Gravity's Rainbow (26 page)

I should . . . should have. . . . There are, in his history, so many of these unmade
moves, so many “should haves”—should have married her, let her father steer him, should
have stayed in Harley Street, been kinder, smiled more at strangers, even smiled back
this afternoon at Maudie Chilkes . . . why couldn’t he? A silly bleeding smile, why
not, what inhibits, what snarl of the mosaic? Pretty, amber eyes behind those government
spectacles . . . Women avoid him. He knows in a general way what it is: he’s creepy.
He’s even aware, usually, of the times when he’s
being
creepy—it’s a certain set to his face-muscles, a tendency to sweat . . . but he can’t
seem to
do
anything about it, can’t ever concentrate for long enough, they distract him so—and
next thing he knows he’s back to radiating the old creepiness again . . . and their
response to it is predictable, they run uttering screams only they, and he, can hear.
Oh but how he’d like someday to give them something
really to scream about. . . .

Here’s an erection stirring, he’ll masturbate himself to sleep again tonight. A joyless
constant, an institution in his life. But goading him, just before the bright peak,
what images will come whirling in? Why, the turrets and blue waters, the sails and
churchtops of Stockholm—the yellow telegram, the face of a tall, cognizant, and beautiful
woman turned to watch him as he passes in the ceremonial limousine, a woman who will
later, hardly by chance, visit him in his suite at the Grand Hotel . . . it’s not
all
ruby nipples and black lace cami-knickers, you know. There are hushed entrances into
rooms that smell of paper, satellite votes on this Committee or that, the Chairs,
the Prizes . . . what could compare!
Later, when you’re older, you’ll know
, they said. Yes and it grows upon him, each war year equal to a dozen of peacetime,
oh my, how right they were.

As his luck has always known, his subcortical, brute luck, his gift of survival while
other and better men are snatched away into Death, here’s the door, one he’s imagined
so often in lonely Thesean brushings down his polished corridors of years: an exit
out of the orthodox-Pavlovian, showing him vistas of Norrmalm, Södermalm, Deer Park
and Old City. . . .

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues
the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living . . .
and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling
to sleep forever, parts of whoever he’s been now losing all definition, reverting
to dumb chemistry. . . .

Kevin Spectro did not differentiate as much as he between Outside and Inside. He saw
the cortex as an interface organ, mediating between the two, but
part of them both.
“When you’ve looked at how it really is,” he asked once, “how can we, any of us,
be separate?” He is my Pierre Janet, Pointsman thought. . . .

Soon, by the dialectic of the Book, Pointsman will be alone, in a black field lapsing
to isotropy, to the zero, waiting to be last to go. . . . Will there be time? He
has
to survive . . . to try for the Prize, not for his own glory, no—but to keep a promise,
to the human field of seven he once was, the ones who didn’t make it. . . . Here’s
a medium shot, himself backlit, alone at the high window in the Grand Hotel, whisky
glass tipped at the bright subarctic sky and
here’s to you then, chaps, it’ll be all of us up there onstage tomorrow, Ned Pointsman
only happened to survive that’s all . . .
TO STOCKHOLM his banner and cry, and after Stockholm a blur, a long golden twilight. . . .

Oh yes once you know, he did believe in a Minotaur waiting for him: used to dream
himself rushing into the last room, burnished sword at the ready, screaming like a
Commando, letting it all out at last—some true marvelous peaking of life inside him
for the first and last time, as the face turned his way, ancient, weary, seeing none
of Pointsman’s humanity, ready only to assume him in another long-routinized nudge
of horn, flip of hoof (but this time there would be struggle, Minotaur blood the fucking
beast, cries from far inside himself whose manliness and violence surprise him). . . .
This was the dream. The settings, the face changed, little of it past the structure
survived the first cup of coffee and flat beige Benzedrine pill. It might be a vast
lorry-park just at dawn, the pavement newly hosed, mottled in grease-browns, the hooded
olive trucks standing each with a secret, each waiting . . . but he knows that inside
one of these . . . and at last, sifting among them, finds it, the identifying code
beyond voicing, climbs up into the back, under the canvas, waits in the dust and brown
light, until through the cloudy oblong of the cab window a face, a face
he knows
begins to turn . . . but the underlying structure is the turning face, the meeting
of eyes . . . stalking Reichssieger von Thanatz Alpdrucken, that most elusive of Nazi
hounds, champion Weimaraner for 1941, bearing studbook number 416832 tattooed inside
his ear along through a Londonized Germany, his liver-gray shape receding, loping
at twilit canalsides strewn with debris of war, rocket blasts each time missing them,
their chase preserved, a plate etched in firebursts, the map of a sacrificial city,
of a cortex human and canine, the dog’s ear-leather mildly aswing, top of his skull
brightly reflecting the winter clouds, into a shelter lying steel-clad miles below
the city, an opera of Balkan intrigue, in whose hermetic safety, among whose clusters
of blue dissonance unperiodically stressed he’s unable to escape completely because
of how always the Reichssieger persists, leading, serene, uncancelable, and to the
literal pursuit of whom he thus returns, must return time and again in a fever-rondo,
until at last they are on some hillside at the end of a long afternoon of dispatches
from Armageddon, among scarlet banks of bougainvillea, golden pathways where dust
is rising, pillars of smoke far away over the spidery city they’ve crossed, voices
in the air telling of South America burned to cinders, the sky over New York glowing
purple with the new all-sovereign death-ray, and here at last is where the gray dog
can turn and the amber eyes gaze into Ned Pointsman’s own. . . .

Each time, each turning, his own blood and heart are stroked, beaten, brought jubilantly
high, and triggered to the icy noctiluca, to flare and fusing Thermite as he begins
to expand, an uncontainable light, as the walls of the chamber turn a blood glow,
orange, then white and begin to slip, to flow like wax, what there is of labyrinth
collapsing in rings outward, hero and horror, engineer and Ariadne consumed, molten
inside the light of himself, the mad exploding of himself. . . .

Years ago. Dreams he hardly remembers. The intermediaries come long since between
himself and his final beast. They would deny him even the little perversity of being
in love with his death. . . .

But now with Slothrop in it—sudden angel, thermodynamic surprise, whatever he is . . .
will it change now? Might Pointsman get to have a go at the Minotaur after all?

Slothrop ought to be on the Riviera by now, warm, fed, well-fucked. But out in this
late English winter the dogs, thrown over, are still ranging the back-streets and
mews, sniffing the dustbins, skidding on carpets of snow, fighting, fleeing, shivering
in their wet pools of Prussian blue . . . seeking to avoid what cannot be smelled
or seen, what announces itself with the roar of a predator so absolute they sink to
the snow whining and roll over to give It their soft and open bellies. . . .

Has Pointsman renounced them in favor of one untried human subject? Don’t think he
hasn’t doubts as to the validity of this scheme, at least. Let Vicar de la Nuit worry
about its “rightness,” he’s the staff chaplain. But . . . what about the dogs? Pointsman
knows them. He’s deftly picked the locks of their awareness. They have no secrets.
He can drive them mad, and with bromides in adequate doses he can bring them back.
But Slothrop . . .

So the Pavlovian dithers about his office, feeling restless and old. He should sleep
but he can’t. It has to be more than the simple conditioning of a child, once upon
a time. How can he’ve been a doctor this long and not developed reflexes for certain
conditions? He knows better: he knows it is more. Spectro is dead, and Slothrop (
sentiments d’emprise
, old man, softly now) was with his Darlene, only a few blocks from St. Veronica’s,
two days before.

When one event happens after another with this awful regularity, of course you don’t
automatically assume that it’s cause-and-effect. But you do look for some mechanism
to make sense of it. You probe, you design a modest experiment. . . . He owes Spectro
that much. Even if the American’s not legally a murderer, he is sick. The etiology
ought to be traced, the treatment found.

There is to this enterprise, Pointsman knows, a danger of seduction. Because of the
symmetry. . . . He’s been led before, you know, down the garden path by symmetry:
in certain test results . . . in assuming that a mechanism must imply its mirror image—“irradiation,”
for example, and “reciprocal induction” . . . and who’d ever said that either had
to exist? Perhaps it will be so this time, too. But how it haunts him, the symmetry
of these two secret weapons, Outside, out in the Blitz, the sounds of V-1 and V-2,
one the reverse of the other. . . . Pavlov showed how mirror-images Inside could be
confused. Ideas of the opposite. But what new pathology lies Outside now? What sickness
to events—to History itself—can create symmetrical opposites like these robot weapons?

Sign and symptoms. Was Spectro right? Could Outside and Inside be part of the same
field? If only in fairness . . . in fairness . . . Pointsman ought to be seeking the
answer at the interface . . . oughtn’t he . . . on the cortex of Lieutenant Slothrop.
The man will suffer—perhaps, in some clinical way, be destroyed—but how many others
tonight are suffering in his name? For pity’s sake, every
day
in Whitehall they’re weighing and taking risks that make his, in this, seem almost
trivial. Almost. There’s something here, too transparent and swift to get a hold on—Psi
Section might speak of ectoplasms—but he knows that the time has never been better,
and that the exact experimental subject
is
in his hands. He must seize now, or be doomed to the same stone hallways, whose termination
he knows. But he must remain open—even to the possibility that the Psi people are
right. “We may all be right,” he puts in his journal tonight, “so may be all we have
speculated, and more. Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologically,
historically, a monster.
We must never lose control.
The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep
dread I cannot extinguish. . . .”

• • • • • • •

More and more, these days of angelic visit and communiqué, Carroll Eventyr feels a
victim of his freak talent. As Nora Dodson-Trucks once called it, his “splendid weakness.”
It showed late in life: he was 35 when out of the other world, one morning on the
Embankment, between strokes of a pavement artist’s two pastels, salmon darkening to
fawn, and a score of lank human figures, rag-sorrowful in the distances interlacing
with ironwork and river smoke, all at once someone was speaking through Eventyr, so
quietly that Nora caught hardly any of it, not even the identity of the soul that
took and used him. Not then. Some of it was in German, some of the words she remembered.
She would ask her husband, whom she was to meet that afternoon out in Surrey—arriving
late though, all the shadows, men and women, dogs, chimneys, very long and black across
the enormous lawn, and she with a dusting of ocher, barely noticeable in the late
sun, making a fan shape near the edge of her veil—it was that color she’d snatched
from the screever’s wood box and swiftly, turning smoothly, touching only at shoe
tip and the creamy block of yellow crumbling onto the surface, never leaving it, drew
a great five-pointed star on the pavement, just upriver from an unfriendly likeness
of Lloyd George in heliotrope and sea-green: pulling Eventyr by the hand to stand
inside the central pentagon, seagulls in a wailing diadem overhead, then stepping
in herself, an instinctive, a motherly way, her way with anyone she loved. She’d drawn
her pentagram not even half in play. One couldn’t be too safe, there was always evil. . . .

Had he felt her, even then, beginning to recede . . . called up the control from across
the Wall as a way of holding on? She was deepening from his waking, his social eye
like light at the edge of the evening when, for perhaps a perilous ten minutes, nothing
helps: put on your glasses and light lamps, sit by the west window and still it keeps
going away, you keep losing the light and perhaps it is forever this time . . . a
good time of day for learning surrender, learning to diminish like the light, or like
certain music. This surrender is his only gift. Afterward he can recall nothing. Sometimes,
rarely, there may be tantalizing—not words, but halos of meaning around words his
mouth evidently spoke, that only stay behind—if they do—for a moment, like dreams,
can’t be held or developed, and, presently, go away. He’s been under Rollo Groast’s
EEG countless times since first he came to “The White Visitation,” and all’s normal-adult
except for, oh once or twice perhaps a stray 50-millivolt spike off a temporal lobe,
now left now right, really no pattern to it—indeed a kind of canals-of-Mars controversy
has been in progress for these years among the different observers—Aaron Throwster
swears he’s seen slow delta-wave shapes out of the left frontal and suspects a tumor,
last summer Edwin Treacle noted a “subdued petitmal spike-and-wave alternation, curiously
much slower than the usual three per second”—though admittedly Treacle was up in London
all the night before debauching with Allen Lamplighter and his gambling crowd. Less
than a week later the buzzbomb gave Lamp-lighter his chance: to find Eventyr from
the other side and prove him to be what others had said: an interface between the
worlds, a sensitive. Lamplighter had offered 5-to-2 odds. But so far he’s been silent:
nothing in the soft acetate/metal discs or typed transcripts that mightn’t be any
of a dozen other souls. . . .