GRAVITY RAINBOW (129 page)

Chomp, chomp, hmm good evening ladies, nice job on the lashings there Ljubica, chomp, how's the head Mieczislav, bet they were surprised when the bullets
bounced off!
heh-heh chomp, chomp, evening "Sparks"
(Ozohande),
anything from Hamburg yet on the liquid oxygen, damned Oururu better come through-ru, or we gonna have a bad-ass time trying to lay low till he do-ru-oh shit who's
that
-

It's Josef Ombindi's who it is, leader of the Empty Ones. But till he stopped smiling, for a few seconds there, Enzian thought it was Oru-tyene's ghost. "The word is that the Okandio child was killed too."

"Not so." Chomp.

"She was my first try at preventing a birth."

"So you maintain a deadly interest in her," chomp, chomp. He knows that's not it, but the man annoys him.

"Suicide is a freedom even the lowest enjoy. But you would deny that freedom to a people."

"No ideology. Tell me if your friend Oururu is going to have the LOX generator ready to roll. Or if there is a funny surprise, instead, waiting for me in Hamburg."

"All right, no ideology. You would deny
your
people a freedom even
you
enjoy, Oberst Nguarorerue." Smiling again like the ghost of

the man who fell tonight. Probing for the spot, jabbing what? what? want to say
what,
Oberst? till he sees the tiredness in Enzian's face, and understands it is not a trick. "A freedom," whispering smiling, a love song under black skies edged all around in acid orange, a commercial full of Cathar horror at the practice of imprisoning souls in the bodies of newborns, "a freedom you may exercise soon. I hear your soul talking in its sleep. I know you better than anyone."

Chomp, chomp, oh I had to give him the watch lists didn't I. Oh, am I a fool. Yes, he can choose the night… "You're a hallucination, Ombindi," putting just enough panic into his voice so that if it doesn't work it'll still be a good insult, "I'm projecting my own death-wish, and it comes out looking like you. Uglier then I ever dreamed." Giving him the Spaceman Smile for a full 30 seconds, after only 10 seconds of which Ombindi has already begun to shift his eyes, sweat, press his lips together, look at the ground, turn away, look back, but Enzian prolongs it, no mercy tonight my people, Spaceman Smile turning everything inside a mile radius to frozen ice-cream colors NOW that we're all in the mood, how about installing the battery covers
anyway,
Djuro? That's right, X-ray vision, saw right through the tarp, write it down as another miracle… you there Vlasta, take the next radio watch, forget what it says on the list, there's never been any more than routine traffic logged with Hamburg and I wanna know why, wanna know what
does
come through when Ombindi's people are on watch… communication on the trek command frequency is by CW dots and dashes-no voices to betray. But operators swear they can tell the individual sending-hands. Vlasta is one of his best operators, and she can do good hand-imitations of most of Ombindi's people. Been practicing up, just in case.

The others, who've been all along wondering if Enzian was
ever
going to move on Ombindi, can tell now by the look on his face and the way he's walking through-So, with little more than touches to the brim of his forage cap, signaling Plan So-and-So, the Ombindi people are quietly, without violence, relieved of all watch duties tonight, though still keeping their weapons and ammo. No one has ever taken those away. There's no reason to. Enzian is no more vulnerable now than he ever was, which was plenty.

The fat boy Ludwig is a white glowworm in the mist. The game is that he's scouting for a vast white army, always at his other flank, ready to come down off of the high ground at a word from Ludwig, and smear the blacks into the earth. But he would never call them down. He would rather go with the trek, invisible. There is no hustling for

him down there. Their journey doesn't include him. They have somewhere to go. He feels he must go with them, but separate, a stranger, no more or less at the mercy of the
Zone…

It's a bridge over a stream. Very seldom will traffic come by overhead. You can look up and see a whole slope of cone-bearing trees rushing up darkly away from one side of the road. Trees creak in sorrow for the engineered wound through their terrain, their terrenity or earth-hood. Brown trout flick by in the stream. Inside the culvert, other shelterers have written on the damp arch of wall.
Take me, Stretchfoot,
what keeps you? Nothing worse than these days. You will be like gentle sleep. Isn't it only sleep? Please. Come soon
-
Private Rudolf Effig, 12.iv.45.
A drawing, in Commando blackface-grease, of a man looking closely at a flower. In the distance, or smaller, appears to be a woman, approaching. Or some kind of elf, or something. The man isn't looking at her (or it). In the middle distance are haystacks. The flower is shaped like the cunt of a young girl. There is a luminary looking down from the sky, a face on it totally at peace, like the Buddha's. Underneath, someone else has written, in English:
Good drawing! Finish!
and underneath that, in another hand,
It
IS
finished, you nit. And so are you.
Nearby, in German,
I
loved you Lisele with all my heart
-no name, rank, unit or serial number… Initials, tic-tac-toe games you can tell were played alone, a game of hangman in which the mystery word was never filled

in: GE____________________ RAT ____________________ and the hanged body visible almost at the other

end of the culvert, even this early in the day, because it's a narrow road, and no real gradient of shadow. A bicycle is incompletely hidden in the weeds at the side of the road. A late butterfly pale as an eyelid winks aimlessly out over the stalks of new hay. High up on the slope, someone is swinging an ax-blade into a living tree… and here is where and when the young witch finds Vaslav Tchitcherine at last.

He's sitting by the stream, not dejected, nor tranquil, just waiting. A passive solenoid waiting to be sprung. At her step, his head lifts, and he sees her. She is the first presence since last night he's looked at and seen. Which is her doing. The charm she recited then, fastening the silk crotch torn from her best underpants across the eyes of the doll,
his
eyes, Eastern and liquid, though they'd been only sketched in clay with her long fingernail, was this:

May he be blind now to all but me. May the burning sun of love

shine in his eyes forever. May this, my own darkness, shelter him. By all the holy names of God, by the Angels Melchidael, Yahoel, Anafiel, and the great Metatron, I conjure you, and all who are with you, to go and do my will.

The secret is in the concentrating. She inhibits everything else: the moon, the wind in the junipers, the wild dogs out ranging in the middle of the night. She fixes on Tchitcherine's memory and his wayward eyes, and lets it build, pacing her orgasm to the incantation, so that by the end, naming the last Names of Power, she's screaming, coming, without help from her fingers, which are raised to the sky.

Later she breaks a piece of the magic bread in half, and eats one part. The other is for Tchitcherine.

He takes the bread now. The stream rushes. A bird sings.

Toward nightfall, the lovers lying naked on a cold grass bank, the sound of a convoy approaches on the little road. Tchitcherine pulls on his trousers and climbs up to see if he can beg some food, or cigarettes. The black faces pass by, mba-kayere, some glancing at him curiously, others too involved with their own exhaustion, or with keeping a tight guard on a covered wagon containing the warhead section of the 00001. Enzian on his motorcyle stops for a moment, mba-kayere, to talk to the scarred, unshaven white. They're in the middle of the bridge. They talk broken German. Tchitcherine manages to hustle half a pack of American cigarettes and three raw potatoes. The two men nod, not quite formally, not quite smiling, Enzian puts his bike in gear and returns to his journey. Tchitcherine lights a cigarette, watching them down the road, shivering in the dusk. Then he goes back to his young girl beside the stream. They will have to locate some firewood before all the light is gone.

This is magic. Sure-but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it.

By now the City is grown so tall that elevators are long-haul affairs, with lounges inside: padded seats and benches, snack bars, newsstands where you can browse through a whole issue of
Life
between stops. For those faint hearts who first thing on entering seek out the Certificate of Inspection on the elevator wall, there are young women in green overseas caps, green velvet basques, and tapered yellowstripe

trousers-a feminine zootsuit effect-who've been well-tutored in all kinds of elevator lore, and whose job it is to set you at ease. "In the early days," pipes young Mindy Bloth of Carbon City, Illinois, smiling vacantly away in profile, close by the brass moire of diamond-blurs passing, passing in vertical thousands-her growing-up face, dreamy and practical as the Queen of Cups, never quite looks for you, is always refracted away some set angle in the gold-brown medium between you… it's morning, and the flower man at the rear of the elevator, down a step or two, behind the little fountain, has brought lilacs and irises fresh and early- "before the Vertical Solution, all transport was, in effect, two-dimensional-ah, I can guess
your
question-" as a smile, familiar and unrefracted for this old elevator regular, passes between girl and heckler- " 'What about
airplane flight,
eh?' That's what you were going to ask wasn't it!" as a matter of fact he was going to ask about the Rocket and everyone knows it, but the subject is under a curious taboo, and polite Mindy has brought in now a chance for actual violence, the violence of repression-the bleached colors of a September morning sky opposite the sunrise, and the filing-edge of a morning wind-into this intimate cubic environment moving so smoothly upward through space (a bubble rising through Castile soap where all around it's green lit by slow lightning), past levels already a-bustle with heads seething brighter than sperm and eggs in the sea, past some levels left dark, unheated, somehow forbidden, looking oddly
wasted,
levels where nobody's been since the War
aaaaa-ahhh!
howling past, "a common aerodynamic effect," explains patient Mindy, "involving our own boundary layer and the shape of the orifice as we pass it-" "Oh you mean that before we get to it," hollers another heckler, "it's a different
shape?"
"Yup, and after we go by it too, Mac," Mindy brushes him off, broadly mugging the same thing with her mouth, purse-relax-smile-these jagged openings howling, hauling forlorn and downward, already stories gone beneath the soles of your shoes, a howl bent downward like a harmonica note-but why don't any of the
busy
floors make a sound going by? where the lights are shining warm as Xmas-week parties, floors that beckon you into densities of glass faceting or screening, good-natured coffee-urn grousing, well golly, here goes another day, howdy Marie, where you ladies hiding the drawings on the SG-1… what do you mean
Field Service
has them… again? doesn't Engineering Design have any rights, it's like watching your child run away, to see a piece of equipment get set out to the Field
(Der Veld).
That it is. A broken heart, a mother's prayer… Slowly, the voices of the Lubeck Hitler

Youth Glee Club fade in behind (nowadays the boys sing at officers' clubs all across the Zone under their road name, "The Lederhosen-ers." They are dressed appropriately, and sing-when the house feels right-with their backs turned to the audiences, their sly little faces turned over shoulders to flirt with the fighting men:

But sharper than a Mother's tears Are the beatings Mutti gave to me…

with a beautifully coordinated wiggle then to each pair of buttocks gleaming through leather so tight that the clenching of gluteal muscles is plainly visible, and you can bet there isn't a cock in the room doesn't stir at the sight, and scarcely an eye that can't hallucinate that maternal birch smacking down across each naked ass, the delicious red lines, the stern and beautiful female face, smiling down through lowered lashes, only a glint of light off of each eye-when you were first learning to crawl, it was her calves and feet you saw the most of-they replaced her breasts as sources of strength, as you learned the smell of her leather shoes, and the sovereign smell rose as far as you could see-to her knees, perhaps-depending on fashion that year-to her thighs. You were infant in the presence of leather legs, leather feet…).

"Isn't it possible," Thanatz whispers, "that we all learned that classical fantasy at Mother's knees? That somewhere tucked in the brain's plush album is always a child in Fauntleroy clothes, a pretty French maid begging to be whipped?"

Ludwig shifts his rather fat ass under Thanatz's hand. Both have perimeters they are not supposed to cross. But they have crept away anyhow, to a piece of the interface, a cold thicket they've pounded down a space in the middle of, to lie on. "Ludwig, a little S and M never hurt anybody."

"Who said that?"

"Sigmund Freud. How do I know? But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but
that
one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In
any
kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away."

This is Sado-anarchism and Thanatz is its leading theoretician in the Zone these days.