Gravity's Rainbow (21 page)

Frans can look at both versions, the miracle and the hunt of more years than he can
remember now, as real, equal possibilities. In both, eventually, the dodoes die. But
as for faith . . . he can believe only in the one steel reality of the firearm he
carries. “He knew that a snaphaan would weigh less, its cock, flint, and steel give
him surer ignition—but he felt a nostalgia about the haakbus . . . he didn’t mind
the extra weight, it was
his
crotchet. . . .”

Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across
and up the winding river, the imperial serpent, crowds of factories, flats, parks,
smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep
streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic stain of burnt orange
to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors
and windows in sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two
in the street before he goes up to the soap-heavy smell of the rented room and the
squares of coral sunset on the floor-boards—an antique light, self-absorbed, fuel
consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more distant shapes among the threads
or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment
by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense
fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars
at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as
if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of
many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions
to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow
in rings, concentric rings, on the radar screens. The operators call them “angels.”

“He’s haunting you,” Osbie puffing on an Amanita cigarette.

“Yes,” Pirate ranging the edges of the roof-garden, irritable in the sunset, “but
it’s the last thing I want to believe. The other’s been bad enough. . . .”

“What d’you think of her, then.”

“Someone can use her, I think,” having decided this yesterday at Charing Cross Station
when she left for “The White Visitation.” “An unforeseen dividend, for somebody.”

“Do you know what they have in mind, down there?”

Only that they’re brewing up something that involves a giant octopus. But no one up
here in London knows with any precision. Even at “The White Visitation” there’s this
sudden great coming and going, and a swampy ambiguity as to why. Myron Grunton is
noted casting less than comradely looks at Roger Mexico. The Zouave has gone back
to his unit in North Africa, back under the Cross of Lorraine, all that the German
might find sinister in his blackness recorded on film, sweet-talked or coerced out
of him by none less than Gerhardt von Göll, once an intimate and still the equal of
Lang, Pabst, Lubitsch, more lately meshed in with the affairs of any number of exile
governments, fluctuations in currencies, the establishment and disestablishment of
an astonishing network of market operations winking on, winking off across the embattled
continent, even as the firefights whistle steel up and down the streets and the firestorms
sweep oxygen up in the sky and the customers fall smothered like bugs in the presence
of Flit . . . but commerce has not taken away von Göll’s Touch: these days it has
grown more sensitive than ever. In these first rushes the black man moves about in
SS uniform, among the lath and canvas mockups of rocket and Meillerwagen (always shot
through pines, through snow, from distant angles that don’t give away the English
location), the others in plausible blackface, recruited for the day, the whole crew
on a lark, Mr. Pointsman, Mexico, Edwin Treacle, and Rollo Groast, ARF’s resident
neurosurgeon Aaron Throwster, all playing the black rocketeers of the fictional Schwarzkommando—even
Myron Grunton in a nonspeaking role, a blurry extra like the rest of them. Running
time of the film is three minutes, 25 seconds and there are twelve shots. It will
be antiqued, given a bit of fungus and ferrotyping, and transported to Holland, to
become part of the “remains” of a counterfeit rocket-firing site in the Rijkswijksche
Bosch. The Dutch resistance will then “raid” this site, making a lot of commotion,
faking in tire-tracks and detailing the litter of hasty departure. The inside of an
Army lorry will be gutted by Molotov cocktails: among ashes, charred clothing, blackened
and slightly melted gin bottles, will be found fragments of carefully forged Schwarzkommando
documents, and of a reel of film, only three minutes and 25 seconds of which will
be viewable. Von Göll, with a straight face, proclaims it to be his greatest work.

“Indeed, as things were to develop,” writes noted film critic Mitchell Prettyplace,
“one cannot argue much with his estimate, though for vastly different reasons than
von Göll might have given or even from his peculiar vantage foreseen.”

At “The White Visitation,” because of erratic funding, there is only one film projector.
Each day, about noon, after the Operation Black Wing people have watched their fraudulent
African rocket troops, Webley Silvernail comes to carry the projector back down the
chilly scuffed-wood corridors again to the ARF wing, in to the inner room where octopus
Grigori oozes sullenly in his tank. In other rooms the dogs whine, bark shrilly in
pain, whimper for a stimulus that does not, will never come, and the snow goes whirling,
invisible tattooing needles against the nerveless window glass behind the green shades.
The reel is threaded, the lights are switched off, Grigori’s attention is directed
to the screen, where an image already walks. The camera follows as she moves deliberately
nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an adolescent wideness and hunching to the shoulders,
her hair not bluntly Dutch at all, but secured in a modish upsweep with an old, tarnished
silver crown. . . .

• • • • • • •

It was very early morning. He stumbled out alone into a wet brick street. Southward
the barrage balloons, surfriders on the combers of morning, were glowing, pink and
pearl, in the sunrise.

They’ve cut Slothrop loose again, he’s back on the street, shit, last chance for a
Section 8 ’n’ he blew it. . . .

Why didn’t they keep him on at that nut ward for as long as they said they would—wasn’t
it supposed to be a few weeks? No explanation—just “Cheerio!” and the onionskin sending
him back to that ACHTUNG. The Kenosha Kid, and that Crouchfield the Westwardman and
his sidekick Whappo have been all his world for these recent days . . . there were
still problems to be worked out, adventures not yet completed, coercions and vast
deals to be made on the order of the old woman’s arrangement for getting her pig home
over the stile. But now, rudely, here’s that London again.

But something’s different . . . something’s . . . been
changed. . .
don’t mean to bitch, folks, but—well for instance he could almost swear he’s being
followed, or watched anyway. Some of the tails are pretty slick, but others he can
spot, all right. Xmas shopping yesterday at that Woolworth’s, he caught a certain
pair of beady eyes in the toy section, past a heap of balsa-wood fighter planes and
little-kid-size Enfields. A hint of constancy to what shows up in the rearview mirror
of his Humber, no color or model he can pin down but
something
always present inside the tiny frame, has led him to start checking out other cars
when he goes off on a morning’s work. Things on his desk at ACHTUNG seem not to be
where they were. Girls have found excuses not to keep appointments. He feels he’s
being gently separated from the life he lived before going into St. Veronica’s. Even
in movies there’s always someone behind him being careful not to talk, rattle paper,
laugh too loud: Slothrop’s been to enough movies that he can pick up an anomaly like
that right away.

The cubicle near Grosvenor Square begins to feel more and more like a trap. He spends
his time, often whole days, ranging the East End, breathing the rank air of Thameside,
seeking places the followers might not follow.

One day, just as he’s entering a narrow street all ancient brick walls and lined with
costermongers, he hears his name called—and hubba hubba what’s this then, here she
comes all right, blonde hair flying in telltales, white wedgies clattering on cobblestone,
an adorable tomato in a nurse uniform, and her name’s, uh, well, oh—Darlene. Golly,
it’s Darlene. She works at St. Veronica’s hospital, lives nearby at the home of a
Mrs. Quoad, a lady widowed long ago and since suffering a series of antiquated diseases—greensickness,
tetter, kibes, purples, imposthumes and almonds in the ears, most recently a touch
of scurvy. So, out in search of limes for her landlady, the fruit beginning to jog
and spill from her straw basket and roll yellowgreen back down the street, young Darlene
comes running in her nurse’s cap, her breasts soft fenders for this meeting on the
gray city sea.

“You came back! Ah Tyrone, you’re
back,
” a tear or two, both of them down picking up citrus, the starch khaki dress rattling,
even the odd sniffle from Slothrop’s not unsentimental nose.

“It’s me love . . .”

Tire tracks in the slush have turned to pearl, mellow pearl. Gulls cruise slowly against
the high windowless brick walls of the district.

Mrs. Quoad’s is up three dark flights, with the dome of faraway St. Paul’s out its
kitchen window visible in the smoke of certain afternoons, and the lady herself tiny
in a rose plush chair in the sitting-room by the wireless, listening to Primo Scala’s
Accordion Band. She looks healthy enough. On the table, though, is her crumpled chiffon
handkerchief: feathered blots of blood in and out the convolutions like a floral pattern.

“You were here when I had that horrid quotidian ague,” she recalls Slothrop, “the
day we brewed the wormwood tea,” sure enough, the very taste now, rising through his
shoe-soles, taking him along. They’re reassembling . . . it must be outside his memory . . .
cool clean interior, girl and woman, independent of his shorthand of stars . . . so
many fading-faced girls, windy canalsides, bed-sitters, bus-stop good-bys, how can
he be expected to remember? but this room has gone on clarifying: part of whoever
he was inside it has kindly remained, stored quiescent these months outside of his
head, distributed through the grainy shadows, the grease-hazy jars of herbs, candies,
spices, all the Compton Mackenzie novels on the shelf, glassy ambrotypes of her late
husband Austin night-dusted inside gilded frames up on the mantel where last time
Michaelmas daisies greeted and razzled from a little Sèvres vase she and Austin found
together one Saturday long ago in a Wardour Street shop. . . .

“He was my good health,” she often says. “Since he passed away I’ve had to become
all but an outright witch, in pure self-defense.” From the kitchen comes the smell
of limes freshly cut and squeezed. Darlene’s in and out of the room, looking for different
botanicals, asking where the cheesecloth’s got to, “Tyrone help me just reach down
that—no next to it, the tall jar, thank you love”—back into the kitchen in a creak
of starch, a flash of pink. “I’m the only one with a memory around here,” Mrs. Quoad
sighs. “We help each other, you see.” She brings out from behind its cretonne camouflage
a great bowl of candies.
“Now,”
beaming at Slothrop. “Here: wine jellies. They’re prewar.”

“Now I remember you—the one with the graft at the Ministry of Supply!” but he knows,
from last time, that no gallantry can help him now. After that visit he wrote home
to Nalline: “The English are kind of weird when it comes to the way things taste,
Mom. They aren’t like us. It might be the climate. They go for things we would never
dream of. Sometimes it is enough to turn your stomach, boy. The other day I had had
one of these things they call ‘wine jellies.’ That’s their idea of
candy
, Mom! Figure out a way to feed some to that Hitler ’n’ I betcha the war’d be over
tomorrow!
” Now once again he finds himself checking out these ruddy gelatin objects, nodding,
he hopes amiably, at Mrs. Quoad. They have the names of different wines written on
them in bas-relief.

“Just a touch of menthol too,” Mrs. Quoad popping one into her mouth. “Delicious.”

Slothrop finally chooses one that says Lafitte Rothschild and stuffs it on into his
kisser. “Oh yeah. Yeah. Mmm. It’s great.”

“If you
really
want something peculiar try the Bernkastler Doktor. Oh! Aren’t you the one who brought
me those lovely American slimy elm things, maple-tasting with a touch of sassafras—”

“Slippery elm. Jeepers I’m sorry, I ran out yesterday.”

Darlene comes in with a steaming pot and three cups on a tray.

“What’s that?” Slothrop a little quickly, here.

“You don’t really want to know, Tyrone.”

“Quite right,” after the first sip, wishing she’d used more lime juice or something
to kill the basic taste, which is ghastly-bitter. These people are really insane.
No sugar, natch. He reaches in the candy bowl, comes up with a black, ribbed licorice
drop. It looks safe. But just as he’s biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar
look, great timing this girl, sez, “Oh, I thought we got rid of all
those
—” a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan ingenue’s
thewse—“years
ago,” at which point Slothrop is encountering this dribbling liquid center, which
tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels.

“You’ve taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!” cries Mrs. Quoad, having now with
conjuror’s speed produced an egg-shaped confection of pastel green, studded all over
with lavender nonpareils. “Just for that I shan’t let you have any of these marvelous
rhubarb creams.” Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.

“Serves me right,” Slothrop, wondering just what he means by this, sipping herb tea
to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy—oops but that’s a mistake, right, here’s
his mouth filling once again with horrible alkaloid desolation, all the way back to
the soft palate where it digs in. Darlene, pure Nightingale compassion, is handing
him a hard red candy, molded like a stylized raspberry . . . mm, which oddly enough
even tastes like a raspberry, though it can’t begin to take away that bitterness.
Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the act knows, fucking idiot, he’s been had
once more, there comes pouring out onto his tongue the most godawful crystalline concentration
of Jeez it must be pure nitric acid, “Oh mercy that’s really
sour
,” hardly able to get the words out he’s so puckered up, exactly the sort of thing
Hop Harrigan used to pull to get Tank Tinker to quit playing his ocarina, a shabby
trick then and twice as reprehensible coming from an old lady who’s supposed to be
one of our Allies, shit he can’t even
see
it’s up his nose and whatever it is won’t dissolve, just goes on torturing his shriveling
tongue and crunches like ground glass among his molars. Mrs. Quoad is meantime busy
savoring, bite by dainty bite, a cherry-quinine
petit four.
She beams at the young people across the candy bowl. Slothrop, forgetting, reaches
again for his tea. There is no graceful way out of this now. Darlene has brought a
couple-three more candy jars down off of the shelf, and now he goes plunging, like
a journey to the center of some small, hostile planet, into an enormous bonbon
chomp
through the mantle of chocolate to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally
into a core of some very tough grape gum arabic. He fingernails a piece of this out
from between his teeth and stares at it for a while. It is purple in color.