Gravity's Rainbow (108 page)

“Right. Dr. Muffage is outside with the ambulance, and we’d like two of your chaps
for a moment, sergeant, till we’re all secure.”

“Certainly, sir.” Wrists weak from steam and comfort gathered skillfully behind his
back before he can even get mad enough to start yelling at them—cold steel, ratcheting
like a phone number being dialed late at night, with no hope in hell of any answer
ever. . . .

“Goddamn,” he finally gets out, mask muffling his voice, giving it an echo that hurts
his ears, “what’n thee hell’s wrong with you, boy?

Don’t you know who I am?”

But oh-oh, waitaminute—if they’ve found the uniform, Marvy ID and cocaine in the same
set of pockets, maybe it isn’t such a hot idea to tell them his name just yet. . . .

“Leftenant Slothrop, we presume. Come along, now.”

He keeps silent. Slothrop, O.K., we’ll just wait, see what the score is, square the
dope thing later, play dumb, say it must’ve been planted. Maybe even find him a Jewish
lawyer good enough to nail the ’suckers for false arrest.

He’s escorted out the door and into the idling ambulance. The bearded driver gives
him only a quick over-the-shoulder glance, then lets in the clutch. Before he can
think to struggle, the other civilian and the MPs have quickly strapped Marvy at knees
and chest to a stretcher.

A pause by an Army lorry to let the MPs off again. Then they continue on. Toward Cuxhaven.
Marvy thinks. Nothing but night, moon-softened blackness out the window. Can’t tell. . . .

“Sedation now?” Ace of Spades crouches beside him, shining a pocket flashlight over
ampoules in his kit, rattling syringes and points.

“Mm. Yes, we’re almost there.”

“I don’t see why they couldn’t have given us hospital space for this.”

The driver laughs. “Oh yes, I can just see
that.
”

Filling the hypodermic slowly, “Well we
are
under orders . . . I mean there’s nothing—”

“Dear
chap
, it’s not the most respectable operation.”

“Hey,” Major Marvy tries to raise his head. “Operation? What’s this, boy?”

“Ssh,” ripping away part of one pigsuit sleeve, baring Marvy’s arm.

“I don’t want no needle—” but it’s already in the vein and discharging as the other
man seeks to calm him. “I mean you really got the wrong fella, you know?”

“Of course, Leftenant.”

“Hey, hey, hey. No. Not me, I’m a
major.
” He should be more emphatic about this, more convincing. Maybe it’s the ’sucking
pig mask in the way. Only he can hear his voice, now given back entirely to himself,
flatter, metallic . . . they can’t hear him. “Major Duane Marvy.” They don’t believe
him, don’t believe his name. Not even
his name. . . .
Panic strikes him, deeper than the sedative has reached, and he begins to buck truly
in terror against the straps, feeling small muscles along his chest stretch into useless
twinges of pain, oh God, beginning to scream now with all his might, no words, only
cries, as loud as the strap across his chest will let him.

“For pity’s sake,” the driver sighs. “Can’t you shut him up, Spontoon?”

Spontoon has already ripped the pig mask away, and replaces it now with one of gauze,
which he holds on with one hand while dripping ether with the other—whenever the thrashing
head comes within range. “Pointsman has taken leave of his senses,” he feels obliged
to say, irritated out of all patience, “if he calls
this
a ‘calm imperturbable.’”

“All right, we’re on the strand now. No one in sight.” Muffage drives down toward
the water, the sand just solid enough to hold the ambulance, everything very white
in the small moon, which is at its zenith . . . perfect ice. . . .

“Oh,” Marvy moans. “Oh fuck. Oh no. Oh Jesus,” the words in long drugged diminuendo,
struggles against his bonds weakening as Muffage parks them at last, an olive-drab
derelict tiny on this broad beach, the enormous slick stretching away moonward, to
the threshold of the north wind.

“Plenty of time,” Muffage looking at his watch. “We’re catching the C-47 at one. They
said they could hold up for a bit.” Sighs of comfort before turning to their task.

“That man’s connections,” Spontoon shaking his head, removing the instruments from
their disinfectant solution and laying them on a sterile cloth beside the stretcher.
“My, my. Let’s hope he never turns to a life of crime, eh?”

“Fuck,” groans Major Marvy softly, “oh, fuck me, will you?”

Both men have scrubbed, and donned masks and rubber gloves. Muffage has switched on
a dome light which stares down, a soft radiant eye. The two work quickly, in silence,
two wartime pros used to field expediency, with only an occasional word from the patient,
a whisper, a white pathetic grope in his ether-darkness after the receding point of
light that’s all he has left of himself.

It’s a simple procedure. The crotch of the velvet costume is torn away. Muffage decides
to dispense with shaving the scrotum. He douses it first with iodine, then squeezes
in turn each testicle against the red-veined and hairy bag, makes the incision quickly
and cleanly through skin and surrounding membranes, popping the testicle itself out
through the wound and welling blood, pulling it out with the left hand till the cords
hard and soft are strung visible under the light. As if they are musical strings he
might, a trifle moon-mad, strum here on the empty beach into appropriate music, his
hand hesitates: but then, reluctantly bowing to duty, he severs them at the proper
distances from the slippery stone, each incision then being bathed in disinfectant,
and the two neat slits, side by side, finally sutured up again. The testicles are
plopped into a bottle of alcohol.

“Souvenirs for Pointsman,” Muffage sighs, stripping off the surgical gloves. “Give
that one another shot. It might be better if he sleeps through, and someone back in
London explains this to him.”

Muffage starts up the motor, backs in a half-circle and slowly heads back up toward
the road, the vast sea lying still behind.

Back at Putzi’s, Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside Solange, asleep
and dreaming about Zwölfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel,
their compartment become a room, one he’s never seen, a room in a great complex of
apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets:
trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees.

And “Solange,” oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, though under a different aspect:
it’s of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train
that never seems to come to rest. She isn’t unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly,
for her father. But Leni’s early dream for her is coming true. She will not be used.
There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from
the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility,
never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy. . . .

Upstairs, one Möllner, valise full of his night’s treasures—an American major’s uniform
and papers, and 2½ ounces of cocaine—explains to the shaggy American sailor that Herr
von Göll is a very busy man, attending to business in the north, as far as he knows,
and has not commissioned him to bring to Cuxhaven any kind of papers, no military
discharges, passports—nothing. He’s sorry. Perhaps the sailor’s friend is mistaken.
Perhaps, again, it’s only a temporary delay. One appreciates that forgeries take time.

Bodine watches him leave, unaware of what’s inside that valise. Albert Krypton has
drunken himself unconscious. Shirley comes wandering in, bright-eyed and restless,
wearing a black garter belt and stockings. “Hmm,” she sez, with a certain look.

“Hmm,” sez Seaman Bodine.

“And anyway, it was only
ten
cents at the Battle of the Bulge.”

• • • • • • •

So: he has traced Weissmann’s battery from Holland, across the salt marshes and lupine
and bones of cows, to find
this.
Lucky he’s not superstitious. He’d be taking it for a prophetic vision. There is
of course a perfectly rational explanation, but Tchitcherine has never read
Martín Fierro.

He watches from his temporary command post in a copse of junipers on a low hill. Through
the binoculars he sees two men, one white, one black, holding guitars. Townspeople
are gathered in a circle, but these Tchitcherine can crop out, leaving in his elliptical
field a scene with the same structure as the male-female singing contest in the middle
of a flat grassland in Central Asia well over a decade ago—a coming-together of opposites
that signaled then his own approach to the Kirghiz Light. What does it signal this
time?

Over his head, the sky is streaked and hard as marble. He knows. Weissmann installed
the S-Gerät and fired the 00000 somewhere close by. Enzian can’t be far behind. It
will be here.

But he has to wait. Once that would have been unbearable. But since Major Marvy dropped
out of sight, Tchitcherine has been a little more cautious. Marvy was a key man. There
is a counterforce in the Zone. Who was the Soviet intelligence man who showed up just
before the fiasco in the clearing? Who tipped the Schwarzkommando off to the raid?
Who got rid of Marvy?

He’s been trying hard not to believe too much in the Rocket-cartel. Since his illumination
that night, Marvy drunk, Bloody Chiclitz declaiming on the virtues of Herbert Hoover,
Tchitcherine has been watching for evidence. Gerhardt von Göll, with his corporate
octopus wrapping every last negotiable item in the Zone, must be in it, consciously
or otherwise. Tchitcherine last week was on the point of flying back to Moscow. He’d
seen Mravenko, one of the VIAM people, briefly in Berlin. They met in the Tiergarten,
two officers ostensibly strolling in the sun. Work crews shoveled cold patch into
holes in the pavement, banging it flat with shovels. Bicycle riders ratcheted by,
skeleton-functional as their machines. Small clusters of civilians and military were
back under the trees, sitting on fallen trunks or lorry wheels, stirring through bags
and valises, dealing. “You’re in trouble,” Mravenko said.

He’d been a remittance man too, back in the thirties, and the most maniacal, systemless
chess player in Central Asia. His tastes ran low enough to include even blindfold
chess, which Russian sensibilities find unutterably gross. Tchitcherine sat down at
the board each time more upset than the last, trying to be amiable, to jolly the madman
into some kind of rational play. Most often he’d lose. But it was either Mravenko
or the Semirechie winter.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

Mravenko laughed. “Does anybody? Molotov isn’t telling Vishinsky. But they know things
about you. Remember the Kirghiz Light? Sure you do. Well, they found out about that.
I
didn’t tell them, but they got to somebody.”

“It’s ancient history. Why bring it up now?”

“You’re regarded as ‘useful,’” Mravenko said.

They looked at each other, then, for a long time. It was a death sentence. Usefulness
out here ends as quickly as a communiqué. Mravenko was afraid, and not entirely for
Tchitcherine, either.

“What will
you
do, Mravenko?”

“Try not to be very useful. They’re not perfect, though.” Both men knew this was meant
to be comfort, and isn’t working too well. “They don’t really know what
makes
you useful. They go on statistics. I don’t think you were supposed to survive the
War. When you did, they had to look at you more closely.”

“Maybe I’ll survive this, too.” And that was when he got the idea of flying to Moscow.
But just about then word came in that Weissmann’s battery couldn’t be traced any further
than the Heath. And the renewed hope of meeting Enzian stopped him from going—the
seductive hope that’s leading him further each day from any chance of continuing on
past the other side of that meeting. He never supposed he would. The real question
is: will they get him before he gets Enzian? All he needs is a little more time . . .
his only hope is if they’re looking for Enzian too, or the S-Gerät, and using him
the same way he thinks he’s using Slothrop. . . .

The horizon is still clear: has been all day. Cypress-shaped junipers stand in the
rust and hazy distances, still as monuments. The first purple flowers are showing
on the heather. It is not the busy peace of late summer, but the peace of a burial
ground. Among the prehistoric German tribes, that’s what this country was: the territory
of the dead.

A dozen nationalities, dressed as Argentine estancieros, crowd around the soup-kitchen
commissary. El Ñato is standing on the saddle of his horse, Gaucho style, looking
off into the German pampas. Felipe is kneeling out in the sun, making his noontime
devotionals to the living presence of a certain rock back in the wasteland of La Rioja,
on the eastern slopes of the Andes. According to an Argentine legend from the last
century, María Antonia Correa followed her lover into that arid land, carrying their
newborn child. Herders found her a week later, dead. But the infant had survived,
by nursing from her corpse. Rocks near the site of the miracle have since been the
objects of yearly pilgrimages. But Felipe’s particular rock embodies also an intellectual
system, for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineral consciousness
not too much different from that of plants and animals, except for the time scale.
Rock’s time scale is a lot more stretched out. “We’re talking frames per century,”
Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language, “per
millennium!” Colossal. But Felipe has come to see, as those who are not Sentient Rocksters
seldom do, that history as it’s been laid on the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible
fraction. That we must also look to the untold, to the silence around us, to the passage
of the next rock we notice—to its aeons of history under the long and female persistence
of water and air (who’ll be there, once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?),
down to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral, are most likely to cross. . . .