Gravity's Rainbow (2 page)

“Cheer up,” Teddy crawling back toward the busted cot. “There’ll be more.”

Good old Bloat, always the positive word. Pirate for a few seconds there, waiting
to talk to Stanmore, was thinking, Danger’s over, Banana Breakfast is saved. But it’s
only a reprieve. Isn’t it. There will indeed be others, each just as likely to land
on top of him. No one either side of the front knows exactly how many more. Will we
have to stop watching the sky?

Osbie Feel stands in the minstrels’ gallery, holding one of the biggest of Pirate’s
bananas so that it protrudes out the fly of his striped pajama bottoms—stroking with
his other hand the great jaundiced curve in triplets against 4/4 toward the ceiling,
he acknowledges dawn with the following:

Time to gather your arse up off the floor,

      (have a bana-na)

Brush your teeth and go toddling off to war.

Wave your hand to sleepy land,

Kiss those dreams away,

Tell Miss Grable you’re not able,

Not till V-E Day, oh,

Ev’rything’ll be grand in Civvie Street

      (have a bana-na)

Bubbly wine and girls wiv lips so sweet—

But there’s still the German or two to fight,

So show us a smile that’s shiny bright,

And then, as we may have suggested once before—

Gather yer blooming arse up off the floor!

There’s a second verse, but before he can get quite into it, prancing Osbie is leaped
upon and thoroughly pummeled, in part with his own stout banana, by Bartley Gobbitch,
DeCoverley Pox, and Maurice (“Saxophone”) Reed, among others. In the kitchen, black-market
marshmallows slide languid into syrup atop Pirate’s double boiler, and soon begin
thickly to bubble. Coffee brews. On a wooden pub sign daringly taken, one daylight
raid, by a drunken Bartley Gobbitch, across which still survives in intaglio the legend
SNIPE AND SHAFT
, Teddy Bloat is mincing bananas with a great isosceles knife, from beneath whose
nervous blade Pirate with one hand shovels the blonde mash into waffle batter resilient
with fresh hens’ eggs, for which Osbie Feel has exchanged an equal number of golf
balls, these being even rarer this winter than real eggs, other hand blending the
fruit in, not overvigorously, with a wire whisk, whilst surly Osbie himself, sucking
frequently at a half-pint milk bottle filled with Vat 69 and water, tends to the bananas
in the skillet and broiler. Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin
Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, which some enthusiast back
during the twenties spent a painstaking year modeling and casting before finding out
it was too large to get out of any door, socking the slopes of the famous mountain
with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the
ice for Pirate’s banana frappés. With their nights’ growths of beard, matted hair,
bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging
on a tardy glacier.

Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one
spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at
themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slap water with no clear plan in
mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain
later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs
whose tunes they don’t always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches
of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a
way of easing into whatever it is they’ll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather
necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair
of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last
night.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke, alcohol and
sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising,
more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute
pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing
the conjuror’s secret by which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to
fuck off—the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some
human face down ten or twenty generations . . . so the same assertion-through-structure
allows this war morning’s banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there
any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As
a spell, against falling objects. . . .

With a clattering of chairs, upended shell cases, benches, and ottomans, Pirate’s
mob gather at the shores of the great refectory table, a southern island well across
a tropic or two from chill Corydon Throsp’s mediaeval fantasies, crowded now over
the swirling dark grain of its walnut uplands with banana omelets, banana sandwiches,
banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded in the shape of a British lion rampant, blended
with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering
creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre
(attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade) which Pirate
has appropriated as his motto . . . tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing
over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting
since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter
morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead . . . banana croissants and banana
kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in
ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing
a clandestine radio transmitter . . .

The phone call, when it comes, rips easily across the room, the hangovers, the grabassing,
the clatter of dishes, the shoptalk, the bitter chuckles, like a rude metal double-fart,
and Pirate knows it’s got to be for him. Bloat, who’s nearest, takes it, forkful of
bananes glacées
poised fashionably in the air. Pirate takes up a last dipper of mead, feels it go
valving down his throat as if it’s time, time in its summer tranquillity, he swallows.

“Your employer.”

“It’s not fair,” Pirate moans, “I haven’t even done me morning pushups yet.”

The voice, which he’s heard only once before—last year at a briefing, hands and face
blackened, anonymous among a dozen other listeners—tells Pirate now there’s a message
addressed to him, waiting at Greenwich.

“It came over in a rather delightful way,” the voice high-pitched and sullen, “none
of
my
friends are that clever. All
my
mail arrives by post. Do come collect it, won’t you, Prentice.” Receiver hits cradle
a violent whack, connection breaks, and now Pirate knows where this morning’s rocket
landed, and why there was no explosion. Incoming mail, indeed. He gazes through sunlight’s
buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of
bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between
them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes
of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively.
Pirate’s again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.

He’s driven out, away, east over Vauxhall Bridge in a dented green Lagonda by his
batman, a Corporal Wayne. The morning seems to grow colder the higher the sun rises.
Clouds begin to gather after all. A crew of American sappers spills into the road,
on route to clear some ruin nearby, singing:

It’s . . .

Colder than the nipple on a witch’s tit!

Colder than a bucket of penguin shit!

Colder than the hairs of a polar bear’s ass!

Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!

No, they are making believe to be narodnik, but I know, they are of Iasi, of Codreanu,
his men, men of the League, they . . . they kill for him—they have oath! They try
to kill me . . . Transylvanian Magyars, they know spells . . . at night they whisper. . . .
Well, hrrump, heh, heh, here comes Pirate’s Condition creeping over him again, when
he’s least expecting it as usual—might as well mention here that much of what the
dossiers call Pirate Prentice is a strange talent for—well, for getting inside the
fantasies of others: being able, actually, to take over the burden of managing them,
in this case those of an exiled Rumanian royalist who may prove needed in the very
near future. It is a gift the Firm has found uncommonly useful: at this time mentally
healthy leaders and other historical figures are indispensable. What better way to
cup and bleed them of excess anxiety than to get someone to take over the running
of their exhausting little daydreams for them . . . to live in the tame green lights
of their tropical refuges, in the breezes through their cabañas, to drink their tall
drinks, changing your seat to face the entrances of their public places, not letting
their innocence suffer any more than it already has . . . to get their erections for
them, at the oncome of thoughts the doctors feel are inappropriate . . . fear all,
all that they cannot afford to fear . . . remembering the words of P. M. S. Blackett,
“You can’t run a war on gusts of emotion.” Just hum the nitwit little tune they taught
you, and try not to fuck up:

Yes—I’m—the—

Fellow that’s hav-ing other peop-le’s fan-tasies,

Suffering what they ought to be themselves—

No matter if Girly’s on my knee—

If Kruppingham-Jones is late to tea,

I don’t even get to ask for whom the bell’s . . .

[Now over a lotta tubas and close-harmony trombones]

It never does seem to mat-ter if there’s daaaanger,

For Danger’s a roof I fell from long ago—

I’ll be out-one-day and never come back,

Forget the bitter you owe me, Jack,

Just piss on m’ grave and car-ry on the show!

He will then actually
skip
to and fro, with his knees high and twirling a walking stick with W. C. Fields’ head,
nose, top hat, and all, for its knob, and surely capable of magic, while the band
plays a second chorus. Accompanying will be a phantasmagoria, a real one, rushing
toward the screen, in over the heads of the audiences, on little tracks of an elegant
Victorian cross section resembling the profile of a chess knight conceived fancifully
but not vulgarly so—then rushing back out again, in and out, the images often changing
scale so quickly, so unpredictably that you’re apt now and then to get a bit of lime-green
in with your rose, as they say. The scenes are highlights from Pirate’s career as
a fantasist-surrogate, and go back to when he was carrying, everywhere he went, the
mark of Youthful Folly growing in an unmistakable Mongoloid point, right out of the
middle of his head. He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could
not be his own. This wasn’t through any rigorous daytime analysis of content, but
just because he
knew.
But then came the day when he met, for the first time, the real owner of a dream
he, Pirate, had had: it was by a drinking fountain in a park, a very long, neat row
of benches, a feeling of sea just over a landscaped rim of small cypresses, gray crushed
stone on the walks looking soft to sleep on as the brim of a fedora, and here comes
this buttonless and drooling derelict, the one you are afraid of ever meeting, to
pause and watch two Girl Guides trying to adjust the water pressure of the fountain.
They bent over, unaware, the saucy darlings, of the fatal strips of white cotton knickers
thus displayed, the undercurves of baby-fat little buttocks a blow to the Genital
Brain, however pixilated. The tramp laughed and pointed, he looked back at Pirate
then and said something extraordinary: “Eh? Girl Guides start pumping water . . .
your sound will be the sizzling night
 . . . eh?” staring directly at no one but Pirate now, no more pretense. . . . Well,
Pirate had dreamed these very words, morning before last, just before waking, they’d
been part of the usual list of prizes in a Competition grown crowded and perilous,
out of some indoor intervention of charcoal streets . . . he couldn’t remember that
well . . . scared out of his wits by now, he replied, “Go away, or I will call a policeman.”

It took care of the immediate problem for him. But sooner or later the time would
come when someone else would find out his gift, someone to whom it mattered—he had
a long-running fantasy of his own, rather a Eugène Sue melodrama, in which he would
be abducted by an organization of dacoits or Sicilians, and used for unspeakable purposes.

In 1935 he had his first episode
outside
any condition of known sleep—it was during his Kipling Period, beastly Fuzzy-Wuzzies
far as eye could see, dracunculiasis and Oriental sore rampant among the troops, no
beer for a month, wireless being jammed by other Powers who would be masters of these
horrid blacks, God knows why, and all folklore broken down, no Cary Grant larking
in and out slipping elephant medicine in the punchbowls out here . . . not even an
Arab With A Big Greasy Nose to perform on, as in that wistful classic every tommy’s
heard . . . small wonder that one fly-blown four in the afternoon, open-eyed, in the
smell of rotting melon rinds, to the seventy-seven-millionth repetition of the outpost’s
only Gramophone record, Sandy MacPherson playing on his organ “The Changing of the
Guard,” what should develop for Pirate here but a sumptuous Oriental episode: vaulting
lazily and well over the fence and sneaking in to town, to the Forbidden Quarter.
There to stumble into an orgy held by a Messiah no one has quite recognized yet, and
to know, as your eyes meet, that you are his John the Baptist, his Nathan of Gaza,
that it is you who must convince him of his Godhead, proclaim him to others, love
him both profanely and in the Name of what he is . . . it could be no one’s fantasy
but H. A. Loaf’s. There is at least one Loaf in every outfit, it is Loaf who keeps
forgetting that those of the Moslem faith are not keen on having snaps taken of them
in the street . . . it is Loaf who borrows one’s shirt runs out of cigarettes finds
the illicit one in your pocket and lights up in the canteen at high noon, where presently
he is reeling about with a loose smile, addressing the sergeant commanding the red-cap
section by his Christian name. So of course when Pirate makes the mistake of verifying
the fantasy with Loaf, it’s not very long at all before higher echelons know about
it too. Into the dossier it goes, and eventually the Firm, in Their tireless search
for negotiable skills, will summon him under Whitehall, to observe him in his trances
across the blue baize fields and the terrible paper gaming, his eyes rolled back into
his head reading old, glyptic old graffiti on his own sockets. . . .