Gravity's Rainbow (131 page)

As some secrets were given to the Gypsies to preserve against centrifugal History,
and some to the Kabbalists, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, so have this Secret of
the Fearful Assembly, and others, found their ways inside the weatherless spaces of
this or that Ethnic Joke. There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent
into the Zone to be present at his own assembly—perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have
whispered,
his time’s assembly
—and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn’t. The plan went wrong. He
is being broken down instead, and scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic
style, in the order suggested by Mr. A. E. Waite, laid out and read, but they are
the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to
mediocrity (not only in his life but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too, yes yes
nothing like getting the 3 of Pentacles upside down covering the significator on the
second try to send you to the tube to watch a seventh rerun of the Takeshi and Ichizo
Show, light a cigarette and try to forget the whole thing)—to no clear happiness or
redeeming cataclysm. All his hopeful cards are reversed, most unhappily of all the
Hanged Man, who is supposed to be upside down to begin with, telling of his secret
hopes and fears. . . .

“There never was a Dr. Jamf,” opines world-renowned analyst Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry—“Jamf
was only a fiction, to help him explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in
his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky . . . to help him deny
what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his,
and his race’s, death.

“These early Americans, in their way, were a fascinating combination of crude poet
and psychic cripple. . . .”

“We were never that concerned with Slothrop
qua
Slothrop,” a spokesman for the Counterforce admitted recently in an interview with
the
Wall Street Journal.

I
NTERVIEWER
: You mean, then, that he was more a rallying-point.

S
POKESMAN
: No, not even that. Opinion even at the start was divided. It was one of our fatal
weaknesses. [I’m sure you want to hear about fatal weaknesses.] Some called him a
“pretext.” Others felt that he was a genuine, point-for-point microcosm. The Microcosmists,
as you must know from the standard histories, leaped off to an early start. We—it
was a very odd form of heretic-chasing, really. Across the Low Countries, in the summer.
It went on in fields of windmills, marshlands where it was almost too dark to get
a decent sight. I recall the time Christian found an old alarm clock, and we salvaged
the radium, to coat our plumb-bob strings with. They shone in the twilight. You’ve
seen them holding bobs, hands characteristically gathered near the crotch. A dark
figure with a stream of luminescent piss falling to the ground fifty meters away . . .
“The Presence, pissing,” that became a standard joke on the apprentices. A Raketen-Stadt
Charlie Noble, you might say. . . . [Yes. A cute way of putting it. I am betraying
them all . . . the worst of it is that I know what your editors want,
exactly
what they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus. Spread by your tireless
Typhoid Marys, cruising the markets and the stations. We did manage to ambush some
of them. Once we caught some in the Underground. It was terrible. My first action,
my initiation. We chased them down the tunnels. We could feel their fright. When the
tunnels branched, we had only the treacherous acoustics of the Underground to go on.
Chances were good for getting lost. There was almost no light. The rails gleamed,
as they do aboveground on a rainy night. And the whispers
then
—the shadows who waited, hunched in angles at the maintenance stations, lying against
the tunnel walls, watching the chase. “The end is too far,” they whispered. “Go back.
There are no stops on this branch. The trains run and the passengers ride miles of
blank mustard walls, but there are no stops. It’s a long afternoon run. . . .” Two
of them got away. But we took the rest. Between two station-marks, yellow crayon through
the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my first blood. Do you want
to put this part in?] We drank the blood of our enemies. That’s why you see Gnostics
so hunted. The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the blood of the enemy.
The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why
should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire, stone
night and winter day, if it’s only for the touch of sweet lips on a humble bowl? No,
it’s mortal sin they’re carrying: to swallow the enemy, down into the slick juicery
to be taken in by all the cells. Your officially defined “mortal sin,” that is. A
sin against you. A section of your penal code, that’s all. [The true sin was yours:
to interdict that union. To draw that line. To keep us worse than enemies, who are
after all caught in the same fields of shit—to keep us strangers.

We drank the blood of our enemies. The blood of our friends, we cherished.]

Item S-1706.31, Fragment of Undershirt, U.S. Navy issue, with brown stain assumed
to be blood in shape of sword running lower left to upper right.

Not included in the Book of Memorabilia is this footnote. The piece of cloth was given
to Slothrop by Seaman Bodine, one night in the Chicago Bar. In a way, the evening
was a reprise of their first meeting. Bodine, smoldering fat reefer stuck in under
the strings at the neck of his guitar, singing mournfully a song that’s part Roger
Mexico’s and part some nameless sailor stuck in wartime San Diego:

Last week I threw a pie at someone’s Momma,

Last night I threw a party for my mind,

Last thing I knew that 6:02 was screamin’ over my head,

Or it might’ve been th’ 11:59 . . .

[Refrain]:

Too many chain-link fences in the evening,

Too many people shiverin’ in the rain,

They tell me that you finally got around to have your baby,

And it don’t look like I’ll see your face again.

Sometimes I wanna go back north, to Humboldt County—

Sometimes I think I’ll go back east, to see my kin . . .

There’s times I think I almost could be happy,

If I knew you thought about me, now and then. . . .

Bodine has a siren-ring, the kind kids send away cereal boxtops for, cleverly arranged
in his asshole so it can be operated at any time by blowing a fart of a certain magnitude.
He’s gotten pretty good at punctuating his music with these farted WHEEEEeeee’s, working
now at getting them in the right key, a brand-new reflex arc, ear-brain-hands-asshole,
and a return toward innocence too. The merchants tonight are all dealing a bit slower.
Sentimental Bodine thinks it’s because they’re listening to his song. Maybe they are.
Bales of fresh coca leaves just in from the Andes transform the place into some resonant
Latin warehouse, on the eve of a revolution that never will come closer than smoke
dirtying the sky above the cane, sometimes, in the long lace afternoons at the window. . . .
Street urchins are into a Busy Elf Routine, wrapping each leaf around a betel nut,
into a neat little packet for chewing. Their reddened fingers are living embers in
the shadow. Seaman Bodine looks up suddenly, canny, unshaven face stung by all the
smoke and unawareness in the room. He’s looking straight at Slothrop (being one of
the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most
of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept—“It’s
just got too remote” ’s what they usually say). Does Bodine now feel his own strength
may someday soon not be enough either: that soon, like all the others, he’ll
have
to let go?
But somebody’s got to hold on, it can’t happen to all of us—no, that’d be too much . . .
Rocketman, Rocketman. You poor fucker.

“Here. Listen. I want you to have it. Understand? It’s yours.”

Does he even hear any more? Can he see this cloth, this stain?

“Look, I was there, in Chicago, when they ambushed him. I was there that night, right
down the street from the Biograph, I heard the gunfire, everything. Shit, I was just
a boot, I thought this was what liberty was all about, so I went running. Me and half
Chicago. Out of the bars, the toilets, the alleys, dames holding their skirts up so
they could run faster, Missus Krodobbly who’s drinking her way through the Big Depression,
waitin’ till the sun shines thru, and whatta you know, there’s half my graduating
class from Great Lakes, in dress blues with the same bedspring marks as mine, and
there’s longtime hookers and pockmark fags with breath smelling like the inside of
a motorman’s glove, old ladies from Back of the Yards, subdebs just out the movies
with the sweat still cold on their thighs, gate,
everybody
was there. They were taking off clothes, tearing checks out of checkbooks, ripping
off pieces of each others’ newspaper, just so they could soak up some of John Dillinger’s
blood. We went crazy. The Agents didn’t stop us. Just stood with smoke still curling
out of their muzzles while the people all went down on that blood in the street. Maybe
I went along without thinking. But there
was something else.
Something I must’ve needed . . . if you can hear me . . . that’s why I’m giving this
to you. O.K.? That’s Dillinger’s blood there. Still warm when I got to it. They wouldn’t
want you thinking he was anything but a ‘common criminal’—but Their head’s so far
up Their ass—he still did what he did. He went out socked Them right in the toilet
privacy of Their banks. Who cares what he was
thinking
about, long as it didn’t get in the way? A-and it doesn’t even matter why
we’re
doing this, either. Rocky? Yeah, what we need isn’t right reasons, but just that
grace.
The physical grace to keep it working. Courage, brains, sure, O.K., but without that
grace? forget it. Do you—please, are you listening? This thing here works. Really
does. It worked for me, but I’m out of the Dumbo stage now, I can fly without it.
But you. Rocky. You. . . .”

It wasn’t their last meeting, but later on there were always others around, doper-crises,
resentments about burns real or intended, and by then, as he’d feared, Bodine was
beginning, helpless, in shame, to let Slothrop go. In certain rushes now, when he
sees white network being cast all directions on his field of vision, he understands
it as an emblem of pain or death. He’s begun to spend more of his time with Trudi.
Their friend Magda was picked up on first-degree mopery and taken back to Leverkusen,
and an overgrown back court where electric lines spit overhead, the dusty bricks sprout
weeds from the cracks, shutters are always closed, grass and weeds turn to bitterest
autumn floor. On certain days the wind brings aspirin-dust from the Bayer factory.
The people inhale it, and grow more tranquil.

They both feel her absence. Bodine finds presently that his characteristic gross laugh,
hyeugh, hyeugh
, has grown more German,
tjachz, tjachz.
He’s also taking on some of Magda’s old disguises. Good-natured and penetrable disguises,
as at a masked ball. It is a transvestism of caring, and the first time in his life
it’s happened. Though nobody asks, being too busy dealing, he reckons it’s all right.

Light in the sky is stretched and clear, exactly like taffy after no more than the
first two pulls.

“Dying a weird death,” Slothrop’s Visitor by this time may be scrawled lines of carbon
on a wall, voices down a chimney, some human being out on the road, “the object of
life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that
however it finds you
, it will find you under
very weird
circumstances. To live that kind of life. . . .”

Item S-1729.06, Bottle containing 7 cc. of May wine. Analysis indicates presence of
woodruff herb, lemon and orange peel.

Sprigs of woodruff, also known as Master of the Woods, were carried by the early Teutonic
warriors. It gives success in battle. It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into
the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe
that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so,
there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present-day population are offshoots of his
original scattering. There’s supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record
album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the
arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East
End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white
lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the
old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop’s: the only printed
credit that might apply to him is “Harmonica, kazoo—a friend.” But knowing his Tarot,
we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to
look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . .
)

Now there’s only a long cat’s-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright
gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of darker gray. It is displayed
above, more than looking down on, this gathering of Džabajev and his friends. Inside
the town, a strange convention is under way. Village idiots from villages throughout
Germany are streaming in (streaming from mouth as well as leaving behind high-pitched
trails of color for the folks to point at in their absence). They are expected to
pass a resolution tonight asking Great Britain for Commonwealth status, and perhaps
even to apply for membership in the UNO. Children in the parish schools are being
asked to pray for their success. Can 13 years of Vatican collaboration have clarified
the difference between what’s holy and what is not? Another State is forming in the
night, not without theatre and festivity. So tonight’s prevalence of Maitrinke, which
Džabajev has managed to score several liters of. Let the village idiots celebrate.
Let their holiness ripple into interference-patterns till it clog the lantern-light
of the meeting hall.