Authors: Thomas Pynchon
A
N
I
NCIDENT IN THE
T
RANSVESTITES’
T
OILET
A small ape or orangutan, holding something behind his back, comes sidling unobserved
among net-stockinged legs, bobby sox rolled down to loop under ankle bones, subdeb
beanies tucked into rayon aquamarine waist-sashes. Finally he reaches Slothrop, who
is wearing a blonde wig and the same long flowing white cross-banded number Fay Wray
wears in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong on the boat (considering his history
in the Roseland toilet, Slothrop may have chosen this gown not only out of some repressed
desire to be sodomized, unimaginably, by a gigantic black ape, but also because of
an athletic innocence to Fay that he’s never spoken of except to point and whisper,
“Oh, look . . .”—some honesty, pluck, a cleanness to the garment itself, its enormous
sleeves so that wherever you pass is visibly where you’ve been . . .).
At that first moment, long before our flight:
Ravine, tyrannosaurus (flying-mares
And jaws cracked out of joint), the buzzing serpent
That jumped you in your own stone living space,
The pterodactyl or the Fall, no—just . . .
While I first hung there, forest and night at one,
Hung waiting with the torches on the wall.
And waiting for the night’s one Shape to come,
I prayed then, not for Jack, still mooning sappy
Along the weather-decks—no. I was thinking
Of Denham—only him, with gun and camera
Wisecracking in his best bum actor’s way
Through Darkest Earth, making the unreal reel
By shooting at it, one way or the other—
Carl Denham, my director, my undying,
Carl . . .
Ah, show me the key light, whisper me a line. . . .
We’ve seen them under a thousand names . . . “Greta Erdmann” is only one, these dames
whose job it is always to cringe from the Terror . . . well, home from work they fall
asleep just like us and dream of assassinations, of plots against good and decent
men. . . .
The ape reaches up taps Slothrop on the ass, hands him what he’s been carrying yaahhgghh
it’s a round black iron anarchist
bomb
’s what it is, with
lit fuse
too. . . . Ape goes scampering away. Slothrop just stands there, in the glassed and
humid rooms, his makeup starting to run, consternation in his eyes clear as marbles
and lips pressed into a bee-stung well-what-th’-heck-’m-I-s’posed-t’-do-
now?
He can’t
say
anything, the contact still hasn’t showed and his voice would blow his disguise. .
. . The fuse is burning shorter and shorter. Slothrop looks around. All the washbowls
and urinals are occupied. Should he just put the fuse out in front of somebody’s
cock
, right in the stream of piss . . . uh, but wouldn’t that look like I was propositioning
them or something? Gee, sometimes I wish I wasn’t so indecisive . . . m-maybe if I
picked somebody
weaker
than me . . . but then it’s the little guys got the reflexes, remember—
He is rescued from his indecision by a very tall, fat, somewhat Oriental-looking transvestite,
whose ideal, screen and personal, seems to be little Margaret O’Brien. Somehow this
Asiatic here is managing to look pigtailed and wistful even as he snatches the sputtering
bomb away from Slothrop, runs heaves it into an empty toiletbowl and flushes it, turning
back to Slothrop and the others with an air of civic duty well done when suddenly—
KRUPPALOOMA comes this giant
explosion
: water leaps in a surprised blue-green tongue (ever seen a toilet hollering, “Yikes!”?)
out of every single black-lidded bowl, pipes wrench and scream, walls and floor shudder,
plaster begins to fall in crescents and powder-sheets as all the chattering transvestites
fall silent, reach out to touch anyone nearby as a gesture of preparation for the
Voice out of the Loudspeaker, saying:
“That was a sodium bomb. Sodium explodes when it touches water.” So the fuse was a
dummy
, the dirty rat. . . . “You saw who threw it in the toilet. He is a dangerous maniac.
Apprehend him, and there’ll be a large reward. Your closet
could
make Norma Shearer’s look like the wastebasket in Gimbel’s basement.”
So they all leap on the poor protesting Margaret O’Brien devotee, while Slothrop,
for whom the humiliation and (presently, as the arrival of the police grows later
and later) the sexual abuse and torture were really intended (Gotta hand it to ya,
Pop!) slips away, loosening as he nears the outside the satin ties of his gown, dragging
reluctantly, off of his grease-chevroned head, the shining wig of innocence. . . .
A
M
OMENT OF
F
UN WITH
T
AKESHI AND
I
CHIZO, THE
K
OMICAL
K
AMIKAZES
Takeshi is tall and fat (but doesn’t braid his hair like that Margaret O’Brien), Ichizo
is short and skinny. Takeshi flies a Zero, while Ichizo flies an Ohka device, which
is a long bomb, actually, with a cockpit for Ichizo to sit in, stub wings, rocket
propulsion and a few control surfaces back aft. Takeshi only had to go to Kamikaze
School for two weeks, on Formosa. Ichizo had to go to Ohka school for six
months
, in Tokyo. They are as different as peanut butter and jelly, these two. No fair asking
which is which.
They are the only two Kamikazes out here at this air base, which is rather remote
actually, on an island that nobody, well, really
cares
much about, any more. The fighting is going on at Leyte . . . then on to Iwo Jima,
moving toward Okinawa, but always too far away for any sortie from
here
to reach. But they have their orders, and their exile. Not much to do for kicks but
go wandering on the beaches looking for dead Cypridinae. These are crustaceans with
three eyes, shaped like a potato with catwhiskers at one end. Dried and powdered,
Cypridinae are also a great source of light. To make the stuff glow in the dark, all
you do is add water. The light is blue, weird multishaded blue—some green in it, and
some indigo—amazingly cool and nocturnal blue. On moonless or overcast nights, Takeshi
and Ichizo take off all their clothes and splash each other with Cypridina light,
running and giggling under the palm trees.
Every morning, and sometimes evening too, the Scatterbrained Suicidekicks mosey down
to the palm-thatched radar shack to see if there’s any American targets worth a crash-dive,
anywhere inside their flying radius. But it’s the same story every time. Old Kenosho
the loony radarman who’s always brewing up a batch of that sake back in the transmitter
room, in a still he’s hooked up to a magnetron tube in some fiendish-Nip way that
defies Western science, every time the fellas show up this drunken old reprobate starts
cackling, “No dying today! No dying today! So solly!” pointing at all the blank PPI
scopes, green radii sweeping silent round and round trailing clear webs of green shampoo,
nothing but surface return for more miles than you can fly, and of the fatal mandala
both hearts would leap to, green carrier-blob screened eightfold in a circle of destroyer-strokes,
nothing . . . no, each morning’s the same—only the odd whitecap and old hysterical
Kenosho, who by now is on the floor gagging on saliva and tongue, having his Seizure,
an eagerly awaited part of each daily visit, each fit trying to top the one before,
or at least bring in a new twist—a back-flip in the air, a gnaw or two after Takeshi’s
blue-and-yellow patent wingtips, an improvised haiku:
The lover leaps in the
volcano!
It’s ten feet deep,
And inactive—
as the two pilots mug, giggle, and jump around trying to avoid the grizzled old radarman’s
thrashings—
what?
You didn’t like the haiku. It wasn’t
ethereal
enough? Not Japanese at all? In fact it sounded like something
right outa Hollywood?
Well, Captain—yes you, Marine Captain Esberg from Pasadena—
you
, have just had, the Mystery Insight! (gasps and a burst of premonitory applause)
and so
you
—are our
Paranoid . . . For The Day!
(band burst into “Button Up Your Overcoat,” or any other suitably paranoid up-tempo
tune, as the bewildered contestant is literally yanked to his feet and dragged out
in the aisle by this M.C. with the gleaming face and rippling jaw). Yes, it
is
a movie! Another World War II situation comedy, and your chance, to find out what
it’s
really like
, because
you
—have
won
(drumroll, more gasps, more applauding and whistling) an all-expense, one-way trip
for
one
, to the movie’s actual location, exotic Puke-a-hook-a-look-i
Island!
(the orchestra’s ukulele section taking up now a tinkling reprise of that “White
Man Welcome” tune we last heard in London being directed at Géza Rózsavölgyi) on a
giant TWA Constellation! You’ll while your nights away chasing vampire mosquitoes
away from your
own throat!
Getting blind
lost
, out in the middle of torrential tropical downpours! Scooping rat turds out of the
enlisted men’s water barrel! But it won’t be all nighttime giddiness and excitement,
Captain, because daytimes, up at five a.m. sharp, you’ll be out making the acquaintance
of the Kamikaze
Zero
you’ll be flying! getting all checked out on those controls, making sure you know
just where
that bomb-safety-release is! A-ha-hand of
course
, trying to stay out of the way, of those two
Nonsensical Nips
, Takeshi and Ichizo! as they go about their uproarious weekly adventures, seemingly
oblivious to your presence, and the frankly ominous implications of your day’s routine. . . .
S
TREETS
Strips of insulation hang up in the morning fog, after a night of moon brightening
and darkening as if by itself, because the blowing fog was so smooth, so hard to see.
Now, when the wind blows, yellow sparks will spill away with a rattlesnake buzz from
the black old fraying wires, against a sky gray as a hat. Green glass insulators go
cloudy and blind in the day. Wood poles lean and smell old: thirty-year-old wood.
Tarry transformers hum aloft. As if it will really be a busy day. In the middle distance
poplars just emerge out of the haze.
It could have been the Semlower Strasse, in Stralsund. The windows have the same ravaged
look: the insides of all the rooms seem to’ve been gutted black. Perhaps there is
a new bomb that can destroy only the
insides
of structures . . . no . . . it was in Greifswald. Across some wet railroad tracks
were derricks, superstructure, tackle, smells of canalside . . . Hafenstrasse in Greifswald,
down over his back fell the cold shadow of some massive church. But isn’t that the
Petritor, that stunted brick tower-arch straddling the alleyway ahead . . . it could
be the Slüterstrasse in the old part of Rostock . . . or the Wandfarberstrasse in
Lüneburg, with pulleys high up on the brick gables, openwork weathercocks up at the
very peaks . . . why was he looking
upward?
Upward from any of a score of those northern streets, one morning, in the fog. The
farther north, the plainer things grow. There’s one gutter, down the middle of the
alley, where the rain runs off. Cobbles are laid straighter and there aren’t as many
cigarettes to be had. Garrison-churches echo with starlings. To come into a northern
Zone town is to enter a strange harbor, from the sea, on a foggy day.
But in each of these streets, some vestige of humanity, of Earth, has to remain. No
matter what has been done to it, no matter what it’s been used for. . . .
There were men called “army chaplains.” They preached inside some of these buildings.
There were actually soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened. Holding on
to what they could. Then they went out, and some died before they got back inside
a garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked to the
men who were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption, salvation. It
really happened. It was quite common.
Even in a street used for that, still there will be one time, one dyed afternoon (coaltar-impossible
orange-brown, clear all the way through), or one day of rain and clearing before bedtime,
and in the yard one hollyhock, circling in the wind, fresh with raindrops fat enough
to be chewed . . . one face by a long sandstone wall and the scuffle of all the doomed
horses on the other side, one hair-part thrown into blue shadows at a turn of her
head—one busful of faces passing through in the middle of the night, no one awake
in the quiet square but the driver, the Ortsschutz sentry in some kind of brown, official-looking
uniform, old Mauser at sling arms, dreaming not of the enemy outside in the swamp
or shadow but of home and bed, strolling now with his civilian friend who’s off-duty,
can’t sleep, under the trees full of road-dust and night, through their shadows on
the sidewalks, playing a harmonica . . . down past the row of faces in the bus, drowned-man
green, insomniac, tobacco-starved, scared, not of tomorrow, not yet, but of this pause
in their night-passage, of how easy it will be to lose, and how much it will hurt. . . .
At least one moment of passage, one it will hurt to lose, ought to be found for every
street now indifferently gray with commerce, with war, with repression . . . finding
it, learning to cherish what was lost, mightn’t we find some way back?
In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery cobblestones,
is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling
in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush. The letters
MB DRO
ROSHI
appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning glamour girl riding
astraddle the cannon of a tank, steel penis with slotted serpent head, 3rd Armored
treads ’n’ triangle on a sweater rippling across her tits. The white image has the
same coherence, the hey-lookit-me smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden
white genital onset in the sky—it is also, perhaps, a Tree. . . .