Gravity's Rainbow (7 page)

Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a few Piratical fantasies about the
glamorous silken-calved English realworld he’d felt so shut away from. They got together
while Clive was away on a trouble-shooting mission for ICI in, of all places, Bahrein.
The symmetry of this helped Pirate relax about it some. They would attend parties
as strangers, though she never learned to arm herself against unexpected sight of
him across a room (trying to belong, as if he were not someone’s employee). She found
him touching in his ignorance of everything—partying, love, money—felt worldly and
desperately caring for this moment of boyhood among his ways imperialized and set
(he was 33), his pre-Austerity, in which Scorpia figured as his Last Fling—though
herself too young to know
that
, to know, like Pirate, what the lyrics to “Dancing in the Dark” are
really
about. . . .

He will be scrupulous about never telling her. But there are times when it’s agony
not to go to her feet, knowing she won’t leave Clive, crying
you’re my last chance . . . if it can’t be you then there’s no more time. . . .
Doesn’t he wish, against all hope, that he
could
let the poor, Western-man’s timetable go . . . but how does a man . . . where does
he even begin, at age 33. . . . “But that’s just
it,
” she’d have laughed, not so much annoyed (she
would have
laughed) as tickled by the unreality of the problem—herself too lost at the manic
edge of him, always at
engage
, so taking, cleaving her (for more than when jerking off into an Army flannel in
the Persian Gulf was some collar of love’s nettles now
at
him, at his cock), too unappeasable for her not to give in to the insanity of, but
too insane really even to think of as any betrayal of Clive. . . .

Convenient as hell for her, anyway. Roger Mexico is now going through much the same
thing with Jessica, the Other Chap in this case being known as Beaver. Pirate has
looked on but never talked about it to Mexico. Yes he is waiting, to see if it will
end for Roger the same way, part of him, never so cheery as at the spectacle of another’s
misfortune, rooting for Beaver and all that he, like Clive, stands for, to win out.
But another part—an alternate self?—one that he mustn’t be quick to call “decent”—does
seem
to want for Roger what Pirate himself lost. . . .

“You
are
a pirate,” she’d whispered the last day—neither of them knew it was the last day—“you’ve
come and taken me off on your pirate ship. A girl of good family and the usual repressions.
You’ve raped me. And I’m the Red Bitch of the High Seas. . . .” A lovely game. Pirate
wished she’d thought it up sooner. Fucking the last (already the last) day’s light
away down afternoon to dusk, hours of fucking, too in love with it to uncouple, they
noticed how the borrowed room rocked gently, the ceiling obligingly came down a foot,
lamps swayed from their fittings, some fraction of the Thameside traffic provided
salty cries over the water, and nautical bells. . . .

But back over their lowering sky-sea behind, Government hounds were on the track—drawing
closer, the cutters are coming, the cutters and the sleek hermaphrodites of the law,
agents who, being old hands, will settle for her safe return, won’t insist on his
execution or capture. Their logic is sound: give him a bad enough wound and he’ll
come round, round to the ways of this hard-boiled old egg of world and timetables,
cycling night to compromise night. . . .

He left her at Waterloo Station. A gala crowd was there, to see Fred Roper’s Company
of Wonder Midgets off to an imperial fair in Johannesburg, South Africa. Midgets in
their dark winter clothes, exquisite little frocks and nip-waisted overcoats, were
running all over the station, gobbling their bonvoyage chocolates and lining up for
news photos. Scorpia’s talc-white face, through the last window, across the last gate,
was a blow to his heart. A flurry of giggles and best wishes arose from the Wonder
Midgets and their admirers. Well, thought Pirate, guess I’ll go back in the Army. . . .

• • • • • • •

They’re bound eastward now, Roger peering over the wheel, hunched Dracula-style inside
his Burberry, Jessica with bright millions of droplets still clinging in soft net
to her shoulders and sleeves of drab wool. They want to be together, in bed, at rest,
in love, and instead it’s eastward tonight and south of the Thames to rendezvous with
a certain high-class vivisectionist before the clock of St. Felix chimes one. And
when the mice run down, who knows tonight but what they’ve run for good?

Her face against the breath-fogged window has become another dimness, another light-trick
of the winter. Beyond her, the white fracture of the rain passes. “Why does he go
out and pinch all his dogs in person? He’s an administrator, isn’t he? Wouldn’t he
hire a boy or something?”

“We call them ‘staff,’” Roger replies, “and I don’t know why Pointsman does anything
he does, he’s a Pavlovian, love. He’s a Royal Fellow. What am I supposed to know about
any of those people? They’re as difficult as the lot back in Snoxall’s.”

They’re both of them peevish tonight, whippy as sheets of glass improperly annealed,
ready to go smash at any indefinite touch in a whining matrix of stresses—

“Poor Roger, poor lamb, he’s having an awful war.”

“All right,” his head shaking, a fuming b or p that refuses to explode, “ahh, you’re
so clever aren’t you,” raving Roger, hands off the wheel to help the words out, windscreen
wipers clicking right along, “you’ve been able to shoot back now and then at the odd
flying buzz bomb, you and the boy friend dear old Nutria—”

“Beaver.”

“Quite right, and all that magnificent esprit you lot are so justly famous for, but
you haven’t brought down many
rockets
lately have you, haha!” gurning his most spiteful pursed smile up against wrinkled
nose and eyes, “any more than I, any more than Pointsman, well who’s that make purer
than whom
these
days, eh mylove?” bouncing up and down in the leather seat.

By now her hand’s reaching out, about to touch his shoulder. She rests her cheek on
her own arm, hair spilling, drowsy, watching him. Can’t get a decent argument going
with her. How he’s tried. She uses her silences like stroking hands to divert him
and hush their corners of rooms, bedcovers, tabletops—accidental spaces. . . . Even
at the cinema watching that awful
Going My Way
, the day they met, he saw every white straying of her ungauntleted hands, could feel
in his skin each saccade of her olive, her amber, her coffee-colored eyes. He’s wasted
gallons of paint thinner striking his faithful Zippo, its charred wick, virility giving
way to thrift, rationed down to a little stub, the blue flame sparking about the edges
in the dark, the many kinds of dark, just to see what’s happening with her face. Each
new flame, a new face.

And there’ve been the moments, more of them lately too—times when face-to-face there
has been no way to tell which of them is which. Both at the same time feeling the
same eerie confusion . . . something like looking in a mirror by surprise but . . .
more than that, the feeling of actually being joined . . . when after—who knows? two
minutes, a week? they realize, separate again, what’s been going on, that Roger and
Jessica were merged into a joint creature unaware of itself. . . . In a life he has
cursed, again and again, for its need to believe so much in the trans-observable,
here is the first, the very first real magic: data he can’t argue away.

It was what Hollywood likes to call a “cute meet,” out in the neat 18th-century heart
of downtown Tunbridge Wells, Roger motoring in the vintage Jaguar up to London, Jessica
at the roadside struggling prettily with a busted bicycle, murky wool ATS skirt hiked
up on a handle bar, most nonregulation black slip and clear pearl thighs above the
khaki stockings, well—

“Here love,” brakes on in a high squeak, “it’s not backstage at the old Windmill or
something, you know.”

She knew. “Hmm,” a curl dropping down to tickle her nose and put a bit more than the
usual acid in her reply, “are they letting little boys into places like that, I didn’t
know.”

“Well nobody’s,” having learned by now to live with remarks about his appearance,
“called up the Girl Guides yet either, have they.”

“I’m twenty.”

“Hurrah, that qualifies you for a ride, in this Jaguar here you see, all the way to
London.”

“But I’m going the other way. Nearly to Battle.”

“Oh, round trip of course.”

Shaking hair back out of her face, “Does your mother know
you’re
out like this.”

“My mother is the war,” declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.

“That’s a queer thing to say,” one muddy little shoe pondering on the running board.

“Come along, love, you’re holding up the mission, leave the machine where it is, mind
your skirt getting in, I wouldn’t want to commit an unspeakable act out here in the
streets of Tunbridge Wells—”

At which moment the rocket falls. Cute, cute. A thud, a hollow drumroll. Far enough
toward the city to be safe, but close and loud enough to send her the hundred miles
between herself and the stranger: long-swooping, balletic, her marvelous round bottom
turning to settle in the other seat, hair in a moment’s fan, hand sweeping Army-colored
skirt under graceful as a wing, all with the blast still reverberating.

He thinks he can see a solemn gnarled something, deeper or changing faster than clouds,
rising to the north. Will she snuggle now cutely against him, ask him to protect her?
He didn’t even believe she’d get in the car, rocket or no rocket, accordingly now
puts Pointsman’s Jaguar somehow into reverse instead of low, yes, backs over the bicycle,
rendering it in a great crunch useless for anything but scrap.

“I’m in your power,” she cries.
“Utterly.”

“Hmm,” Roger at length finding his gear, dancing among the pedals rrrn, snarl, off
to London. But Jessica’s not in his power.

And the war, well, she
is
Roger’s mother, she’s leached at all the soft, the vulnerable inclusions of hope
and praise scattered, beneath the mica-dazzle, through Roger’s mineral, grave-marker
self, washed it all moaning away on her gray tide. Six years now, always just in sight,
just where he can see her. He’s forgotten his first corpse, or when he first saw someone
living die. That’s how long it’s been going on. Most of his life, it seems. The city
he visits nowadays is Death’s antechamber: where all the paperwork’s done, the contracts
signed, the days numbered. Nothing of the grand, garden, adventurous capital his childhood
knew. He’s become the Dour Young Man of “The White Visitation,” the spider hitching
together his web of numbers. It’s an open secret that he doesn’t get on with the rest
of his section. How can he? They’re all wild talents—clairvoyants and mad magicians,
telekinetics, astral travelers, gatherers of light. Roger’s only a statistician. Never
had a prophetic dream, never sent or got a telepathic message, never touched the Other
World directly. If anything’s there it will show in the experimental data won’t it,
in the numbers . . . but that’s as close or clear as he’ll ever get. Any wonder he’s
a bit short with Psi Section, all the definitely 3-sigma lot up and down his basement
corridor? Jesus Christ, wouldn’t you be?

That one clear need of theirs, so patent, exasperates him. . . .
His
need too, all right. But how are you ever going to put anything “psychical” on a
scientific basis with your mortality always goading, just outside the chi-square calculations,
in between the flips of the Zener cards and the silences among the medium’s thick,
straining utterances? In his mellower moments he thinks that continuing to try makes
him brave. But most of the time he’s cursing himself for not working in fire control,
or graphing Standardized Kill Rates Per Ton for the bomber groups . . .
anything
but this thankless meddling into the affairs of invulnerable Death. . . .

They have drawn near a glow over the rooftops. Fire Service vehicles come roaring
by them, heading the same direction. It is an oppressive region of brick streets and
silent walls.

Roger brakes for a crowd of sappers, firefighters, neighbors in dark coats over white
nightclothes, old ladies who have a special place in their night-thoughts for the
Fire Service
no please you’re not going to use that great Hose on me . . . oh no . . . aren’t you
even going to take off those horrid rubber boots . . . yesyes that’s
—

Soldiers stand every few yards, a loose cordon, unmoving, a bit supernatural. The
Battle of Britain was hardly so formal. But these new robot bombs bring with them
chances for public terror no one has sounded. Jessica notes a coal-black Packard up
a side street, filled with dark-suited civilians. Their white collars rigid in the
shadows.

“Who’re they?”

He shrugs: “they” is good enough. “Not a friendly lot.”

“Look who’s talking.” But their smile is old, habitual. There was a time when his
job had her a bit mental: lovely little scrapbooks on the flying bombs, how sweet. . . .
And his irritated sigh: Jess don’t make me out some cold fanatical man of science. . . .

Heat beats at their faces, eye-searing yellow when the streams shoot into the fire.
A ladder hooked to the edge of the roof sways in the violent drafts. Up top, against
the sky, figures in slickers brace, wave arms, move together to pass orders. Half
a block down, flare lamps illuminate the rescue work in the charry wet wreckage. From
trailer pumps and heavy units, canvas hoses run fat with pressure, hastily threaded
unions sending out stars of cold spray, bitter cold, that flash yellow when the fire
leaps. Somewhere over a radio comes a woman’s voice, a quiet Yorkshire girl, dispatching
other units to other parts of the city.