Gravity's Rainbow (45 page)

Too impatient to wait for the first star, Slothrop enters the hotel. The carpets are
dusty, the place smells of alcohol and bleach. Sailors and girls come ambling through,
together and separate, as Slothrop paranoids from door to door looking for one that
might have something to tell him. Radios play in the heavy wood rooms. The stairwell
doesn’t appear to be plumb, but
tilted
at some peculiar angle, and the light running down the walls is of only two colors:
earth and leaf. Up on the top floor Slothrop finally spots an old motherly femme de
chambre on the way into a room carrying a change of linen, very white in the gloom.

“Why did you leave,” the sad whisper ringing as if through a telephone receiver from
someplace far away, “they wanted to help you. They wouldn’t have done anything bad. . . .”
Her hair is rolled up, George Washington style, all the way around. She gazes at 45°
to Slothrop, a patient, parkbench chessplayer’s gaze, very large, arching kindly nose
and bright eyes: she is starch, sure-boned, the toes of her leather shoes turn up
slightly, she’s wearing red-and-white striped socks on enormous feet that give her
the look of a helpful critter from one of the other worlds, the sort of elf who’d
not only make shoes while you slept but also sweep up a little, have the pot on when
you awoke, and maybe a fresh flower by the window—

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s still time.”

“You don’t understand. They’ve killed a friend of mine.” But seeing it in the
Times
that way, so public . . . how could any of that be real, real enough to convince
him Tantivy won’t just come popping in the door some day, howdyfoax and a bashful
smile . . . hey, Tantivy. Where were you?

“Where
was
I, Slothrop? That’s a good one.” His smile lighting the time again, and the world
all free. . . .

He flashes Waxwing’s card. The old woman breaks into an amazing smile, the two teeth
left in her head beam under the night’s new bulbs. She thumbs him upstairs and then
gives him either the V-for-victory sign or some spell from distant countryside against
the evil eye that sours the milk. Whichever it is, she is chuckling sarcastically.

Upstairs is a roof, a kind of penthouse in the middle. Three young men with Apache
sideburns and a young woman packing a braided leather sap are sitting in front of
the entrance smoking a thin cigarette of ambiguous odor. “You are lost, mon ami.”

“Uh, well,” out with Waxwing’s card again.

“Ah, bien. . . .” They roll aside, and he passes into a bickering of canary-yellow
Borsalini, corksoled comicbook shoes with enormous round toes, lotta that saddle-stitching
in contrasting colors (such as orange on blue, and the perennial favorite, green on
magenta), workaday groans of comforted annoyance commonly heard in public toilets,
telephone traffic inside clouds of cigar smoke. Waxwing isn’t in, but a colleague
interrupts some loud dealing soon as he sees the card.

“What do you need?”

“Carte d’identité, passage to Zürich, Switzerland.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Place to sleep.”

The man hands over a key to one of the rooms downstairs. “Do you have any money?”

“Not much. I don’t know when I could—”

Count, squint, riffle, “Here.”

“Uh . . .”

“It’s all right, it’s not a loan. It comes out of overhead. Now, don’t go outside,
don’t get drunk, stay away from the girls who work here.”

“Aw . . .”

“See you tomorrow.” Back to business.

Slothrop’s night passes uncomfortably. There is no position he can manage to sleep
in for more than ten minutes. The bugs sally out onto his body in skirmish parties
not uncoordinated with his level of wakefulness. Drunks come to the door, drunks and
revenants.

“’Rone, you’ve gotta let me in, it’s Dumpster, Dumpster Villard.”

“What’s ’at—”

“It’s really bad tonight. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t impose this way, I’m more trouble
than I’m worth . . . listen . . . I’m cold . . . I’ve been a long way. . . .”

A sharp knock. “Dumpster—”

“No, no, it’s Murray Smile, I was next to you in basic, company 84, remember? Our
serial numbers are only two digits apart.”

“I had to let . . . let Dumpster in . . . where’d he go? Was I asleep?”

“Don’t tell them I was here. I just came to tell you you don’t have to go back.”

“Really? Did they say it was all right?”

“It’s all right.”

“Yeah, but did
they say
it was?” Silence. “Hey? Murray?” Silence.

The wind is blowing in the ironwork very strong, and down in the street a vegetable
crate bounces end over end, wooden, empty, dark. It must be four in the morning. “Got
to get back, shit I’m late. . . .”

“No.” Only a whisper. . . . But it was her “no” that stayed with him.

“Whozat. Jenny? That you, Jenny?”

“Yes it’s me. Oh love I’m so glad I found you.”

“But I have to . . .” Would They ever let her live with him at the Casino . . .?

“No. I can’t.” But
what’s wrong with her voice?

“Jenny, I heard your block was hit, somebody told me, the day after New Year’s . . .
a rocket . . . and I meant to go back and see if you were all right, but . . . I just
didn’t . . .
and then They took me to that Casino. . . .”

“It’s all right.”

“But not if I didn’t—”

“Just don’t go back to them.”

And somewhere, dark fish hiding past angles of refraction in the flow tonight, are
Katje and Tantivy, the two visitors he wants most to see. He tries to bend the voices
that come to the door, bend them like notes on a harmonica, but it won’t work. What
he wants lies too deep. . . .

Just before dawn knocking comes very loud, hard as steel. Slothrop has the sense this
time to keep quiet.

“Come on, open up.”

“MPs, open up.”

American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing,
wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is
hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what
surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on
the
rightness
of what they planned to do . . . he’d been told long ago to expect this sort of thing
from Nazis, and especially from Japs—
we
were the ones who always played fair—but this pair outside the door now are as demoralizing
as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are, funny
you never noticed before) screaming “BANZAI!”

“Wait a minute Ray, there he goes—”

“Hopper! You asshole, come back here—”

“You’ll never get me in a strait jacket agaaaaain. . . .” Hopper’s voice goes fading
around the corner as the MPs take off in pursuit.

It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown window shade, that this is
his first day Outside. His first free morning. He
doesn’t
have to go back. Free? What’s free? He falls asleep at last. A little before noon
a young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves him the papers. He is now
an English war correspondent named Ian Scuffling.

“This is the address of one of our people in Zürich. Waxwing wishes you good luck
and asks what kept you so long.”

“You mean he wants an answer?”

“He said you’d have to think about it.”

“Sa-a-a-ay.” It’s just occurred to him. “Why are all you folks helping me like this?
For free and all?”

“Who knows? We have to play the patterns. There must be a pattern you’re in, right
now.”

“Uh . . .”

But she’s already left. Slothrop looks around the place: in the daylight it’s mean
and anonymous. Even the roaches must be uncomfortable here. . . . Is he off so quickly,
like Katje on her wheel, off on a ratchet of rooms like this, to be in each one only
long enough to gather wind or despair enough to move on to the next, but no way backward
now, ever again? No time even to get to know the Rue Rossini, which faces holler from
the windows, where’s a good place to eat, what’s the name of the song everybody’s
whistling these premature summer days. . . .

A week later he’s in Zürich, after a long passage by train. While the metal creatures
in their solitude, days of snug and stable fog, pass the hours at mime, at playing
molecules, imitating industrial synthesis as they are broken up, put together, coupled
and recoupled, he dozes in and out of a hallucination of Alps, fogs, abysses, tunnels,
bone-deep laborings up impossible grades, cowbells in the darkness, in the morning
green banks, smells of wet pasture, always out the windows an unshaven work crew on
the way to repair some stretch of track, long waits in marshaling-yards whose rails
run like layers of an onion cut end to end, gray and desolate places, nights of whistles,
coupling, crashes, sidings, staring cows on the evening hillsides, army convoys waiting
at the crossings as the train puffs by, never a clear sense of nationality anywhere,
nor even of belligerent sides, only the War, a single damaged landscape, in which
“neutral Switzerland” is a rather stuffy convention, observed but with as much sarcasm
as “liberated France” or “totalitarian Germany,” “Fascist Spain,” and others. . . .

The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in
different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad
spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first
time, begin to feel the leading edges of. . . .

He checks in to the Hotel Nimbus, in an obscure street in the Niederdorf or cabaret
section of Zürich. The room’s in an attic, and is reached by ladder. There’s also
a ladder outside the window, so he reckons it’ll be O.K. When night comes down he
goes out looking for the local Waxwing rep, finds him farther up the Limmatquai, under
a bridge, in rooms full of Swiss watches, clocks and altimeters. He’s a Russian named
Semyavin. Outside boats hoot on the river and the lake. Somebody upstairs is practicing
on a piano: stumbling, sweet lieder. Semyavin pours gentian brandy into cups of tea
he’s just brewed. “First thing you have to understand is the way everything here is
specialized. If it’s watches, you go to one café. If it’s women, you go to another.
Furs are subdivided into Sable, Ermine, Mink, and Others. Same with dope: Stimulants,
Depressants, Psychomimetics. . . . What is it you’re after?”

“Uh, information?” Gee, this stuff tastes like Moxie. . . .

“Oh. Another one.” Giving Slothrop a sour look. “Life was simple before the first
war. You wouldn’t remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items. Currency in those days was no
more than a sideline, and the term ‘industrial espionage’ was unknown. But I’ve seen
it change—oh, how it’s changed. The German inflation, that should’ve been my clue
right there, zeros strung end to end from here to Berlin. I would have stern talks
with myself. ‘Semyavin, it’s only a temporary lapse away from reality. A small aberration,
nothing to worry about. Act as you always have—strength of character, good mental
health.
Courage
, Semyavin! Soon all will be back to normal.’ But do you know what?”

“Let me guess.”

A tragic sigh. “Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the
world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?”

“I thought it was cigarettes.”

“You dream.” He brings out a list of Zürich cafés and gathering spots. Under Espionage,
Industrial, Slothrop finds three. Ultra, Lichtspiel, and Sträggeli. They are on both
banks of the Limmat, and widely spaced.

“Footwork,” folding the list in an oversize zoot-suit pocket.

“It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines. You
are the wave of the future.”

Begins a period of shuttling among the three cafés, sitting a few hours over coffee
at each one, eating once a day, Zürich baloney and rösti at the People’s Kitchens . . .
watching crowds of businessmen in blue suits, sun-black skiers who’ve spent the duration
schussing miles of glacier and snow hearing nothing of campaigns or politics, reading
nothing but thermometers and weathervanes, finding their atrocities in avalanches
or toppling séracs, their victories in layers of good powder . . . ragged foreigners
in oil-stained leather jackets and tattered fatigues, South Americans bundled in fur
coats and shivering in the clear sunlight, elderly hypochondriacs who were caught
out lounging at some spa when the War began and have been here since, women in long
black dresses who don’t smile, men in soiled overcoats who do . . . and the mad, down
from their fancy asylums on weekend furlough—oh, the mental cases of Switzerland:
Slothrop is known to them, all right, among all the somber street faces and colors
only he is wearing white, shoes zoot ’n’ hat, white as the cemetery mountains here. . . .
He’s also the New Mark In Town. It’s difficult for him to sort out the first wave
of corporate spies from the

L
OONIES
ON
L
EAVE
!

(The Chorus line is divided not into the conventional Boys and Girls but into Keepers
and Nuts, without regard to sex, though all four possibilities are represented on
stage. Many are wearing sunglasses with black lenses and white rims, not so much to
be fashionable as to suggest snow-blindness, the antiseptic white of the Clinic, perhaps
even the darkness of the mind. But all seems happy, relaxed, informal . . . no sign
of repression, not even a distinction in costume so that at first there is some problem
telling Nuts from Keepers as they all burst in from the wings dancing and singing):

Here we come foax—ready or not!

Put your mask on, and plot your plot,

We’re just laughin’ and droolin’, all—
over
the sleigh,

Like a buncha happy midgets on a holiday!

Oh we’re the LOONIES ON LEAVE, and

We haven’t a care—