Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“You ought to be offering me one or two, then, instead of—are you serious?—giant octopi.”
The doctors are watching each other closely.
“I wonder what you’ll do.”
“So do I.”
“Take the octopus.” Does he mean “forget Slothrop”? A charged moment.
But then Pointsman laughs the well-known laugh that’s done him yeoman service in a
profession where too often it’s hedge or hang. “I’m
always
being told to take animals.” He means that years ago a colleague—gone now—told him
he’d be more human, warmer, if he kept a dog of his own, outside the lab. Pointsman
tried—God knows he did—it was a springer spaniel named Gloucester, pleasant enough
animal, he supposed, but the try lasted less than a month. What finally irritated
him out of all tolerance was that the dog didn’t know how to reverse its behavior.
It could open doors to the rain and the spring insects, but not close them . . . knock
over garbage, vomit on the floor, but not clean it up—how could
anyone
live with such a creature?
“Octopi,” Spectro wheedles, “are docile under surgery. They can survive massive removals
of brain tissue. Their unconditioned response to prey is
very
reliable—show them a crab, WHAM! out wiv the old tentacle, home to poisoning and
supper. And, Pointsman, they don’t
bark.
”
“Oh, but. No . . . tanks, pumps, filtering, special food . . . that may be fine up
in Cambridge, that lot, but everyone here’s so damned tightfisted, it’s the damned
Rundstedt offensive, has to be. . . . P.W.E. won’t fund anything now unless it pays
off tactically, immediately—last week you know, if not sooner. No an octopus is much
too elaborate, not even Pudding would buy it, no not even old delusions-of-grandeur
himself.”
“No limit to the things you can teach them.”
“Spectro, you’re not the devil.” Looking closer, “Are you? You know we’re set for
sound stimuli, the whole thrust of this Slothrop scheme
has
to be auditory, the
reversal
is auditory. . . . I’ve seen an octopus brain or two in my time, mate, and don’t
think I haven’t noticed those great blooming optic lobes. Eh? You’re trying to palm
off a visual creature on me. What’s there to see when the damned things come down?”
“The glow.”
“Eh?”
“A fiery red ball. Falling like a meteor.”
“Rot.”
“Gwenhidwy saw one the other night, over Deptford.”
“What I want,” Pointsman leaning now into the central radiance of the lamp, his white
face more vulnerable than his voice, whispering across the burning spire of a hypodermic
set upright on the desk, “what I really need, is not a dog, not an octopus, but one
of your fine Foxes.
Damn it.
One, little,
Fox!
”
• • • • • • •
Something’s stalking through the city of Smoke—gathering up slender girls, fair and
smooth as dolls, by the handful.
Their piteous cries . . . their dollful and piteous cries
. . . the face of one is suddenly very close, and
down!
over the staring eyes come cream lids with stiff lashes, slamming loudly shut, the
long reverberating of lead counterweights tumble inside her head as Jessica’s own
lids now come flying open. She surfaces in time to hear the last echoes blowing away
on the heels of the blast, austere and keen, a winter sound. . . . Roger wakes up
briefly too, mutters something like “Fucking madness,” and nods back to sleep.
She reaches out, blind little hand grazing the ticking clock, the worn-plush stomach
of her panda Michael, an empty milk bottle holding scarlet blossoms from a spurge
in a garden a mile down the road: reaches to where her cigarettes ought to be but
aren’t. Halfway out now from under the covers, she hangs, between the two worlds,
a white, athletic tension in this cold room. Oh, well . . . she leaves him in their
warm burrow, moves shivering vuhvuhvuh in grainy darkness over winter-tight floorboards,
slick as ice to her bare soles.
Her cigarettes are on the parlor floor, left among pillows in front of the fire. Roger’s
clothing is scattered all about. Puffing on a cigarette, squinting with one eye for
the smoke, she tidies up, folding his trousers, hanging up his shirt. Then wanders
to the window, lifts the blackout curtain, tries to see out through frost gathering
on the panes, out into the snow tracked over by foxes, rabbits, long-lost dogs, and
winter birds but no humans. Empty canals of snow thread away into trees and town whose
name they still don’t know. She cups the cigarettes in her palm, leery of showing
a light though blackout was lifted weeks and weeks ago, already part of another time
and world. Late lorry motors rush north and south in the night, and airplanes fill
the sky then drain away east to some kind of quiet.
Could they have settled for hotels, AR-E forms, being frisked for cameras and binoculars?
This house, town, crossed arcs of Roger and Jessica are so vulnerable, to German weapons
and to British bylaws . . . it doesn’t
feel
like danger here, but she does wish there were others about, and that it could really
be a village, her village. The searchlights could stay, to light the night, and barrage
balloons to populate fat and friendly the daybreak—everything, even the explosions
in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose . . . as long as no
one had to die . . . couldn’t it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a
storm approaching in the summer (to live in a world where
that
would be the day’s excitement . . .), only kind thunder?
Jessica has floated out of herself, up to watch herself watching the night, to hover
in widelegged, shoulderpadded white, satin-polished on her nightward surfaces. Until
something falls here, close enough to matter, they do have their safety: their thickets
of silverblue stalks reaching after dark to touch or sweep clouds, the green-brown
masses in uniform, at the ends of afternoons, stone, eyes on the distances, bound
in convoy for fronts, for high destinies that have, strangely, so little to do with
the two of them here . . . don’t you know there’s a war on, moron? yes but—here’s
Jessica in her sister’s hand-me-down pajamas, and Roger asleep in nothing at all,
but where
is
the war?
Until it touch them. Until something falls. A doodle will give time to get to safety,
a rocket will hit before they can hear it coming. Biblical, maybe, spooky as an old
northern fairy tale, but not The War, not the great struggle of good and evil the
wireless reports everyday. And no reason not just to, well, to keep on. . . .
Roger has tried to explain to her the V-bomb statistics: the difference between distribution,
in angel’s-eye view, over the map of England, and their own chances, as seen from
down here. She’s almost got it: nearly understands his Poisson equation, yet can’t
quite put the two together—put her own enforced calm day-to-day alongside the pure
numbers, and keep them both in sight. Pieces keep slipping in and out.
“Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can’t
we
do something, down here? Couldn’t there be an equation for us too, something to help
us find a safer place?”
“Why am I surrounded,” his usual understanding self today, “by statistical illiterates?
There’s no way, love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant. Pointsman
doesn’t even understand that.”
The rockets
are
distributing about London just as Poisson’s equation in the textbooks predicts. As
the data keep coming in, Roger looks more and more like a prophet. Psi Section people
stare after him in the hallways. It’s not precognition, he wants to make an announcement
in the cafeteria or something . . . have I ever pretended to be anything I’m not?
all I’m doing is plugging numbers into a well-known equation, you can look it up in
the book and do it yourself. . . .
His little bureau is dominated now by a glimmering map, a window into another landscape
than winter Sussex, written names and spidering streets, an ink ghost of London, ruled
off into 576 squares, a quarter square kilometer each. Rocket strikes are represented
by red circles. The Poisson equation will tell, for a number of total hits arbitrarily
chosen, how many squares will get none, how many one, two, three, and so on.
An Erlenmeyer flask bubbles on the ring. Blue light goes rattling, reknotting through
the seedflow inside the glass. Ancient tatty textbooks and mathematical papers lie
scattered about on desk and floor. Somewhere a snapshot of Jessica peeks from beneath
Roger’s old Whittaker and Watson. The graying Pavlovian, on route with his tautened
gait, thin as a needle, in the mornings to his lab, where dogs wait with cheeks laid
open, winter-silver drops welling from each neat raw fistula to fill the wax cup or
graduated tube, pauses by Mexico’s open door. The air beyond is blue from cigarettes
smoked and as fag-ends later in the freezing black morning shifts resmoked, a stale
and loathsome atmosphere. But he must go in, must face the habitual morning cup.
Both know how strange their liaison must look. If ever the Anti-pointsman existed,
Roger Mexico is the man. Not so much, the doctor admits, for the psychical research.
The young statistician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful
thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman
can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in
between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain
as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some are always in bright excitation, others
darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is
allowed only the two states: waking or sleep. One or zero. “Summation,” “transition,”
“irradiation,” “concentration,” “reciprocal induction”—all Pavlovian brain-mechanics—assumes
the presence of these bi-stable points. But to Mexico belongs the domain
between
zero and one—the middle Pointsman has excluded from his persuasion—the probabilities.
A chance of 0.37 that, by the time he stops his count, a given square on his map will
have suffered only one hit, 0.17 that it will suffer two. . . .
“Can’t you . . .
tell,
” Pointsman offering Mexico one of his Kyprinos Orients, which he guards in secret
fag fobs sewn inside all his lab coats, “from your map here, which places would be
safest to go into, safest from attack?”
“No.”
“But surely—”
“Every square is just as likely to get hit again. The hits aren’t clustering. Mean
density is constant.”
Nothing on the map to the contrary. Only a classical Poisson distribution, quietly
neatly sifting among the squares exactly as it should . . . growing to its predicted
shape. . . .
“But squares that have already
had
several hits, I mean—”
“I’m sorry. That’s the Monte Carlo Fallacy. No matter how many have fallen inside
a particular square, the odds remain the same as they always were. Each hit is independent
of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning.”
Nice thing to tell a Pavlovian. Is it Mexico’s usual priggish insensitivity, or does
he know what he’s saying? If there
is
nothing to link the rocket strikes—no reflex arc, no Law of Negative Induction . . .
then . . . He goes in to Mexico each morning as to painful surgery. Spooked more and
more by the choirboy look, the college pleasantries. But it’s a visit he must make.
How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and fright?
Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware—perhaps—that in his play he wrecks the elegant
rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect itself. What if Mexico’s
whole
generation
have turned out like this? Will Postwar be nothing but “events,” newly created one
moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?
“The Romans,” Roger and the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit were drunk together one night,
or the vicar was, “the ancient Roman priests laid a sieve in the road, and then waited
to see which stalks of grass would come up through the holes.”
Roger saw the connection immediately. “I wonder,” reaching for pocket after pocket,
why are there never any damned—ah here, “if it would follow a Poisson . . . let’s
see . . .”
“Mexico.” Leaning forward, definitely hostile. “They used the stalks that grew through
the holes to cure the sick. The sieve was a very sacred item to them. What will you
do with the sieve you’ve laid over London? How will you use the things that grow in
your network of death?”
“I don’t follow you.” It’s just an equation. . . .
Roger really wants other people to know what he’s talking about. Jessica understands
that. When they don’t, his face often grows chalky and clouded, as behind the smudged
glass of a railway carriage window as vaguely silvered barriers come down, spaces
slide in to separate him that much more, thinning further his loneliness. She knew
their very first day, he leaning across to open the Jaguar door and so sure she’d
never get in. She saw his loneliness: in his face, between his red nail-bitten hands. . . .
“Well, it isn’t fair.”
“It’s eminently fair,” Roger now cynical, looking very young, she thinks. “Everyone’s
equal. Same chances of getting hit. Equal in the eyes of the rocket.”
To which she gives him her Fay Wray look, eyes round as can be, red mouth about to
open in a scream, till he has to laugh. “Oh, stop.”
“Sometimes . . .” but what does she want to say? That he must always be lovable, in
need of her and never, as now, the hovering statistical cherub who’s never quite been
to hell but speaks as if he’s one of the most fallen. . . .
“Cheap nihilism” is Captain Prentice’s name for that. It was one day by the frozen
pond near “The White Visitation,” Roger off sucking icicles, lying flat and waving
his arms to make angels in the snow, larking.
“Do you mean that he hasn’t paid . . . ,” looking up, up, Pirate’s wind-burned face
seeming to end in the sky, her own hair finally in the way of his gray, reserved eyes.
He was Roger’s friend, he wasn’t playing or undermining, didn’t know the first thing,
she guessed, about such dancing-shoe wars—and anyway didn’t have to, because she was
already, terrible flirt . . . well, nothing serious, but those eyes she could never
quite see into were so swoony, so utterly terrif, really. . . .