Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Ghosts of fishermen, glassworkers, fur traders, renegade preachers, hilltop patriarchs
and valley politicians go avalanching back from Slothrop here, back to 1630 when Governor
Winthrop came over to America on the
Arbella
, flagship of a great Puritan flotilla that year, on which the first American Slothrop
had been a mess cook or something—there go that
Arbella
and its whole fleet, sailing backward in formation, the wind sucking them east again,
the creatures leaning from the margins of the unknown
sucking in
their cheeks, growing crosseyed with the effort, in to black deep hollows at the
mercy of teeth no longer the milky molars of cherubs, as the old ships zoom out of
Boston Harbor, back across an Atlantic whose currents and swells go flowing and heaving
in reverse . . . a redemption of every mess cook who ever slipped and fell when the
deck made an unexpected move, the night’s stew collecting itself up out of the planks
and off the indignant shoes of the more elect, slithering in a fountain back into
the pewter kettle as the servant himself staggers upright again and the vomit he slipped
on goes gushing back into the mouth that spilled it . . . Presto change-o! Tyrone
Slothrop’s English again! But it doesn’t seem to be redemption exactly that
this
They have in mind. . . .
He’s on a broad cobbled esplanade, lined with palms shifting now to coarse-grained
black as clouds begin to come over the sun. Tantivy isn’t out on the beach, either—nor
are any of the girls. Slothrop sits on a low wall, feet swinging, watching the front,
slate, muddy purple, advancing from the sea in sheets, in drifts. Around him the air
is cooling. He shivers. What are They doing?
He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to
splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom
of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn’t about to look.
Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day’s end. He just
runs. Rain grows in wet crescendo. His footfalls send up fine flowers of water, each
hanging a second behind his flight. It is flight. He comes in speckled, pied with
rain, begins a frantic search through the great inert Casino, starting again with
the same smoky, hooch-fumed bar, proceeding through the little theatre, where tonight
will play an abbreviated version of
L’Inutil Precauzione
(that imaginary opera with which Rosina seeks to delude her guardian in
The Barber of Seville
), into its green room where girls, a silkenness of girls, but not the three Slothrop
wants most to see, tease hair, arrange garters, glue on eyelashes, smile at Slothrop.
No one has seen Ghislaine, Françoise, Yvonne. From another room the orchestra rehearses
a lively Rossini tarantella. The reeds are all something like a half tone flat. At
once Slothrop understands that he is surrounded by women who have lived a good fraction
of their lives at war and under occupation, and for whom people have been dropping
out of sight every day . . . yes, in one or two pairs of eyes he finds an old and
European pity, a look he will get to know, well before he loses his innocence and
becomes one of them. . . .
So he drifts, through the bright and milling gaming rooms, the dining hall and its
smaller private satellites, busting up tête-à-têtes, colliding with waiters, finding
only strangers wherever he looks.
And if you need help, well, I’ll help you. . . .
Voices, music, the shuffling of cards all grow louder, more oppressive, till he stands
looking into the Himmler-Spielsaal again, crowded now, jewels flashing, leather gleaming,
roulette spokes whirling blurring—it’s here that saturation hits him, it’s all this
playing games, too much of it, too many games: the nasal, obsessive voice of a croupier
he can’t see—messieurs, mesdames, les jeux sont faits—is suddenly speaking out of
the Forbidden Wing directly to him, and about what Slothrop has been playing against
the invisible House, perhaps after all for his soul, all day—terrified he turns, turns
out into the rain again where the electric lights of the Casino, in full holocaust,
are glaring off the glazed cobbles. Collar up, Bloat’s hat down over his ears, saying
shit
every few minutes, shivering, his back aching from that fall out of that tree, he
goes stumbling along in the rain. He thinks he might begin to cry. How did this all
turn against him so fast? His friends old and new, every last bit of paper and clothing
connecting him to what he’s been, have just, fucking, vanished. How can he meet this
with any kind of grace? Only much later, worn out, snuffling, cold and wretched in
his prison of soggy Army wool, does he think of Katje.
He gets back to the Casino near midnight, her hour, tramping upstairs leaving wet
footprints behind, loud as a washing machine—stops at her door, rain pattering onto
the carpet, afraid even to knock. Has she been taken too? Who’s waiting behind the
door and what machinery have They brought with Them? But she’s heard him, and opens
with a dimpled, chiding smile for being so wet. “Tyrone, I missed you.”
He shrugs, convulsive, helpless, showering both of them. “It’s the only place I knew
to come.” Her smile slowly unpurses. Gingerly he steps across the sill then, not sure
if it’s door or high window, into her deep room.
• • • • • • •
Good mornings of good old lust, early shutters open to the sea, winds coming in with
the heavy brushing of palm leaves, the wheezing break to surface and sun of porpoises
out in the harbor.
“Oh,” Katje groans, somewhere under a pile of their batistes and brocade, “Slothrop,
you pig.
”
“Oink, oink, oink,” sez Slothrop cheerfully. Seaglare dances up on the ceiling, smoke
curls from black-market cigarettes. Given the precisions of light these mornings,
there are forms of grace to be found in the rising of the smoke, meander, furl, delicate
fade to clarity. . . .
At certain hours the harbor blue will be reflected up on the whitewashed sea-façade,
and the tall windows will be shuttered again. Wave images will flicker there in a
luminous net. By then Slothrop will be up, in British uniform, gobbling down croissants
and coffee, already busy at a refresher course in technical German, or trying to dope
out the theory of arrow-stable trajectories, or tracing nearly with the end of his
nose some German circuit schematic whose resistors look like coils, and the coils
like resistors—“What bizarre shit,” once he got hep to it, “why would they go and
switch it around like that? Trying to camouflage it, or what?”
“Recall your ancient German runes,” suggests Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, who is from
the Foreign Office P.I.D. and speaks 33 languages including English with a strong
Oxonian blither to it.
“My what?”
“Oh,” lips compressing, some kind of brain nausea here, “that coil symbol there happens
to be very like the Old Norse rune for ‘S,’
sôl
, which means ‘sun.’ The Old High German name for it is
sigil.
”
“Funny way to draw that
sun
,” it seems to Slothrop.
“Indeed. The Goths, much earlier, had used a circle with a dot in the center. This
broken line evidently dates from a time of discontinuities, tribal fragmenting perhaps,
alienation—whatever’s analogous, in a social sense, to the development of an independent
ego by the very young child, you see. . . .”
Well, no, Slothrop doesn’t see, not exactly. He hears this sort of thing from Dodson-Truck
nearly every time they get together. The man just materialized one day, out on the
beach in a black suit, shoulders starred with dandruff from thinning carrot hair,
coming into view against the white face of the Casino, which trembled over him as
he approached. Slothrop was reading a Plasticman comic. Katje was dozing in the sun,
face-up. But when his footpads reached her hearing, she turned on one elbow to wave
hello. The peer flung himself at full length, Attitude 8.11, Torpor, Undergraduate.
“So this is Lieutenant Slothrop.”
Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out of a keyhole, around a corner and up through
piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist’s lab, out of whose faucet Plas’s
head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw, is just emerging. “Yeah. Who’re
you, Ace?”
Sir Stephen introduces himself, freckles roused by the sun, eying the comic book curiously.
“I gather this isn’t a study period.”
“Is he cleared?”
“He’s cleared,” Katje smiling/shrugging at Dodson-Truck.
“Taking a break from that Telefunken radio control. That ‘Hawaii I.’ You know anything
about that?”
“Only enough to wonder where they got the name from.”
“The
name?
”
“There’s a poetry to it, engineer’s poetry . . . it suggests
Haverie—
average, you know—certainly you have the two lobes, don’t you, symmetrical about the
rocket’s intended azimuth . . .
hauen
, too—smashing someone with a hoe or a club . . .” off on a voyage of his own here,
smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression
ab-hauen
, quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient
Greeks. . . . Slothrop’s first impulse is to get back to what that Plas is into, but
something about the man, despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him listening . . .
an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing
what engages and runs him, a love for the Word.
“Well, it might be just Axis propaganda. Something to do with that Pearl Harbor.”
Sir Stephen considers this, seeming pleased. Did They choose him because of all those
word-smitten Puritans dangling off of Slothrop’s family tree? Were They trying to
seduce his brain now, his reading eye too? There are times when Slothrop actually
can find a clutch mechanism between him and Their iron-cased engine far away up a
power train whose shape and design he has to guess at, a clutch he can disengage,
feeling then all his inertia of motion, his real helplessness . . . it is not exactly
unpleasant, either. Odd thing. He is almost sure that whatever They want, it won’t
mean risking his life, or even too much of his comfort. But he can’t fit any of it
into a pattern, there’s no way to connect somebody like Dodson-Truck with somebody
like Katje. . . .
Seductress-and-patsy, all right, that’s not so bad a game. There’s very little pretending.
He doesn’t blame her: the real enemy’s somewhere back in that London, and this is
her job. She can be versatile, gay, and kind, and he’d rather be warm here with her
than freezing back under the Blitz. But now and then . . . too insubstantial to get
a fix on, there’ll be in her face a look, something not in her control, that depresses
him, that he’s even dreamed about and so found amplified there to honest fright: the
terrible chance that she might have been conned too. As much a victim as he is—an
unlucky, an unaccountably
futureless
look. . . .
One gray afternoon in where but the Himmler-Spielsaal, where else, he surprises her
alone by a roulette wheel. She’s standing, head bent, gracefully hipshot, playing
croupier. An employee of the House. She wears a white peasant blouse and a rainbow-striped
dirndl skirt of satin, which shimmers underneath the skylight. The ball’s tattoo,
against the moving spokes, gathers a long, scratchy resonance here in the muraled
space. She doesn’t turn till Slothrop is beside her. To her breathing there is a grave
slow-beating tremor: she nudges at the shutters of his heart, opening to him brief
flashes of an autumn country he has only suspected, only feared, outside him, inside
her. . . .
“Hey Katje . . .” Making a long arm, hooking a finger on a spoke to stop the wheel.
The ball drops in a compartment whose number they never see. Seeing the number is
supposed to be the point. But in the game behind the game, it is not the point.
She shakes her head. He understands that it’s something back in Holland, before Arnhem—an
impedance permanently wired into the circuit of themselves. How many ears smelling
of Palmolive and Camay has he crooned songs into, outside-the-bowling-alley songs,
behind-the-Moxie-billboard songs, Saturday-night open-me-another-quart songs, all
saying, honey, it don’t matter where you’ve been, let’s not live in the past, right
now’s all there is. . . .
Fine for back there. But not in here, tapping on her bare shoulder, peering in at
her European darkness, bewildered with it, himself with his straight hair barely combable
and shaven face without a wrinkle such a chaste intrusion in the Himmler-Spielsaal
all crowded with German-Baroque perplexities of shape (a sacrament of hands in every
last turn each hand must produce, because of what the hand was, had to become, to
make it all come out exactly this way . . . all the cold, the trauma, the departing
flesh that has ever touched it. . . . ) In the twisted gilt playing-room his secret
motions clarify for him, some. The odds They played here belonged to the past, the
past only. Their odds were never probabilities, but frequencies
already observed.
It’s the past that makes demands here. It whispers, and reaches after, and, sneering
disagreeably, gooses its victims.
When They chose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They mean by it? What Wheel
did They set in motion?
Back in a room, early in Slothrop’s life, a room forbidden to him now, is something
very bad. Something was done to him, and it may be that Katje knows what. Hasn’t he,
in her “futureless look,” found some link to his own past, something that connects
them closely as lovers? He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life,
without any next step to take—all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of
being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers
do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That’s all.
Naïve Slothrop never thought anybody’s life could end like that. Nothing so bleak.
But by now it’s grown much less strange to him—he’s been snuggling up, masturbatorily
scared-elated, to the disagreeable chance that exactly such Control might already
have been put over him.