Authors: Thomas Pynchon
And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war. . . .
• • • • • • •
These pine limbs, crackling so blue and watery, don’t seem to put out any heat at
all. Confiscated weapons and ammo lie around half-crated or piled loose inside the
C-Company perimeter. For days the U.S. Army has been out sweeping Thuringia, busting
into houses in the middle of the night. A certain lycanthropophobia or fear of Werewolves
occupies minds at higher levels. Winter is coming. Soon there won’t be enough food
or coal in Germany. Potato crops toward the end of the War, for example, all went
to make alcohol for the rockets. But there are still small-arms aplenty, and ammunition
to fit them. Where you cannot feed, you take away weapons. Weapons and food have been
firmly linked in the governmental mind for as long as either has been around.
On the mountainsides, patches will flash up now and then, bright as dittany in July
at the Zippo’s ceremonial touch. Pfc. Eddie Pensiero, a replacement here in the 89th
Division, also an amphetamine enthusiast, sits huddling nearly on top of the fire,
shivering and watching the divisional patch on his arm, which ordinarily resembles
a cluster of rocket-noses seen out of a dilating asshole, all in black and olive-drab,
but which now looks like something even stranger than
that
, which Eddie will think of in a minute.
Shivering is one of Eddie Pensiero’s favorite pastimes. Not the kind of shiver
normal
people get, the goose-on-the-grave passover and gone, but shivering that
doesn’t stop.
Very hard to get used to at first. Eddie is a connoisseur of shivers. He is even
able, in some strange way, to
read
them, like Säure Bummer reads reefers, like Miklos Thanatz reads whipscars. But the
gift isn’t limited just to Eddie’s
own
shivers, oh no, they’re
other
peoples’ shivers, too! Yeah they come in one by one, they come in all together in
groups (lately he’s been growing in his brain a kind of discriminator circuit, learning
how to separate them out). Least interesting of these shivers are the ones with a
perfectly steady frequency, no variation to them at all. The next-to-least interesting
are the frequency-modulated kind, now faster now slower depending on information put
in at the other end, wherever that might be. Then you have the irregular waveforms
that change both in frequency and in amplitude. They have to be Fourier-analyzed into
their harmonics, which is a little tougher. There is often coding involved, certain
subfrequencies, certain power-levels—you have to be pretty good to get the hang of
these.
“Hey Pensiero.” It is Eddie’s Sergeant, Howard (“Slow”) Lerner. “Getcher ass offa
dat fire.”
“Aww, Sarge,” chatters Eddie, “c’mon. I wuz just tryin’ ta get wawm.”
“No ick-skew-siz, Pensiero! One o’ th’ koinels wants his hair cut,
right now
, an’ yer
it!
”
“Ahh, youse guys,” mutters Pensiero, crawling over to his sleeping bag and looking
through his pack for comb and scissors. He is the company barber. His haircuts, which
take hours and often days, are immediately recognizable throughout the Zone, revealing
as they do the hair-by-hair singlemindedness of the “benny” habitué.
The colonel is sitting, waiting, under an electric bulb. The bulb is receiving its
power from another enlisted man, who sits back in the shadows hand-pedaling the twin
generator cranks. It is Eddie’s friend Private Paddy (“Electro”) McGonigle, an Irish
lad from New Jersey, one of those million virtuous and adjusted city poor you know
from the movies—you’ve seen them dancing, singing, hanging out the washing on the
lines, getting drunk at wakes, worrying about their children going bad, I just don’t
know any more Faather, he’s a good b’y but he’s runnin’ with a crool crowd, on through
every wretched Hollywood lie down to and including this year’s big hit,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
With his crank here young Paddy is practicing another form of Eddie’s gift, though
he’s transmitting not receiving. The bulb appears to burn steadily, but this is really
a succession of electric peaks and valleys, passing by at a speed that depends on
how fast Paddy is cranking. It’s only that the wire inside the bulb unbrightens slow
enough before the next peak shows up that fools us into seeing a steady light. It’s
really a train of imperceptible light and dark.
Usually
imperceptible. The message is never conscious on Paddy’s part. It is sent by muscles
and skeleton, by that circuit of his body which has learned to work as a source of
electrical power.
Right now Eddie Pensiero is shivering and not paying much attention to that light
bulb. His own message is interesting enough. Somebody close by, out in the night,
is playing a blues on a mouth harp. “Whut’s
dat?
” Eddie wants to know, standing under the white light behind the silent colonel in
his dress uniform, “hey, McGonigle—you hear sump’n?”
“Yeah,” jeers Paddy from behind the generator, “I hear yer dischodge, flyin’ away,
wit’ big
wings
comin’ outa th’ ass end. Dat’s whut
I
hear! Yuk, yuk!”
“Aw, it’s th’
bunk!
” replies Eddie Pensiero. “Y-you don’t hear no dischodge, ya big dumbheaded Mick.”
“Hey, Pensiero, ya know whut a Eye-talian
submarine
sounds like, on dat new sonar? Huh?”
“Uh . . . whut?”
“
Pinnnggg
uinea-guinea-guinea wopwopwop!
Dat’s
whut! Yuk, yuk, yuk!”
“Fuck youse,” sez Eddie, and commences combing the colonel’s silver-black hair.
The moment the comb contacts his head, the colonel begins to speak. “Ordinarily, we’d
spend no more than 24 hours on a house-to-house sweep. Sundown to sundown, house to
house. There’s a quality of black and gold to either end of it, that way, silhouettes,
shaken skies pure as a cyclorama. But these sunsets, out here, I don’t know. Do you
suppose something has exploded somewhere? Really—somewhere in the East? Another Krakatoa?
Another name at least that exotic . . . the colors are so different now. Volcanic
ash, or any finely-divided substance, suspended in the atmosphere, can diffract the
colors strangely. Did you know that, son? Hard to believe, isn’t it? Rather a long
taper if you don’t mind, and just short of combable on top. Yes, Private, the colors
change, and how! The question is, are they changing
according to something?
Is the sun’s everyday spectrum being modulated? Not at random, but systematically,
by this unknown debris in the prevailing winds? Is there information for us? Deep
questions, and disturbing ones.
“Where are you from, son? I’m from Kenosha, Wisconsin. My folks have a little farm
back there. Snowfields and fenceposts all the way to Chicago. The snow covers the
old cars up on blocks in the yards . . . big white bundles . . . it looks like Graves
Registration back there in Wisconsin.
“Heh, heh. . . .”
“Hey Pensiero,” calls Paddy McGonigle, “ya still hearin’ dat sound?”
“Yeah uh I t’ink it’s a mouth-organ,” Pensiero busily combing up single hairs, cutting
each one a slightly different length, going back again and again to touch up here
and there . . . God is who knows their number. Atropos is who severs them to different
lengths. So, God under the aspect of Atropos, she who cannot be turned, is in possession
of Eddie Pensiero tonight.
“I
got your
mouth organ,” jeers Paddy, “right here! Look! A wop clarinet!”
Each long haircut is a passage. Hair is yet another kind of modulated frequency. Assume
a state of grace in which all hairs were once distributed perfectly even, a time of
innocence when they fell perfectly straight, all over the colonel’s head. Winds of
the day, gestures of distraction, sweat, itchings, sudden surprises, three-foot falls
at the edge of sleep, watched skies, remembered shames, all have since written on
that perfect grating. Passing through it tonight, restructuring it, Eddie Pensiero
is an agent of History. Along with the reworking of the colonel’s head runs the shiver-borne
blues—long runs in number 2 and 3 hole correspond, tonight anyway, to passages in
the deep reaches of hair, birch trunks in a very humid summer night, approaches to
a stone house in a wooded park, stags paralyzed beside the high flagged walks. . . .
Blues is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear note, on pitch, and then bend
it lower with the muscles of your face. Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight
with pain, often trying not to betray
any
emotion, all your life. Where you send the pure note is partly a function of that.
There’s that secular basis for blues, if the spiritual angle bothers you. . . .
“I didn’t know where I was,” relates the colonel. “I kept climbing downward, along
these big sheared chunks of concrete. Black reinforcing rod poking out . . . black
rust. There were touches of royal purple in the air, not bright enough to blur out
over their edges, or change the substance of the night. They dribbled down, lengthening
out, one by one—ever seen a chicken fetus, just beginning? oh of course not, you’re
a city boy. There’s a lot to learn, out on the farm. Teaches you what a chicken fetus
looks like, so that if you happen to be climbing around a concrete mountain in the
dark, and see one, or several, up in the sky reproduced in purple, you’ll know what
they look like—that’s a heap better than the city, son, there you just move from crisis
to crisis, each one brand-new, nothing to couple it back onto. . . .”
Well, there he is, cautiously edging along the enormous ruin, his hair at the moment
looking
very
odd—brushed forward from one occipital spot, forward and up in great long points,
forming a black sunflower or sunbonnet around his face, in which the prominent feature
is the colonel’s long, crawling magenta lips. Things grab up for him out of crevices
among the debris, sort of fast happy lunge out and back in, thin pincer arms, nothing
personal, just thought I’d
grab a little night air
, ha, ha! When they miss the colonel—as they always seem to do—why they just zip back
in with a gambler’s ho-hum, well, maybe next time. . . .
Dammit, cut off from my regiment here, gonna be captured and cremated by dacoits!
Oh Jesus there they are now
, unthinkable Animals running low in the light from the G-5 version of the city, red
and yellow turbans, scarred dope-fiend faces, faired as the front end of a ’37 Ford,
same undirected eyes, same exemption from the Karmic Hammer—
A ’37 Ford, exempt from the K.H.? C’mon quit fooling. They’ll all end up in junkyards
same as th’ rest!
Oh,
will they
, Skippy? Why are there so many on the roads, then?
W-well gee, uh, Mister Information, th-th’ War, I mean there’s no new cars being built
right now so we all have to keep our Old Reliable in tiptop shape cause there’s not
too many mechanics left here on the home front, a-and we shouldn’t hoard gas, and
we should keep that A-sticker prominently displayed in the lower right—
Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and retrograde journeys.
Come back, here, to the points. Here is where the paths divided. See the man back
there. He is wearing a white hood. His shoes are brown. He has a nice smile, but nobody
sees it. Nobody sees it because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice man.
He is the pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes the
points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or “Der Leid-Stadt,” that’s
what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man
named Mr. Rilke. But we will not read it, because
we
are going to Happyville. The pointsman has made sure we’ll go there. He hardly has
to work at all. The lever is very smooth, and easy to push. Even you could push it,
Skippy. If you knew where it was. But look what a lot of work he has done, with just
one little push. He has sent us all the way to Happyville, instead of to Pain City.
That is because he knows just where the points and the lever are. He is the only kind
of man who puts in very little work and makes big things happen, all over the world.
He could have sent you on the right trip back there, Skippy. You can have
your
fantasy if you want, you probably don’t deserve anything better, but Mister Information
tonight is in a kind mood. He will show you Happyville. He will begin by reminding
you of the 1937 Ford. Why is that dacoit-faced auto still on the roads? You said “the
War,” just as you rattled over the points onto the wrong track. The War
was
the set of points. Eh? Yesyes, Skippy, the truth is that the War is keeping things
alive.
Things.
The Ford is only one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surrealistic
version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and
then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing
them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at
this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies
fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern.
The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment’s
weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The
right ones survive. The others, it’s said, even
know
they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they do. Nobody
knows why. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one
would have to be killed in the War. That would be fun, wouldn’t it, Skippy?
Jeepers, it sure
would
, Mister Information! Wow, I-I can’t wait to see Happyville!
Happily, he doesn’t have to wait at all. One of the dacoits comes leaping with a whistling
sound, ecru silk cord strung buzzing tight between his fists, eager let’s-get-to-it
grin, and just at the same moment a pair of arms comes pincering up out of a fissure
in the ruins, and gathers the colonel down to safety just in time. The dacoit falls
on his ass, and sits there trying to pull the cord apart, muttering oh shit, which
even dacoits do too.