Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Slothrop sits on a curbstone watching it, and the letters, and girl with steel cock
waving hi fellas, as the fog whitens into morning, and figures with carts, or dogs,
or bicycles go by in brown-gray outlines, wheezing, greeting briefly in fog-flattened
voices, passing. He doesn’t remember sitting on the curb for so long staring at the
picture. But he did.
At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the east, head, shoulders,
breasts, 17° 36′ down to her maidenhead at the horizon. A few doomed Japanese knew
of her as some Western deity. She loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city
about to be sacrificed. The sun was in Leo. The fireburst came roaring and sovereign. . . .
L
ISTENING TO THE
T
OILET
The basic idea is that They will come and shut off the water first. The cryptozoa
who live around the meter will be paralyzed by the great inbreak of light from overhead . . .
then scatter like hell for lower, darker, wetter. Shutting the water off interdicts
the toilet: with only one tankful left, you really can’t get rid of much of anything
any more, dope, shit, documents, They’ve stopped the inflow/outflow and here you are
trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up, ass hanging out all over Their
Movieola viewer, waiting for Their editorial blade. Reminded, too late, of how dependent
you are on Them, for neglect if not good will: Their neglect is your freedom. But
when They do come on it’s like society-gig Apollos, striking the lyre
ZONGGG
Everything freezes. The sweet, icky chord hangs in the air . . . there is no way to
be at ease with it. If you try the “Are you quite finished, Superintendent?” gambit,
the man will answer, “No, as a matter of fact . . . no, you nasty little wet-mouthed
prig, I’m not
half
finished, not with you. . . .”
So it’s good policy always to have the toilet valve cracked a bit, to maintain some
flow through the toilet so when it
stops
you’ll have that extra minute or two. Which is not the usual paranoia of waiting
for a knock, or a phone to ring: no, it takes a particular kind of mental illness
to sit and listen for a cessation of noise. But—
Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that sound cannot travel through outer
space. Well, but suppose it
can.
Suppose They don’t want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called
an “aether,” which can carry sound to every part of the Earth. The Soniferous Aether.
For millions of years, the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93 millionmile
roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed
out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody know?
Except that at night now and then, in some part of the dark hemisphere, because of
eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there will come to pass a very shallow pocket of
no-sound. For a few seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in
the World, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the sun
stops.
For its brief life, the point of sound-shadow may come to rest a thousand feet above
a desert, between floors in an empty office building, or exactly around a seated individual
in a working-class restaurant where they hose the place out at 3 every morning . . .
it’s all white tile, the chairs and tables riveted solid into the floor, food covered
with rigid shrouds of clear plastic . . . soon, from outside, rrrnnn! clank, drag,
squeak of valve opening oh yes, ah yes, Here Are The Men With The Hoses To Hose The
Place Out—
At which instant, with no warning, the arousing feather-point of the Sound-Shadow
has touched you, enveloping you in sun-silence for oh, let us say 2:36:18 to 2:36:24,
Central War Time, unless the location is Dungannon, Virginia, Bristol, Tennessee,
Asheville or Franklin, North Carolina, Apalachicola, Florida, or conceivably in Murdo
Mackenzie, South Dakota, or Phillipsburg, Kansas, or Stockton, Plainville, or Ellis,
Kansas—yes sounds like a Roll of Honor don’t it, being read off someplace out on the
prairie, foundry colors down the sky in long troughs, red and purple, darkening crowd
of civilians erect and nearly-touching as wheat stalks, and the one old man in black
up at the microphone, reading off the towns of the war dead, Dungannon . . . Bristol . . .
Murdo Mackenzie . . . his white hair blown back by a sculpting thine-alabaster-cities
wind into leonine wreathing, his stained pored old face polished by wind, sandy with
light, earnest outboard corners of his eyelids folding down as one by one, echoing
out over the anvil prairie, the names of death-towns unreel, and surely Bleicheröde
or Blicero will be spoken any minute now. . . .
Well, you’re
wrong
, champ—these happen to be towns all located on the borders of
Time Zones
, is all. Ha, ha! Caught
you
with your hand in your pants! Go on, show us
all
what you were doing or leave the area, we don’t need your kind around. There’s nothing
so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.
“Now—the eastern towns we’ve listed are on Eastern War Time. All the other towns along
the interface are on Central. The western towns just read off are on Central, while
the other towns along
that
interface are on Mountain. . . .”
Which is all our Sentimental Surrealist, leaving the area, gets to hear. Just as well.
He is more involved, or “unhealthily obsessed,” if you like, with the moment of sun-silence
inside the white tile greasy-spoon. It seems like a place he has been (Kenosha, Wisconsin?)
already, though he can’t remember in what connection. They called him “the Kenosha
Kid,” though this may be apocryphal. By now, the only other room he can remember being
in was a two-color room, nothing but the two exact colors, for all the lamps, furniture,
drapes, walls, ceiling, rug, radio, even book jackets in the shelves—
everything
was either (1) Deep Cheap-Perfume Aquamarine, or (2) Creamy Chocolate FBI-Shoe Brown.
That may’ve been in Kenosha, may not. If he tries he will remember, in a minute, how
he got to the white tiled room half an hour before hose-out time. He is sitting with
a coffee cup half full, heavy sugar and cream, crumbs of a pineapple Danish under
the saucer where his fingers can’t reach. Sooner or later he’ll have to move the saucer
to get them. He’s just holding off. But it isn’t sooner and it isn’t later, because
the sound-shadow comes down on him,
settles around his table, with the invisible long vortex surfaces that brought it
here swooping up away like whorls of an Aetheric Danish, audible only by virtue of
accidental bits of sound-debris that may happen to be caught in the eddying, voices
far away out at sea
our position is two seven degrees two six minutes north
, a woman crying in some high-pitched language, ocean waves in gale winds, a voice
reciting in Japanese,
Hi wa Ri ni katazu,
Ri wa Ho ni katazu,
Ho wa Ken ni katazu,
Ken wa Ten ni katazu,
which is the slogan of a Kamikaze unit, an Ohka outfit—it means
Injustice cannot conquer Principle,
Principle cannot conquer Law,
Law cannot conquer Power,
Power cannot conquer Heaven.
Hi, Ri, Ho, Ken, Ten go Jap-gibbering away on the long solar eddy and leave the Kenosha
Kid at the riveted table, where the roaring of the sun has stopped. He is hearing,
for the first time, the mighty river of his blood, the Titan’s drum of his heart.
Come into the bulbshine and sit with him, with the stranger at the small public table.
It’s almost hosing-out time. See if you can sneak in under the shadow too. Even a
partial eclipse is better than never finding out—better than cringing the rest of
your life under the great Vacuum in the sky they have taught you, and a sun whose
silence you never get to hear.
What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is—what if They’re
using
it on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded
by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual life in time? What
if it’s
in Their interest
to have you believing that?
“He won’t bother us for a while,” They tell each other. “I just put him on the Dark
Dream.” They drink together, shoot very very synthetic drugs into skin or blood, run
incredible electronic waveforms into Their skulls, directly into the brainstem, and
backhand each other, playfully, with openmouth laugh—
you know, don’t you
is in those ageless eyes . . . They speak of taking So-and-So and “putting him on
the Dream.” They use the phrase for each other too, in sterile tenderness, when bad
news is passed, at the annual Roasts, when the endless mind-gaming catches a colleague
unprepared—“Boy, did we put
him
on the Dream.”
You
know, don’t you?
W
ITTY
R
EPARTEE
Ichizo comes out of the hut, sees Takeshi in a barrel under some palm leaves taking
a bath and singing “Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo,” some koto tune, twanging through his nose—Ichizo
screams runs back inside reemerging with a Japanese Hotchkiss machine gun, a Model
92, begins setting it up with a lot of jujitsu grunting and eyepopping. About the
time he’s got the ammo belt poised, ready to riddle Takeshi in the tub,
TAKESHI: Wait a minute, wait a minute! What’s all this?
ICHIZO: Oh, it’s
you! I
—thought it was General MacArthur, in his—rowboat!
Interesting weapon, the Hotchkiss. Comes in many nationalities, and manages to fit
in ethnically wherever it goes. American Hotchkisses are the guns that raked through
the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee. On the lighter side, the racy 8 mm French Hotchkiss
when fired goes haw-haw-haw-haw, just as nasal and debonair as a movie star. As for
our cousin John Bull, a lot of British Hotchkiss heavies were either resold privately
after World War I, or blow-torched. These melted machine guns will show up now and
then in the strangest places. Pirate Prentice saw one in 1936, during his excursion
with Scorpia Mossmoon, at the Chelsea home of James Jello, that year’s king of Bohemian
clowns—but a minor king, from a branch prone to those loathsome inbred diseases, idiocy
in the family, sexual peculiarities surfacing into public view at most inappropriate
times (a bare penis dangling out of a dumpster one razor-clear and rainwashed morning,
in an industrial back-street about to be swarmed up by a crowd of angry workers in
buttontop baggy caps carrying spanners three feet long, Kelly crowbars, lengths of
chain, here’s bareass Crown Prince Porfirio with a giant halo of aluminum-shaving
curls on his head, his mouth made up with black grease, his soft buttocks squirming
against the cold refuse picking up steel splinters that sting deliciously, his eyes
sultry and black as his lips, but oh dear what’s this, oh how embarrassing here they
come around the corner he can smell the rabble from here, though they are not too
sure about Porfirio—the march pauses in some confusion as these most inept revolutionaries
fall to arguing whether the apparition is a diversionary nuisance planted here by
the Management, or whether he’s real Decadent Aristocracy to be held for real ransom
and if so how much . . . while up on the rooftops, out from the brick and corrugated
doorways begin to appear brown Government troops manning British Hotchkisses which
were
not
melted down, but bought up by machinegun jobbers and sold to a number of minor governments
around the world). It may have been in memory of Crown Prince Porfirio that day of
massacre that James Jello kept a melted Hotchkiss in his rooms—or it may’ve been only
another flight of grotesquerie on dear James’s part you know, he’s
so
unaware. . . .
H
EART-TO-
H
EART,
M
AN-TO-
M
AN
—Son, been wondering about this, ah, “screwing in” you kids are doing. This matter
of the, shooting electricity into head, ha-ha?
—
Waves
, Pop. Not just raw
electricity.
That’s fer drips!
—Yes, ah, waves. “Keying waves,” right? ha-hah. Uh, tell me, son, what’s it like?
You know
I’ve
been something of a doper all m’life, a-and—
—Oh Pop. Cripes. It isn’t like
dope
at all!
—Well we got off on some pretty good “vacations” we called them then, some pretty
“weird” areas they got us into ’s a matter of fact—
—But you always came back, didn’t you.
—What?
—I mean it was always understood that
this
would still be here when you got back, just the same, exactly the same, right?
—Well ha-ha guess that’s why we called ’em
vacations
, son! Cause you always do come back to old Realityland, don’t you.
—
You
always
did.
—Listen Tyrone, you don’t know how dangerous that stuff is. Suppose someday you just
plug in and go away and never come back? Eh?
—Ho, ho! Don’t I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams about? You’re such
an old fuddyduddy! A-and who sez it’s a dream, huh? M-maybe
it exists.
Maybe there
is
a Machine to take us away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes
out of the skull ’n’ into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls
it’s got stored there.
It
could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope never gave
you
immortality.
You
hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly
meat!
But
We
can live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld—
—Shit that’s what I get, havin’ a double Virgo fer a son. . . .
S
OME
C
HARACTERISTICS OF
I
MIPOLEX
G