GRAVITY RAINBOW (66 page)

"They said it was a stroke," Saure sez. His voice is arriving from some quite peculiar direction, let us say from directly underneath, as the wide necropolis begins now to draw inward, to neck down and stretch out into a Corridor, one known to Slothrop though not by name, a deformation of space that lurks inside his life, latent as a hereditary disease. A band of doctors in white masks that cover everything but eyes, bleak and grown-up eyes, move in step down the passage toward where Roosevelt is lying. They carry shiny black kits. Metal rings inside the black leather, rings as if to speak, as if a ventriloquist were playing a trick, help-let-me-out-of-here… Whoever it was, posing in the black cape at Yalta with the other leaders, conveyed beautifully the sense of Death's wings, rich, soft and black as the winter cape, prepared a nation of starers for the passing of Roosevelt, a being They assembled, a being They would dismantle…

Someone here is cleverly allowing for parallax, scaling, shadows all going the right way and lengthening with the day-but no, Saure can't be real, no more than these dark-clothed extras waiting in queues for some hypothetical tram, some two slices of sausage (sure, sure), the dozen half-naked kids racing in and out of this burned tenement so amazingly detailed-They sure must have the budget, all right. Look at this desolation, all built then hammered back into pieces, ranging body-size down to powder (please order by Gauge Number), as that well-remembered fragrance Noon in Berlin, essence of human decay, is puffed on the set by a hand, lying big as a flabby horse up some alley, pumping its giant atomizer…

(By Saure's black-market watch, it's nearly noon. From 11 to 12 in the morning is the Evil Hour, when the white woman with the ring of keys comes out of her mountain and may appear to you. Be careful,

then. If you can't free her from a spell she never specifies, you'll be punished. She is the beautiful maiden offering the Wonderflower, and the ugly old woman with long teeth who found you in that dream and said nothing. The Hour is hers.)

Black P-38s fly racketing in formation, in moving openwork against the pale sky. Slothrop and Saure find a cafe on the sidewalk, drink watered pink wine, eat bread and some cheese. That crafty old doper breaks out a "stick" of "tea" and they sit in the sun handing it back and forth, offering the waiter a hit, who can tell? that's how you have to smoke armies too, these days. Jeeps, personnel carriers, and bicycles go streaming by. Girls in fresh summer frocks, orange and green as fruit ices, drift in to sit at tables, smiling, smiling, checking the area continuously for early business.

Somehow Saure has got Slothrop to talking about the Rocket. Not at all Saure's specialty, of course, though he's been keeping an ear tuned. If it's wanted, then it has a price. "I could never see the fascination. We kept hearing so much about it on the radio. It was our Captain Midnight Show. But we grew disillusioned. Wanting to believe, but nothing we saw giving us that much faith. Less and less toward the end. All I know is it brought disaster down on the cocaine market, Kerl."

"How's that?"

"Something in that rocket needed potassium permanganate, right?"

"Turbopump."

"Well, without that Purpurstoff you can't deal cocaine honestly. Forget honesty, there just wasn't any
reality.
Last winter you couldn't find a cc of permanganate in the whole fucking Reich, Kerl.
Oh
you should've seen the burning that was going on. Friends, understand. But what friend hasn't wanted to-in terms you can recognize-
push a
pie
in your face? eh?"

"Thank you." Wait a minute. Is he talking about
us?
Is he getting ready to-

"So," having continued, "there crept over Berlin a gigantic Laurel and Hardy film, silent, silent… because of the permanganate shortage. I don't know what other economies may have been affected by the A4. This was not just pie-throwing, not just anarchy on a market, this was chemical irresponsibility! Clay, talcum, cement, even, it got this perverse, flour! Powdered milk, diverted from the stomachs of little sucklings! Look-alikes that were worth even more than cocaine-but the idea was that someone should get a sudden noseful of milk, haha-

hahah!" breaking up here for a minute, "and that was
worth the loss!
Without the permanganate there was no way to tell anything for sure. A little novocain to numb the tongue, something bitter for the taste, and you could be making enormous profits
off of
sodium bicarbonate. Permanganate is the touchstone. Under a microscope, you drop some on the substance in question, which dissolves-then you watch how it comes out of solution, how it recrystallizes: the cocaine will appear first, at the edges, then the vegetable cut, the procaine, the lactose at other well-known positions-a purple target, with the outer ring worth the most, and the bull's-eye worth nothing. An anti-target. Certainly not the A4's idea of one,
eh, Rocketman.
That machinery of yours was not exactly the doper's friend. What do you want it for? Will your country use it against Russia?"

"I don't want it. What do you mean, 'my country'?"

"I'm sorry. I only meant that it looks like the Russians want it badly enough. I've had connections all over the city taken away. Interrogated. None of them know any more about rockets than I do. But Tchitcherine thinks we do."

"Oboy. Him again?"

"Yes he's in Potsdam right now. Supposed to be. Set up a headquarters in one of the old film studios."

"Swell news, Emil. With my luck…"

"You don't look too good, Rocketman."

"Think that's horrible? Try this!" and Slothrop proceeds to ask if Saure has heard anything about the Schwarzgerat.

Saure does not exactly scream
Aiyee!
and run off down the street or

anything, but squeeeak goes a certain valve all right, and something is routed another way. "I'll tell you what," nodding and shifting in his seat, "you talk to der Springer. Ja, you two would get on fine. I am only a retired cat burglar, looking to spend my last several decades as the Sublime Rossini did his: comfortable. Just don't mention me at all, O.K., Joe?"

"Well, who is that der Springer, and where do I find him, Emil?"

"He is the knight who leaps perpetually-"

"Wow."

"-across the chessboard of the Zone, is who he is. Just as Rocketman flies over obstacles today." He laughs nastily. "A fine pair. How do I know where he is? He could be anyplace. He is everywhere."

"Zorro? The Green Hornet?"

"Last I heard, a week or two ago, he was up north on the Hanseatic run. You will meet. Don't worry." Abruptly Saure stands up to go,

shaking hands, slipping Rocketman another reefer for later, or for luck. "I have medical officers to see. The happiness of a thousand customers is on your shoulders, young man. Meet me at my place. Cluck."

So the Evil Hour has worked its sorcery. The wrong word was Schwarzgerat. Now the mountain has closed again thundering behind Slothrop, damn near like to crush his heel, and it might just be centuries before that White Woman appears again. Shit.

The name on the special pass is "Max Schlepzig." Slothrop, feeling full of pep, decides to pose as a vaudeville entertainer. An illusionist. He has had a good apprenticeship with Katje, her damask tablecloth and magical body, a bed for her salon, a hundred soirees fantastiques…

He's through Zehlendorf by midafternoon, inside his Rocketman rig and ready to cross. The Russian sentries wait under a wood archway painted red, toting Suomis or Degtyarovs, oversize submachine guns with drum magazines. Here comes also a Stalin tank now, lumbering in low, soldier in earflapped helmet standing up in the 76 mm mount yelling into walkie-talkie… uh, well… On the other side of the arch is a Russian jeep with a couple officers, one talking earnestly into the mike of
his
radio set, and the air between quickens with spoken Russian at the speed of light weaving a net to catch Slothrop. Who else? He sweeps his cape back with a wink, tips his helmet and smiles. In a conjuror's flourish he's out with card, ticket 'n' bilingual pass, giving them some line about a command performance in that Potsdam.

One of the sentries takes the pass and nips into his kiosk to make a phone call. The others stand staring at Tchitcherine's boots. No one speaks. The call is taking a while. Scarred leather, day-old beards, cheekbones in the sun. Slothrop's trying to think of a few card tricks he can do, sort of break the ice, when the sentry sticks his head out. "Stiefeln, bitte."

Boots? What would they want with-
yaaahhh!
Boots, indeed, yes. We know beyond peradventure who has to be on the other end, don't we. Slothrop can hear all the man's metal parts jingling with glee. In the smoky Berlin sky, somewhere to the left of the Funkturm in its steelwool distance, appears a full-page photo in
Life
magazine: it is of Slothrop, he is in full Rocketman attire, with what appears to be a long, stiff sausage of very large diameter being stuffed into his mouth, so forcibly that his eyes are slightly crossed, though the hand or agency actually holding the stupendous wiener is not visible in the

photo. A SNAFU FOR ROCKETMAN, reads the caption-"Barely off the ground, the Zone's newest celebrity 'rucks up.' "

We-e-e-11, Slothrop slides off the boots, the sentry takes them inside to the telephone-the others lean Slothrop up against the arch and shake him down, rinding nothing but the reefer Saure gave him, which they expropriate. Slothrop waits in his socks, trying not to think ahead. Glancing around for cover, maybe. Nothing. Clear field of fire for 360 degrees. Smells of fresh asphalt patch and gun oil. The jeep, crystal verdigris, waiting: the road back to Berlin, for the moment, deserted… Providence, hey
Providence,
what'd you do, step out for a beer or something?

Not at all. The boots reappear, smiling sentry right behind them. "Stimmt, Herr Schlepzig." What does irony sound like in Russian? These birds are too inscrutable for Slothrop. Tchitcherine would've known enough not to arouse any suspicion by asking to see those boots. Nah, it couldn't've been him on the phone. This was probably some routine search for that contraband, was all. Slothrop is being seized right now by what the Book of Changes calls Youthful Folly. He swirls his green cape a few more times, chisels a stubby Balkan army off of one of the tommyguns, and moseys away, southward. The officers' jeep stays where it is. The tank has vanished.

Jubilee Jim, just a-peddlin' through the country, Winkin' at the ladies from Stockbridge up to Lee- Buy your gal a brooch for a fancy gown, Buggy-whip rigs for just a dollar down, Hey come along ev'rybody, headin' for the Jubi-lee!

Two miles down the road, Slothrop hits that canal Saure mentioned: takes a footpath down under the bridge where it's wet and cool for a minute. He sets off along the bank, looking for a boat to hijack. Girls in halters and shorts lie sunning, brown and gold, all along this dreaming grass slope. The clouded afternoon is mellowed to windsoft-ened edges, children kneeling beside the water with fishing lines, two birds in a chase across the canal soaring down and up in a loop into the suspended storm of a green treetop, where they sit and begin to sing. With distance the light gathers a slow ecru haze, girls' flesh no longer bleached by the zenith sun now in gender light reawakening to warmer colors, faint shadows of thigh-muscles, stretched filaments of skin cells saying touch… stay… Slothrop walks on-past eyes opening, smiles breaking like kind dawns. What's wrong with him? Stay, sure. But what keeps him passing by?

There are a few boats, moored to railings, but always somebody with an eye out. He finally comes on a narrow flat-bottomed little rig, oars in the locks and ready to go, nothing but a blanket upslope, a pair of high heels, man's jacket, stand of trees nearby. So Slothrop climbs right in, and casts off. Have ran-a little nasty here-
I
can't, but I can steal your
boat!
Ha!

He hauls till sundown, resting for long stretches, really out of condition, cape smothering him in a cone of sweat so bad he has to take it off finally. Ducks drift at a wary distance, water dripping off of bright orange beaks. Surface of the canal ripples with evening wind, sunset in his eyes streaking the water red and gold: royal colors. Wrecks poke up out of the water, red lead and rust ripening in this light, bashed gray hullplates, flaking rivets, unlaid cable pointing hysterical strands to all points of the compass, vibrating below any hearing in the breeze. Empty barges drift by, loose and forlorn. A stork flies over, going home, below him suddenly the pallid arch of the Avus overpass ahead. Any farther and Slothrop's back in the American sector. He angles across the canal, debarking on the opposite bank, and heads south, trying to skirt the Soviet control point the map puts someplace to his right. Massive movement in the dusk: Russian guardsmen, green-capped elite, marching and riding, pokerfaced, in trucks, on horseback. You can feel the impedance in the fading day, the crowding, jittering wire loops, Potsdam warning stay away… stay away….The closer it comes, the denser the field around that cloaked international gathering across the Havel. Bodine's right: a gnat can't get in. Slothrop knows it, but just keeps on skulking along, seeking less sensitive axes of suspicion, running zigzags, aimed innocuously south.

Invisible. It becomes easier to believe in the longer he can keep going. Sometime back on Midsummer Eve, between midnight and one, fern seed fell in his shoes. He is the invisible youth, the armored changeling. Providence's little pal.
Their
preoccupation is with forms of danger the War has taught them-phantoms they may be doomed now, some of them, to carry for the rest of their lives. Fine for Slothrop, though-it's a set of threats he doesn't belong to. They are still back in geographical space, drawing deadlines and authorizing personnel, and the only beings who can violate their space are safely caught and paralyzed in comic books. They think. They don't know about Rocketman here. They keep passing him and he remains alone, blotted to evening by velvet and buckskin-if they do see him his image is shunted immediately out to the boondocks of the brain where it remains in exile with other critters of the night…