Gravity's Rainbow (130 page)

It’s Josef Ombindi’s who it is, leader of the Empty Ones. But till he stopped smiling,
for a few seconds there, Enzian thought it was Orutyene’s ghost. “The word is that
the Okandio child was killed too.”

“Not so.” Chomp.

“She was my first try at preventing a birth.”

“So you maintain a deadly interest in her,” chomp, chomp. He knows that’s not it,
but the man annoys him.

“Suicide is a freedom even the lowest enjoy. But you would deny that freedom to a
people.”

“No ideology. Tell me if your friend Oururu is going to have the LOX generator ready
to roll. Or if there is a funny surprise, instead, waiting for me in Hamburg.”

“All right, no ideology. You would deny
your
people a freedom even
you
enjoy, Oberst Nguarorerue.” Smiling again like the ghost of the man who fell tonight.
Probing for the spot, jabbing what? what? want to say
what
, Oberst? till he sees the tiredness in Enzian’s face, and understands it is not a
trick. “A freedom,” whispering smiling, a love song under black skies edged all around
in acid orange, a commercial full of Cathar horror at the practice of imprisoning
souls in the bodies of newborns, “a freedom you may exercise soon. I hear your soul
talking in its sleep. I know you better than anyone.”

Chomp, chomp, oh I had to give him the watch lists didn’t I. Oh, am I a fool. Yes,
he can choose the night. . . . “You’re a hallucination, Ombindi,” putting just enough
panic into his voice so that if it doesn’t work it’ll still be a good insult, “I’m
projecting my own death-wish, and it comes out looking like you. Uglier then I ever
dreamed.” Giving him the Spaceman Smile for a full 30 seconds, after only 10 seconds
of which Ombindi has already begun to shift his eyes, sweat, press his lips together,
look at the ground, turn away, look back, but Enzian prolongs it, no mercy tonight
my people, Spaceman Smile turning everything inside a mile radius to frozen ice-cream
colors NOW that we’re all in the mood, how about installing the battery covers
any
way, Djuro? That’s right, X-ray vision, saw right through the tarp, write it down
as another miracle . . . you there Vlasta, take the next radio watch, forget what
it says on the list, there’s never been any more than routine traffic logged with
Hamburg and I wanna know why, wanna know what
does
come through when Ombindi’s people are on watch . . . communication on the trek command
frequency is by CW dots and dashes—no voices to betray. But operators swear they can
tell the individual sending-hands. Vlasta is one of his best operators, and she can
do good hand-imitations of most of Ombindi’s people. Been practicing up, just in case.

The others, who’ve been all along wondering if Enzian was
ever
going to move on Ombindi, can tell now by the look on his face and the way he’s walking
through—So, with little more than touches to the brim of his forage cap, signaling
Plan So-and-So, the Ombindi people are quietly, without violence, relieved of all
watch duties tonight, though still keeping their weapons and ammo. No one has ever
taken those away. There’s no reason to. Enzian is no more vulnerable now than he ever
was, which was plenty.

The fat boy Ludwig is a white glowworm in the mist. The game is that he’s scouting
for a vast white army, always at his other flank, ready to come down off of the high
ground at a word from Ludwig, and smear the blacks into the earth. But he would never
call them down. He would rather go with the trek, invisible. There is no hustling
for him down there. Their journey doesn’t include him. They have somewhere to go.
He feels he must go with them, but separate, a stranger, no more or less at the mercy
of the Zone. . . .

• • • • • • •

It’s a bridge over a stream. Very seldom will traffic come by overhead. You can look
up and see a whole slope of cone-bearing trees rushing up darkly away from one side
of the road. Trees creak in sorrow for the engineered wound through their terrain,
their terrenity or earth-hood. Brown trout flick by in the stream. Inside the culvert,
other shelterers have written on the damp arch of wall.
Take me, Stretchfoot, what keeps you? Nothing worse than these days. You will be like
gentle sleep. Isn’t it only sleep? Please. Come soon—Private Rudolf Effig, 12.iv.45.
A drawing, in Commando blackface-grease, of a man looking closely at a flower. In
the distance, or smaller, appears to be a woman, approaching. Or some kind of elf,
or something. The man isn’t looking at her (or it). In the middle distance are haystacks.
The flower is shaped like the cunt of a young girl. There is a luminary looking down
from the sky, a face on it totally at peace, like the Buddha’s. Underneath, someone
else has written, in English:
Good drawing! Finish!
and underneath that, in another hand,
It
IS
finished, you nit. And so are you.
Nearby, in German,
I
loved you Lisele with all my heart
—no name, rank, unit or serial number. . . . Initials, tic-tac-toe games you can tell
were played alone, a game of hangman in which the mystery word was never filled in:
GE_ _RAT_ _ and the hanged body visible almost at the other end of the culvert, even
this early in the day, because it’s a narrow road, and no real gradient of shadow.
A bicycle is incompletely hidden in the weeds at the side of the road. A late butterfly
pale as an eyelid winks aimlessly out over the stalks of new hay. High up on the slope,
someone is swinging an ax-blade into a living tree . . . and here is where and when
the young witch finds Vaslav Tchitcherine at last.

He’s sitting by the stream, not dejected, nor tranquil, just waiting. A passive solenoid
waiting to be sprung. At her step, his head lifts, and he sees her. She is the first
presence since last night he’s looked at and seen. Which is her doing. The charm she
recited then, fastening the silk crotch torn from her best underpants across the eyes
of the doll,
his
eyes, Eastern and liquid, though they’d been only sketched in clay with her long
fingernail, was this:

May he be blind now to all but me. May the burning sun of love shine in his eyes forever.
May this, my own darkness, shelter him. By all the holy names of God, by the Angels
Melchidael, Yahoel, Anafiel, and the great Metatron, I conjure you, and all who are
with you, to go and do my will.

The secret is in the concentrating. She inhibits everything else: the moon, the wind
in the junipers, the wild dogs out ranging in the middle of the night. She fixes on
Tchitcherine’s memory and his wayward eyes, and lets it build, pacing her orgasm to
the incantation, so that by the end, naming the last Names of Power, she’s screaming,
coming, without help from her fingers, which are raised to the sky.

Later she breaks a piece of the magic bread in half, and eats one part. The other
is for Tchitcherine.

He takes the bread now. The stream rushes. A bird sings.

Toward nightfall, the lovers lying naked on a cold grass bank, the sound of a convoy
approaches on the little road. Tchitcherine pulls on his trousers and climbs up to
see if he can beg some food, or cigarettes. The black faces pass by, mba-kayere, some
glancing at him curiously, others too involved with their own exhaustion, or with
keeping a tight guard on a covered wagon containing the warhead section of the 00001.
Enzian on his motorcyle stops for a moment, mba-kayere, to talk to the scarred, unshaven
white. They’re in the middle of the bridge. They talk broken German. Tchitcherine
manages to hustle half a pack of American cigarettes and three raw potatoes. The two
men nod, not quite formally, not quite smiling, Enzian puts his bike in gear and returns
to his journey. Tchitcherine lights a cigarette, watching them down the road, shivering
in the dusk. Then he goes back to his young girl beside the stream. They will have
to locate some firewood before all the light is gone.

This is magic. Sure—but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not the first time a man
has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing
it.

• • • • • • •

By now the City is grown so tall that elevators are long-haul affairs, with lounges
inside: padded seats and benches, snack bars, newsstands where you can browse through
a whole issue of
Life
between stops. For those faint hearts who first thing on entering seek out the Certificate
of Inspection on the elevator wall, there are young women in green overseas caps,
green velvet basques, and tapered yellowstripe trousers—a feminine zootsuit effect—who’ve
been well-tutored in all kinds of elevator lore, and whose job it is to set you at
ease. “In the early days,” pipes young Mindy Bloth of Carbon City, Illinois, smiling
vacantly away in profile, close by the brass moiré of diamond-blurs passing, passing
in vertical thousands—her growing-up face, dreamy and practical as the Queen of Cups,
never quite looks for you, is always refracted away some set angle in the gold-brown
medium between you . . . it’s morning, and the flower man at the rear of the elevator,
down a step or two, behind the little fountain, has brought lilacs and irises fresh
and early—“before the Vertical Solution, all transport was, in effect, two-dimensional—ah,
I can guess
your
question—” as a smile, familiar and unrefracted for this old elevator regular, passes
between girl and heckler— “‘What about
airplane flight
, eh?’ That’s what you were going to ask wasn’t it!” as a matter of fact he was going
to ask about the Rocket and everyone knows it, but the subject is under a curious
taboo, and polite Mindy has brought in now a chance for actual violence, the violence
of repression—the bleached colors of a September morning sky opposite the sunrise,
and the filing-edge of a morning wind—into this intimate cubic environment moving
so smoothly upward through space (a bubble rising through Castile soap where all around
it’s green lit by slow lightning), past levels already a-bustle with heads seething
brighter than sperm and eggs in the sea, past some levels left dark, unheated, somehow
forbidden, looking oddly
wasted
, levels where nobody’s been since the War aaaaa-
ahhh!
howling past, “a common aerodynamic effect,” explains patient Mindy, “involving our
own boundary layer and the shape of the orifice as we pass it—” “Oh you mean that
before we get to it,” hollers another heckler, “it’s a different
shape?
” “Yup, and after we go by it too, Mac,” Mindy brushes him off, broadly mugging the
same thing with her mouth, purse-relax-smile—these jagged openings howling, hauling
forlorn and downward, already stories gone beneath the soles of your shoes, a howl
bent downward like a harmonica note—but why don’t any of the
busy
floors make a sound going by? where the lights are shining warm as Xmas-week parties,
floors that beckon you into densities of glass faceting or screening, good-natured
coffee-urn grousing, well golly, here goes another day, howdy Marie, where you ladies
hiding the drawings on the SG-1 . . . what do you mean
Field Service
has them . . . again? doesn’t Engineering Design have any rights, it’s like watching
your child run away, to see a piece of equipment get set out to the Field
(Der Veld).
That it is. A broken heart, a mother’s prayer. . . . Slowly, the voices of the Lübeck
Hitler Youth Glee Club fade in behind (nowadays the boys sing at officers’ clubs all
across the Zone under their road name, “The Lederhoseners.” They are dressed appropriately,
and sing—when the house feels right—with their backs turned to the audiences, their
sly little faces turned over shoulders to flirt with the fighting men:

But sharper than a Mother’s tears

Are the beatings Mutti gave to me . . .

with a beautifully coordinated wiggle then to each pair of buttocks gleaming through
leather so tight that the clenching of gluteal muscles is plainly visible, and you
can bet there isn’t a cock in the room doesn’t stir at the sight, and scarcely an
eye that can’t hallucinate that maternal birch smacking down across each naked ass,
the delicious red lines, the stern and beautiful female face, smiling down through
lowered lashes, only a glint of light off of each eye—when you were first learning
to crawl, it was her calves and feet you saw the most of—they replaced her breasts
as sources of strength, as you learned the smell of her leather shoes, and the sovereign
smell rose as far as you could see—to her knees, perhaps—depending on fashion that
year—to her thighs. You were infant in the presence of leather legs, leather feet . . .).

“Isn’t it possible,” Thanatz whispers, “that we all learned that classical fantasy
at Mother’s knees? That somewhere tucked in the brain’s plush album is always a child
in Fauntleroy clothes, a pretty French maid begging to be whipped?”

Ludwig shifts his rather fat ass under Thanatz’s hand. Both have perimeters they are
not supposed to cross. But they have crept away anyhow, to a piece of the interface,
a cold thicket they’ve pounded down a space in the middle of, to lie on. “Ludwig,
a little S and M never hurt anybody.”

“Who said that?”

“Sigmund Freud. How do I know? But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever
the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior
but
that
one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival.
They cannot be wasted in private sex. In
any
kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our
lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no
joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at
the family level, the State would wither away.”

This is Sado-anarchism and Thanatz is its leading theoretician in the Zone these days.

It is the Lüneburg Heath, at last. Rendezvous was made last night with the groups
carrying fuel and oxidizer tanks. The tail-section group has been on the radio all
morning, trying to get a position fix, if the skies will only clear. So the assembly
of the 00001 is occurring also in a geographical way, a Diaspora running backwards,
seeds of exile flying inward in a modest preview of gravitational collapse, of the
Messiah gathering in the fallen sparks. . . . Remember the story about the kid who
hates kreplach? Hates and fears the dish, breaks out in these horrible green hives
that shift in relief maps all across his body, in the mere presence of kreplach. Kid’s
mother takes him to the psychiatrist. “Fear of the unknown,” diagnoses this gray eminence,
“let him watch you
making
the kreplach, that’ll ease him into it.” Home to Mother’s kitchen. “Now,” sez Mother,
“I’m going to make us a delicious surprise!” “Oh, boy!” cries the kid, “that’s
keen
, Mom!” “See, now I’m sifting the flour and salt into a nice little pile.” “What’s
that, Mom, hamburger? oh, boy!” “Hamburger, and
onions.
I’m frying them here, see, in this frying pan.” “Gee, I can hardly wait! This is
exciting! What’re ya doin’
now
?” “Making a little volcano in the flour here, and breaking these eggs into it.” “Can
I help ya mix it up? Oh, boy!” “Now, I’m going to roll the dough out, see? into a
nice flat sheet, now I’m cutting it up into squares—” “This is ter
rif
, Mom!” “Now I spoon some of the hamburger into this little square, and now I fold
it over into a tri—” “GAAHHHH!” screams the kid, in absolute terror—“
kreplach!”