GRAVITY RAINBOW (6 page)

In 1931, the year of the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire, young Tyrone was visiting his aunt and uncle in Lenox. It was in April, but for a second or two as he was coming awake in the strange room and the racket of big and little cousins' feet down the stairs, he thought of winter, because so often he'd been wakened like this, at this hour of sleep, by Pop, or Hogan, bundled outside still blinking through an overlay of dream into the cold to watch the Northern Lights.

They scared the shit out of him. Were the radiant curtains just about to swing open? What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to show him?

But this was a spring night, and the sky was gusting red, warm-orange, the sirens howling in the valleys from Pittsfield, Lenox, and Lee-neighbors stood out on their porches to stare up at the shower of sparks falling down on the mountainside… "Like a meteor shower," they said, "Like cinders from the Fourth of July…" it was 1931, and those were the comparisons. The embers fell on and on for five hours while kids dozed and grownups got to drink coffee and tell fire stories from other years.

But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the next moment, all of it, the complete night,
-were
to go out of control and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at…

6:43:16 BDST-
in the sky right now
here is the same unfolding, just about to break through, his face deepening with its light, everything about to rush away and he to lose himself, just as his countryside has

ever proclaimed… slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose windows taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the faces above the pulpits defining grace, swearing
this is how it does happen
-
yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud.
…

On the wall, in an ornate fixture of darkening bronze, a gas jet burns, laminar and gently singing-adjusted to what scientists of the last century called a "sensitive flame": invisible at the base, as it issues from its orifice, fading upward into smooth blue light that hovers several inches above, a glimmering small cone that can respond to the most delicate changes in the room's air pressure. It registers visitors as they enter and leave, each curious and civil as if the round table held some game of chance. The circle of sitters is not at all distracted or hindered. None of your white hands or luminous trumpets here.

Camerons officers in parade trews, blue puttees, dress kilts drift in conversing with enlisted Americans… there are clergymen, Home Guard or Fire Service just off duty, folds of wool clothing heavy with smoke smell, everyone grudging an hour's sleep and looking it… ancient Edwardian ladies in crepe de Chine, West Indians softly plaiting vowels round less flexible chains of Russian-Jewish consonants… Most skate tangent to the holy circle, some stay, some are off again to other rooms, all without breaking in on the slender medium who sits nearest the sensitive flame with his back to the wall, reddish-brown curls tightening close as a skullcap, high forehead unwrinkled, dark lips moving now effortless, now in pain:

"Once transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero, Roland found that all the signs had turned against him… Lights he had studied so well as one of you, position and movement, now gathered there at the opposite end, all in dance… irrelevant dance. None of Blicero's traditional progress, no something new… alien… Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him. Discovered it so… so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it. The wind had been blowing all year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the secular wind… he means, only his personal wind. Yet… Selena, the wind, the wind's everywhere…"

Here the medium breaks off, is silent awhile… one groan… a quiet, desperate moment. "Selena. Selena. Have you gone, then?"

"No, my dear," her cheeks molded with previous tears, "I'm listen-ing."

"It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was
inside,
do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces'-to veer into any wind. As if…

"A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could
create itself-
ils
own logic, momentum, style, from
inside.
Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened- that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can
do.
Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable…"

"More Ouspenskian nonsense," whispers a lady brushing by on the arm of a dock worker. Odors of Diesel fuel and Sous le Vent mingle as they pass. Jessica Swanlake, a young rosy girl in the uniform of an ATS private, noticing the prewar perfume, looks up, hmm, the frock she imagines is about 15 guineas and who knows how many coupons, probably from Harrods
and would do more for me,
she's also sure. The lady, suddenly looking back over her shoulder, smiles oh, yes? My gosh, did she hear? Around
this
place almost certainly.

Jessica's been standing near the seance table with a handful of darts idly plucked from the board on the wall, her head bent, pale nape and top vertebra visible above the brown wool collar and through some of her lighter brown hair, fallen either side along her cheeks. Brass throats and breasts warm to her blood, quake in the hollow of her hand. She seems herself, gentling their feathered crosses, brushing with fingertips, to have slid into a shallow trance…

Outside, rolling from the east, comes the muffled rip of another rocket bomb. The windows rattle, the floor shakes. The sensitive flame dives for shelter, shadows across the table sent adance, darkening toward the other room-then it leaps high, the shadows drawing inward again, fully two feet, and disappears completely. Gas hisses on in the dim room. Milton Gloaming, who achieved perfect tripos at Cambridge ten years ago, abandons his shorthand to rise and go shut the gas off.

It seems the right moment now for Jessica to throw a dart: one dart. Hair swinging, breasts bobbing marvelously beneath each heavy wool lapel. A hiss of air, whack: into the sticky fibers, into the dead center. Milton Gloaming cocks an eyebrow. His mind, always gathering correspondences, thinks it has found a new one.

The medium, irritable now, has begun to drift back out of his trance. Anybody's guess what's happening over on the other side. This sitting, like any, needs not only its congenial circle here and secular, but also a basic, four-way entente which oughtn't, any link of it, be broken: Roland Feldspath (the spirit), Peter Sachsa (the control), Car-roll Eventyr (the medium), Selena (the wife and survivor). Somewhere, through exhaustion, redirection, gusts of white noise out in the aether, this arrangement has begun now to dissolve. Relaxation, chairs squeaking, sighs and throatclearings… Milton Gloaming fusses with his notebook, shuts it abruptly.

Presently Jessica comes wandering over. No sign of Roger and she's not sure he wants her to come looking for him, and Gloaming, though shy, isn't as horrid as some of Roger's other friends…

"Roger says that now you'll count up all those words you copied and graph them or something," brightly to head off any comment on the dart incident, which she'd rather avoid. "Do you do it only for seances?"

"Automatic texts," girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, "one or two Ouija-board episodes, yes yes… we-we're trying to develop a vocabulary of curves-certain pathologies, certain characteristic shapes you see-"

"I'm not sure that I-"

"Well. Recall Zipf's Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word P sub n against its rank-order
n
on logarithmic axes," babbling into her silence, even her bewilderment graceful, "we should of course get something like a straight line… however we've data that suggest the curves for certain-conditions, well they're actually quite different-schizophrenics for example tend to run a bit flatter in the upper part then progressively steeper-a sort of bow shape… I think with this chap, this Roland, that we're on to a classical paranoiac-"

"Ha."
That's
a word she knows. "Thought I saw you brighten up there when he said 'turned against.' "

" 'Against,' 'opposite,' yes you'd be amazed at the frequency with this one."

"What's the
most
frequent word?" asks Jessica. "Your number one."

"The same as it's always been at these affairs," replies the statistician, as if everyone knew: "death."

An elderly air-raid warden, starchy and frail as organdy, stands on tiptoe to relight the sensitive flame.

"Incidentally, ah, where's your mad young gentleman gone off to?"

"Roger's with Captain Prentice." Waving vaguely. "The usual Mysterious Microfilm Drill." Being transacted in some distant room, across a crown-and-anchor game with which chance has very little to do, billows of smoke and chatter, Falkman and His Apache Band subdued over the BBC, chunky pints and slender sherry glasses, winter rain at the windows. Time for closeting, gas logs, shawls against the cold night, snug with your young lady or old dutch or, as here at Snox-all's, in good company. Here's a shelter-perhaps a real node of tranquillity among several scattered throughout this long wartime, where they're gathering for purposes not entirely in the martial interest.

Pirate Prentice feels something of this, obliquely, by way of class nervousness really: he bears his grin among these people here like a phalanx. He learned it at the films-it is the exact mischievous Irish grin your Dennis Morgan chap goes about cocking down at the black smoke vomiting from each and every little bucktooth yellow rat he shoots down.

It's as useful to him as he is to the Firm-who, it is well known, will use anyone, traitors, murderers, perverts, Negroes, even women, to get what They want. They may not've been that sure of Pirate's usefulness at first, but later, as it developed, They were to grow very sure, indeed.

"Major-General, you can't actually give your support to this."

"We're watching him around the clock. He certainly isn't leaving the premises physically."

"Then he has a confederate. Somehow-hypnosis, drugs, I don't know-they're getting to his man and tranquilizing him. For God's sake, next you'll be consulting horoscopes."

"Hitler does."

"Hitler is an inspired man. But you and I are employees, remember…"

After that first surge of interest, the number of clients assigned to Pirate tapered off some. At the moment he carries what he feels is a comfortable case load. But it's not what he really wants. They will not understand, the gently bred maniacs of S.O.E.
ah very good, Captain
rattling sitreps, shuffling boots, echoes off of Government eyeglasses
jolly good and why not do it actually for us sometime at the Club…

Pirate wants Their trust, the good-whisky-and-cured-Latakia scent of Their rough love. He wants understanding from his
own
lot, not these bookish sods and rationalized freaks here at Snoxall's so dedi-

cated to Science, so awfully tolerant that this (he regrets it with all his heart) may be the only place in the reach of war's empire that he does feel less than a stranger…

"It's not at all clear," Roger Mexico's been saying, "what they have in mind, not at all, the Witchcraft Act's more than 200 years old, it's a relic of an entirely different age, another way of thinking. Suddenly here we are 1944 being hit with convictions right and left. Our Mr. Eventyr," motioning at the medium who's across the room chatting with young Gavin Trefoil, "could be fallen upon at any moment-pouring in the windows, hauling dangerous tough Eventyr away to the Scrubs on pretending-to-exercise-or-use-a-kind-of-conjuration-to-cause-the-spirits-of-deceased-persons-to-be-present-in-fact-at-the-place-where-he-then-was-and-that-those-spirits-were-communicating-with-living-persons-then-and-there-present my God what imbecile Fascist
rot
…"

"Careful, Mexico, you're losing the old objectivity again-a man of science shouldn't want to do that, should he. Hardly scientific, is it."

"Ass. You're on
their
side. Couldn't you feel it tonight, coming in the door? It's a great swamp of paranoia."

"That's my talent, all right," Pirate as he speaks knowing it's too abrupt, tries to file off the flash with: "I don't know that I'm really up to the
multiple
sort ofthing…"

"Ah. Prentice." Not an eyebrow or lip out of place. Tolerance. Ah.

"You ought to come down this time and have our Dr. Groast check it out on his EEG."

"Oh, if I'm in town," vaguely. There's a security problem here. Loose talk sinks ships and he can't be sure, even about Mexico. There are too many circles to the current operation, inner and outer. Distribution lists growing narrower as we move ring by ring toward the bull's eye, Instructions To Destroy gradually encompassing every scrap, idle memo, typewriter ribbon.

His best guess is that Mexico only now and then supports the Firm's latest mania, known as Operation Black Wing, in a statistical way-analyzing what foreign-morale data may come in, for instance- but someplace out at the fringes of the enterprise, as indeed Pirate finds himself here tonight, acting as go-between for Mexico and his own roommate Teddy Bloat.

He knows that Bloat goes somewhere and microfilms something, then transfers it, via Pirate, to young Mexico. And thence, he gathers, down to "The White Visitation," which houses a catchall agency

known as PISCES-Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender. Whose surrender is not made clear.

Pirate wonders if Mexico isn't into yet another of the thousand dodgy intra-Allied surveillance schemes that have sprung up about London since the Americans, and a dozen governments in exile, moved in. In which the German curiously fades into irrelevance. Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in… some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically drunk or opiated for getting through the day's reverses, most somehow losing, losing what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game's unending chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demands for total attention… and what foreigner is it, exactly, that Pirate has in mind if it isn't that stateless lascar across his own mirror-glass, that poorest of exiles…