Authors: Thomas Pynchon
They’ll help him through it. The Erdschweinhöhlers will sit up all night with this
nonstop intelligence briefing. He is the angel they’ve hoped for, and it’s logical
he should come now, on the day when they have their Rocket all assembled at last,
their single A4 scavenged all summer piece by piece clear across the Zone from Poland
to the Low Countries. Whether you believed or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically
celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling—a suspicion, a latent wish,
some hidden tithe out of your soul,
something
—for the Rocket. It is that “something” that the Angel Thanatz now illuminates, each
in a different way, for everybody listening.
By the time he’s done, they will all know what the Schwarzgerät was, how it was used,
where the 00000 was fired from, and which way it was pointed. Enzian will smile grimly,
and groan to his feet, the decision already made for him hours ago, and say, “Well,
let’s have a look at the timetables now.” His Erdschweinhöhle rival, Empty One Josef
Ombindi, grips him by the forearm—“If there’s anything . . .” Enzian nods. “See if
you can work us out a tight security watch, ’kurandye.” He hasn’t called Ombindi
that
for a while. Nor is it a small concession to give the Empty Ones control of the watch
lists, at least for the duration of this journey . . .
. . . which has already begun, as one and a half levels below, men and women are busy
with tackle, lines, and harness easing rocket sections each onto its dolly, more Schwarzkommando
waiting in leather and blueflowered files up the ramps to the outside, along the present
and future vectors strung between wood rails and grooves, Empty, Neutral and Green
all together now, waiting or hauling or supervising, some talking for the first time
since the dividing along lines of racial life and racial death began, how many years
ago, reconciled for now in the only Event that could have brought them together (
I
couldn’t, Enzian knows, and shudders at what’s going to happen after it’s over—but
maybe it’s only meant to last its fraction of a day, and why can’t that be enough?
try to let it be enough . . .).
Christian comes past, downhill adjusting a web belt, not quite swaggering—night before
last his sister Maria visited him in a dream to tell him she wished no revenge against
anyone, and wanted him to trust and love the Nguarorerue—so their eyes now meet not
quite amused nor quite yet in a challenge, but knowing more together than they ever
have so far, and Christian’s hand at the moment of passing cocks out half in salute,
half in celebration, aimed toward the Heath, northwesterly, Kingdom-of-Deathward,
and Enzian’s goes out the same way, iya, ’kurandye! as, at some point, the two palms
do slide and brush, do touch, and it is touch and trust enough, for this moment. . . .
• • • • • • •
Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it, quite pleasant after
all. Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American
teenager’s own
Father
, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that.
So far he’s managed to escape his father’s daily little death-plots—but nobody has
said he has to
keep
escaping.
He’s a cheerful and a plucky enough lad, and doesn’t hold any of this against his
father particularly. That ol’ Broderick’s just a murderin’ fool, golly what’ll he
come up with next—
It’s a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930s swoop-façaded
and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, classy airships
of all descriptions drifting in the boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies
sunning in roof-gardens and turning to wave as you pass. It is the Raketen-Stadt.
Down below, thousands of kids are running in windy courtyards and areaways, up and
down flights of steps, skullcaps on their heads with plastic propellers spinning in
the wind rattling and blurred, kids running messages among the plastic herbage in
and out of the different soft-plastic offices—Here’s a memo for you Tyrone, go and
find the Radiant Hour (Weepers! Didn’t know it was lost! Sounds like ol’ Pop’s up
to somma those
tricks
again!), so it’s out into the swarming corridors, full of larking dogs, bicycles,
pretty subdeb secretaries on roller skates, produce carts, beanies whirling forever
in the lights, cap-gun or water-pistol duels at each corner, kids dodging behind the
sparkling fountains WAIT
that’s a real gun
, this is a real bullet zinnnggg! good try, Pop, but you’re not quite as keen as The
Kid today!
Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the day’s 24 by
colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their own. Travel here gets complicated—a
system of buildings that move, by right angles, along the grooves of the Raketen-Stadt’s
street-grid. You can also raise or lower the building itself, a dozen floors per second,
to desired heights or levels underground, like a submarine skipper with his periscope—although
certain paths aren’t available to you. They are available to others, but not to you.
Chess. Your objective is not the King—there is no King—but momentary targets such
as the Radiant Hour.
Bing
in pops a kid with beanie spinning, hands Slothrop another message and spins off
again. “The Radiant Hour is being held captive, if you want to see her on display
to all interested customers be present at this address 11:30 a.m.”—in the sky a white
clockface drifts conveniently by, hmm only half an hour to gather together my rescue
team. Rescue team will consist of Myrtle Miraculous flyin’ in here in a shoulderpadded
maroon dress, the curlers still up in her hair and a tough frown fer draggin’ her
outa Slumberland . . . next a Negro in a pearl-gray zoot and Inverness cape name of
Maximilian, high square pomaded head and a superthin mustache come zooming here out
of his “front” job, suave manager of the Club Oogabooga where Beacon Street aristocracy
rubs elbows ev’ry night with Roxbury winos ’n’ dopefiends, yeah hi Tyrone, heah Ah
is! H’lo Moitle baby, hyeah, hyeah, hyeah! Whut’s de big rush, mah man? Adjusting
his carnation, lookin’ round th’ room, everybody’s here now except for that
Mar-cel
but hark the familiar music-box theme yes it’s that old-timery sweet Stephen Foster
music and sure enough in through the balcony window now comes Marcel, a mechanical
chessplayer dating back to the Second Empire, actually built a century ago for the
great conjuror Robert-Houdin, very serious-looking French refugee kid, funny haircut
with the ears perfectly outlined in hair that starts abruptly a quarter-inch strip
of bare plastic skin away, black patent-shiny hair, hornrim glasses, a rather remote
manner, unfortunately much too literal with humans (imagine what happened the first
time Maximilian come hi-de-hoing in the door with one finger jivin’ in the air sees
metal-ebonite-and-plastic young Marcel sitting there and say, “Hey man gimme some
skin
, man!” well not only does Marcel give him a heavy time about skin, skin in
all
its implications, oh no that’s only at the superficial level,
next
we get a long discourse on the concept of “give,” that goes on for a while, then,
then he starts in on “Man.” That’s really an exhaustive one. In fact Marcel isn’t
anywhere near finished with it
yet
). Still, his exquisite 19th-century brainwork—the human art it took to build which
has been flat lost, lost as the dodo bird—has stood the Floundering Four in good stead
on many, many go-rounds with the Paternal Peril.
But where inside Marcel is the midget Grandmaster, the little Johann Allgeier? where’s
the pantograph, and the magnets? Nowhere. Marcel really is a mechanical chessplayer.
No fakery inside to give him any touch of humanity at all. Each of the FF is, in fact,
gifted while at the same time flawed by his gift—unfit by it for human living. Myrtle
Miraculous specializes in performing miracles. Stupendous feats, impossible for humans.
She has lost respect for humans, they are clumsy, they fail, she does want to love
them but love is the only miracle that’s beyond her. Love is denied her forever. The
others of her class are either homosexuals, fanatics about law ’n’ order, off on strange
religious excursions, or as intolerant of failure as herself, and though friends such
as Mary Marvel and Wonder Woman keep inviting her to parties to meet eligible men,
Myrtle knows it’s no use. . . . As for Maximilian, he has a natural sense of rhythm,
which means
all
rhythms, up to and including the cosmic. So he will never be where the fathomless
manhole awaits, where the safe falls from the high window shrieking like a bomb—he
is a pilot through Earth’s baddest minefields, if we only stay close to him, be where
he is as much as we can—yet Maximilian’s doom is never to go any further into danger
than its dapperness, its skin-exciting first feel. . . .
Fine crew this is, getting set to go off after the Radiant—say what? what’s Slothrop’s
own
gift and Fatal Flaw? Aw,
c’mon
—uh, the Radiant Hour, collecting their equipment, Myrtle zooming to and fro materializing
this and that:
The Golden Gate Bridge (“How about that one?” “Uh, let’s see the other one, again?
with the, you know, uh . . .” “The Brooklyn?” “—kind of old-fashioned looking—” “The
Brooklyn Bridge?” “Yeah, that’s it, with the pointed . . . whatever they are . . .”).
The Brooklyn Bridge (“See, for a chase-scene, Myrtle, we ought to observe proportions—”
“Do tell.” “Now if we were gonna be in highspeed automobiles, well, sure, we might
use the Golden Gate . . . but for zooming through the air now, we need something older,
more intimate,
human—
”).
A pair of superlatively elegant Rolls Royces (“Quit fooling, Myrtle, we already agreed,
didn’t we? No automobiles . . .”).
A small plastic baby’s steering wheel (“Aw all right, I know you don’t respect me
as a leader but listen can’t we be reasonable . . .”).
Any wonder it’s hard to feel much confidence in these idiots as they go up against
Pernicious Pop each day? There’s no real direction here, neither lines of power nor
cooperation. Decisions are never really
made
—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and
all-round assholery. This is less a fighting team than nest full of snits, blues,
crotchets and grudges, not a rare or fabled bird in the lot. Its survival seems, after
all, only a mutter of blind fortune groping through the heavy marbling of skies one
Titanic-Night at a time. Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes
for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that
doesn’t
cancel out to apathy—it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as
knives). It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come
down on one side or another. Those whom the old Puritan sermons denounced as “the
glozing neuters of the world” have no easy road to haul down, Wear-the-Pantsers, just
cause you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there! Energy inside is just as real,
just as binding and inescapable, as energy that shows. When’s the last time you felt
intensely lukewarm?
eh? Glozing neuters are just as human as heroes and villains. In many ways they have
the most grief to put up with, don’t they? Why don’t you, right now, wherever you
are, city folks or out in the country, snuggled in quilts or riding the bus, just
turn to the Glozing Neuter nearest you, even your own reflection in the mirror, and . . .
just . . . sing,
How-dy neighbor, how-dy pard!
Ain’t it lone-ly, say ain’t it hard,
Passin’ by so silent, day-after-day, with-out, even a smile-or, a friendly word to
say? Oh, let me
Tell ya bud-dy, tell ya ace,
Things’re fal-lin’, on their face—
Maybe we should stick together part o’ the way, and
Skies’ll be bright-er some day!
Now
ev
’rybody—
As the 4 suit up, voices continue singing for a while, depending how much each one
happens to care—Myrtle displaying generous expanses of nifty gam, and Maximilian leering
up beneath the fast-talking young tomato’s skirts, drawing bewildered giggles from
adolescent Marcel, who may be a bit repressed.
“Now,” Slothrop with a boobish, eager-to-please smile, “time for that
Pause that Refreshes!
” And he’s into the icebox before Myrtle’s “Oh, Jesus” has quite finished echoing . . .
the light from the cold wee bulb turning his face to summernight blue, Broderick and
Nalline’s shadow-child, their unconfessed, their monster son, who was born with hydraulic
clamps for hands that know only how to reach and grab . . . and a heart that gurgles
audibly, like a funny fatman’s stomach . . . but look how lost, how unarrested his
face is, was, that 1½ seconds in the glow from the folksy old icebox humming along
in Kelvinator-Bostonian dialect, “Why cummawn in, T’rone, it’s nice and friendly heeah
in my stummick, gawt lawtsa nice things, like Mawxies, ’n’ big Baby Rooths. . . .”
Walking now in among miles-down-the-sky shelves and food-mountains or food-cities
of Iceboxland (but look out, it can get pretty Fascist in here, behind the candy-colored
sweet stuff is thermodynamic elitism at its clearest—bulbs can be replaced with candles
and the radios fall silent, but the Grid’s big function in this System is iceboxery:
freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world,
this cube of changelessness), climbing over the celery ridges where the lettered cheese
glasses loom high and glossy in the middle distance, slippin’ on the butter dish,
piggin’ on the watermelon down to the rind, feelin’ yellow and bright as you skirt
the bananas, gazing down at verdigris reaches of mold across the crusted terrain of
an old, no longer identifiable casserole—
bananas!
who-who’s been putting bananas—