Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Himself, as the World sees him: the scholarly young Page of Pentacles, meditating
on his magic gold talisman. The Page may also be used to stand for a young girl. But
Pentacles describe people of very dark complexion, and so the card almost certainly
is Enzian as a young man. And Weissmann may at last, in this limited pasteboard way,
have become what he first loved.
The King of Cups, crowning his hopes, is the fair intellectual-king.
If you’re wondering where he’s gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential
advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely
there. Look high, not low. His future card, the card of what will come, is The World.
T
HE
L
AST
G
REEN AND
M
AGENTA
The Heath grows green and magenta in all directions, earth and heather, coming of
age—
No. It was spring.
T
HE
H
ORSE
In a field, beyond the clearing and the trees, the last horse is standing, tarnished
silver-gray, hardly more than an assembling of shadows. The heathen Germans who lived
here sacrificed horses once, in their old ceremonies. Later the horse’s role changed
from holy offering to servant of power. By then a great change was working on the
Heath, kneading, turning, stirring with fingers strong as wind.
Now that sacrifice has become a political act, an act of Caesar, the last horse cares
only about how the wind starts up this afternoon: rises at first, and tries to stick,
to catch, but fails . . . each time, the horse feels a similar rising in his heart,
at the edges of eye, ear, brain. . . . Finally, at the sure catching of the wind,
which is also a turning in the day, his head rises, and a shiver comes over him—possesses
him. His tail lashes at the clear elusive flesh of the wind. The sacrifice in the
grove is beginning.
I
SAAC
There is an Aggadic tradition from around the 4th century that Isaac, at the moment
Abraham was about to sacrifice him on Moriah, saw the antechambers of the Throne.
For the working mystic, having the vision and passing through the chambers one by
one, is terrible and complex. You must have not only the schooling in countersigns
and seals, not only the physical readiness through exercise and abstinence, but also
a hardon of resolution that will never go limp on you. The angels at the doorways
will try to con you, threaten you, play all manner of cruel practical jokes, to turn
you aside. The Qlippoth, shells of the dead, will use all your love for friends who
have passed across against you. You have chosen the active way, and there is no faltering
without finding the most mortal danger.
The other way is dark and female, passive, self-abandoning. Isaac under the blade.
The glittering edge widening to a hallway, down, up which the soul is borne by an
irresistible Aether. Gerhardt von Göll on his camera dolly, whooping with joy, barrelassing
down the long corridors at Nymphenburg. (Let us leave him here, in his transport,
in his innocence. . . . ) The numinous light grows ahead, almost blue among all this
gilt and glass. The gilders worked naked and had their heads shaved bald—to get a
static charge to hold the fluttering leaf they had first to run the brush through
their pubic hair: genital electricity would shine forever down these gold vistas.
But we have long left mad Ludwig and his Spanish dancer guttering, fading scarlet
across the marble, shining so treacherously like sweet water . . . already that lies
behind. The ascent to the Merkabah, despite his last feeble vestiges of manhood, last
gestures toward the possibility of magic, is irreversibly on route. . . .
P
RE-
L
AUNCH
A giant white fly: an erect penis buzzing in white lace, clotted with blood or sperm.
Deathlace is the boy’s bridal costume. His smooth feet, bound side by side, are in
white satin slippers with white bows. His red nipples are erect. The golden hairs
on his back, alloyed German gold, pale yellow to white, run symmetric about his spine,
run in arches fine and whirled as the arches of a fingerprint, as filings along magnetic
lines of force. Each freckle or mole is a dark, precisely-set anomaly in the field.
Sweat gathers at his nape. He is gagged with a white kid glove. Weissmann has engineered
all the symbolism today. The glove is the female equivalent of the Hand of Glory,
which second-story men use to light their way into your home: a candle in a dead man’s
hand, erect as all your tissue will grow at the first delicious tongue-flick of your
mistress Death. The glove is the cavity into which the Hand fits, as the 00000 is
the womb into which Gottfried returns.
Stuff him in. Not a Procrustean bed, but modified to take him. The two, boy and Rocket,
concurrently designed. Its steel hindquarters bent so beautifully . . . he fits well.
They are mated to each other, Schwarzgerät and next higher assembly. His bare limbs
in their metal bondage writhe among the fuel, oxidizer, live-steam lines, thrust frame,
compressed air battery, exhaust elbow, decomposer, tanks, vents, valves . . . and
one of these valves, one test-point, one pressure-switch is the right one, the true
clitoris, routed directly into the nervous system of the 00000. She should not be
a mystery to you, Gottfried. Find the zone of love, lick and kiss . . . you have time—there
are still a few minutes. The liquid oxygen runs freezing so close to your cheek, bones
of frost to burn you past feeling. Soon there will be the fires, too. The Oven we
fattened you for will glow. Here is the sergeant, bringing the Zündkreuz. The pyrotechnic
Cross to light you off. The men are at attention. Get ready, Liebchen.
H
ARDWARE
He’s been given a window of artificial sapphire, four inches across, grown by the
IG in 1942 as a mushroom-shaped boule, a touch of cobalt added to give it a greenish
tint—very heat-resistant, transparent to most visible frequencies—it warps the images
of sky and clouds outside, but pleasantly, like Ochsen-Augen in Grandmother’s day,
the days before window-glass. . . .
Part of the vaporized oxygen is routed through Gottfried’s Imipolex shroud. In one
of his ears, a tiny speaker has been surgically implanted. It shines like a pretty
earring. The data link runs through the radio-guidance system, and the words of Weissmann
are to be, for a while, multiplexed with the error-corrections sent out to the Rocket.
But there’s no return channel from Gottfried to the ground. The exact moment of his
death will never be known.
C
HASE
M
USIC
At long last, after a distinguished career of uttering, “My God, we are too late!”
always with the trace of a sneer, a pro-forma condescension—because of course he
never
arrives too late, there’s always a reprieve, a mistake by one of the Yellow Adversary’s
hired bunglers, at worst a vital clue to be found next to the body—now, finally, Sir
Denis Nayland Smith
will
arrive, my God, too late.
Superman will swoop boots-first into a deserted clearing, a launcher-erector sighing
oil through a slow seal-leak, gum evoked from the trees, bitter manna for this bitterest
of passages. The colors of his cape will wilt in the afternoon sun, curls on his head
begin to show their first threads of gray. Philip Marlowe will suffer a horrible migraine
and reach by reflex for the pint of rye in his suit pocket, and feel homesick for
the lacework balconies of the Bradbury Building.
Submariner and his multilingual gang will run into battery trouble. Plasticman will
lose his way among the Imipolex chains, and topologists all over the Zone will run
out and stop payments on his honorarium checks (“perfectly deformable,” indeed!).
The Lone Ranger will storm in at the head of a posse, rowels tearing blood from the
stallion’s white hide, to find his young friend, innocent Dan, swinging from a tree
limb by a broken neck. (Tonto, God willing, will put on the ghost shirt and find some
cold fire to hunker down by to sharpen his knife.)
“Too late” was never in their programming. They find instead a moment’s suspending
of their sanity—but then it’s over with, whew, and it’s back to the trail, back to
the
Daily Planet. Yes Jimmy, it must’ve been the day I ran into that singularity, those
few seconds of absolute mystery . . . you know Jimmy, time—time is a funny thing. . . .
There’ll be a thousand ways to forget. The heroes will go on, kicked upstairs to oversee
the development of bright new middle-line personnel, and they will watch their system
falling apart, watch those singularities begin to come more and more often, proclaiming
another dispensation out of the tissue of old-fashioned time, and they’ll call it
cancer, and just won’t know what things are coming to, or what’s the meaning of it
all, Jimmy. . . .
These days, he finds he actually misses the dogs. Who would have thought he’d ever
feel sentimental over a pack of slobbering curs? But here in the Sub-ministry all
is so odorless, touchless. The sensory deprivation, for a while, did stimulate his
curiosity. For a while he kept a faithful daily record of his physiological changes.
But this was mostly remembering about Pavlov on his own deathbed, recording himself
till the end. With Pointsman it’s only habit, retro-scientism: a last look back at
the door to Stockholm, closing behind him forever. The entries began to fall off,
and presently stopped. He signed reports, he supervised. He traveled to other parts
of England, later to other countries, to scout for fresh talent. In the faces of Mossmoon
and the others, at odd moments, he could detect a reflex he’d never allowed himself
to dream of: the tolerance of men in power for one who never Made His Move, or made
it wrong. Of course there are still moments of creative challenge—
Yes, well, he’s an ex-scientist now, one who’ll never get Into It far enough to start
talking about God, apple-cheeked lovable white-haired eccentric gabbing from the vantage
of his Laureate—no he’ll be left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile
armamentarium . . . his mineral corridors do not shine. They will stay the same neutral
nameless tone from here in to the central chamber, and the perfectly rehearsed scene
he is to play there, after all. . . .
C
OUNTDOWN
The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for
the Ufa film
Die Frau im Mond.
He put it into the launch scene to heighten the suspense. “It is another of my damned
‘touches,’” Fritz Lang said.
“At the Creation,” explains Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman, “God sent out a pulse
of energy into the void. It presently branched and sorted into ten distinct spheres
or aspects, corresponding to the numbers 1–10. These are known as the Sephiroth. To
return to God, the soul must negotiate each of the Sephiroth, from ten back to one.
Armed with magic and faith, Kabbalists have set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many
Kabbalist secrets have to do with making the trip successfully.
“Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also
the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to
a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called ‘Major Arcana’
in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals
the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.
“Some Sephiroth are active or masculine, others passive or feminine. But the Tree
itself is a unity, rooted exactly at the Bodenplatte. It is the axis of a particular
Earth, a new dispensation, brought into being by the Great Firing.”
“But but with a new axis, a newly spinning Earth,” it occurs to the visitor, “what
happens to astrology?”
“The signs change, idiot,” snaps Edelman, reaching for his family-size jar of Thorazine.
He has become such a habitual user of this tranquilizing drug that his complexion
has deepened to an alarming slate-purple. It makes him an oddity on the street here,
where everybody else walks around suntanned, and red-eyed from one irritant or another.
Edelman’s children, mischievous little devils, have lately taken to slipping wafer
capacitors from junked transistor radios into Pop’s Thorazine jar. To his inattentive
eye there was hardly any difference: so, for a while, Edelman thought he must be developing
a tolerance, and that the Abyss had crept intolerably close, only an accident away—a
siren in the street, a jet plane rumbling in a holding pattern—but luckily his wife
discovered the prank in time, and now, before he swallows, he is careful to scrutinize
each Thorazine for leads, mu’s, numbering.
“Here—” hefting a fat Xeroxed sheaf, “the Ephemeris. Based on the new rotation.”
“You mean someone’s actually found the Bodenplatte? The Pole?”
“The delta-t itself. It wasn’t made public, naturally. The ‘Kaisersbart Expedition’
found it.”
A pseudonym, evidently. Everyone knows the Kaiser has no beard.
S
TRUNG
I
NTO THE
A
POLLONIAN
D
REAM . . .
When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent
surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes
very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something
real.
Here in the tail section of the 00000, Gottfried has found this clear surface before
him in fact, literal: the Imipolex shroud. Flotsam from his childhood are rising through
his attention. He’s remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look
into curved reddening space. His eyes taken on and on, and further. . . . The plastic
surface flutters minutely: gray-white, mocking, an enemy of color.
The day outside is raw and the victim lightly dressed, but he feels warm in here.
His white stockings stretch nicely from his suspender-tabs. He has found a shallow
bend in a pipe where he can rest his cheek as he gazes into the shroud. He feels his
hair tickling his back, his bared shoulders. It’s a dim, whited room. A room for lying
in, bridal and open to the pallid spaces of the evening, waiting for whatever will
fall on him.