Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Well, wouldn’t you know it, just as things look worst, Providence plants a short—
statatatah!
the lights go out leaving a diminishing red glow on the shaven cheeks and chins of
the two operators cringing before the girls’ destroying kooch-dance, the solenoid
jitters to silence, the chrome ball, released, rolls traumatized back to the comfort
of its friends.
“They’re
all
like this?”
“Oh, was I took,” groans Alfonso Tracy.
“It comes and goes,” consoles Bland, and here we get a reprise of Gerhardt von Göll’s
“Bright Days for the Black Market,” with allowances made for time, place and color:
There’ll al-ways—be another dollar,
Any way it hap-pens!
If they catch ya nap-pin’,
Wake up-with, the dew on the grass
‘n’ you can hand ’em their ass—
You can make another dollar,
Third eye up on that py-ra-mid,
Oh give a listen kid,
It’s just winkin’ at you, singin’, “Piss on through!”
There’s a will, there’s a way,
Doesn’t happen, ev’ry day,
But if ya got-the-brains, those mid-night-trains
’ll never whistle your dreams away, hey—
Just flip another dollar,
Heads or tails it’ll be all right,
You can lose the fight, but
That ever-lovin’ War goes on and on, ya know,
Just follow that dollar and vo-dee, o-do-do!
All the baggy-pants outfielders, doughboys in khaki, cancan girls now sedate, bathing
beauties even more so, cowboys and cigar-store Indians, google-eyed Negroes, apple-cart
urchins, lounge lizards and movie queens, cardsharps, clowns, crosseyed lamppost drunks,
flying aces, motorboat captains, white hunters on safari and Negroid apes, fat men,
chefs in chefs’ hats, Jewish usurers, XXX jug-clutching hillbillies, comic-book cats
dogs and mice, prizefighters and mountaineers, radio stars, midgets, ten-in-one freaks,
railroad hobos, marathon dancers, swing bands, high-society partygoers, racehorses
and jockeys, taxidancers, Indianapolis drivers, sailors ashore and wahines in hula
skirts, sinewed Olympic runners, tycoons holding big round bags with dollar signs,
all join in on a second grand chorus of the song, all the boards of the pinball machines
flashing on and off, primary colors with a touch of acid to them, flippers flipping,
bells ringing, nickels pouring out of the coinboxes of the more enthusiastic, each
sound and move exactly in its place in the complex ensemble.
Outside the temple, the organization reps from Chicago lurk, play morra, drink Canadian
blends out of silver hip-flasks, oil and clean .38s and generally carry on in their
loathsome ethnic way, Popish inscrutability in every sharp crease and shadowy jowl.
No way to tell if someplace in the wood file cabinets exists a set of real blueprints
telling exactly how all these pinball machines were rewired—a randomness deliberately
simulated—or if it has happened at real random, preserving at least our faith in Malfunction
as still something beyond Their grasp . . . a faith that each machine, individually,
has simply, in innocence, gone on the blink, after the thousands of roadhouse nights,
end-of-the-world Wyoming thunderstorms that come straight down on your hatless head,
truckstop amphetamines, tobacco smoke clawing at insides of eyelids, homicidal grabs
after some way out of the year’s never-slackening shit . . . have players forever
strangers brought about, separately, alone, each of these bum machines? believe it:
they’ve sweated, kicked, cried, smashed, lost their balance forever—a single Mobility
you never heard, a unity unaware of itself, a silence the encyclopedia histories have
blandly filled up with agencies, initials, spokesmen and deficits enough to keep us
from finding them again . . . but for the moment, through the elaborate theatrical
foofooraw of Mob ’n’ Masons, it has concentrated here, in the back of the Mouthorgan
temple, an elegant chaos to bend the ingenuity of Bland’s bought expert, Silver-Streaking
Bert Fibel.
Last we saw of Fibel he was hooking, stretching, and running shock cord for that Horst
Achtfaden back in his gliding days, Fibel who stayed on the ground, and saw his friend
on to Peenemünde—
saw him on?
isn’t that a slice of surplus paranoia there, not
quite
justified is it—well, call it Toward a Case for Bland’s Involvement with Achtfaden
Too, if you want. Fibel worked for Siemens back when it was still part of the Stinnes
trust. Along with his design work he also put in some time as a Stinnes intelligence
agent. There are also still loyalties to Vereinigte Stahlwerke in effect, though Fibel
happens to be working now at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
It’s in Bland’s interest to have an agent in the Berkshires, can you guess why? Yup!
to keep an eye on adolescent Tyrone Slothrop, is why. Nearly ten years after the original
deal was closed, IG Farben is still finding it easier to subcontract the surveillance
of young Tyrone back to Lyle Bland.
This stonefaced kraut Fibel is a genius with solenoids and switches. How all this
machinery got “out of the glue,” as they say over there, is a sinful waste of time
even to think about—he dives into topologies and color-codes, the odor of rosin flux
goes seeping into the poolrooms and saloons, a Schnipsel here and there, a muttered
also
or two, and before you know it he’s got most of them working again. You can bet there’s
a lotta happy Masons in Mouthorgan, Missouri.
In return for his good deed, Lyle Bland, who couldn’t care less, is made a Mason.
He finds good fellowship, all kinds of comforts designed to remind him of his virility,
and even a number of useful business contacts. Beyond this, all is just as tight as
that Business Advisory Council. Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What
Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back
again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions. Some of the American
Founding Fathers were Masons, for instance. There is a theory going around that the
U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the
group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single
eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe
the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon,
Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy,
not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids
when all else fails. One of the best of the classic Weird Mason Stories has Doctor
Livingstone (living stone? oh, yes) come wandering into a native village in, not even
the heart, but the
subconscious
of Darkest Africa, a place, a tribe he’s never seen before: fires in the silence,
unfathomable stares, Livingstone ambles up to the village chief and flashes him a
Masonic high sign—the chief recognizes it,
returns it
, all smiles, and orders every fraternal hospitality laid on for the white stranger.
But recall that Dr. Livingstone, like Wernher von Braun, was born close to the Spring
Equinox, and so had to confront the world from that most singular of the Zodiac’s
singular points. . . . Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from
in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you’ll ever
find here.)
We must also never forget famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman: sitting by virtue of
death in office, this very August 1945, with his control-finger poised right on Miss
Enola Gay’s atomic clit, making ready to tickle 100,000 little yellow folks into what
will come down as a fine vapor-deposit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble
of their city on the Inland Sea. . . .
By the time Bland joined up, the Masons had long, long degenerated into just another
businessmen’s club. A real shame. Business of all kinds, over the centuries, had atrophied
certain sense-receptors and areas of the human brain, so that for most of the fellows
taking part, the present-day rituals were no more, and even maybe a little less, than
hollow mummery. Not for
all
of them, though. Now and then you found a throwback. Lyle Bland happened to be one.
The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days,
it
worked.
As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were
only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves,
and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through
the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent,
needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.
Bland found himself coming home to Beacon Hill after meetings late at night, unable
to sleep. He would lie down in his study on the davenport, not thinking about anything
in particular, and come back with a jolt, his heart pounding terribly, knowing he’d
just been
somewhere
, but unable to account for the passage of time. The old American Empire clock beat
in the resonant hallway. The Girandole mirror, passed on by generations of Blands,
gathered images in its quicksilver pool that Lyle couldn’t bring himself to face.
In another room his wife, varicose and religious, groaned in her sleep. What was happening
to him?
Next meeting night, home on his back on the accustomed davenport,
Wall Street Journal
with nothing in it he didn’t already know, Lyle Bland rose up out of his body, about
a foot, face-up, realized where he was and gaahh!
whoosh
back in again. He lay there, more terrified than he’d ever been, even at Belleau
Wood—not so much because he’d left his body, but because he knew that this was only
a first step.
The next step would be to roll over in mid-air and look back. Old magic had found
him. He was off on a journey. He knew he couldn’t keep from going on with it.
It took him a month or two before he could make the turn. When it happened, he felt
it as a turn not so much in space as in his own history. Irreversible. The Bland who
came back to rejoin the inert white container he’d seen belly-up on the sofa, thousands
of years beneath him, had changed forever.
Before very long, he was spending most of his time on that davenport, and hardly any
at all down on State Street. His wife, who never questioned anything, moved vaguely
through the rooms, discussing only household affairs, sometimes getting an answer
if Bland happened to be inside his body, but most often not. Odd-looking people began
to show up at the door, without phoning. Creeps, foreigners with tinted, oily skin,
wens, sties, cysts, wheezes, bad teeth, limps, staring or—worse—with Strange Faraway
Smiles. She let them in the house, all of them, and the study doors were closed gently
behind them, in her face. She could hear nothing but a murmur of voices, in what she
guessed to be some foreign tongue. They were instructing her husband in techniques
of voyage.
There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys taken northward
on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes, to the final walls of ice.
Our judgment lapsed, fatally: we paid more attention to the Pearys and Nansens who
returned—and worse, we named what they did “success,” though they failed. Because
they came back, back to fame, to praise, they failed. We only wept for Sir John Franklin
and Salomon Andrée: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among the poor frozen
rubbish the announcements of their victory. By the time we had the technology to make
such voyages easy, we had long worded over all ability to know victory or defeat.
What did Andrée find in the polar silence: what should we have heard?
Bland, still an apprentice, hadn’t yet shaken off his fondness for hallucinating.
He knows where he is when he’s there, but when he comes back, he imagines that he
has been journeying underneath history: that history is Earth’s mind, and that there
are layers, set very deep, layers of history analogous to layers of coal and oil in
Earth’s body. The foreigners sit in his parlor, hissing over him, leaving offensive
films of sebum on everything they touch, trying to see him through this phase, clearly
impatient with what they feel are the tastes of a loafer and vulgarian. He comes back
raving about the presences he has found out there, members of an astral IG, whose
mission—as indeed Rathenau implied through the medium of Peter Sachsa—is past secular
good and evil: distinctions like that are meaningless out there. . . .
“Yess, yess,” all staring at him, “but then why keep saying ’mind and body’? Why make
that distinction?”
Because it’s hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter,
after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and psyche,
he feels like a child again, he knows that in theory he must not attach himself, but
still he is in love with his sense of wonder, with having found it again, even this
late, even knowing he must soon let it go. . . . To find that Gravity, taken so for
granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth’s mindbody . . .
having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted,
realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of
the other side, the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased
apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion
still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics—“Forget
them, they are no better than the Qlippoth, the shells of the dead, you must not waste
your time with them. . . .”
The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the
mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go
on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for
each psi-synthetic taken from Earth’s soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less
ordinary and named, over here—kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding
in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a
power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like
the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken . . . plastic saxophone reed
sounds of unnatural timbre
, shampoo bottle
ego-image
, Cracker Jack prize
one-shot amusement
, home appliance casing
fairing for winds of cognition
, baby bottles
tranquilization
, meat packages
disguise of slaughter
, dry-cleaning bags
infant strangulation
, garden hoses
feeding endlessly the desert . . .
but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition . . . to
make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication,
so much waste. . . .