GRAVITY RAINBOW (79 page)

Part III finds her at the bottom of the river. She has drowned. But all forms of life fill her womb. "Using her as mermaid" (line 7), they transport her down through these green river-depths. "It was down, and out again./ Old Squalidozzi, ploughman of the deep,/ At the end of his day's sowing/ Sees her verdigris belly among the weeds" (lines 10-13), and brings her back up. He is a classically-bearded Neptune figure with an old serene face. From out of her body streams a flood now of different creatures, octopuses, reindeer, kangaroos, "Who can say all the life/ That left her womb that day?" Squalidozzi can only

catch a glimpse of the amazing spill as he bears her back toward the surface. Above, it is a mild and sunlit green lake or pond, grassy at the banks, shaded by willows. Insects whine and hover. The key color now is green. "And there as it broke to sun/ Her corpse found sleep in the water/ And in the summer depths/ The creatures took their way/ Each to its proper love/ In the height of afternoon/ As the peaceful river went…"

This dream will not leave him. He baits his hook, hunkers by the bank, drops his line into the Spree. Presently he lights up an army cigarette, and stays still then for a long while, as the fog moves white through the riverbank houses, and up above the warplanes go droning somewhere invisible, and the dogs run barking in the back-streets.

When emptied of people, the interior is steel gray. When crowded, it's green, a comfortable acid green. Sunlight comes in through portholes in the higher of the bulkheads (the
Rucksichtslos
here lists at a permanent angle of 23° 27'), and steel washbowls line the lower bulkheads. At the end of each sub-latrine are coffee messes and hand-cranked peep shows. You'll find all the older, less glamorous, un-Teutonic-looking women in the enlisted men's machines. The real stacked and more racially golden tomatoes go to the officers, naturlich. This is some of that Nazi fanaticism.

The
Rucksichtslos
itself is the issue of another kind of fanaticism: that of the specialist. This vessel here is a Toiletship, a triumph of the German mania for subdividing. "If the house is organic," argued the crafty early Toiletship advocates, "family lives in the house, family's organic, house is outward-and-visible sign, you see," behind their smoked glasses and under their gray crewcuts not believing a word of it, Machiavellian and youthful, not quite ripe yet for paranoia, "and if the bathroom's part of the house-
house-is-organic!
ha-hah," singing, chiding, pointing out the broad blond-faced engineer, hair parted in the middle and slicked back, actually blushing and looking at his knees among the good-natured smiling teeth of his fellow technologists because he'd been about to forget that point (Albert Speer, himself, in a gray suit with a smudge of chalk on the sleeve, all the way in the back leaning akimbo the wall and looking remarkably like American cowboy actor Henry Fonda, has
already
forgotten about the house being

organic, and nobody points at
him,
RHIP). "Then the Toiletship is to the Kriegsmarine as the bathroom is to the house. Because the Navy is organic, we all know
that,
ha-hah!" [General, or maybe Admiral, laughter.] The
Rucksichtslos
was intended to be the flagship of a whole Geschwader of Toiletships. But the steel quotas were diverted clear out of the Navy over to the A4 rocket program. Yes, that does seem unusual, but Degenkolb was heading up the Rocket Committee by then, remember, and had both power and will to cut across all branches of the service. So the
Rucksichtslos
is one-of-a-kind, old warship collectors, and if you're in the market you better hurry 'cause GE's already been by to have a look. Lucky the Bolshies didn't get it, huh, Charles? Charles, meantime, is making on his clipboard what look like studious notes, but are really observations of the passing scene such as
They are all looking at me,
or
Lieutenant Rinso is plotting to
murder me,
and of course the ever-reliable
He's one of them too and I'm going to get him some night,
well by now Charles's colleague here, Steve, has forgotten about the Russians, and discontinued his inspection of a flushing valve to take a really close look at that
Charles,
you can't pick your search team, not if you're just out of school and here I am, in the asshole of nowhere, not much more than a gofer to this-what-is he, a fag? What am
I?
What does GE want me to be? Is this some obscure form of company punishment, even, good God, permanent
exile?
I'm a career man, they can keep me out here 20 years if they want, 'n' no-body'll ever know, they'll just keep writing it off to overhead. Sheila! How'm I gonna tell Sheila? We're engaged. This is her picture (hair waved like choppy seas falling down Rita Hayworth style, eyes that if it were a color snap would have yellow lids with pink rims, and a mouth like a hot dog bun on a billboard). Took her out to Buf-falo Bayou,

Lookin' for a little fun- Big old bayou mosquito, oh my you Shoulda seen what he done! Poked his head up, under her dress, Give a little grin and, well I guess, Things got rough on Buf-falo Bayou, Skeeter turn yer meter, down, All-right-now!

Ya ta, ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, ta-ta Lookin'for a little fun,
Ev
-rybody!

Oh ya know, when you're young and wholesome ["Ev'ry-body," in this case a Toiletshipload of bright hornrimmed shoe-pac'd young fellas from Schenectady, are singin' along behind this recitative here] and a good church-goin' kid, it's sure a mournful thing to get suddenly ganged by a pack of those Texas mosquitoes, it can set you back 20 years. Why, there's boys just like you wanderin' around, you may've seen one in the street today and never known it, with the mind of a infant, just because those mosquitoes got to him and did their unspeakable thing. And we've laid down insecticides, a-and bombed the bayous with citronella, and it's no good, folks. They breed faster'n we can kill 'em, and are we just gonna tuck tail and let them
be
there out in Buffalo Bayou where my gal Sheila had to look at the loathsome behavior of those-things, we gonna allow them even to
exist?

– And,

Things got rough on, Buf-falo Bayou,

Skeeter turn yer meter, down,

Hubba hubba- Skeeter turn yer meter, down!

Well, you can't help but wonder who's really the more paranoid of the two here. Steve's sure got a lot of gall badmouthing Charles that way. Among the hilarious graffiti of visiting mathematicians,

that sort of thing, they go poking away down the narrow sausage-shaped latrine now, two young/old men, their feet fade and cease to ring on the sloping steel deck, their forms grow more transparent with distance until it's impossible to see them any more. Only the empty compartment here, the S-curved spokes on the peep-show machines, the rows of mirrors directly facing, reflecting each other, frame after frame, back in a curve of very great radius. Out to the end of this segment of curve is considered part of the space of the
Rucksichtslos.
Making it a rather fat ship. Carrying its right-of-way along with it. "Crew morale," whispered the foxes at the Ministry meetings, "sailors' superstitions. Mirrors at high midnight.
We
know, don't we?"

The officers' latrines, by contrast, are done in red velvet. The

decor is 1930s Safety Manual. That is, all over the walls, photograffiti, are pictures of Horrible Disasters in German Naval History. Collisions, magazine explosions, U-boat sinkings, just the thing if you're an officer trying to take a shit. The Foxes have been busy. Commanding officers get whole suites, private shower or sunken bathtub, manicurist (BDM volunteers, mostly), steam room, massage table.
To
compensate though, all the bulkheads, and the overhead, are occupied by enormous photographs of Hitler at various forms of play. The toilet paper! The toilet paper is covered square after square with caricatures of Churchill, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, there was even a Staff Caricaturist always on duty to custom-illustrate blank paper for those connoisseurs who are ever in search of the unusual. Wagner and Hugo Wolf were patched into speakers from up in the radio shack. Cigarettes were free. It was a good life on board the Toiletship
Ruck-
sichtslos,
as it plied its way from Swinemunde to Helgoland, anyplace it was needed, camouflaged in shades of gray, turn-of-the-century style with sharp-shadowed prows coming at you from midships so you couldn't tell which way she was headed. Ship's company actually lived each man inside his stall, each with his own key and locker, pin-ups and library shelves decorating the partitions… and there were even one-way mirrors so you could sit at your ease, penis dangling toward the ice-cold seawater in your bowl, listen to your VE-301 People's Receiver, and watch the afternoon rush, the busy ringing of feet and talk, card games inside the group toilets, dealers enthroned on real porcelain receiving visitors, some of them lined up back outside the compartment (quiet queues, all business, something like the queues in banks), toilet-lawyers dispensing advice, all kinds of visitor coming and going, the U-boat crews hunching in, twitching eyes nervously every second or two at the overhead, destroyer sailors larking at the troughs
(gigantic
troughs! running the whole beam of the ship, even, legend has it, off into mirror-space, big enough to seat 40 or 50 aching assholes side by side, while a constant river of salt flushing water roared by underneath), lighting wads of toilet paper, is what they especially liked to do, setting them flaming yellow in the water upstream and cackling with glee as one by one down the line the sitters leaped off the holes screaming and clutching their blistered asses and inhaling the smell of singed pubic hair. Not that the crew of the Toiletship itself were above a practical joke now and then. Who can ever forget the time shipfitters Hopmann and Kreuss, at the height of the Ptomaine Epidemic of 1943, routed those waste lines into the ventilation system of the executive officer's stateroom? The exec, being an old Toiletship hand, laughed good-naturedly at the clever prank and transferred Hopmann and Kreuss to icebreaker duty, where the two Scatotechnic Snipes went on to erect vaguely turd-shaped monoliths of ice and snow all across the Arctic. Now and then one shows up on an ice floe drifting south in ghostly grandeur, exciting the admiration of all.

A good ship, a good crew, Merry Xmas and turn to. Horst Acht-faden, late of the Elektromechanische Werke, Karlshagen (another cover name for the testing station at Peenemunde), has really no time for naval nostalgia. With the technical spies of three or four nations after him, he has had the disastrous luck to've been picked up by the Schwarzkommando, who for all he knows now constitute a nation of their own. They have interned him in the Chiefs' Head. He has watched voluptuous Gerda and her Fur Boa go through the same number 178 times (he has jimmied the coin box and figured a way to override it) since they put him in here, and the thrill is gone. What do they want? Why are they occupying a derelict in the middle of the Kiel Canal? Why don't the British
do
something about this?

Look at it this way, Achtfaden. This Toiletship here's a wind tunnel's all it is. If tensor analysis is good enough for turbulence, it ought to be good enough for history. There ought to be nodes, critical points… there ought to be super-derivatives of the crowded and insatiate flow that can be set equal to zero and these critical points found… 1904 was one of them-1904 was when Admiral Rozhdestvenski sailed his fleet halfway around the world to relieve Port Arthur, which put your present captor Enzian on the planet, it was the year the Germans all but wiped out the Hereros, which gave Enzian some peculiar ideas about survival, it was the year the American Food and Drug people took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola, which gave us an alcoholic and death-oriented generation of Yanks ideally equipped to fight WWII, and it was the year Ludwig Prandtl proposed the boundary layer, which really got aerodynamics into business and put you right here, right now. 1904, Achtfaden. Ha, ha!
That's
a better joke on you than any singed asshole, all right. Lotta good it does
you.
You can't swim upstream, not under the present dispensation anyhow, all you can do is attach the number to it and
suffer,
Horst, fella. Or, if you can tear yourself away from Gerda and her Fur Boa, here's a thought-find a non-dimensional coefficient for yourself. This is a wind-tunnel you're in, remember? You're an aerodynamics man. So-

Coefficients, ja, ja… Achtfaden flings himself disconsolately on the scarlet VD toilet way down at the very end of the row. He knows about coefficients. In Aachen once, for a while, he and his colleagues

could stand in the forward watchtower: look out into the country of the barbarians through Hermann and Wieselsberger's tiny window. Terrific compressions, diamond shadows writhing like snakes. Often the sting was bigger than the model itself-the very need to measure interfered with the observations. That should have been a clue right there. No one wrote then about supersonic flow. It was surrounded by myth, and by a pure, primitive terror. Professor Wagner of Darmstadt predicted that at speeds above Mach 5, air would liquefy. Should pitch and roll frequencies happen to be equal, the resonance would throw the projectile into violent oscillations. It would corkscrew to destruction. "Lunar motion," we called it. "Bingen pencils" we would call the helical contrails in the sky. Terrified. The Schlieren shadows danced. At Peenemunde the test section measured 40 x 40 cm, about the size of a tabloid page. "They pray not only for their daily bread," Strese-mann had said, "but also for their daily illusion." We, staring through the thick glass, had our Daily Shock-the only paper many of us read.