GRAVITY RAINBOW (22 page)

The lightning
-

And Slothrop is yawning "What time is it?" and Darlene is swimming up from sleep. When, with no warning, the room is full of noon, blinding white, every hair flowing up from her nape clear as day, as the concussion drives in on them, rattling the building to its poor bones, beating in the windowshade, gone all to white and black lattice of mourning-cards. Overhead, catching up, the rocket's rush comes swelling, elevated express down, away into ringing silence. Outside glass has been breaking, long, dissonant cymbals up the street. The floor has twitched like a shaken carpet, and the bed with it. Slothrop's penis has sprung erect, aching. To Darlene, suddenly awake, heart pounding very fast, palms and fingers in fear's pain, this hardon has seemed reasonably part of the white light, the loud blast. By the time the explosion has died to red strong flickering on the shade, she's begun to wonder… about the two together… but they're fucking now, and what does it matter, but God's sake why shouldn't this stupid Blitz be good for something?

And who's that, through the crack in the orange shade, breathing carefully? Watching? And where, keepers of maps, specialists at surveillance, would you say the next one will fall?

The very first touch: he'd been saying something mean, a bit of the usual Mexico self-reproach-ah you don't know me I'm really a bastard sort ofthing-"No," she went to put her fingers to his lips, "don't say that…"As she reached, without thinking he grabbed her wrist, moved her hand away, pure defense-but kept holding her, by the wrist. They were eyes-to-eyes, and neither would look away. Roger brought her hand to his lips and kissed it then, still watching her eyes. A pause, his heart in sharp knocks against the front of his chest… "Ohh…" the sound rushing out of her, and she came in to hug him, completely let-go, open, shivering as they held each other. She told him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. And

the first time he touched her cunt, squeezed Jessica's soft cunt through her knickers, the trembling began again high in her thighs, growing, taking her over. She came twice before cock was ever officially put inside cunt, and this is important to both of them though neither has figured out why, exactly.

Whenever it happens, though, the light always gets very red for them.

Once they met at a teashop: she was wearing a red sweater with short sleeves, and her bare arms glowed red by her sides. She hadn't any make-up on, the first time he'd seen her so. Walking to the car, she takes his hand and puts it, for a moment, lightly between her moving legs. Roger's heart grows erect, and comes. That's really how it feels. Up sharply to skin level in a V around his centerline, washing over his nipples… it is love, it is amazing. Even when she isn't there, after a dream, at a face in the street that might against chance be Jessica's, Roger can never control it, he's in its grasp.

About Beaver, or Jeremy, as he is known to his mother, Roger tries not to think any more than he has to. Of course he agonizes over technical matters. She cannot possibly-can she?-be Doing The Same Things with Jeremy. Does Jeremy ever kiss her cunt, for example? Could
that prig
actually-does she reach around as they're fucking a-and slide a mischievous finger, his English rose,
into Jeremy's
asshole? Stop, stop this (but does she suck his cock? Has he ever had his habitually insolent face between her lovely buttocks?) no use, it's youthful folly time here and you're better off up at the Tivoli watching Maria Montez and Jon Hall, or looking for leopards or peccaries in Regents Park Zoo, and wondering if it'll rain before 4:30.

The time Roger and Jessica have spent together, totaled up, still only comes to hours. And all their spoken words to less than one average SHAEF memorandum. And there is no way, first time in his career, that the statistician can make these figures mean anything.

Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.

Apart is for all their flip film-dialogue, scenarios they make up to play alone for themselves in the nights with the Bofors door-knocking against her sky, with his wind humming
among
the loops of barbed wire down along the beach. The Mayfair Hotel. "We
are
quite the jet-propelled one aren't we, only half an hour late."

"Well," Wrens and NAAFI girls, jeweled young widows side-glancing on by, "I'm
sure you've
put the time to good use."

"Time enough for several assignations," he replies, looking elabo-

rately at his watch, worn WWII style on the inside of his wrist, "and by
now,
I should say, a confirmed pregnancy or two, if not indeed-" "Ah," she blithely jumps (but upward, not on), "that
reminds
me…" "Yaaahhh!" Roger reeling back to a potted plant, among the lilting saxophones of Roland Peachey and his Orchestra playing "There, I Said It Again," and cowering.

"So,
thaies
on your mind. If mind is the word I want." They confuse everyone. They look so innocent. People immediately want to protect them: censoring themselves away from talk of death, business, duplicity when Roger and Jessica are there. It's all shortages, songs and boy friends, films and blouses…

With her hair pulled back of her ears, her soft chin in profile, she looks only 9 or 10, alone by windows, blinking into the sun, turning her head on the light counterpane, coming in tears, child's reddening wrinkling face about to cry, going
oh, oh…

One night in the dark quilt-and-cold refuge of their bed, drowsing to and fro himself, he licked Jessica to sleep. When she felt his first warm breaths touch her labia, she shivered and cried like a cat. Two or three notes, it seemed, that sounded together, hoarse, haunted, blowing with snowflakes remembered from around nightfall. Trees outside sifting the wind, out of her sight the lorries forever rushing down the streets and roads, behind houses, across canals or river, beyond the simple park. Oh and the dogs and cats who went padding in the fine snow…

"… pictures, well scenes, keep flashing
in,
Roger. By themselves, I

mean I'm not
making
them…"A bright swarm of them is passing by,

against the low isotonic glimmer of the ceiling. He and she lie and

breathe mouth-up. His soft cock drools down around his thigh,

the downhill one, closest to Jessica. The night room heaves a sigh,

yes Heaves, a Sigh-old-fashioned comical room, oh me I'm hope

less, born a joker never change, flirting away through the mirrorframe

in something green-striped, pantalooned, and ruffled-meantime

though, it
is
quaint, most rooms today hum you know, have been

known also to "breathe," yes even
wait in hushed expectancy
and that

ought to be the rather sinister tradition here, long slender creatures,

heavy perfume and capes in rooms assailed by midnight, pierced with

spiral stairways, blue-petaled pergolas, an ambience in which no one,

however provoked or out of touch, my dear young lady, ever, Heaves,

a Sigh. It is not done. I

But here. Oh,
this
young lady. Checked gingham. Ragged eye- '/

brows, grown wild. Red velvet. On a dare once, she took off her blouse, motoring up on the trunk road near Lower Beeding.

"My God she's gone insane, what
is
this, why do they all come to
me?"

"Well, ha, ha," Jessica twirling the necktie of her Army blouse like a stripper, "you uh, said I was afraid to. Di'n't you. Called me 'cowardly, cowardly custard' or something, 's I recall-" No brassiere of course, she never wears one.

"Look here," glaring sideways, "do you know you can get arrested? Never mind
you,"
just occurring to him, here, "
I'll
get arrested!"

"They'll blame it all on you, la, la." Lower teeth edging out in a mean-girl's smile. "I'm just an innocent lamb and this-" flinging a little arm out, striking light from the fair hairs on her forearm, her small breasts bouncing free, "this Roger-the-rake! here, this awful beast! makes me perform, these degrading…"

Meantime, the most gigantic lorry Roger has ever seen in his
life
has manoeuvred steel-shuddering nearby, and now not only the driver, but also several-well, what appear to be horrid…
midgets,
in strange operetta uniforms actually, some sort of Central European government-in-exile, all of them crammed somehow into the high-set cab, all are staring down, scuffling like piglets on a sow for position, eyes popping, swarthy, mouths leaking spit, to take in the spectacle of his Jessica Swanlake scandalously bare-breasted and himself desperately looking to slow down and drop behind the lorry-except that now, behind Roger, pressing him on, in fact, at a speed identical with the lorry's, has appeared, oh shit it
is,
a military police car. He can't slow down, and if he speeds up, they'll
really
get suspicious…

"Uh, Jessie, please get dressed, urn, would you love?" Making a show of looking for his comb which is, as usual, lost, suspect is known as a notorious ctenophile…

The driver of the huge, loud lorry now tries to get Roger's attention, the other midgets crowding at the windows calling, "Hey! Hey! " and emitting oily, guttural laughs. Their leader speaks English with some liquid, unspeakably nasty European accent. Lot of winking and nudging up there now, too: "Meester! Ay, zhu! Wet a meeneh', eh?" More laughter. Roger in the rearview mirror sees English cop-faces pink with rectitude, red insignia leaning, bobbing, consulting, turning sharply now and then to stare ahead at the couple in the Jaguar who're acting so-"What
are
they
doing,
Prigsbury, can you make it out?"

"Appears to be a man and a woman, sir."

"Ass." And it's out with the black binoculars.

Through rain… then through dreaming glass, green with the evening. And herself in a chair, old-fashioned bonneted, looking west over the deck of Earth, inferno red at its edges, and further in the brown and gold clouds…

Then, suddenly, night: The empty rocking chair lit staring chalk blue by-is it the moon, or some other light from the sky? just the hard chair, empty now, in the very clear night, and this cold light coming down…

The images go, flowering, in and out, some lovely, some just awful… but she's snuggled in here with her lamb, her Roger, and how she loves the line of his neck all at once so -why there it is right
there,
the back of his bumpy head like a boy of ten's. She kisses him up and down the sour salt reach of skin that's taken her so, taken her nightlit along this high tendoning, kisses him as if kisses were flowing breath itself, and never ending.

One morning-he had not seen her for about a fortnight-he woke in his hermit's cell at "The White Visitation" with a hardon, scratchy eyelids and a long pale brown hair tangled in his mouth. It wasn't one of his own hairs. It wasn't anybody's he could think of but Jessica's. But it couldn't be-he hadn't seen her. He sniffled a couple of times, then sneezed. Morning developed out the window. His right canine ached. He unreeled the long hair, beaded with saliva, tooth-tartar, mouth-breather's morning fur, and stared at it. How'd it get here? Eerie, dearie. A bit of the je ne sais quoi de sinistre, all right. He had to piss. Shuffling to the lavatory, his graying government flannel tucked limply inside the cord of his pajamas, it came to him: what if it's some mauve turn-of-the-century tale of ghostly revenge and this hair here's some First Step… Oh, paranoia? You should've seen him going through all the combinations as he moved around doing lavatory things among the stumbling, farting, razor-scraping, hacking, sneezing and snot-crusted inmates of Psi Section. Only later in this did he even begin to think of Jessica-of her safety. Thoughtful Roger. What if, if she'd died in the night, an accident at the magazines… with this hair the only good-by her ghostly love had been able to push back through to this side, to the only one who'd ever mattered… Some spider-statistician: his eyes had actually filled with tears before the Next Idea-
oh.
Oboy. Turn off that faucet, Dorset, and get hep to
this.
He stood, half-stooped, over the washbasin, paralyzed, putting his worry for Jessica on Hold for a bit, wanting very much to look back

over his shoulder, even into the, the old mirror, you know, see what they're up to, but too frozen to risk even that…
now
… oh yes a most superb possibility has found seedbed in his brain, and here it is. What if they are all, all these Psi Section freaks here, ganged up on him in secret? O.K.? Yes: suppose they
can
see into your mind! a-and how about-what if it's
hypnotism?
Eh? Jesus: then a whole number of
other
occult things such as: astral projection, brain control (nothing occult about
that),
secret curses for impotence, boils, madness, yaaahhh-
potions!
(as he straightens at last and back in his mind's eyes to his office now glances,
very
gingerly, at the coffee mess, oh
God…
), psychic-unity-with-the-Controlling-Agency such that Roger would be he and he Roger, yes yes a number of these notions rambling through his mind here, none of them really pleasant, either-especially inside this staff latrine, with Gavin Trefoil's face this morning colored bright magenta, a clover blossom flashing in the wind, Ronald Cherrycoke hawking fine-marbled amber phlegm into the basin-what's all this, who
are all these people…
Freaks!
Freeeeaks!
He's surrounded! they've been out there night and day all the war long tapping his brain, telepaths, witches, Satanic operators of all descriptions tuning in on
everything
-even when he and Jessica are in bed
fu
cking
-

Try to hold it down old man, panic if you must but later, not here… Faint washroom light bulbs deepen the thousands of old clustered water and soap spots on the mirrors to an interfeathering of clouds, of skin and smoke as he swings his head past, lemon and beige, oilsmoke black and twilight brown in here, very loosely crumbled, that's the texture…