Authors: Thomas Pynchon
They’ve come, in their time, from as far away as the institute at Bristol to gape
at, to measure and systematically doubt the freaks of Psi Section. Here’s Ronald Cherrycoke,
the noted psychometrist, eyes lightly fluttering, hands a steady inch away framing
the brown-wrapped box in which are securely hidden certain early-War mementos, a dark-maroon
cravat, a broken Schaeffer fountain pen, a tarnished pince-nez of white gold, all
belonging to a Group Captain “Basher” St. Blaise, stationed far away north of London . . .
as this Cherrycoke, a normal-looking lad, perhaps a bit overweight, begins now to
recite in his lathe-humming Midland accents an intimate résumé of the Group Captain,
his anxieties about his falling hair, his enthusiasm over the Donald Duck cinema cartoons,
an incident during the Lübeck raid which only he and his wingman, now passed on, shared
and agreed not to report—nothing that violated security: confirmed later, in fact,
by St. Blaise himself smiling a bit openmouthed well the joke’s certainly on me and
now tell me how’d you do it? Indeed, how does Cherrycoke do it? How do any of them?
How does Margaret Quartertone produce voices on discs and wire recorders miles distant
without speaking or physically touching the equipment? And what speakers are now beginning
to assemble? Where are the five-digit groups coming from which the Reverend Dr. Paul
de la Nuit, chaplain and staff automatist, has been writing for weeks now, and which,
it is felt ominously, no one up in London quite knows how to decrypt? What do Edwin
Treacle’s recent dreams of flight mean, especially as time-correlated with Nora Dodson-Truck’s
dreams of falling? What gathers among them all, that each in his own freak way can
testify to but not in language, not even the lingua franca of the offices? Turbulences
in the aether, uncertainties out in the winds of karma. Those souls across the interface,
those we call the dead, are increasingly anxious and evasive. Even Carroll Eventyr’s
own control, the habitually cool and sarcastic Peter Sachsa, the one who found him
that day long ago on the Embankment and thereafter—whenever there are messages to
be passed across—even Sachsa’s become nervous. . . .
Lately, as if all tuned in to the same aethereal Xth Programme, new varieties of freak
have been showing up at “The White Visitation,” all hours of the day and night, silent,
staring, expecting to be taken care of, carrying machines of black metal and glass
gingerbread, off on waxy trances, hyperkinetically waiting only the right trigger-question
to start blithering 200 words a minute about their special, terrible endowments. An
assault. What are we to make of Gavin Trefoil, for whose gift there’s not even a name
yet? (Rollo Groast wants to call it
autochromatism
.) Gavin, the youngest here, only 17, can somehow metabolize at will one of his amino
acids, tyrosine. This will produce melanin, which is the brown-black pigment responsible
for human skin color. Gavin can also inhibit this metabolizing by—it appears—varying
the level of his blood phenylalanine. So he can change his color from most ghastly
albino up through a smooth spectrum to very deep, purplish, black. If he concentrates
he can keep this up, at any level, for weeks. Usually he is distracted, or forgets,
and gradually drifts back to his rest state, a pale freckled redhead’s complexion.
But you can imagine how useful he was to Gerhardt von Göll during the shooting of
the Schwarzkommando footage: he helped save literally hours of make-up and lighting
work, acting as a variable reflector. The best theory of
how
is Rollo’s, but it’s hopelessly vague—we do know that the dermal cells which produce
melanin—the melanocytes—were once, in each of us, at an early stage of embryonic growth,
part of the central nervous system. But as the embryo grows, as tissue goes on differentiating,
some of these nerve cells move away from what will be the CNS, and migrate out to
the skin, to become melanocytes. They keep their original tree-branch shapes, the
axon and dendrites of the typical nerve cell. But the dendrites are used now to carry
not electric signals but skin pigment. Rollo Groast believes in some link, so far
undiscovered—some surviving cell-memory that will, retrocolonial, still respond to
messages from the metropolitan brain. Messages that young Trefoil may not consciously
know of. “It is part,” Rollo writes home to the elder Dr. Groast in Lancashire, in
elaborate revenge for childhood tales of Jenny Greenteeth waiting out in the fens
to drown him, “part of an old and clandestine drama for which the human body serves
only as a set of very allusive, often cryptic programme-notes—it’s as if the body
we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent
stone theatre we cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us! the great Stage,
even darker than Mr Tyrone Guthrie’s accustomed murk. . . . Gilt and mirroring, red
velvet, tier on tier of box seats all in shadows too, as somewhere down in that deep
proscenium, deeper than geometries we know of, the voices utter secrets we are never
told. . . .”
—Everything that comes out from CNS we have to file here, you see. It gets to be a
damned nuisance after a while. Most of it’s utterly useless. But you never know when
they’ll want something. Middle of the night, or during the worst part of an ultraviolet
bombardment you know, it makes no difference to them back there.
—Do you ever get out much to . . . well, up to the Outer Level?
(A long pause in which the older operative stares quite openly, as several changes
flow across her features—amusement, pity, concern— until the younger one speaks again.)
I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be—
—(Abruptly) I’m supposed to tell you, eventually, as part of the briefing.
—Tell me what?
—Just as I was told once. We hand it on, one generation to the next. (There is no
piece of business plausible enough for her to find refuge in. We sense that this has
not yet become routine for her. Out of decency now, she tries to speak quietly, if
not gently.) We
all
go up to the Outer Level, young man. Some immediately, others not for a while. But
sooner or later everyone out here has to go Epidermal. No exceptions.
—Has to—
—I’m sorry.
—But isn’t it . . . I thought it was only a—well, a
level.
A place you’d visit. Isn’t it. . . ?
—Outlandish scenery, oh yes so did I—unusual formations, a peep into the Outer Radiance.
But it’s all of
us
, you see. Millions of
us
, changed to interface, to horn, and no feeling, and silence.
—Oh, God. (A pause in which he tries to take it in—then, in panic, pushes it back:)
No—how can you say that—you can’t feel the
memory?
the tug . . . we’re in exile, we do have a home! (Silence from the other.) Back there!
Not up at the interface. Back in the CNS!
—(Quietly) It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken
at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A
messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no
such message, no such home—only the millions of last moments . . . no more. Our history
is an aggregate of last moments.
She crosses the complex room dense with its supple hides, lemon-rubbed teak, rising
snarls of incense, bright optical hardware, faded Central Asian rugs in gold and scarlet,
hanging open-ribbed wrought-ironwork, a long, long downstage cross, eating an orange,
section by acid section, as she goes, the faille gown flowing beautifully, its elaborate
sleeves falling from very broadened shoulders till tightly gathered into long button-strung
cuffs all in some nameless earth tone—a hedge-green, a clay-brown, a touch of oxidation,
a breath of the autumnal—the light from the street lamps comes in through philodendron
stalks and fingered leaves arrested in a grasp at the last straining away of sunset,
falls a tranquil yellow across the cut-steel buckles at her insteps and streaks on
along the flanks and down the tall heels of her patent shoes, so polished as to seem
of no color at all past such mild citrus light where it touches them, and they refuse
it, as if it were a masochist’s kiss. Behind her steps the carpet relaxes ceilingward,
sole and heel-shapes disappearing visibly slow out of the wool pile. A single rocket
explosion comes thudding across the city, from far east of here, east by southeast.
The light along her shoes flows and checks like afternoon traffic. She pauses, reminded
of something: the military frock trembling, silk filling-yarns shivering by crowded
thousands as the chilly light slides over and off and touching again their unprotected
backs. The smells of burning musk and sandalwood, of leather and spilled whisky, thicken
in the room.
And he—passive as trance, allowing her beauty: to enter him or avoid him, whatever’s
to be her pleasure. How shall he be other than mild receiver, filler of silences?
All the radii of the room are hers, watery cellophane, crackling tangential as she
turns on her heel-axis, lancing as she begins to retrace her path. Can he have loved
her for nearly a decade? It’s incredible. This connoisseuse of “splendid weaknesses,”
run not by any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope.
She is frightening. Someone called her an erotic nihilist . . . each of them, Cherrycoke,
Paul de la Nuit, even, he would imagine, young Trefoil, even—so he’s heard—Margaret
Quartertone, each of them
used
for the ideology of the Zero . . . to make Nora’s great rejection that much more
awesome. For . . . if she does love him: if all her words, this decade of rooms and
conversations meant anything . . . if she loves him and still will deny him, on the
short end of 5-to-2 deny his gift, deny what’s distributed in his every cell . . .
then . . .
If she loves him. He’s too passive, he hasn’t the nerve to reach in, as Cherrycoke
has tried to. . . . Of course Cherrycoke is odd. He laughs too often. Not aimlessly
either, but
directed at
something he thinks everyone else can see too. All of us watching some wry newsreel,
the beam from the projector falling milky-white, thickening with smoke from briers
and cheroots, Abdullas and Woodbines . . . the lit profiles of military personnel
and young ladies are the edges of clouds: the manly crepe of an overseas cap knifing
forward into the darkened cinema, the shiny rounding of a silk leg tossed lazily toe-in
between two seats in the row ahead, the keen-shadowed turbans of velvet and feathering
eyelashes beneath. Among these nights’ faint and lusting couples, Ronald Cherrycoke’s
laughing and bearing his loneliness, brittle, easily crazed, oozing gum from the cracks,
a strange mac of most unstable plastic. . . . Of all her splendid weaklings, it is
he who undertakes the most perilous trips into her void, looking for a heart whose
rhythms
he
will call. It must astonish her, Nora-so-heartless, Cherrycoke kneeling, stirring
her silks, between his hands old history flowing in eddy-currents—scarves of lime,
aqua, lavender passing, pins, brooches, opalescent scorpions (her birth sign) inside
gold mountings in triskelion, shoe-buckles, broken nacre fans and theatre programs,
suspender-tabs, dark, lank, pre-austerity stockings . . . on his unaccustomed knees,
hands swimming, turning, seeking out her past in molecular traces so precarious among
the flow of objects, the progress through his hands, she delighted to issue her denials,
covering up his hits (close, often dead on) skillfully as if it were drawing-room
comedy. . . .
It’s a dangerous game Cherrycoke’s playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume
of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out . . . she
seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it,
always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect
her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She
has
turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there.
And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to
courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that’s vanishingly small: he has to admire
it, even if he can’t accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but
of final indifference. . . . Any more than she can accept the truth he knows about
himself. He does receive emanations, impressions . . . the cry inside the stone . . .
excremental kisses stitched unseen across the yoke of an old shirt . . . a betrayal,
an informer whose guilt will sicken one day to throat cancer, chiming like daylight
through the fourchettes and quirks of a tattered Italian glove . . . Basher St. Blaise’s
angel, miles beyond designating, rising over Lübeck that Palm Sunday with the poison-green
domes underneath its feet, an obsessive crossflow of red tiles rushing up and down
a thousand peaked roofs as the bombers banked and dived, the Baltic already lost in
a pall of incendiary smoke behind, here was the Angel: ice crystals swept hissing
away from the back edges of wings perilously deep, opening as they were moved into
new white abyss. . . . For half a minute radio silence broke apart. The traffic being:
St. Blaise: Freakshow Two,
did you see that
, over.
Wingman: This is Freakshow Two—affirmative.
St. Blaise: Good.
No one else on the mission seemed to’ve had radio communication. After the raid, St.
Blaise checked over the equipment of those who got back to base and found nothing
wrong: all the crystals on frequency, the power supplies rippleless as could be expected—but
others remembered how, for the few moments the visitation lasted, even static vanished
from the earphones. Some may have heard a high singing, like wind among masts, shrouds,
bedspring or dish antennas of winter fleets down in the dockyards . . . but only Basher
and his wingman saw it, droning across in front of the fiery leagues of face, the
eyes, which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red
as embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no
particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its
rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a strike
at earth for a strike at heaven. . . .