Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Imipolex G is the first plastic that is actually
erectile.
Under suitable stimuli, the chains grow cross-links, which stiffen the molecule and
increase intermolecular attraction so that this Peculiar Polymer runs far outside
the known phase diagrams, from limp rubbery amorphous to amazing perfect tessellation,
hardness, brilliant transparency, high resistance to temperature, weather, vacuum,
shock of any kind (slowly gleaming in the Void. Silver and black. Curvewarped reflections
of stars flowing across, down the full length of, round and round in meridians exact
as the meridians of acupuncture. What are the stars but points in the body of God
where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? Shadows of the creature’s
bones and ducts—leaky, wounded, irradiated white—mingling in with its own.
It
is entangled with the bones and ducts, its own shape determined by how the Erection
of the Plastic shall proceed: where fast and where slow, where painful and where slithery-cool . . .
whether areas shall exchange characteristics of hardness and brilliance, whether some
areas should be allowed to flow over the surface so that the passage will be a caress,
where to orchestrate sudden discontinuities—blows, wrenchings—in among these more
caressive moments).
Evidently the stimulus would have had to be electronic. Alternatives for signaling
to
the plastic surface were limited:
(a) a thin matrix of wires, forming a rather close-set coordinate system over the
Imipolectic Surface, whereby erectile and other commands could be sent to an area
quite specific, say on the order of ½ cm
2
,
(b) a beam-scanning system—or several—analogous to the well-known video electron stream,
modulated with grids and deflection plates located as needed on the Surface (or even
below the outer layer of Imipolex, down at the interface with What lies just beneath:
with What has been inserted or What has actually
grown itself a skin of Imipolex G
, depending which heresy you embrace. We need not dwell here on the Primary Problem,
namely that everything below the plastic film does after all lie in the Region of
Uncertainty, except to emphasize to beginning students who may be prone to Schwärmerei,
that terms referring to the Subimipolexity such as “Core” and “Center of Internal
Energy” possess, outside the theoretical, no more reality than do terms such as “Supersonic
Region” or “Center of Gravity” in other areas of Science),
(c) alternatively, the projection,
onto
the Surface, of an electronic “image,” analogous to a motion picture. This would
require a minimum of three projectors, and perhaps more. Exactly how many is shrouded
in another order of uncertainty: the so-called Otyiyumbu Indeterminacy Relation (“Probable
functional derangement γ
R
resulting from physical modification ϕ
R
(x,y,z) is directly proportional to a higher power
p
of sub-imipolectic derangement γ
B
,
p
being not necessarily an integer and determined empirically”), in which subscript
R is for Rakete, and B for Blicero.
• • • • • • •
Meantime, Tchitcherine has found it necessary to abandon his smegma-gathering stake-out
on the Argentine anarchists. The heat, alias Nikolai Ripov of the Commissariat for
Intelligence Activities, is in town and closing in. The faithful Džabajev, in terror
or disgust, has gone off across the cranberry bogs on a long wine binge with two local
derelicts, and may never be back. Rumor sez he is cutting a swath these days across
the Zone in a stolen American Special Services getup, posing as Frank Sinatra. Comes
into town finds a tavern and starts crooning out on the sidewalk, pretty soon there’s
a crowd, sub-deb cuties each a $65 fine and worth every penny dropping in epileptiform
seizures into selfless heaps of cable-stitching, rayon pleats and Xmastree appliqué.
It works. It’s always good for free wine, an embarrassment of wine, rolling Fuder
and Fass in a rumbling country procession through the sandy streets, wherever the
Drunkards Three find themselves. Never occurs to anybody to ask what Frank Sinatra’s
doing flanked by this pair of wasted rumdums. Nobody doubts for a minute that it
is
Sinatra. Town hepcats usually take the other two for a comedy team.
While nobles are crying in their nights’ chains, the squires sing. The terrible politics
of the Grail can never touch them. Song is the magic cape.
Tchitcherine understands that he is finally alone now. Whatever is to find him will
find him alone.
He feels obliged to be on the move, though there’s noplace for him to go. Now, too
late, the memory of Wimpe, longago IG Farben V-Mann, finds him. Tags along for the
run. Tchitcherine was hoping he might find a dog. A dog would have been ideal, a perfect
honesty to calibrate his own against, day to day, till the end. A dog would have been
good to have along. But maybe the next best thing is an albatross with no curse attached:
an amiable memory.
Young Tchitcherine was the one who brought up political narcotics. Opiates of the
people.
Wimpe smiled back. An old, old smile to chill even the living fire in Earth’s core.
“Marxist dialectics? That’s
not
an opiate, eh?”
“It’s the antidote.”
“No.” It can go either way. The dope salesman may know everything that’s ever going
to happen to Tchitcherine, and decide it’s no use—or, out of the moment’s velleity,
lay it right out for the young fool.
“The basic problem,” he proposes, “has always been getting other people to die for
you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had
the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate
so much as a technique—it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about
death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it
worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular
version—yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your
act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if
History’s changes
are
inevitable, why not
not
die? Vaslav? If it’s going to happen anyway, what does it matter?”
“But you haven’t ever had the choice to make, have you.”
“If I ever did, you can be sure—”
“You don’t know. Not till you’re there, Wimpe. You can’t say.”
“That doesn’t sound very dialectical.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Then, right up till the point of decision,” Wimpe curious but careful, “a man could
still be perfectly pure . . .”
“He could be anything.
I
don’t care. But he’s only real
at
the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter.”
“Real to a Marxist.”
“No. Real to himself.”
Wimpe looks doubtful.
“I’ve been there. You haven’t.”
Shh, shh. A syringe, a number 26 point. Bloods stifling in the brownwood hotel suite.
To chase or worry this argument is to become word-enemies, and neither man really
wants to. Oneirine theophosphate is one way around the problem. (Tchitcherine: “You
mean
thio
phosphate, don’t you?” Thinks
indicating the presence of sulfur. . . .
Wimpe: “I mean
theo
phosphate, Vaslav,”
indicating the Presence of God.)
They shoot up: Wimpe eying the water-tap nervously, recalling Tchaikovsky, salmonella,
a fast medley of whistlable tunes from the
Pathétique.
But Tchitcherine has eyes only for the point, its German precision, its fine steel
grain. Soon he will come to know a circuit of aid stations and field hospitals, as
good for postwar nostalgia as a circuit of peacetime spas—army surgeons and dentists
will bond and hammer patent steel for life into his suffering flesh, and pick out
what has entered it by violence with an electromagnetic device bought between the
wars from Schumann of Düsseldorf, with a light bulb and adjustable reflector, 2-axis
locking handles and a complete set of weird-shaped Polschuhen, iron pieces to modify
the shape of the magnetic field . . . but there in Russia, that night with Wimpe,
was his first taste—his initiation into the bodyhood of steel . . . no way to separate
this from the theophosphate, to separate vessels of steel from the ungodly insane
rush. . . .
For 15 minutes the two of them run screaming all over the suite, staggering around
in circles, lined up with the rooms’ diagonals. There is in Laszlo Jamf’s celebrated
molecule a particular twist, the so-called “Pökler singularity,” occurring in a certain
crippled indole ring, which later Oneirinists, academician and working professional
alike, are generally agreed is responsible for the hallucinations which are unique
to this drug. Not only audiovisual, they touch all senses, equally. And they recur.
Certain themes, “mantic archetypes” (as Jollifox of the Cambridge School has named
them), will find certain individuals again and again, with a consistency which has
been well demonstrated in the laboratory (see Wobb and Whoaton, “Mantic Archetype
Distribution Among Middle-Class University Students,”
J. Oneir. Psy. Pharm.
, XXIII, pg. 406–453). Because analogies with the ghost-life exist, this recurrence
phenomenon is known, in the jargon, as “haunting.” Whereas other sorts of hallucinations
tend to flow by, related in deep ways that aren’t accessible to the casual dopefiend,
these Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say,
the average
Reader’s Digest
article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional—Jeaach calls them “the dullest
hallucinations known to psychopharmacology”—that they are only recognized as hauntings
through some radical though plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the
dead, journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out later but
arrive earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable. . . .
On recognizing that he is being haunted, the subject enters immediately into “phase
two,” which, though varying in intensity from subject to subject, is always disagreeable:
often sedation (0.6 mg atropine subcut.) will be necessary, even though Oneirine is
classified as a CNS depressant.
About the paranoia often noted under the drug, there is nothing remarkable. Like other
sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery
that
everything is connected
, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One, but
at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held
at the edge. . . .
T
CHITCHERINE’S
H
AUNTING
As to whether the man is or isn’t Nikolai Ripov: he does arrive the way Ripov is said
to: heavy and inescapable. He wants to talk, only to talk. But somehow, as they progress,
into the indoor corridor-confusions of words, again and again he will trick Tchitcherine
into uttering heresy, into damning himself.
“I’m here to help you see clearly. If you have doubts, we should air them, honestly,
man to man. No reprisals. Hell, don’t you think I’ve had doubts? Even
Stalin’s
had them. We all have.”
“It’s all right though. It isn’t anything I can’t handle.”
“But you’re
not
handling it, or they wouldn’t have sent me out here. Don’t you think they
know
when someone they care for is in trouble?”
Tchitcherine doesn’t want to ask. He strains against it with the muscles of his heart-cage.
The pain of cardiac neurosis goes throbbing down his left arm. But he asks, feeling
his breath shift a little, “Was I supposed to die?”
“When, Vaslav?”
“In the War.”
“Oh, Vaslav.”
“You wanted to hear what was troubling me.”
“But don’t you see how they’ll take that? Come, bring it all the way out. We lost
twenty million souls, Vaslav. It’s not an accusation you can make lightly. They’d
want documentation. Even your life might be in danger—”
“I’m not accusing anyone . . . please don’t . . . I only want to know if I am supposed
to die for them.”
“No one wants you to die.” Soothing. “Why do you think that?”
So it is coaxed out of him by the patient emissary, whining, desperate, too many words—paranoid
suspicions, unappeasable fears, damning himself, growing the capsule around his person
that will isolate him from the community forever. . . .
“Yet that’s the very heart of History,” the gentle voice talking across twilight,
neither man having risen to light a lamp. “The inmost heart. How could everything
you know, all you’ve seen and touched of it, be fed by a lie?”
“But life after death . . .”
“There is no life after death.”
Tchitcherine means he’s had to fight to believe in his mortality. As his body fought
to accept its steel. Fight down all his hopes, fight his way into that bitterest of
freedoms. Not till recently did he come to look for comfort in the dialectical ballet
of force, counterforce, collision, and new order—not till the War came and Death appeared
across the ring, Tchitcherine’s first glimpse after the years of training: taller,
more beautifully muscled, less waste motion than he’d ever expected—only in the ring,
feeling the terrible cold each blow brought with it, only then did he turn to a Theory
of History—of all pathetic cold comforts—to try and make sense of it.
“The Americans say, ‘There are no atheists in foxholes.’ You were never of the faith,
Vaslav. You had a deathbed conversion, out of fear.”
“Is that why you want me dead now?”
“Not dead. You’re not much use dead.” Two more olive-drab agents have come in, and
stand watching Tchitcherine. They have regular, unremarkable faces. This is, after
all, an Oneirine haunting. Mellow, ordinary. The only tipoff to its unreality is—
The radical-though-plausible-violation-of-reality—