Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Phone traffic drones into his wired ear. The voices are metal and drastically filtered.
They buzz like the voices of surgeons, heard as you’re going under ether. Though they
now only speak the ritual words, he can still tell them apart.
The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a smell he knows. It doesn’t
frighten him. It was in the room when he fell asleep so long ago, so deep in sweet
paralyzed childhood . . . it was there as he began to dream. Now it is time to wake,
into the breath of what was always real. Come, wake. All is well.
O
RPHEUS
P
UTS
D
OWN
H
ARP
LOS
ANGELES
(PNS)—Richard M. Zhlubb, night manager of the Orpheus Theatre on Melrose, has come
out against what he calls “irresponsible use of the harmonica.” Or, actually, “harbodica,”
since Manager Zhlubb suffers from a chronic adenoidal condition, which affects his
speech. Friends and detractors alike think of him as “the Adenoid.” Anyway, Zhlubb
states that his queues, especially for midnight showings, have fallen into a state
of near anarchy because of the musical instrument.
“It’s been going on ever since our Bengt Ekerot / Maria Casarès Film Festival,” complains
Zhlubb, who is fiftyish and jowled, with a permanent five-o’clock shadow (the worst
by far of all the Hourly Shadows), and a habit of throwing his arms up into an inverted
“peace sign,” which also happens to be semaphore code for the letter U, exposing in
the act uncounted yards of white French cuff.
“Here, Richard,” jeers a passerby, “I got your French cuff, right here,” meanwhile
exposing himself in the grossest possible way and manipulating his foreskin in a manner
your correspondent cannot set upon his page.
Manager Zhlubb winces slightly. “That’s one of the ringleaders, definitely,” he confides.
“I’ve had a lot of trouble with him. Him and that Steve Edelman.” He pronounces it
“Edelbid.” “I’b dot afraid to dabe dabes.”
The case he refers to is still pending. Steve Edelman, a Hollywood businessman, accused
last year of an 11569 (Attempted Mopery with a Subversive Instrument), is currently
in Atascadero under indefinite observation. It is alleged that Edelman, in an unauthorized
state of mind, attempted to play a chord progression on the Department of Justice
list, out in the street and in the presence of a whole movie-queue of witnesses.
“A-and now they’re all doing it. Well, not ‘all,’ let me just clarify that, of course
the actual lawbreakers are only a small but loud minority, what I meant to say was,
all those like Edelman. Certainly not all those good folks in the queue. A-ha-ha.
Here, let me show you something.”
He ushers you into the black Managerial Volkswagen, and before you know it, you’re
on the freeways. Near the interchange of the San Diego and the Santa Monica, Zhlubb
points to a stretch of pavement: “Here’s where I got my first glimpse of one. Driving
a VW, just like mine. Imagine. I couldn’t believe my eyes.” But it is difficult to
keep one’s whole attention centered on Manager Zhlubb. The Santa Monica Freeway is
traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man. It is not
white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously engineered as the Pasadena,
nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor. No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa
Monica is a freeway for freaks, and they are all out today, making it difficult for
you to follow the Manager’s entertaining story. You cannot repress a certain shudder
of distaste, almost a reflexive Consciousness of Kind, in their presence. They come
gibbering in at you from all sides, swarming in, rolling their eyes through the side
windows, playing harmonicas and even
kazoos
, in full disrespect for the Prohibitions.
“Relax,” the Manager’s eyes characteristically aglitter. “There’ll be a nice secure
home for them all, down in Orange County. Right next to Disneyland,” pausing then
exactly like a nightclub comic, alone in his tar circle, his chalk terror.
Laughter surrounds you. Full, faithful-audience laughter, coming from the four points
of the padded interior. You realize, with a vague sense of dismay, that this is some
kind of a stereo rig here, and a glance inside the glove compartment reveals an entire
library
of similar tapes:
CHEERING
(
AFFECTIONATE
),
CHEERING
(
AROUSED
),
HOSTILE
MOB
in an assortment of 22 languages,
YESES
,
NOES
,
NEGRO
SUPPORTERS
,
WOMEN
SUPPORTERS
,
ATHLETIC
—oh, come now—
FIRE
-
FIGHT
(
CONVENTIONAL
),
FIRE
-
FIGHT
(
NUCLEAR
),
FIRE
-
FIGHT
(
URBAN
),
CATHEDRAL
ACOUSTICS
. . . .
“We have to talk in
some
kind of code, naturally,” continues the Manager. “We always have. But none of the
codes is that hard to break. Opponents have accused us, for just that reason, of contempt
for the people. But really we do it all in the spirit of fair play. We’re not monsters.
We know we have to give them
some
chance. We can’t take hope away from them, can we?”
The Volkswagen is now over downtown L.A., where the stream of traffic edges aside
for a convoy of dark Lincolns, some Fords, even GMCs, but not a Pontiac in the lot.
Stuck on each windshield and rear window is a fluorescent orange strip that reads
FUNERAL
.
The Manager’s sniffling now. “He was one of the best. I couldn’t go myself, but I
did send a high-level assistant. Who’ll ever replace him, I wonder,” punching a sly
button under the dash. The laughter this time is sparse male
oh
-hoho’s with an edge of cigar smoke and aged bourbon. Sparse but loud. Phrases like
“Dick, you character!” and “Listen to
him
,” can also be made out.
“I have a fantasy about how I’ll die. I suppose you’re on
their
payroll, but that’s all right. Listen to this. It’s 3 a.m., on the Santa Monica Freeway,
a warm night. All my windows are open. I’m doing about 70, 75. The wind blows in,
and from the floor in back lifts a thin plastic bag, a common dry-cleaning bag: it
comes floating in the air, moving from behind, the mercury lights turning it white
as a ghost . . . it wraps around my head, so superfine and transparent I don’t know
it’s there really until too late. A plastic shroud, smothering me to my death. . . .”
Heading up the Hollywood Freeway, between a mysteriously-canvased trailer rig and
a liquid-hydrogen tanker sleek as a torpedo, we come upon a veritable caravan of harmonica
players. “At least it’s not those tambourines,” Zhlubb mutters. “There aren’t as many
tambourines as last year, thank God.”
Quilted-steel catering trucks crisscross in the afternoon. Their ripples shine like
a lake of potable water after hard desert passage. It’s a Collection Day, and the
garbage trucks are all heading north toward the Ventura Freeway, a catharsis of dumpsters,
all hues, shapes and batterings. Returning to the Center, with all the gathered fragments
of the Vessels. . . .
The sound of a siren takes you both unaware. Zhlubb looks up sharply into his mirror.
“You’re not holding, are you?”
But the sound is greater than police. It wraps the concrete and the smog, it fills
the basin and mountains further than any mortal could ever move . . . could move in
time. . . .
“I don’t think that’s a police siren.” Your guts in a spasm, you reach for the knob
of the AM radio.
“I
don’t think—”
T
HE
C
LEARING
“Räumen,” cries Captain Blicero. Peroxide and permanganate tanks have been serviced.
The gyros are run up. Observers crouch down in the slit trenches. Tools and fittings
are stashed rattling in the back of an idling lorry. The battery-loading crew and
the sergeant who screwed in the percussion pin climb in after, and the truck hauls
away down the fresh brown ruts of earth, into the trees. Blicero remains for a few
seconds at launch position, looking around to see that all is in order. Then he turns
away and walks, with deliberate speed, to the fire-control car.
“Steuerung klar?” he asks the boy at the steering panel.
“Ist klar.” In the lights from the panel, Max’s face is hard, stubborn gold.
“Treibwerk klar?”
“Ist klar,” from Moritz at the rocket motor panel. Into the phone dangling at his
neck, he tells the Operations Room, “Luftlage klar.”
“Schlüssel auf
SCHIESSEN
,” orders Blicero.
Moritz turns the main key to
FIRE
. “Schlüssel steht auf
SCHIESSEN
.”
Klar.
There ought to be big dramatic pauses here. Weissmann’s head ought to be teeming with
last images of creamy buttocks knotted together in fear (not one trickle of shit,
Liebchen?) the last curtain of gold lashes over young eyes pleading, gagged throat
trying to say too late what he should have said in the tent last night . . . deep
in the throat, the gullet, where Blicero’s own cock’s head has burst for the last
time (but what’s this just past the spasming cervix, past the Curve Into The Darkness
The Stink The . . . The White . . . The Corner . . . Waiting . . . Waiting For—).
But no, the ritual has its velvet grip on them all. So strong, so warm. . . .
“Durchschalten.” Blicero’s voice is calm and steady.
“Luftlage klar,” Max calls from the steering panel.
Moritz presses the button marked
VORSTUFE
. “Ist durchgeschaltet.”
A pause of 15 seconds while the oxygen tank comes up to pressure.
A light blazes up on Moritz’s panel.
Entlüftung. “Beluftung klar.”
The ignition lamp lights: Zundung. “Zundung klar.”
Then, “Vorstufe klar.” Vorstufe is the last position from which Moritz can still switch
backward. The flame grows at the base of the Rocket. Colors develop. There is a period
of four seconds here, four seconds of indeterminacy. The ritual even has a place for
that. The difference between a top-grade launch officer and one doomed to mediocrity
is in knowing exactly when, inside this chiming and fable-crowded passage, to order
Hauptstufe.
Blicero is a master. He learned quite early to fall into a trance, to wait for the
illumination, which always comes. It is nothing he’s ever spoken of aloud.
“Hauptstufe.”
“Hauptstufe ist gegeben.”
The panel is latched forever.
Two lights wink out. “Stecker 1 und 2 gefallen,” Moritz reports. The Stotz plugs lie
blasted on the ground, tossing in the splash of flame. On gravity feed, the flame
is bright yellow. Then the turbine begins to roar. The flame suddenly turns blue.
The sound of it grows to full cry. The Rocket stays a moment longer on the steel table,
then slowly, trembling, furiously muscular, it begins to rise. Four seconds later
it begins to pitch over. But the flame is too bright for anyone to see Gottfried inside,
except now as an erotic category, hallucinated out of that blue violence, for purposes
of self-arousal.
A
SCENT
This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion
that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim, in bondage to falling, rises on a
promise, a prophecy, of Escape. . . .
Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple-colored. The
knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple. Everything is where it
is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more present. So much has to be left behind
now, so quickly. Pressed down-and-aft in his elastic bonds, pressed painfully (his
pectorals ache, an inner thigh has frozen numb) till his forehead is bent to touch
one knee, where his hair rubs in a touch crying or submissive as a balcony empty in
the rain, Gottfried does not wish to cry out . . . he knows they can’t hear him, but
still he prefers not to . . . no radio back to them . . .
it was done as a favor, Blicero wanted to make it easier for me, he knew I’d try to
hold on—hold each voice, each hum or crackle—
He thinks of their love in illustrations for children, in last thin pages fluttering
closed, a line gently, passively unfinished, a pastel hesitancy: Blicero’s hair is
darker, shoulder-length and permanently waved, he is an adolescent squire or page
looking into an optical device and beckoning the child Gottfried with a motherly or
eager-to-educate look . . . now he is far away, seated, at the end of an olive room,
past shapes going out of focus, shapes Gottfried can’t identify as friend or enemy,
between him and—where did he—it’s already
gone
, no . . . they’re beginning to slide away now faster than he can hold, it’s like
falling to sleep—they begin to blur CATCH you can hold it steady enough to see a suspender-belt
straining down your thighs, white straps as slender as the legs of a fawn and the
points of the black . . . the black CATCH you’ve let a number of them go by, Gottfried,
important ones you didn’t want to miss . . . you know this is the
last time . . .
CATCH when did the roaring stop? Brennschluss, when was Brennschluss
it can’t be this soon . . .
but the burnt-out tail-opening is swinging across the sun and through the blonde hair
of the victim here’s a Brocken-specter, someone’s, something’s shadow projected from
out here in the bright sun and darkening sky into the regions of gold, of whitening,
of growing still as underwater as Gravity dips away briefly . . . what is this death
but a whitening, a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite, what is it but bleaches, detergents,
oxidizers, abrasives—Streckefuss he’s been today to the boy’s tormented muscles, but
more appropriately is he Blicker, Bleicheröde, Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying
the Caucasian pallor to an abolition of pigment, of melanin, of spectrum, of separateness
from shade to shade, it is
so white that
CATCH the dog was a red setter, the last dog’s head, the kind dog come to see him
off
can’t remember what red meant
, the pigeon he chased was slateblue, but they’re both white now beside the canal
that night the smell of trees
oh I didn’t want to lose that night
CATCH a wave between houses, across a street, both houses are ships, one’s going
off on a long, an important journey, and the waving is full of ease and affection
CATCH last word from Blicero: “The edge of evening . . . the long curve of people
all wishing on the first star. . . . Always remember those men and women along the
thousands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the moment in which
you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and the Shadow that has just
gathered you in its sweep . . .”