Gravity's Rainbow (92 page)

Wasn’t that life more decent than gangstering? A cleaner sort of friendship . . .
less devious, anyway. . . . There we
saw
how we had to fit in . . . the machinery itself determined that . . . everything
was so clear then, paranoia was all for the enemy, and never for one’s own. . . .

—What about the SS?

—Oh, they were the enemy, I’d say. . . . [Laughter.]

No, Klaus, don’t drift away, please, not onto dreams of kindly Soviet interrogation
that will end in some ermine bed, some vodka-perfumed stupor, you know that’s foolish. . . .

B, B-sub-N-for-Närrisch, is nearly here—nearly about to burn through the last whispering
veil to equal “A”—to equal the only fragment of himself left by them to go through
the moment, the irreducible doll of German styrene, shabbier, less authentic than
any earlier self . . . a negligible quantity in this last light . . . this tattoo
of hunters’ boots, and rifle bolts in oiled keyways. . . .

• • • • • • •

Here come Enzian, Andreas, and Christian, coming on like Smith, Klein, ’n’ French,
crashing into the basement room—field-gray kit, newspaper shoes, rolled trouser-cuffs,
hands and bare forearms shining with motor oil and gear grease, toting carbines in
a show of force. But no Empty Ones here to see them. It’s too late. Just the mute
bed, and the brown ellipse her blood made on the torn ticking. And washing-blue in
grainy splashes in the corners, under the bed . . . their signature, their challenge.

“Where
is she
—” Christian is just this side of berserk. One word astray and he’ll be off to kill
the first Empty One he finds. Maria, his sister, is, was, may be—

“We’d better,” Enzian already back out the door, “where’s, uh . . . her husband, you
know. . . .”

“Pavel.” Christian wants to see his eyes, but Enzian won’t turn.

Pavel and Maria meant to have the child. Then Josef Ombindi and his people started
their visiting. They have learned their vulturehood from the Christian missionaries.
They keep lists of all the women of childbearing age. Any pregnancy is an invitation
to hover, to tune in, to swoop. They will use threats, casuistry, physical seduction—there’s
an arsenal of techniques. Washing-blue is the abortifacient of choice.

“The refinery,” suggests Andreas Orukambe.

“Really? I thought he’d sworn off that.”

“Maybe not now.” The girl’s brother stares him hard as fists.
Enzian, old bastard, you really are out of touch. . . .

They remount their motorcycles and head off again. Blasted dry-docks, charcoal ribs
of warehouses, cylindrical chunks of submarine that never got assembled, go ripping
by in the darkness. British security are about, but that’s another, encapsulated world.
The British G-5 occupy their own space and Zone congruent but not identical to what
these serious Schwarzkommando astride bikes unmuffled go blasting on through tonight.

Separations are proceeding. Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others,
in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center. Each day the mythical return
Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia,
airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made.
The single root lost, way back there in the May desolation. Each bird has his branch
now, and each one is the Zone.

A crowd of DPs is milling by the ruin of an ornamental fountain, a score of them,
eyes of ash, smudged into faces white as salt. The Hereros go swerving by them, halfway
up a shallow flight of long steps dovetailing into the grade of the street, teeth
slamming together upper and lower, cycle frames squeaking shrill, up and down the
steps past wordless plosions of Slavic breath. Ashes and salt. A sound-truck appears
around a wall a hundred meters away: the voice, University-bred and long tired of
the message, recites, “Clear the streets. Go to your homes.” Clear the—go to your
what
? There must be a mistake, it must be for some other town. . . .

Whir
underneath an oil pipeline up on trestles running down leftward to the water now,
huge bolted flanges overhead softened by rust and oily dirt. Far out in the harbor
rides an oil tanker, rocking serene as a web of stars. . . .
Zoom
uphill slantwise toward a rampart of wasted, knotted, fused, and scorched girderwork,
stacks, pipes, ducting, windings, fairings, insulators reconfigured by all the bombing,
grease-stained pebblery on the ground rushing by a mile a minute and wait, wait, say
what, say “
reconfigured
,” now?

There doesn’t exactly dawn, no but there
breaks
, as that light you’re afraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain
away—there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This
serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery, Jamf Ölfabriken
Werke AG, is
not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order.
Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on . . . modified,
precisely,
deliberately
by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides—“
sides
?”—had always agreed on . . . yes and now what if we—all right, say we
are
supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that’s our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians
of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated,
and masturbated till it’s all squeezed limp of its last drop . . . well we assumed—natürlich!—that
this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising, dead, the
blazing, the great one (“orunene” is already being modified by the Zone-Herero children
to “omunene,” the eldest brother) . . . our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its
latencies, the
cuteness
of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in
its darkness, our darkness . . . even this far from Südwest we are not to be spared
the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will never leave us. . . .

But, if I’m riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it . . . or if
I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ash-dust,
missing it completely . . . if what the IG built on this site were not at
all
the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down
special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers
yes
the “Allied” planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director
Krupp, through his English interlocks—the bombing was the exact industrial process
of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time, each shock-wave
plotted in advance to bring
precisely tonight’s wreck
into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text . . .
If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it as a
refinery never knew there were any further steps to be taken. Their design was “finalized,”
and they could forget it.

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just
to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the
needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very
life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely,
dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . .
The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—it was only
staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics,
Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . .

Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged
and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially),
“All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think we’d’ve
had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn’t
wanted
to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead,
capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it’ll make you feel less responsible—but
it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of
our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with
no right at all to be where they are—”

We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught,
routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid . . . we
have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics,
getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real
function . . . zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coaltars,
hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real,
the planetary mission
yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling . . . this ruinous plant, waiting for its
Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others . . .

And if it isn’t exactly Jamf Ölfabriken Werke? what if it’s the Krupp works in Essen,
what if it’s Blohm & Voss right here in Hamburg or another make-believe “ruin,” in
another city? Another
country
? YAAAGGGGHHHHH!

Well, this is stimulant talk here, yes Enzian’s been stuffing down Nazi surplus Pervitins
these days like popcorn at the movies, and by now the bulk of the refinery—named,
incidentally, for the famous discoverer of Oneirine—is behind them, and Enzian is
on into some other paranoid terror, talking, talking, though each man’s wind and motor
cuts him off from conversation.

Last night in his journal, Enzian wrote: “The Mouth lately has been too much in service.
Too little coming out of use to anybody. A defense. Oh God, oh God. Then they really
are getting to me. Please I don’t
want
to pontificate this way . . . I know what my voice sounds like—heard it at Peenemünde
years ago on Weissmann’s Dictaphone . . . chrome and Bakelite . . . too high, obnoxious,
Berliner Schnauze . . . how they must wince inside whenever I begin to speak. . . .

“I could go tomorrow. I know how to be alone. It doesn’t frighten me as much as they
do. They take endlessly—but they never
use
what they take. What do they think they can take from me? They don’t want my patriarchy,
they don’t want my love, they don’t want my information, or my work, or my energy,
or what I own . . . I don’t own
anything.
There’s no money any more—nobody’s seen any out here for months, no it can’t be money . . .
cigarettes? I never have enough cigarettes. . . .

“If I left them, where could I go?”

Back among the reservoir tanks now, into the evening wind, skidding on this synthetic
wastefield, all of it ungraded blackness . . . Christian’s motor seems to be missing
now and then, dithering toward a stall. Spot decision: if he breaks down let him walk.
That way less trouble if Pavel’s there, if he’s not there pick up Christian on the
way back and see about getting a truck out to repair it . . . keep it simple, that’s
the mark of a great leader, Enzian.

Christian doesn’t break down, though, and Pavel turns out to be there, sort of. Well,
not “there” the way Enzian in his current state of mind would consider for very long.
But present, all right, along with an amazing collection of friends who always seem
to show up whenever he comes to sniff Leunagasolin, such as, oh, the Moss Creature
here, brightest green you can imagine, more burning than fluorescent, lurking over
in a corner of the field tonight, shy, stirring like an infant now and then . . .
or how about the Water Giant, a mile-high visitor made all of flowing water who likes
to dance, twisting from the waist, arms blowing loosely along the sky. When the Ombindi
people took Maria off to find their doctor in Hamburg, voices began calling—voices
of the Fungus Pygmies who breed in the tanks at the interface between fuel and water-bottom
began to call to him. “Pavel! Omunene! Why don’t you come back, to see
us
? We miss you. Why have you stayed away?” Not much fun for them down here at the Interface,
competing with the bacteria who cruise by in their country of light, these cellular
aristocracy, approaching the wall of hydrocarbons each for his share of God’s abundance—leaving
their wastes, a green murmur, a divergently unstable gabbling, a slime that grows
with the days thicker, more poisonous. It is a depressing thing indeed to be a pygmy
clustered together with thousands of others, hundreds of thousands, and have to live
on the other side of all this. You say other side? What do you mean? What other side?
You mean in the gasoline? (Clustered Pygmies, playfully and to some well-known swing
riff:) No-no, no, no!—You mean in the water, then? (C.P.:) No-no, no, no!—Well you
gotta tell me please, ’fore I drop my BVDs! We mean, explain the Pygmies, gathering
their little heads into a symmetrical cauliflower pattern, and settling into a soft,
wistful a cappella like kids around the campfire with Bing Crosby in a baseball cap
(yes these Leunahalluzinationen have been known to get weird all right, weirder than
cultural shock, even, this here is
meta
shock’s what it is, 3-sigma white faces in a ritual whose mystery is deeper than north
light over the Kalahari . . .) we mean on the other side of the whole thing, the whole
bacteria-hydrocarbon-waste cycle. We can see the Interface from here. It’s a long
rainbow, mostly indigo, if that’s any help—indigo and Kelly green (Bing, directing,
raises up all these brainwashed little Irish faces in a moving firelit crescendo)
green . . . gasoline . . . between . . . submarine . . . fading, because by then Pavel
was on his way out to the refinery, forget this 2½ weeks of self-imposed torture,
Ombindi’s men after him down by the glasswool boiler pipes, men and women both trying
to caress him, pressure from both sides of the Tribal Suicide Question, Enzian complaining,
too entangled with the Rocket, too encrimsoned in his feud with the Russian, to care
much about anyone outside himself . . . and here Pavel was trying to stay away from
this, from the breath of Mukuru, only trying to be a good man—