Authors: Thomas Pynchon
All three men are smiling at him now.
There is no violation.
It’s a scream, but it comes out as a roar. He leaps at Ripov, nearly nails him with
his fist too, but the others, with faster reflexes than he counted on, have come up
either side to hold him. He can’t believe their strength. Through the nerves of hip
and ass he feels his Nagant being slid from its holster, and feels his own cock sliding
out of a German girl he can’t remember now, on the last sweetwine morning he saw her,
in the last warm bed of the last morning departure. . . .
“You’re a child, Vaslav. Only making believe that you understand ideas which are really
beyond you. We have to speak very simply for you.”
In Central Asia he was told of the functions of Moslem angels. One is to examine the
recently dead. After the last mourner has gone, angels come to the grave and interrogate
the dead one in his faith. . . .
There is another figure now, at the edge of the room. She is Tchitcherine’s age, and
in uniform. Her eyes don’t want to say anything to Tchitcherine. She only watches.
No music heard, no summer journey taken . . . no horse seen against the steppe in
the last daylight. . . .
He doesn’t recognize her. Not that it matters. Not at this level of things. But it’s
Galina, come back to the cities, out of the silences after all, in again to the chain-link
fields of the Word, shining, running secure and always close enough, always tangible. . . .
“Why were you hunting your black brother?” Ripov manages to make the question sound
courteous.
Oh. Nice of you to ask, Ripov. Why
was
I? “When it began . . . a long time ago—at first . . . I thought I was being punished.
Passed over. I blamed him.”
“Now?”
“I don’t know.”
“What made you think he was
your
target?”
“Who else’s would he be?”
“Vaslav. Will you never
rise above?
These are old barbarisms. Blood lines, personal revenge. You think this has all been
arranged for you, to ease your little, stupid lusts.”
All right. All right. “Yes. Probably. What of it?”
“
He isn’t your target.
Others want him.”
“So you’ve been letting me—”
“So far. Yes.”
Džabajev could have told you. That sodden Asiatic is first and last an enlisted man.
He
knew. Officers. Fucking officer mentality. You do all the work, then
they
come in, to wrap it up, to get the glory.
“You’re taking it away from me.”
“You can go home.”
Tchitcherine has been watching the other two. He sees now that they are in American
uniform, and probably haven’t understood a word. He holds out his empty hands, his
sunburned wrists, for a last application of steel. Ripov, in the act of turning to
leave, appears surprised. “Oh. No, no. You have thirty days’ survivor’s leave. You
have survived, Vaslav. You’re to report to TsAGI when you get back to Moscow, that’s
all. There’ll be another assignment. We’ll be taking German rocket personnel out to
the desert. To Central Asia. I imagine they’ll need an old Central Asia hand out there.”
Tchitcherine understands that in
his
dialectic, his own life’s unfolding, to return to Central Asia is, operationally,
to die.
They have gone. The woman’s iron face, at the very last, did not turn back. He is
alone in a gutted room, with the plastic family toothbrushes still in their holders
on the wall, melted, strung downward in tendrils of many colors, bristles pointing
to every black plane and corner and soot-blinded window.
• • • • • • •
The dearest nation of all is one that will survive no longer than you and I, a common
movement at the mercy of death and time: the ad hoc adventure.
—Resolutions of the Gross Suckling Conference
North? What searcher has ever been directed
north?
What you’re supposed to be looking for lies south—those dusky natives, right? For
danger and enterprise they send you west, for visions, east. But what’s north?
The escape route of the
Anubis.
The Kirghiz Light.
The Herero country of death.
Ensign Morituri, Carroll Eventyr, Thomas Gwenhidwy, and Roger Mexico are sitting at
a table on the redbrick terrace of Der Grob Säugling, an inn by the edge of a little
blue Holstein lake. The sun makes the water sparkle. The housetops are red, the steeples
are white. Everything is miniature, neat, gently pastoral, locked into the rise and
fall of seasons. Contrasting wood x s on closed doors. The brink of autumn. A cow
sez moo. The milkmaid farts at the milk pail, which echoes with a very slight clang,
and the geese honk or hiss. The four envoys drink watered Moselle and talk mandalas.
The Rocket was fired southward, westward, eastward. But not northward—not so far.
Fired south, at Antwerp, the bearing was about 173°. East, during testing at Peenemünde,
072°. Fired west, at London, about 260°. Working it out with the parallel rulers,
the missing (or, if you want, “resultant”) bearing comes out to something like 354°.
This would be the firing implied by all the others, a ghost-firing which, in the logic
of mandalas, either has occurred, most-secretly, or will occur.
So the conferees at the Gross Suckling Conference here, as it will come to be known,
sit around a map with their instruments, cigarettes and speculations. Sneer not. Here
is one of the great deductive moments in postwar intelligence. Mexico is holding out
for a weighting system to make vector lengths proportional to the actual number of
firings along each one. Thomas Gwenhidwy, ever sensitive to events in geographical
space, wants to take the 1944 Blizna firings (also eastward) into account, which would
pull the arrow northward from 354°—and even closer to true north if the firings at
London and Norwich from Walcheren and Staveren are also included.
Evidence and intuition—and maybe a residue of uncivilizable terror that lies inside
us, every one—point to 000°: true North. What better direction to fire the 00000?
Trouble is, what good’s a bearing, even a mythic-symmetric bearing, without knowing
where the Rocket was fired from to begin with? You have a razor-edge, 280 km long,
sweeping east/west across the Zone’s pocked face, endlessly sweeping, obsessive, dithering,
glittering, unbearable, never coming to rest. . . .
Well, Under The Sign Of The Gross Suckling. Swaying full-color picture of a loathsomely
fat drooling infant. In one puddinglike fist the Gross Suckling clutches a dripping
hamhock (sorry pigs, nothing personal), with the other he reaches out for a human
Mother’s Nipple that emerges out into the picture from the left-hand side, his gaze
arrested by the approaching tit, his mouth open—a gleeful look, teeth pointed and
itching, a glaze of FOODmunchmunchyesgobblemmm over his eyes. Der Grob Säugling, 23rd
card of the Zone’s trumps major. . . .
Roger likes to think of it as a snap of Jeremy as a child. Jeremy, who Knows All,
has forgiven Jessica her time with Roger. He’s had an outing or two himself, and can
understand, he’s of liberal mind, the War after all has taken down certain barriers,
Victorianisms you might say (a tale brought to you by the same jokers who invented
the famous Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat) . . . and what’s this, Roger, he’s trying
to
impress
you? his eyelids make high, amiable crescents as he leans forward (smaller chap than
Roger thought) clutching his glass, sucking on the most tasteless Pipe Roger has ever
seen, a reproduction in brier of Winston Churchill’s
head
for a bowl, no detail is spared, even a
cigar in its mouth
with a little hole drilled down it so that some of the smoke can actually seep out
the end . . . it is a servicemen’s pub in Cuxhaven here, the place used to be a marine
salvage yard, so the lonesome soldiers sit dreaming and drinking among all that nautical
junk, not at the same level as in one’s usual outdoor café, no, some are up in tilted
hatchways, or dangling in boatswain’s chairs, crow’s-nests, sitting over their bitter
among the chain, tackle, strakework, black iron fittings. It’s night. Lanterns have
been brought out to the tables. Soft little nocturnal waves hush on the shingle. Late
waterfowl cry out over the lake.
“But will it ever get
us
, Jeremy, you and me, that’s the quesshun. . . .” Mexico has been uttering these oracular—often,
as at the Club today for lunch, quite embarrassing—bits of his ever since he showed
up.
“Er, will
what
ever get me, old chap?” It’s been old chap all day.
“Haven’t—ch’ever felt something wanted to
gesh
you, Jeremy?”
“Get me.” He’s drunk. He’s insane. I obviously can’t let him near Jessica these math
chaps they’re like oboe players it affects the
brain
or something. . . .
Aha,
but
, once a month, Jeremy, even Jeremy, dreams: about a gambling debt . . . different
sorts of Collectors keep arriving . . . he cannot remember the debt, the opponent
he lost to, even the game. He senses a great organization behind these emissaries.
Its threats are always left open, left for Jeremy to complete . . . each time, terror
has come welling up through the gap, crystal terror. . . .
Good, good. The other sure-fire calibration test has already been sprung on Jeremy—at
a prearranged spot in a park, two unemployed Augustes leap out in whiteface and working-clothes,
and commence belting each other with gigantic (7 or 8 feet long) foam rubber penises,
cunningly detailed, all in natural color. These phancy phalli have proven to be a
good investment. Roger and Seaman Bodine (when he’s in town) have outdrawn the ENSA
shows. It is a fine source of spare change—multitudes will gather at the edges of
these north German villages to watch the two zanies whack away. Granaries, mostly
empty, poke up above the rooftops now and then, stretching a wood gallows-arm against
the afternoon sky. Soldiers, civilians, and children. There is a lot of laughter.
Seems people can be reminded of Titans and Fathers, and laugh. It isn’t as funny as
a pie in the face, but it’s at least as pure.
Yes, giant rubber cocks are here to stay as part of the arsenal. . . .
What Jessica said—hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of different outline,
harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of letters between them—was:
“We’re going to be married. We’re trying very hard to have a baby.”
All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity and Roger. “I don’t care.
Have his baby. I’ll love you both—just come with me Jess, please . . . I need you. . . .”
She flips a red lever on her intercom. Far away a buzzer goes off. “Security.” Her
voice is perfectly hard, the word still clap-echoing in the air as in through the
screen door of the Quonset office with a smell of tide flats come the coppers, looking
grim. Security. Her magic word, her spell against demons.
“Jess—” shit is he going to
cry?
he can feel it building like an orgasm—
Who saves him (or interferes with his orgasm)? Why, Jeremy himself. Old Beaver shows
up and waves off the heat, who go surly, fangflashing back to masturbating into
Crime Does Not Pay
Comics, gazing dreamy at guardroom pinups of J. Edgar Hoover or whatever it was they
were up to, and the romantic triangle are suddenly all to have
lunch
together at the
Club. Lunch
together? Is this Noel Coward or some shit? Jessica at the last minute is overcome
by some fictitious female syndrome which both men guess to be morning-sickness, Roger
figuring she’ll do the most spiteful thing she can think of, Jeremy seeing it as a
cute little private yoo-hoo for 2-hoo. So that leaves the fellas alone, to talk briskly
about Operation Backfire, which is the British program to assemble some A4s and fire
them out into the North Sea. What else are they going to talk about?
“Why?” Roger keeps asking, trying to piss Jeremy off. “Why do you want to put them
together and fire them?”
“We’ve captured them, haven’t we? What does one
do
with a rocket?”
“But why?”
“Why? Damn it, to
see
, obviously. Jessica tells me you’re—ah—a
math chap?
”
“Little sigma, times P of s-over-little-sigma, equals one over the square root of
two pi, times e to the minus s squared over two little-sigma squared.”
“Good Lord.” Laughing, hastily checking out the room.
“It is an old saying among my people.”
Jeremy knows how to handle
this.
Roger is invited to dinner in the evening, an intimate informal party at the home
of Stefan Utgarthaloki, an ex-member of management at the Krupp works here in Cuxhaven.
“You’re welcome to bring a guest, of course,” gnaws the eager Beaver, “there’re a
lot of snazzy NAAFIs about, it wouldn’t be too difficult for
you
to—”
“Informal means lounge suit, eh?” interrupts Roger. Too bad, he hasn’t got one. The
prospects of being nabbed tonight are good. A party that includes (a) an Operation
Backfire figure, (b) a Krupp executive, must necessarily then include (c) at least
one ear to the corporate grapevine that’s heard of the Urinating Incident in Clive
Mossmoon’s office. If Roger only knew what Beaver and his friends
really
have in mind!
He does take a guest: Seaman Bodine, who has caused to be brought him from the Panama
Canal Zone (where the lock workers wear them as a uniform, in amazing tropical-parrot
combinations of yellow, green, lavender, vermilion) a zoot suit of unbelievable proportions—the
pointed lapels have to be
reinforced with coat-hanger stays
because they extend so far outboard of the rest of the suit—underneath his purple-on-purple
satin shirt the natty tar is actually wearing a corset, squeezing his waist in to
a sylphlike 42 inches to allow for the drastic suppression of the jacket, which then
falls to Bodine’s knees
quintuple-vented
in yards of kilt-style pleats that run clear back up over his ass. The pants are
belted under his armpits and pegged down to something like ten inches, so he has to
use hidden zippers to get his feet through. The whole suit is blue, not suit-blue,
no—really BLUE:
paint
-blue. It is immediately noticed everywhere it goes. At gatherings it haunts the peripheral
vision, making decent small-talk impossible. It is a suit that forces you either to
reflect on matters as primary as its color, or feel superficial. A subversive garment,
all right.