Gravity's Rainbow (110 page)

Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, some more powerful
than others, had been going over every sundown to the furious host. They were the
fifth-columnists, well inside his head, waiting the moment to deliver him to the four
other divisions outside, closing in. . . .

So, next to the other graffiti, with a piece of rock, he scratches this sign:

Slothrop besieged. Only after he’d left it half a dozen more places did it dawn on
him that
what he was really drawing was the A4 rocket
, seen from below. By which time he had become tuned to other fourfold expressions—variations
on Frans Van der Groov’s cosmic windmill—swastikas, gymnastic symbols FFFF in a circle
symmetrically upside down and backward, Frisch Fromm Frölich Frei over neat doorways
in quiet streets, and crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from
the Other Side, hearing about the future (no serial time over there: events are all
there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don’t always “make sense”
back here: they lack historical structure, they sound fanciful, or insane).

The sand-colored churchtops rear up on Slothrop’s horizons, apses out to four sides
like rocket fins guiding the streamlined spires . . . chiseled in the sandstone he
finds waiting the mark of consecration, a cross in a circle. At last, lying one afternoon
spread-eagled at his ease in the sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns
he becomes a cross himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have
come to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to be hanged at noon. Black hounds
and fanged little hunters slick as weasels, dogs whose breeds have been lost for 700
years, chase a female in heat as the spectators gather, it’s the fourth hanging this
spring and not much spectacle here except that this one, dreaming at the last instant
of who can say what lifted smock, what fat-haunched gnädige Frau Death may have come
sashaying in as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple swelling, and just as his
neck breaks, he actually
comes
in his ragged loin-wrapping creamy as the skin of a saint under the purple cloak
of Lent, and one drop of sperm succeeds in rolling, dripping hair to hair down the
dead leg, all the way down, off the edge of the crusted bare foot, drips to earth
at the exact center of the crossroad where, in the workings of the night, it changes
into a mandrake root. Next Friday, at dawn, the Magician, his own moving Heiligenschein
rippling infrared to ultraviolet in spectral rings around his shadow over the dewy
grass, comes with his dog, a coal-black dog who hasn’t been fed for a few days. The
Magician digs carefully all around the precious root till it’s held only by the finest
root-hairs—ties it to the tail of his black dog, stops his own ears with wax then
comes out with a piece of bread to lure the unfed dog
rrrowf!
dog lunges for bread, root is torn up and lets loose its piercing and fatal scream.
The dog drops dead before he’s halfway to breakfast, his holy-light freezes and fades
in the million dewdrops. Magician takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little
white outfit and leaves money with it overnight: in the morning the cash has multiplied
tenfold. A delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes comes to visit. “Inflation?”
the Magician tries to cover up with some flowing hand-moves.” ‘Capital’? Never heard
of that.” “No, no,” replies the visitor, “not at the moment. We’re trying to think
ahead. We’d like very much to hear about the basic structure of this. How bad was
the scream, for instance?” “Had m’ears plugged up, couldn’t hear it.” The delegate
flashes a fraternal business smile. “Can’t say as I blame you. . . .”

Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop? He’s sat in
Säure Bummer’s kitchen, the air streaming with kif moirés, reading soup recipes and
finding in every bone and cabbage leaf paraphrases of himself . . . news flashes,
names of wheelhorses that will pay him off enough for a certain getaway. . . . He
used to pick and shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, April afternoons he’s lost,
“Chapter 81 work,” they called it, following the scraper that clears the winter’s
crystal attack-from-within, its white necropolizing . . . picking up rusted beer cans,
rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite
snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when in
superstition and fright he could
make it all fit
, seeing clearly in each an entry in a record, a history: his own, his winter’s, his
country’s . . . instructing him, dunce and drifter, in ways deeper than he can explain,
have been faces of children out the train windows, two bars of dance music somewhere,
in some other street at night, needles and branches of a pine tree shaken clear and
luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundreds in a smudged yellowing
sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the early morning as he was walking to school,
the idling of a motorcycle at one dusk-heavy hour of the summer . . . and now, in
the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall,
Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic
clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying,
not a thing in his head, just feeling natural. . . .

• • • • • • •

Double-declutchingly, heel-and-toe, away goes Roger Mexico. Down the summer Autobahn,
expansion joints booming rhythmic under his wheels, he highballs a pre-Hitler Horch
870B through the burnt-purple rolling of the Lüneburg Heath. Over the windscreen mild
winds blow down on him, smelling of junipers. Heidschnucken sheep out there rest as
still as fallen clouds. The bogs and broom go speeding by. Overhead the sky is busy,
streaming, a living plasma.

The Horch, army-green with one discreet daffodil painted halfway up its bonnet, was
lurking inside a lorry at the Elbeward edge of the Brigade pool at Hamburg, shadowed
except for its headlamps, stalked eyes of a friendly alien smiling at Roger. Welcome
there, Earthman. Once under way, he discovered the floor strewn with rolling unlabeled
glass jars of what seems to be baby food, weird unhealthy-colored stuff no human baby
could possibly eat and survive, green marbled with pink, vomit-beige with magenta
inclusions, all impossible to identify, each cap adorned with a smiling, fat, cherubic
baby, seething under the bright glass with horrible botulism toxins ’n’ ptomaines . . .
now and then a new jar will be produced, spontaneously, under the seat, and roll out,
against all laws of acceleration, among the pedals for his feet to get confused by.
He knows he ought to look back underneath there to find out what’s going on, but can’t
quite bring himself to.

Bottles roll clanking on the floor, under the bonnet a hung-up tappet or two chatters
its story of discomfort. Wild mustard whips past down the center of the Autobahn,
perfectly two-tone, just yellow and green, a fateful river seen only by the two kinds
of rippling light. Roger sings to a girl in Cuxhaven who still carries Jessica’s name:

I dream that I have found us both again,

With spring so many strangers’ lives away,

And we, so free,

Out walking by the sea,

With someone else’s paper words to say. . . .

They took us at the gates of green return,

Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why—

Do children meet again?

Does any trace remain,

Along the superhighways of July?

Driving now suddenly into such a bright gold bearding of slope and field that he nearly
forgets to steer around the banked curve. . . .

A week before she left, she came out to “The White Visitation” for the last time.
Except for the negligible rump of PISCES, the place was a loony bin again. The barrage-balloon
cables lay rusting across the sodden meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth—tendons
that sang in the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant
wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old, in hard twists of metal
ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants crowd, bustling with a sense
of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the
cliffs. Jessica has cut fringes since Roger saw her last, and is going through the
usual anxiety—“It looks utterly horrible, you don’t have to say it. . . .”

“It’s utterly swoony,” sez Roger, “I love it.”

“You’re making fun.”

“Jess, why are we talking about
haircuts
for God’s sake?”

While somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death
to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face
of the Zone. Roger doesn’t want to give him up: Roger wants to do what’s right. “I
just can’t leave the poor twit out there, can I? They’re trying to destroy him—”

But, “Roger,” she’d smile, “it’s
spring.
We’re at peace.”

No, we’re not. It’s another bit of propaganda. Something the P.W.E. planted. Now gentlemen
as you’ve seen from the studies our optimum time is 8 May, just before the traditional
Whitsun exodus, schools letting out, weather projections for an excellent growing
season, coal requirements beginning their seasonal decline, giving us a few months’
grace to get our Ruhr interests back on their feet—no, he sees only the same flows
of power, the same impoverishments he’s been thrashing around in since ’39. His girl
is about to be taken away to Germany, when she ought to be demobbed like everyone
else. No channel upward that will show either of them any hope of escape. There’s
something
still on, don’t call it a “war” if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone
down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there
were
a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago . . . but Their enterprise
goes on.

The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is that Jessica believes
Them. “The War” was the condition she needed for being with Roger. “Peace” allows
her to leave him. His resources, next to Theirs, are too meager. He has no words,
no technically splendid embrace, no screaming fit that can ever hold her. Old Beaver,
not surprisingly, will be doing air-defense liaison over there, so they’ll be together
in romantic Cuxhaven. Ta-ta mad Roger, it’s been grand, a wartime fling, when we came
it was utterly incendiary, your arms open wide as a Fortress’s wings, we had our military
secrets, we fooled the fat old colonels right and left but stand-down time must come
to all, yikes! I must run sweet Roger really it’s been dreamy. . . .

He would fall at her knees smelling of glycerine and rose-water, he would lick sand
and salt from her ATS brogans, offer her his freedom, his next 50 years’ pay from
a good steady job, his poor throbbing brain. But it’s too late. We’re at Peace. The
paranoia, the danger, the tuneless whistling of busy Death next door, are all put
to sleep, back in the War, back with her Roger Mexico Years. The day the rockets stopped
falling, it began to end for Roger and Jessica. As it grew clear, day after safe day,
that no more would fall ever again, the new world crept into and over her like spring—not
so much the changes she felt in air and light, in the crowds at Woolworth’s, as a
bad cinema spring, full of paper leaves and cotton-wool blossoms and phony lighting . . .
no, never again will she stand at their kitchen sink with a china cup squeaking in
her fingers, its small crying-child sound defenseless, meekly resonating BLOWN OUT
OF ATTENTION AS THE ROCKET FELL smashing to a clatter of points white and blue across
the floor. . . .

Those death-rockets now are in the past. This time she’ll be on the firing end, she
and Jeremy—isn’t
that
how it was always meant to be? firing them out to sea: no death, only the spectacle,
fire and roar, the excitement without the killing, isn’t that what she prayed for?
back in the fading house, derequisitioned now, occupied again by human extensions
of ball-fringe, dog pictures, Victorian chairs, secret piles of
News of the World
in the upstairs closet.

She’s meant to go. The orders come from higher than she can reach. Her future is with
the World’s own, and Roger’s only with this strange version of the War he still carries
with him. He can’t move, poor dear, it won’t let him go. Still passive as he’d been
under the rockets. Roger the victim. Jeremy the firer. “The War’s my mother,” he said
the first day, and Jessica has wondered what ladies in black appeared in his dreams,
what ash-white smiles, what shears to come snapping through the room, through their
winter . . . so much of him she never got to know . . . so much unfit for Peace. Already
she’s beginning to think of their time as a chain of explosions, craziness ganged
to the rhythms of the War. Now he wants to go rescue Slothrop, another rocket-creature,
a vampire whose sex life actually
fed
on the terror of that Rocket Blitz—ugh, creepy, creepy. They ought to lock him up,
not set him free. Roger
must
care more about Slothrop than about her, they’re two of a kind, aren’t they, well—she
hopes they’ll be happy together. They can sit and drink beer, tell rocket stories,
scribble equations for each other. How jolly. At least she won’t be leaving him in
a vacuum. He won’t be lonely, he’ll have something to occupy the time. . . .