Authors: Thomas Pynchon
The Forbidden Wing. Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that touch on the sleeves
of his dreams: all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to’ve
been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel—where only
destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals:
and where the House always does, of course, keep turning a profit. . . .
“You were in London,” she will presently whisper, turning back to her wheel and spinning
it again, face averted, womanly twisting the night-streaked yarn of her past, “while
they were coming down. I was in ’s Gravenhage”—fricatives sighing, the name spoken
with exile’s lingering—“while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a
rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two
points, in the five minutes,
it
lives an entire life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight
profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none
of us know. . .”
But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must
have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always,
collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape
of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved
for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they
its children. . . .
As the War’s front moves away from them, and the Casino becomes more and more a rear
area, as the water grows more polluted and the prices rise, so the personnel coming
down on leave get noisier and more dedicated to pure assholery—none of Tantivy’s style
about them, his habit of soft-shoe dancing when drunk, his make-believe foppishness
and shy, decent impulses to conspire, however marginally, whenever possible, against
power and indifference. . . . There hasn’t been a word about him. Slothrop misses
him, not just as an ally, but as a presence, a kindness. He continues to believe,
here on his French leave, and at his ease, that the interference is temporary and
paper, a matter of messages routed and orders cut, an annoyance that will end when
the War ends, so well have They busted the sod prairies of his brain, tilled and sown
there, and subsidized him not to grow anything of his own. . . .
No letters from London, not even news of ACHTUNG. All gone. Teddy Bloat one day just
vanished: other conspirators, like a chorus line, will show up off and on behind Katje
and Sir Stephen, dancing in, all with identical Corporate Smiles, the multiplication
of whose glittering choppers is to dazzle him, they think, distract him from what
they’re taking away, his ID, his service dossier, his past. Well, fuck . . . you know.
He lets it happen. He’s more interested, and sometimes a little anxious, about what
they seem to be adding on. At some point, apparently on a whim, though how can a fellow
be sure, Slothrop decides to raise a mustache. Last mustache he had was at age 13,
he sent away to that Johnson Smith for a whole Mustache Kit, 20 different shapes from
Fu Manchu to Groucho Marx. They were made of black cardboard, with hooks that fit
into your nose. After a while snot would soak into these hooks, and they’d grow limp,
and the mustache would fall off.
“What kind?” Katje wants to know, soon as this one is visible.
“Bad-guy,” sez Slothrop. Meaning, he explains, trimmed, narrow, and villainous.
“No, that’ll give you a negative attitude. Why not raise a good-guy mustache instead?”
“But good guys don’t
have
—”
“Oh no? What about Wyatt Earp?”
To which one might’ve advanced the objection that Wyatt wasn’t all that good. But
this is still back in the Stuart Lake era here, before the revisionists moved in,
and Slothrop believes in that Wyatt, all right. One day a General Wivern, of SHAEF
Technical Staff, comes in and sees it. “The ends droop down,” he observes.
“So did that Wyatt’s,” explains Slothrop.
“So did John Wilkes Booth’s,” replies the general. “Eh?”
Slothrop ponders. “He was a bad guy.”
“Precisely. Why don’t you twist the ends
up?
”
“You mean English style. Well, I tried that. It must be the weather or something,
the old duster just keeps droopin’ down again, a-and I need to bite those
ends
off. It’s really annoying.”
“It’s disgusting,” sez Wivern. “Next time I come round I shall bring you some wax
for it. They make it with a bitter taste to discourage, ah, end-chewers, you know.”
So as the mustache waxes, Slothrop waxes the mustache. Every day there’s something
new like this. Katje’s always there, slipped by Them into his bed like nickels under
the pillow for his deciduous Americanism, innocent incisors ’n’ Momworshiping molars
just left in a clattering trail back down these days at the Casino. For some odd reason
he finds himself with hardons right after study sessions. Hm, that’s peculiar. There
is nothing specially erotic about reading manuals hastily translated from the German—brokenly
mimeographed, even a few salvaged by the Polish underground from the latrines at the
training site at Blizna, stained with genuine SS shit and piss . . . or memorizing
conversion factors, inches to centimeters, horsepower to Pferdestärke, drawing from
memory schematics and isometrics of the snarled maze of fuel, oxidizer, steam, peroxide
and permanganate lines, valves, vents, chambers—what’s sexy about that? still he emerges
from each lesson with great hardon, tremendous pressure inside . . . some of that
temporary insanity, he reckons, and goes looking for Katje, hands to crabwalk his
back and silk stockings squealing against his hipbones. . . .
During the lessons he will often look over and catch Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck consulting
a stopwatch and taking notes. Jeepers. He wonders what that’s all about. Never occurs
to him it might have to do with these mysterious erections. The man’s personality
was chosen—or designed—to sidetrack suspicions before they have a chance to gather
speed. Winter sunlight hitting half his face like a migraine, trouser cuffs out of
press, wet and sandy because he’s up every morning at six to walk along the strand,
Sir Stephen makes perfectly accessible his disguise, if not his function in the conspiracy.
For all Slothrop knows he’s an agronomist, a brain surgeon, a concert oboist—in that
London you saw all levels of command seething with these multidimensional geniuses.
But as with Katje, there hangs about Dodson-Truck’s well-informed zeal an unmistakable
aura of the employee and loser. . . .
One day Slothrop gets a chance to check this out. Seems Dodson-Truck is a chess fanatic.
Down in the bar one afternoon he gets around to asking Slothrop if he plays.
“Nope,” lying, “not even checkers.”
“Damn. I’ve hardly had time till now for a good game.”
“I do know a game,” has something of Tantivy been sheltering inside all this time?
“a drinking game, it’s called Prince, maybe the English even invented it, cause you
have those princes, right? and we don’t, not that that’s wrong understand, but everybody
takes a number, a-and you start off the Prince of Wales has lost his tails, no offense
now, the numbers going clockwise around the table, and number two has found them,
clockwise from that Prince, or whatever number he wants to call out actually, he,
that’s the Prince, six or anything, see, you pick a Prince first, he starts it off,
then that number two, or whoever that Prince called, sez, but first he goes, the Prince
does, Wales, tails, two sir, after saying that about how that Prince of Wales has
lost his tails, and number two answers, not I, sir—”
“Yes yes but—” giving Slothrop a most odd look, “I mean I’m not quite sure I really
see, you know, the point to it all. How does one
win?
”
Ha! How does one win, indeed. “One doesn’t win,” easing into it, thinking of Tantivy,
one small impromptu counter-conspiracy here, “one loses. One by one. Whoever’s
left
is the winner.”
“It sounds rather negative.”
“Garçon.” Drinks here are always on the house for Slothrop—They are springing for
it, he imagines. “Some of that champagne! Wantcha to just keep it coming, and any
time we run out, go get more, comprendez?” Any number of slack-jawed subalterns, hearing
the magic word, drift over and take seats while Slothrop explains the rules.
“I’m not sure—” Dodson-Truck begins.
“Baloney. Come on, do you good to get outa that chess rut.”
“Right, right,” agree the others.
Dodson-Truck stays in his seat, a bit tense.
“Bigger glasses,” Slothrop hollers at the waiter. “How about those
beer mugs
over there! Yeah! They’d be just fine.” The waiter unblasts a jeroboam of Veuve Clicquot
Brut, and fills everybody up.
“Well, the Prince o’ Wales,” Slothrop commences, “has lost his tails, and number three
has found them. Wales, tails, three sir!”
“Not I, sir,” replies Dodson-Truck, kind of defensive about it.
“Who, sir?”
“Five, sir.”
“Say what?” inquires Five, a Highlander in parade trews, with a sly look.
“You fucked up,” commands princely Slothrop, “so you got to drink up. All the way
now, ’n’ no stopping to breathe or anything.”
On it goes. Slothrop loses Prince position to Four, and all the numbers change. The
Scot is first to drop, making mistakes at first deliberate but soon inevitable. Jeroboams
come and go, fat, green, tattered gray foil at the necks giving back the bar’s electric
radiance. Corks grow straighter, less mushroomy, dates of
degorgement
move further into the war years as the company gets drunker. The Scot has rolled
chuckling from his chair, remaining ambulatory for some ten feet, where he goes to
sleep against a potted palm. At once another junior officer slides beaming into his
place. The word has osmosed out into the Casino, and there is presently a throng of
kibitzers gathered around the table, waiting for casualties. Ice is being hauled in
by the giant block, fern-faulted inside, breathing white off of its faces, to be sledged
and chipped into a great wet tub for the procession of bottles being run up from the
cellar now in relays. It soon becomes necessary for the harassed waiters to stack
empty tankards in pyramids and pour fountain-style from the top, the bubble-shot cascades
provoking cheers from the crowd. Some joker is sure to reach in and grab one of the
mugs on the bottom, sending the whole arrangement swaying, everybody else jumping
to salvage what they can before it all comes down, crashing, soaking uniforms and
shoes—so that it can be set up all over again. The game has switched to Rotating Prince,
where each number called out immediately becomes Prince, and all the numbers shift
accordingly. By this time it is impossible to tell who’s making mistakes and who isn’t.
Arguments arise. Half the room are singing a vulgar song:
V
ULGAR
S
ONG
Last night I poked the Queen of Transylvan-ia,
Tonight I’ll poke the Queen of Burgundee—
I’m bordering on the State of Schizophren-ia,
But Queenie is so very nice to me. . . .
It’s pink champagne and caviar for break-fast,
A spot of Chateaubriand wiv me tea—
Ten-shilling panatelas now are all that I can smoke,
I laugh so much you’d think the world was just a silly joke,
So call me what you will, m’ lads, but make way for the bloke
That’s poked the love-ly lit-tle Queen of Transyl-vaayn-yaa!
Slothrop’s head is a balloon, which rises not vertically but horizontally, constantly
across the room, whilst staying in one place. Each brain cell has become a bubble:
he’s been transmuted to black Épernay grapes, cool shadows, noble cuvées. He looks
across at Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, who is still miraculously upright though with
a glaze about the eyes. Aha, right, s’posed to be counter-conspiring here, yes yes
uh, now . . . he gets involved watching another pyramidal fountain, this time of sweet
Taittinger with no date on the label. Waiters and off-duty dealers sit like birds
along the bar, staring. Noise in the place is incredible. A Welshman with an accordion
stands on a table playing “Lady of Spain,” in C, just zooming up and down that wheezebox
like a maniac. Smoke hangs thick and swirling. Pipes glow in the murk. At least three
fist-fights are in progress. The Prince game is difficult to locate any more. Girls
crowd at the door, giggling and pointing. The light in the room has gone bear-brown
with swarming uniforms. Slothrop, clutching his tankard, struggles to his feet, spins
around once, falls with a crash into a floating crown-and-anchor game. Grace, he warns
himself: grace. . . . Roisterers pick him up by the armpits and back pockets, and
fling him in the direction of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. He makes his way on under
a table, a lieutenant or two falling over him on route, through the odd pond of spilled
bubbly, the odd slough of vomit, till he finds what he imagines to be Dodson-Truck’s
sand-filled cuffs.
“Hey,” getting himself threaded among the legs of a chair, angling his head up to
locate Dodson-Truck’s face, haloed by a hanging fringe-shaded lamp. “Can you walk?”
Carefully swinging his eyes down on Slothrop, “Not sure, actually, that I can stand. . . .”
They spend some time at the business of untangling Slothrop from the chair, then standing
up, which is not without its complications—locating the door, aiming for it. . . .
Staggering, propping each other up, they push through a bottle-wielding, walleyed,
unbuttoned, roaring, white-faced and stomach-clutching mob, in among the lithe and
perfumed audience of girls at the exit, all sweetly high, a decompression lock for
the outside.
“Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness
sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American
West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent,
and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean,
high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found
anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted . . . of course Empire took its way
westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and
to foul?