Authors: Thomas Pynchon
It’s only a matter of weeks, and everything will be over, Germany will have lost the
War. The routines go on. The boy cannot imagine anything past the last surrender.
If he and Blicero are separated, what will happen to the flow of days?
Will Blicero die
no please don’t let him die. . . .
(But he will.) “You’re going to survive me,” he whispers. Gottfried kneels at his
feet, wearing the dog collar. Both are in army clothes. It’s a long time since either
of them dressed as a woman. It is important tonight that they both be men. “Ah, you’re
so smug, you little bastard. . . .”
It is only another game isn’t it, another excuse for a whipping? Gottfried keeps silent.
When Blicero wants an answer, he says so. It happens often that he only wants to talk,
and that may go on for hours. No one has ever talked to Gottfried before, not like
this. His father uttered only commands, sentences, flat judgments. His mother was
emotional, a great flow of love, frustration and secret terror passed into him from
her, but they never really talked. This is so more-than-real . . . he feels he must
keep every word, that none must be lost. Blicero’s words have become precious to him.
He understands that Blicero wants to give, without expecting anything back, give away
what he loves. He believes that he exists for Blicero, even if the others have all
ceased to, that in the new kingdom they pass through now, he is the only other living
inhabitant. Was it this he expected to be taken by, taken into? Blicero’s seed, sputtering
into the poisoned manure of his bowels . . . it is waste, yes, futility . . . but . . .
as man and woman, coupled, are shaken to the teeth at their approaches to the gates
of life, hasn’t he also felt more, worshipfully more past these arrangements for penetration,
the style, garments of flaying without passion, sheer hosiery perishable as the skin
of a snake, custom manacles and chains to stand for the bondage he feels in his heart . . .
all become theatre as he approached the gates of that Other Kingdom, felt the white
gigantic muzzles somewhere inside, expressionless beasts frozen white, pushing him
away, the crust and mantle hum of mystery so beyond his poor hearing . . . there have
to be these too, lovers whose genitals
are
consecrated to shit, to endings, to the desperate nights in the streets when connection
proceeds out of all personal control, proceeds or fails, a gathering of fallen—as
many in acts of death as in acts of life—or a sentence to be alone for another night. . . .
Are they to be denied, passed over, all of them?
On his approaches to it, taken inward again and again, Gottfried can only try to keep
himself open, to loosen the sphincter of his soul. . . .
“And sometimes I dream of discovering the edge of the World. Finding that there
is
an end. My mountain gentian always knew. But it has cost me so much.
“America
was
the edge of the World. A message for Europe, continent-sized, inescapable. Europe
had found the site for its Kingdom of Death, that special Death the West had invented.
Savages had their waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the
other side. But Europe had gone deeper—into obsession, addiction, away from all the
savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible powers, a way of returning.
But Europe refused it. It wasn’t Europe’s Original Sin—the latest name for that is
Modern Analysis—but it happens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for.
“In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established its order of Analysis
and Death. What it could not use, it killed or altered. In time the death-colonies
grew strong enough to break away. But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate
death, the structure of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death
has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But now
we have
only
the structure left us, none of the great rainbow plumes, no fittings of gold, no
epic marches over alkali seas. The savages of other continents, corrupted but still
resisting in the name of life, have gone on despite everything . . . while Death and
Europe are separate as ever, their love still unconsummated. Death only rules here.
It has never, in love, become
one with. . . .
“Is the cycle over now, and a new one ready to begin? Will our new Edge, our new Deathkingdom,
be the Moon? I dream of a great glass sphere, hollow and very high and far away . . .
the colonists have learned to do without air, it’s vacuum inside and out . . . it’s
understood the men won’t ever return . . . they are all men. There are ways for getting
back, but so complicated, so at the mercy of language, that presence back on Earth
is only temporary, and never ‘real’ . . . passages out there are dangerous, chances
of falling so shining and deep. . . . Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere,
there is always the danger of falling.
Inside the colony, the handful of men have a frosty appearance, hardly solid, no
more alive than memories, nothing to touch . . . only their remote images, black and
white film-images, grained, broken year after hoarfrost year out in the white latitudes,
in empty colony, with only infrequent visits from the accidental, like me. . . .
“I wish I could recover it all. Those men had once been through a tragic day—ascent,
fire, failure, blood. The events of that day, so long ago, had put them into exile
forever . . . no, they weren’t really spacemen. Out here, they wanted to dive between
the worlds, to fall, turn, reach and swing on journeys curved through the shining,
through the winter nights of space—their dreams were of rendezvous, of cosmic trapeze
acts carried on in loneliness, in sterile grace, in certain knowledge that no one
would ever be watching, that loved ones had been lost forever. . . .
“The connections they hoped for would always miss by trillions of dark miles, by years
of frozen silence. But I wanted to bring you back the story. I remember that you used
to whisper me to sleep with stories of us one day living on the Moon . . . are you
beyond that by now? You’ve got much older. Can you feel in your body how strongly
I have infected you with my dying? I was meant to: when a certain time has come, I
think that we are all meant to. Fathers are carriers of the virus of Death, and sons
are the infected . . . and, so that the infection may be more certain, Death in its
ingenuity has contrived to make the father and son beautiful to each other as Life
has made male and female . . . oh Gottfried of course yes you are beautiful to me
but I’m dying . . . I want to get through it as honestly as I can, and your immortality
rips at my heart—can’t you see why I might want to destroy that, oh that
stupid clarity
in your eyes . . . when I see you in morning and evening ranks, so open, so ready
to take my sickness in and shelter it, shelter it inside your own little ignorant
love. . . .
“Your love.” He nods several times. But his eyes are too dangerously spaced beyond
the words, stunned irreversibly away from real Gottfried, away from the weak, the
failed smells of real breath, by barriers stern and clear as ice, and hopeless as
the one-way flow of European time. . . .
“I want to break out—to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken
in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered, inseparable,
into the radiance of what we would become. . . .”
Gottfried kneels, numb, waiting.
Blicero is looking at him.
Deeply: his face whiter than the boy has ever seen it. A raw spring wind beats the
canvas of their tent. It’s near sunset. In a moment Blicero must go out to take evening
reports. His hands rest near a mound of cigarette butts in a mess tray. His myopic
witch’s eyes, through the thick lenses, may be looking into Gottfried’s for the first
time. Gottfried cannot look away. He knows, somehow, incompletely, that he has a decision
to make . . . that Blicero expects something from him . . . but Blicero has always
made the decisions.
Why is he suddenly asking . . .
It all poises here. Passageways of routine, still cogent enough, still herding us
through time . . . the iron rockets waiting outside . . . the birth-scream of the
latest spring torn across rainy miles of Saxony, route-sides littered with last envelopes,
stripped gears, seized bearings, rotted socks and skivvies fragrant now with fungus
and mud. If there is still hope for Gottfried here in this wind-beat moment, then
there is hope elsewhere. The scene itself must be read as a card: what is to come.
Whatever has happened since to the figures in it (roughly drawn in soiled white, army
gray, spare as a sketch on a ruined wall) it is preserved, though it has no name,
and, like The Fool, no agreed assignment in the deck.
• • • • • • •
Here’s Enzian ramrodding his brand-new rocket through the night. When it rains, when
the mist is heavy, before the watch can quite get tarps over, the glossy skin of the
rocket is seen to’ve turned to dark slate. Perhaps, after all, just before the firing,
it will be painted black.
It is the 00001, the second in its series.
Russian loudspeakers across the Elbe have called to you. American rumors have come
jiving in to the fires at night and summoned, against the ground of your hopes, the
yellow American deserts, Red Indians, blue sky, green cactus. How did you feel about
the old Rocket? Not now that it’s giving you job security, but back then—do you remember
any more what it was like wheeling them out by hand, a dozen of you that morning,
a guard of honor in the simple encounter of your bodies with its inertia . . . all
your faces drowning in the same selfless look—the moirés of personality softening,
softening, each sweep of surf a little more out of focus till all has become subtle
grades of cloud—all hatred, all love, wiped away for the short distance you had to
push it over the winter berm, aging men in coatskirts flapping below your boottops,
breaths in white spouts breaking turbulent as the waves behind you. . . . Where will
you all go? What empires, what deserts? You caressed its body, brute, freezing through
your gloves, here together without shame or reticence you twelve struggled, in love,
on this Baltic shore—not Peenemünde perhaps, not official Peenemünde . . . but once,
years ago . . . boys in white shirts and dark vests and caps . . . on some beach,
a children’s resort, when we were younger . . . at Test Stand VII the image, at last,
you couldn’t leave—the way the wind smelled salt and dying, the sound of winter surf,
the premonition of rain you could feel at the back of your neck, stirring in the clipped
hairs. . . . At Test Stand VII, the holy place.
But young men have all grown older, and there’s little color in the scene . . . they
are pushing into the sun, the glare strikes them squinting and grinning, bright here
as the morning shift at Siemens with the centaurs struggling high on the wall, the
clock without numerals, bicycles squeaking, lunchpails and lunchbags and the lowered
faces of the trudging dutiful streams of men and women into the dark openings . . .
it resembles a Daguerreotype taken of the early Raketen-Stadt by a forgotten photographer
in 1856: this is the picture, in fact, that killed him—he died a week later from mercury
poisoning after inhaling fumes of the heated metal in his studio . . . well, he was
a habitué of mercury fumes in moderate doses, he felt it did his brain some good,
and that may account for pictures like “Der Raketen-Stadt”: it shows, from a height
that is topographically impossible in Germany, the ceremonial City, fourfold as expected,
an eerie precision to all lines and shadings architectural and human, built in mandalic
form like a Herero village, overhead a magnificent sky, marble carried to a wildness
of white billow and candescence . . . there seems to be building, or demolition, under
way in various parts of the City, for nothing here remains the same, we can see the
sweat in individual drops on the workers’ dark necks as they struggle down in the
bonedamp cellars . . . a bag of cement has broken, and its separate motes hang in
the light . . . the City will always be changing, new tire-treads in the dust, new
cigarette wrappers in the garbage . . . engineering changes to the Rocket create new
routes of supply, new living arrangements, reflected in traffic densities as viewed
from this unusual height—there are indeed tables of Functions to get from such City-changes
to Rocket-modifications: no more than an extension, really, of the techniques by which
Constance Babington-Smith and her colleagues at R. A. F. Medmenham discovered the
Rocket back in 1943 in recco photographs of Peenemünde.
But remember if you loved it. If you did, how you loved it. And how much—after all
you’re used to asking “how much,” used to measuring, to comparing measurements, putting
them into equations to find out how much more, how much of, how much when . . . and
here in your common drive to the sea feel as much as you wish of that dark double-minded
love which is also shame, bravado, engineers’ geopolitics—“spheres of influence” modified
to toruses of Rocket range that are parabolic in section . . .
. . . not, as we might imagine, bounded below by the line of the Earth it “rises from”
and the Earth it “strikes” No But Then You Never Really Thought It Was Did You Of
Course It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth
it’s only the
peak
that we are allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out of the other silent
world, violently (a jet airplane crashing into faster-than-sound, some years later
a spaceship crashing into faster-than-light) Remember The Password In The Zone This
Week Is FASTER—THAN, THE-SPEEDOFLIGHT Speeding Up Your Voice Exponentially—Linear
Exceptions Made Only In Case of Upper Respiratory Complaints, at each “end,” understand,
a very large transfer of energy: breaking upward into this world, a controlled burning—breaking
downward again, an uncontrolled explosion . . . this lack of symmetry leads to speculating
that a presence, analogous to the Aether, flows through time, as the Aether flows
through space. The assumption of a Vacuum in time tended to cut us off one from another.
But an Aether sea to bear us world-to-world might bring us back a continuity, show
us a kinder universe, more easygoing. . . .