Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Meantime, the most gigantic lorry Roger has ever seen in his
life
has manoeuvred steel-shuddering nearby, and now not only the driver, but also several—well,
what appear to be horrid . . .
midgets
, in strange operetta uniforms actually, some sort of Central European government-in-exile,
all of them crammed somehow into the high-set cab, all are staring down, scuffling
like piglets on a sow for position, eyes popping, swarthy, mouths leaking spit, to
take in the spectacle of his Jessica Swanlake scandalously bare-breasted and himself
desperately looking to slow down and drop behind the lorry—except that now, behind
Roger, pressing him on, in fact, at a speed identical with the lorry’s, has appeared,
oh shit it
is
, a military police car. He can’t slow down, and if he speeds up, they’ll
really
get suspicious. . . .
“Uh, Jessie, please get dressed, um, would you love?” Making a show of looking for
his comb which is, as usual, lost, suspect is known as a notorious ctenophile . . .
The driver of the huge, loud lorry now tries to get Roger’s attention, the other midgets
crowding at the windows calling, “Hey! Hey!” and emitting oily, guttural laughs. Their
leader speaks English with some liquid, unspeakably nasty European accent. Lot of
winking and nudging up there now, too: “Meester! Ay, zhu! Wet a meeneh’, eh?” More
laughter. Roger in the rearview mirror sees English cop-faces pink with rectitude,
red insignia leaning, bobbing, consulting, turning sharply now and then to stare ahead
at the couple in the Jaguar who’re acting so—“What
are
they
doing
, Prigsbury, can you make it out?”
“Appears to be a man and a woman, sir.”
“Ass.” And it’s out with the black binoculars.
Through rain . . . then through dreaming glass, green with the evening. And herself
in a chair, old-fashioned bonneted, looking west over the deck of Earth, inferno red
at its edges, and further in the brown and gold clouds. . . .
Then, suddenly, night: The empty rocking chair lit staring chalk blue by—is it the
moon, or some other light from the sky? just the hard chair, empty now, in the very
clear night, and this cold light coming down. . . .
The images go, flowering, in and out, some lovely, some just awful . . . but she’s
snuggled in here with her lamb, her Roger, and how she loves the line of his neck
all at once so—why there it is right
there
, the back of his bumpy head like a boy of ten’s. She kisses him up and down the sour
salt reach of skin that’s taken her so, taken her nightlit along this high tendoning,
kisses him as if kisses were flowing breath itself, and never ending.
One morning—he had not seen her for about a fortnight—he woke in his hermit’s cell
at “The White Visitation” with a hardon, scratchy eyelids and a long pale brown hair
tangled in his mouth. It wasn’t one of his own hairs. It wasn’t anybody’s he could
think of but Jessica’s. But it couldn’t be—he hadn’t seen her. He sniffled a couple
of times, then sneezed. Morning developed out the window. His right canine ached.
He unreeled the long hair, beaded with saliva, tooth-tartar, mouth-breather’s morning
fur, and stared at it. How’d it get here? Eerie, dearie. A bit of the je ne sais quoi
de sinistre, all right. He had to piss. Shuffling to the lavatory, his graying government
flannel tucked limply inside the cord of his pajamas, it came to him: what if it’s
some mauve turn-of-the-century tale of ghostly revenge and this hair here’s some First
Step . . . Oh, paranoia? You should’ve seen him going through all the combinations
as he moved around doing lavatory things among the stumbling, farting, razor-scraping,
hacking, sneezing and snot-crusted inmates of Psi Section. Only later in this did
he even begin to think of Jessica—of her safety. Thoughtful Roger. What if, if she’d
died in the night, an accident at the magazines . . . with this hair the only good-by
her ghostly love had been able to push back through to this side, to the only one
who’d ever mattered. . . . Some spider-statistician: his eyes had actually filled
with tears before the Next Idea—
oh.
O
boy. Turn off that faucet, Dorset, and get hep to
this.
He stood, half-stooped, over the washbasin, paralyzed, putting his worry for Jessica
on Hold for a bit, wanting very much to look back over his shoulder, even into the,
the old mirror, you know, see what they’re up to, but too frozen to risk even that . . .
now
. . . oh yes a most superb possibility has found seedbed in his brain, and here it
is. What if they are all, all these Psi Section freaks here, ganged up on him in secret?
O.K.? Yes: suppose they
can
see into your mind! a-and how about—what if it’s
hypnotism?
Eh? Jesus: then a whole number of
other
occult things such as: astral projection, brain control (nothing occult about
that
), secret curses for impotence, boils, madness, yaaahhh—
potions!
(as he straightens at last and back in his mind’s eyes to his office now glances,
very
gingerly, at the coffee mess, oh
God
. . .), psychic-unity-with-the-Controlling-Agency such that Roger would be he and
he Roger, yes yes a number of these notions rambling through his mind here, none of
them really pleasant, either—especially inside this staff latrine, with Gavin Trefoil’s
face this morning colored bright magenta, a clover blossom flashing in the wind, Ronald
Cherrycoke hawking fine-marbled amber phlegm into the basin—what’s all this, who
are all these people. . . .
Freaks!
Freeeeaks!
He’s surrounded! they’ve been out there night and day all the war long tapping his
brain, telepaths, witches, Satanic operators of all descriptions tuning in on
everything
—even when he and Jessica are in bed
fucking
—
Try to hold it down old man, panic if you must but later, not here. . . . Faint washroom
light bulbs deepen the thousands of old clustered water and soap spots on the mirrors
to an interfeathering of clouds, of skin and smoke as he swings his head past, lemon
and beige, oilsmoke black and twilight brown in here, very loosely crumbled, that’s
the texture. . . .
Lovely morning, World War Two. All he can keep in front of his mind are the words
I want a transfer
, kind of humming tunelessly at the mirror, yes sir got to put in a chit right away.
I’ll volunteer for duty in Germany’s what I’ll do. Dum de dum, de dum. Right, there
was an ad only Wednesday in the classified section of
Nazis in the News
, sandwiched between a Merseyside Labour branch that was looking for a publicist,
and a London advertising agency with positions open immediately on demob, they said.
This ad in the middle was placed by some arm of the G-5-to-be, trying to round up
a few “re-education” experts. Vital, vital stuff. Teach the German Beast about the
Magna Carta, sportsmanship, that sort of thing, eh? Out inside the works of some neurotic
Bavarian cuckoo clock of a village, were-elves streaking in out of the forests at
night to leave subversive handbills at door and window—“Anything!” Roger groping back
to his narrow quarters, “anything at all’s better than this. . . .”
That’s how bad it was. He knew he’d feel more at home in mad Germany with the Enemy
than here in Psi Section. The time of year makes it even worse. Christmas. Bwweeeaaaagghh,
clutching to his stomach. Jessica was all that made it human or tolerable. Jessica . . .
He was taken over then, for half a minute, shivering and yawning in his long underwear,
soft, nearly invisible in the December-dawn enclosure, among so many sharp edges of
books, sheafs and flimsies, charts and maps (and the chief one, red pockmarks on the
pure white skin of lady London, watching over all . . .
wait . . .
disease on skin . . .
does
she carry the fatal infection inside herself? are the sites predestined, and does
the flight of the rocket actually follow from the fated eruption
latent in the city . . .
but he can’t hold it, no more than he understands Pointsman’s obsession with the reversal
of sound stimuli and please, please can’t we just drop it for a bit . . .), visited,
not knowing till it passed how clearly he was seeing the honest half of his life that
Jessica was now, how fanatically his mother the War must disapprove of her beauty,
her cheeky indifference to death-institutions he’d not so long ago believed in—her
unflappable hope (though she hated to make plans), her exile from childhood (though
she refused ever to hold on to memories). . . .
His life had been tied to the past. He’d seen himself a point on a moving wavefront,
propagating through sterile history—a known past, a projectable future. But Jessica
was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable . . .
new life. Past and future stopped at the beach: that was how he’d set it out. But
he wanted to believe it too, the same way he loved her, past all words—believe that
no matter how bad the time, nothing was fixed, everything could be changed and she
could always deny the dark sea at his back, love it away. And (selfishly) that from
a somber youth, squarely founded on Death—along for Death’s ride—he might, with her,
find his way to life and to joy. He’d never told her, he avoided telling himself,
but that was the measure of his faith, as this seventh Christmas of the War came wheeling
in another charge at his skinny, shivering flank. . . .
She trips fussing about the dormitory, bothering other girls for puffs off of stale
Woodbines, nylon-repair kits, sparrow-bright war-wisecracks passing for sympathy.
Tonight she’ll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except
that, really, she doesn’t. Does she? She can’t remember ever being so confused. When
she’s with Roger it’s all love, but at any distance—any at
all
, Jack—she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the
wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough
not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall away melting to the coverlet coming there’s
only room for
Roger, Roger, oh love
to the end of breath. But out of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness,
run deeper than the War, the winter: he hates England so, hates “the System,” gripes
endlessly, says he’ll emigrate when the War’s over, stays inside his paper cynic’s
cave hating himself . . . and does she
want
to bring him out, really? Isn’t it safer with Jeremy? She tries not to allow this
question in too often, but it’s there. Three years with Jeremy. They might as well
be married. Three years ought to count for something. Daily, small stitches and easings.
She’s worn old Beaver’s bathrobes, brewed his tea and coffee, sought his eye across
lorry-parks, day rooms and rainy mud fields when all the day’s mean, dismal losses
could be rescued in the one look—familiar, full of trust, in a season when the word
is invoked for quaintness or a minor laugh. And to rip it all out? three years? for
this erratic, self-centered—
boy
, really. Weepers, he’s supposed to be past thirty, he’s years older than she. He
ought to’ve learned
something
, surely? A man of experience?
The worst of it’s that she has no one to talk to. The politics of this mixed battery,
the professional incest, the unwholesome obsessions with who said what to whom in
the spring of
1942
for God’s sake, outside of Grafty Green, Kent, or someplace, and who ought to have
answered what but didn’t but told someone else instead thus provoking hatreds that
have thrived wonderfully down to the present day—six years of slander, ambition and
hysteria make confiding anything to anyone around here an act of pure masochism.
“Girl in distress, Jess?” Maggie Dunkirk on the way by, smoothing her gauntlets. On
the Tannoy a BBC swing band is blaring hotly syncopated Christmas music.
“Got a fag, Mag?” pretty automatic by now, you guess, Jess?
Well— “Thought it looked somewhat like a bloody Garbo film around here, not at all
the usual nicotine starvation, sorry wrong again, ta-ta. . . .”
Oh be on your way. “Thinking about me Xmas shopping.”
“What’re you getting the Beaver then.”
Concentrating on gartering her nylons, the older pair, up-in-front-down-in-back mnemonically
stirring in wafts among her fingers, laundry-white puckered elastic being stretched
fine and tangent now to the gentle front curve of her thigh, suspender-clips glittering
silver under or behind her lacquered red fingernails, passing like distant fountains
behind red topiary trees, Jessica replies, “Oh. Mm. A Pipe, I suppose. . . .”
Near her battery one night, driving Somewhere in Kent, Roger and Jessica came upon
a church, a hummock in the dark upland, lamp-lit, growing out of the earth. It was
Sunday evening, and shortly before vespers. Men in greatcoats, in oilskins, in dark
berets they slipped off at the entrance, American fliers in leather lined with sheep’s
wool, a few women in clinking boots and wide-shouldered swagger coats, but no children,
not a child in sight, just grownups, trudging in from their bomber fields, balloon-bivouacs,
pillboxes over the beach, through the Norman doorway shaggy with wintering vines.
Jessica said, “Oh, I remember . . .” but didn’t go on. She was remembering other Advents,
and hedges snowy as sheep from her window, and the Star ready to be pasted up on the
sky again.
Roger pulled over, and they watched the scuffed and dun military going in to evensong.
The wind smelled of fresh snow.
“We ought to be home,” she said, after a bit, “it’s late.”
“We could just pop in here for a moment.”
Well,
that
surprised her, but def, after weeks of his snide comments? His unbeliever’s annoyance
with the others in Psi Section he thought were out to drive him dotty as they were,
and his Scroogery growing as shopping days till Xmas dwindled—“You’re not supposed
to be the sort,” she told him. But she did want to go in, nostalgia was heavy in tonight’s
snow-sky, her own voice ready to betray her and run to join the waits whose carols
we’re so apt to hear now in the distances, these days of Advent dropping one by one,
voices piping across frozen downs where the sown mines crowd thick as plums in a pudding . . .
often above sounds of melting snow, winds that must blow not through Christmas air
but through the substance of time would bring her those child-voices, singing for
sixpences, and if her heart wasn’t ready to take on quite all the stresses of her
mortality and theirs, at least there was the fear that she was beginning to lose them—that
one winter she would go running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as far
as the trees but in vain, their voices fading. . . .