Authors: Thomas Pynchon
It’s the map that spooks them all, the map Slothrop’s been keeping on his girls. The
stars fall in a Poisson distribution, just like the rocket strikes on Roger Mexico’s
map of the Robot Blitz.
But, well, it’s a bit more than the distribution. The two patterns also happen to
be identical. They match up square for square. The slides that Teddy Bloat’s been
taking of Slothrop’s map have been projected onto Roger’s, and the two images, girl-stars
and rocket-strike circles, demonstrated to coincide.
Helpfully, Slothrop has dated most of his stars. A star always comes
before
its corresponding rocket strike. The strike can come as quickly as two days, or as
slowly as ten. The mean lag is about 4½ days.
Suppose, Pointsman argues, that Jamf’s stimulus
x
was some loud noise, as it was in the Watson-Rayner experiment. Suppose that, in
Slothrop’s case, the hardon reflex wasn’t completely extinguished. In that case he
ought to be getting one on at any loud noise that’s preceded by the same kind of ominous
buildup he would’ve found in Jamf’s lab—as dogs to this day find in Pointsman’s own
lab. That points to the V-1: any doodle close enough to make him jump ought to be
giving him an erection: the sound of the motor razzing louder and louder, then the
cutoff and silence, suspense building up—then the explosion. Boing, a hardon. But
oh, no. Slothrop instead only gets erections when this sequence happens
in reverse.
Explosion first, then the sound of approach: the V-2.
But the stimulus, somehow,
must
be the rocket, some precursor wraith, some rocket’s double present for Slothrop in
the percentage of smiles on a bus, menstrual cycles being operated upon in some mysterious
way—what
does
make the little doxies do it for free? Are there fluctuations in the sexual market,
in pornography or prostitutes, perhaps tying in to prices on the Stock Exchange itself,
that we clean-living lot know nothing about? Does news from the front affect the itch
between their pretty thighs, does desire grow directly or inversely as the real chance
of sudden death—damn it, what cue, right in front of our eyes, that we haven’t the
subtlety of heart to see? . . .
But if it’s in the air, right here, right now, then the rockets follow from it, 100%
of the time. No exceptions. When we find it, we’ll have shown again the stone determinacy
of everything, of every soul. There will be precious little room for any hope at all.
You can see how important a discovery like that would be.
They walk down past the snow-drifted kennel runs, Pointsman in Glastonburys and fawn-colored
British warm, Mexico wearing a scarf Jessica’s lately knitted him whipping landward
a scarlet dragon’s tongue—this day the coldest so far of the winter, 39 degrees of
frost. Down to the cliffs, faces freezing, down to the deserted beach. Waves run up,
slide away to leave great crescents of ice fine as skin and dazzling in the weak sunlight.
The boots of the two men crunch through to sand or shingle. The very bottom of the
year. They can hear the guns in Flanders today, all the way across the Channel on
the wind. The Abbey’s ruin stands gray and crystal up on the cliff.
Last night, in the house at the edge of the stay-away town, Jessica, snuggling, afloat,
just before sleep was to take them, whispered, “Roger . . . what about the girls?”
That was all she said. But it brought Roger wide awake. And bone-tired as he was,
he lay staring for another hour, wondering about the girls.
Now, knowing he ought to let it go, “Pointsman, what if Edwin Treacle is right? That
it’s PK. What if Slothrop’s—not even consciously—
making
them fall where they do?”
“Well. You lot’d have something then, wouldn’t you.”
“But . . .
why
should he. If they are falling wherever he’s been—”
“Perhaps he hates women.”
“I’m serious.”
“Mexico. Are you actually worried?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I wondered if it might tie in, in any way, with your ultraparadoxical
phase. Perhaps . . . I want to know what you’re really looking for.”
Above them now throb a flight of B-17s, bound somewhere uncommon today, well out of
the usual corridors of flight. Behind these Fortresses the undersides of the cold
clouds are blue, and their smooth billows are veined in blue—elsewhere touched with
grayed-out pink or purple. . . . Wings and stabilizers are shadowed underneath in
dark gray. The shadows softly feather lighter up around curves of fuselage or nacelle.
Spinners emerge from hooded dark inside the cowlings, spinning props invisible, the
light of the sky catching all vulnerable surfaces a uniform bleak gray. The planes
drone along, stately, up in the zero sky, shedding frost as it builds, sowing the
sky behind in white ice-furrows, their own color matching certain degrees of cloud,
all the tiny windows and openings in soft blackness, the perspex nose shining back
forever warped and streaming cloud and sun. Inside it is black obsidian.
Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the “idea of the opposite.” He has scribbled
in The Book exclamation points and
how trues
all about the margins of Pavlov’s open letter to Janet concerning the
sentiments d’emprise,
and of Chapter LV, “An Attempt at a Physiological Interpretation of Obsessions and
of Paranoia”—he can’t help this bit of rudeness, although the agreement among the
seven owners was not to mark up The Book—it was too valuable for that sort of thing,
they’d had to put in a guinea apiece. It was sold him on the sly, in the dark, during
a Luftwaffe raid (most existing copies had been destroyed in their warehouse early
in the Battle of Britain). Pointsman never even saw the seller’s face, the man vanishing
into the hoarse auditory dawn of the all-clear, leaving the doctor and The Book, the
dumb sheaf already heating up, moistening in his tight hand . . . yes it might have
been a rare work of erotica, certainly that coarse hand-set look to the type . . .
the crudities in phrasing, as if Dr. Horsley Gantt’s odd translation were in cipher,
the plaintext listing shameful delights, criminal transports. . . . And how much of
the pretty victim straining against her bonds does Ned Pointsman see in each dog that
visits his test stands . . . and aren’t scalpel and probe as decorative, as fine extensions
as whip and cane?
Surely the volume preceding The Book—the first Forty-one Lectures—came to him at age
28 like a mandate from the submontane Venus he could not resist: to abandon Harley
Street for a journey more and more deviant, deliciously on, into a labyrinth of conditioned-reflex
work in which only now, thirteen years along the clew, he’s beginning to circle back,
trip across old evidence of having come that path before, here and there to confront
consequences of his younger, total embrace. . . . But she did warn him—did she not?
was he ever listening?—of the deferred payment, in its full amount. Venus and Ariadne!
She seemed worth any price, the labyrinth looking, in those days, too intricate for
them
—the twilit pimps who made the arrangement between a version of himself, a crypto-Pointsman,
and his fate . . . too varied, he thought then, ever to find him in. But he knows
now. Too far in, preferring not to face it just yet, he knows that they only wait,
stone and sure—these agents of the Syndicate she must also pay—wait in the central
chamber, as he draws closer. . . . They own everything: Ariadne, the Minotaur, even,
Pointsman fears, himself. He gets flashes of them these days, naked, athletes poised
and breathing about the chamber, terrible penises up mineral as their eyes, which
glisten with frost or flakes of mica, but not with lust, or for him. It’s only a job
they have. . . .
“Pierre Janet—sometimes the man talked like an Oriental mystic. He had no real grasp
of the opposites. ‘The act of injuring and the act of being injured are joined in
the behavior of the whole injury.’ Speaker and spoken-of, master and slave, virgin
and seducer, each pair most conveniently coupled and inseparable—The last refuge of
the incorrigibly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish. One avoids all
manner of unpleasant lab work that way, but what has one
said?
”
“I don’t want to get into a religious argument with you,” absence of sleep has Mexico
more cranky today than usual, “but I wonder if you people aren’t a bit too—well, strong,
on the virtues of analysis. I mean, once you’ve taken it all apart, fine, I’ll be
first to applaud your industry. But other than a lot of bits and pieces lying about,
what have
you
said?”
It isn’t the sort of argument Pointsman relishes either. But he glances sharply at
this young anarchist in his red scarf. “Pavlov believed that the ideal, the end we
all struggle toward in science, is the true mechanical explanation. He was realistic
enough not to expect it in his lifetime. Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope
was for a long chain of better and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay
in a pure physiological basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause,
and a clear train of linkages.”
“It’s not my forte, of course,” Mexico honestly wishing not to offend the man, but
really, “but there’s a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as
far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow,
a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when
we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other
angle.”
“No—not ‘strike off.’ Regress. You’re 30 years old, man. There are no ‘other angles.’
There is only forward—
into it
—or backward.”
Mexico watches the wind tugging at the skirts of Pointsman’s coat. A gull goes screaming
away sidewise along the frozen berm. The chalk cliffs rear up above, cold and serene
as death. Early barbarians of Europe who ventured close enough to this coast saw these
white barriers through the mist, and knew then where their dead had been taken to.
Pointsman has turned now, and . . . oh, God. He is smiling. There is something so
ancient in its assumption of brotherhood that—not now, but a few months from now,
with spring prevailing and the War in Europe ended—Roger will remember the smile—it
will haunt him—as the most evil look he has ever had from a human face.
They’ve paused in their walking. Roger stares back at the man. The Antimexico. “Ideas
of the opposite” themselves, but on what cortex, what winter hemisphere? What ruinous
mosaic, facing outward into the Waste . . . outward from the sheltering city . . .
readable only to those who journey outside . . . eyes in the distance . . . barbarians . . .
riders. . . .
“We both have Slothrop,” is what Pointsman has just said.
“Pointsman—what are you expecting out of this? Besides glory, I mean.”
“No more than Pavlov. A physiological basis for what seems very odd behavior. I don’t
care which of your P.R.S. categories it may fit into—oddly enough none of you’s even
suggested telepathy: perhaps he’s tuned in to someone over there, someone who knows
the German firing schedule ahead of time. Eh? And I don’t care if it’s some terrible
Freudian revenge against his mother for trying to castrate him or something. I am
not grandiose, Mexico. I am modest, methodical—”
“Humble.”
“I have set myself limitations in this. I have only the reversal of rocket sounds
to go on . . . his clinical history of sexual conditioning,
perhaps
to auditory stimuli, and what
appears
to be a reversal of cause-and-effect. I’m not as ready as you to junk cause-and-effect,
but if it does need modifying—so be it.”
“But what are you
after?
”
“You’ve seen his MMPI. His F Scale? Falsifications, distorted thought processes. . . .
The scores show it clearly: he’s psychopathically deviant, obsessive, a latent paranoiac—well,
Pavlov believed that obsessions and paranoid delusions were a result of certain—call
them cells, neurons, on the mosaic of the brain, being excited to the level where,
through reciprocal induction, all the area around becomes inhibited. One bright, burning
point, surrounded by darkness. Darkness it has, in a way, called up. Cut off, this
bright point, perhaps to the end of the patient’s life, from all other ideas, sensations,
self-criticisms that might temper its flame, restore it to normalcy. He called it
a ‘point of pathological inertia.’ We’re working right now with a dog . . . he’s been
through the ‘equivalent’ phase, where any stimulus, strong or weak, calls up exactly
the same number of saliva drops . . . and on through the ‘paradoxical’ phase—strong
stimuli getting weak responses and vice versa. Yesterday we got him to go ultraparadoxical.
Beyond. When we turn on the metronome that used to stand for food—that once made Dog
Vanya drool like a fountain—now he turns away. When we shut off the metronome, oh
then
he’ll turn to it, sniff, try to lick it, bite it—seek, in the silence, for the stimulus
that is not there. Pavlov thought that all the diseases of the mind could be explained,
eventually, by the ultraparadoxical phase, the pathologically inert points on the
cortex, the confusion of ideas of the opposite. He died at the very threshold of putting
these things on an experimental basis. But I live. I have the funding, and the time,
and the will. Slothrop is a strong imperturbable. It won’t be easy to send him into
any of the three phases. We may finally have to starve, terrorize, I don’t know . . .
it needn’t come to that. But I will find his spots of inertia, I will find what they
are if I have to open up his damned skull, and how they are isolated, and perhaps
solve the mystery of why the rockets are falling as they do—though I admit that was
more of a sop to get your support.”
“Why?” A bit uneasy, there, Mexico? “Why do you need me?”
“I don’t know. But I do.”
“
You’re
obsessed.”