life, hasn't he also felt more, worshipfully more past these arrangements for penetration, the style, garments of flaying without passion, sheer hosiery perishable as the skin of a snake, custom manacles and chains to stand for the bondage he feels in his heart… all become theatre as he approached the gates of that Other Kingdom, felt the white gigantic muzzles somewhere inside, expressionless beasts frozen white, pushing him away, the crust and mantle hum of mystery so beyond his poor hearing… there have to be these too, lovers whose genitals
are
consecrated to shit, to endings, to the desperate nights in the streets when connection proceeds out of all personal control, proceeds or fails, a gathering of fallen-as many in acts of death as in acts of life- or a sentence to be alone for another night… Are they to be denied, passed over, all of them?

On his approaches to it, taken inward again and again, Gottfried can only try to keep himself open, to loosen the sphincter of his soul…

"And sometimes I dream of discovering the edge of the World. Finding that there
is
an end. My mountain gentian always knew. But it has cost me so much.

"America
was
the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the

other side. But Europe had gone deeper-into obsession, addiction, away from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn't Europe's Original Sin-the latest name for that is Modern Analysis-but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for.

"In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe carne and established its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now we have
only
the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything… while Death and Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here. It has never, in love, become
one with…

"Is the cycle over now, and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? I dream of a great glass sphere, hollow and very high and far away… the colonists have learned to do without air, it's vacuum inside and out… it's understood the men won't ever return… they are all men. There are ways for getting back, but so complicated, so at the mercy of language, that presence back on Earth is only temporary, and never 'real'… passages out there are dangerous, chances of falling so shining and deep… Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere,
there is always the danger of falling.
Inside the colony, the handful of men have a frosty appearance, hardly solid, no more alive than memories, nothing to touch… only their remote images, black and white film-images, grained, broken year after hoarfrost year out in the white latitudes, in empty colony, with only infrequent visits from the accidental, like me…

"I wish I could recover it all. Those men had once been through a tragic day-ascent, fire, failure, blood. The events of that day, so long ago, had put them into exile forever… no, they weren't really spacemen. Out here, they wanted to dive between the worlds, to fall, turn, reach and swing on journeys curved through the shining, through the winter nights of space-their dreams were of rendezvous, of cosmic trapeze acts carried on in loneliness, in sterile grace, in certain knowledge that no one would ever be watching, that loved ones had been lost forever…

"The connections they hoped for would always miss by trillions of

dark miles, by years of frozen silence. But I wanted to bring you back the story. I remember that you used to whisper me to sleep with stories of us one day living on the Moon… are you beyond that by now? You've got much older. Can you feel in your body how strongly I have infected you with my dying? I was meant to: when a certain time has come, I think that we are all meant to. Fathers are carriers of the virus of Death, and sons are the infected… and, so that the infection may be more certain, Death in its ingenuity has contrived to make the father and son beautiful to each other as Life has made male and female… oh Gottfried of course yes you are beautiful to me but I'm dying… I want to get through it as honestly as I can, and your immortality rips at my heart-can't you see why I might want to destroy that, oh that
stupid clarity
in your eyes… when I see you in morning and evening ranks, so open, so ready to take my sickness in and shelter it, shelter it inside your own little ignorant love…

"Your love." He nods several times. But his eyes are too dangerously spaced beyond the words, stunned irreversibly away from real Gottfried, away from the weak, the failed smells of real breath, by barriers stern and clear as ice, and hopeless as the one-way flow of European time…

"I want to break out-to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become…"

Gottfried kneels, numb, waiting.
Blicero is looking at him.
Deeply: his face whiter than the boy has ever seen it. A raw spring wind beats the canvas of their tent. It's near sunset. In a moment Blicero must go out to take evening reports. His hands rest near a mound of cigarette butts in a mess tray. His myopic witch's eyes, through the thick lenses, may be looking into Gottfried's for the first time. Gottfried cannot look away. He knows, somehow, incompletely, that he has a decision to make… that Blicero expects something from him… but Blicero has always made the decisions.
Why is he suddenly asking…

It all poises here. Passageways of routine, still cogent enough, still herding us through time… the iron rockets waiting outside… the birth-scream of the latest spring torn across rainy miles of Saxony, route-sides littered with last envelopes, stripped gears, seized bearings, rotted socks and skivvies fragrant now with fungus and mud. If there is still hope for Gottfried here in this wind-beat moment, then there is hope elsewhere. The scene itself must be read as a card: what is to come. Whatever has happened since to the figures in it (roughly

drawn in soiled white, army gray, spare as a sketch on a ruined wall) it is preserved, though it has no name, and, like The Fool, no agreed assignment in the deck.

Here's Enzian ramrodding his brand-new rocket through the night. When it rains, when the mist is heavy, before the watch can quite get tarps over, the glossy skin of the rocket is seen to've turned to dark slate. Perhaps, after all, just before the firing, it will be painted black.

It is the 00001, the second in its series.

Russian loudspeakers across the Elbe have called to you. American rumors have come jiving in to the fires at night and summoned, against the ground of your hopes, the yellow American deserts, Red Indians, blue sky, green cactus. How did you feel about the old Rocket? Not now that it's giving you job security, but back then-do you remember any more what it was like wheeling them out by hand, a dozen of you that morning, a guard of honor in the simple encounter of your bodies with its inertia… all your faces drowning in the same selfless look-the moires of personality softening, softening, each sweep of surf a little more out of focus till all has become subtle grades of cloud-all hatred, all love, wiped away for the short distance you had to push it over the winter berm, aging men in coatskirts flapping below your boottops, breaths in white spouts breaking turbulent as the waves behind you… Where will you all go? What empires, what deserts? You caressed its body, brute, freezing through your gloves, here together without shame or reticence you twelve struggled, in love, on this Baltic shore-not Peenemunde perhaps, not official Peene-munde… but once, years ago… boys in white shirts and dark vests and caps… on some beach, a children's resort, when we were younger… at Test Stand VII the image, at last, you couldn't leave-the way the wind smelled salt and dying, the sound of winter surf, the premonition of rain you could feel at the back of your neck, stirring in the clipped hairs… At Test Stand VII, the holy place.

But young men have all grown older, and there's little color in the scene… they are pushing into the sun, the glare strikes them squinting and grinning, bright here as the morning shift at Siemens with the centaurs struggling high on the wall, the clock without numerals, bicycles squeaking, lunchpails and lunchbags and the lowered faces of the trudging dutiful streams of men and women into the dark openings

… it resembles a Daguerreotype taken of the early Raketen-Stadt by a forgotten photographer in 1856: this is the picture, in fact, that killed him-he died a week later from mercury poisoning after inhaling fumes of the heated metal in his studio… well, he was a habitue of mercury fumes in moderate doses, he felt it did his brain some good, and that may account for pictures like "Der Raketen-Stadt": it shows, from a height that is topographically impossible in Germany, the ceremonial City, fourfold as expected, an eerie precision to all lines and shadings architectural and human, built in mandalic form like a Herero village, overhead a magnificent sky, marble carried to a wild-ness of white billow and candescence… there seems to be building, or demolition, under way in various parts of the City, for nothing here remains the same, we can see the sweat in individual drops on the workers' dark necks as they struggle down in the bonedamp cellars… a bag of cement has broken, and its separate motes hang in the light… the City will always be changing, new tire-treads in the dust, new cigarette wrappers in the garbage… engineering changes to the Rocket create new routes of supply, new living arrangements, reflected in traffic densities as viewed from this unusual height-there are indeed tables of Functions to get from such City-changes to Rocket-modifications: no more than an extension, really, of the techniques by which Constance Babington-Smith and her colleagues at R. A. F. Medmenham discovered the Rocket back in 1943 in recco photographs of Peenemunde.