Authors: Thomas Pynchon
But out at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who are these visitors
standing . . . these robed figures—perhaps, at this distance, hundreds of miles tall—their
faces, serene, unattached, like the Buddha’s, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed,
as the Angel that stood over Lübeck during the Palm Sunday raid, come that day neither
to destroy nor to protect, but to bear witness to a game of seduction. It was the
next-to-last step London took before her submission, before that liaison that would
bring her at length to the eruption and scarring of the wasting pox noted on Roger
Mexico’s map, latent in this love she shares with the night-going rake Lord Death . . .
because sending the RAF to make a terror raid against civilian Lübeck was the unmistakable
long look that said
hurry up and fuck me
, that brought the rockets hard and screaming, the A4s, which were to’ve been fired
anyway, a bit sooner instead. . . .
What have the watchmen of world’s edge come tonight to look for? deepening on now,
monumental beings, stoical, on toward slag, toward ash the color the night will stabilize
at, tonight . . . what is there grandiose enough to witness? only Slothrop here, and
Sir Stephen, blithering along, crossing shadow after long prison-bar shadow cast by
the tall trunks of palms lining the esplanade. The spaces between the shadows are
washed a very warm sunset-red now, across grainy chocolate beach. There seems to be
nothing happening of any moment. No traffic whispering in the circular driveways,
no milliards of francs being wagered because of a woman or an entente of nations at
any of the tables inside. Only the somewhat formal weeping of Sir Stephen, down now
on one knee in the sand still warm from the day: soft and strangled cries of despair
held in, so testifying to all the repression he ever underwent that even Slothrop
can feel, in his own throat, sympathetic flashes of pain for the effort it is clearly
costing the man. . . .
“Oh yes, yes you know, I, I, I can’t. No. I assumed that you knew—but then why should
they tell you?
They
all know. I’m an office joke. The people even know. Nora’s been the sweetheart of
the psychic crowd for years and years. That’s always good for some bit of copy in
the
News of the World
—”
“Oh! Yeah! Nora—that’s that dame that was caught that time with that kid who-who can
change his color
, right? Wow! Sure, that Nora Dodson-Truck! I knew your name was familiar—”
But Sir Stephen has gone on: “. . . had a son, yes we came complete with sensitive
son, boy about your age. Frank . . . I think they sent him to Indo-China. They’re
very polite when I ask, very polite but, they won’t let me find out where he is. . . .
They’re good chaps at Fitzmaurice House, Slothrop. They mean well. It’s been, most
of it’s been my fault. . . . I did love Nora. I did. But there were other things. . . .
Important things. I believed they were. I still do. I must. As she got along, you
know . . . they do get that way. You know how they are, demanding, always trying to-to
drag you into bed. I couldn’t,” shaking his head, his hair now incandescent orange
in this twilight, “I couldn’t. I’d climbed too far. Another branch. Couldn’t climb
back down to her. She-she might even have been happy with a, even a
touch
now and then. . . . Listen Slothrop, your girl, your Katje, sh-she’s very
lovely
, you know.”
“I know.”
“Th-they think I don’t
care
, any more. ‘You can observe without passion.’ Bastards . . . No I didn’t mean that. . . .
Slothrop, we’re all such mechanical men. Doing our jobs. That’s all we are. Listen—how
do you think I
feel?
When you’re off with her after every lesson. I’m an impotent
man
—all I have to look forward to is a book, Slothrop. A report to write . . .”
“Hey, Ace—”
“Don’t get angry. I’m harmless. Go ahead hit me, I’ll only fall over and bounce right
up again. Watch.” He demonstrates. “I care about you, both of you. I do care, believe
me, Slothrop.”
“O.K. Tell me what’s going on.”
“I
care!
”
“Fine, fine . . .”
“My ‘function’ is to observe you. That’s my function. You like my function? You like
it?
Your
‘function’ . . . is, learn the rocket, inch by inch.
I
have . . . to send in a daily log of your progress. And that’s all I know.”
But that’s not all. He’s holding something back, something deep, and fool Slothrop
is too drunk to get at it with any kind of style. “Me and Katje too? You looking through
the keyhole?”
Sniffling, “What difference’s it make? I’m the perfect man for it. Perfect. I can’t
even masturbate half the time . . . no nasty jissom getting all over their reports,
you know. Wouldn’t want that. Just a neuter, just a recording eye. . . . They’re so
cruel. I don’t think they even know, really. . . . They aren’t even sadists. . . .
There’s just
no passion at all. . . .”
Slothrop puts a hand on his shoulder. The suit padding shifts and bunches over the
warm bone beneath it. He doesn’t know what to say, what to do: himself, he feels empty,
and wants to sleep. . . . But Sir Stephen is on his knees, just about, quaking at
the edge of it, to tell Slothrop a terrible secret, a fatal confidence concerning:
T
HE
P
ENIS
H
E
T
HOUGHT
W
AS
H
IS
O
WN
(lead tenor): ’Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own—
Just a big playful boy of a bone . . .
With a stout purple head,
Sticking up from the bed,
Where the girlies all played Telephone—
(bass): Te-le-phone. . . .
(inner voices): But They came through the hole in the night,
(bass): And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight—
(inner voices): Out of sight . . .
(tenor): Now he sighs all alone,
With a heartbroken moan,
For the pe-nis, he thought-was, his, owwwwn!
(inner voices): Was, his, own!
The figures out to sea have been attending, growing now even more windy and remote
as the light goes cold and out. . . . They are so difficult to reach across to—difficult
to grasp. Carroll Eventyr, trying to confirm the Lübeck angel, learned how difficult—he
and his control Peter Sachsa both, floundering in the swamp between the worlds. Later
on, in London, came the visit from that most ubiquitous of double agents, Sammy Hilbert-Spaess,
whom everyone had thought in Stockholm, or was it Paraguay?
“Here then,” the kindly scombroid face scanning Eventyr, quick as a fire-control dish
antenna and even less mercy, “I thought I’d—”
“You thought you’d just check in.”
“Telepathic too, God he’s amazing i’n’t he.” But the fishy eyes will not let up. It
is a rather bare room, the address behind Gallaho Mews ordinarily reserved for cash
transactions. They have summoned Eventyr up from “The White Visitation.” They know
in London how to draw pentacles too, and cry conjurations, how to bring in exactly
the ones they want. . . . The tabletop is crowded with glasses, smudged, whitish,
emptied or with residues of deep brown and red drinks, with ashtrays and with debris
from artificial flowers which old Sammy here has been plucking, unpeeling, twisting
into mysterious curves and knots. Trainsmoke blows in a partly opened window. One
wall of the room, though blank, has been eroded at, over years, by shadows of operatives,
as certain mirrors in public eating-places have been by the images of customers: a
surface gathering character, like an old face. . . .
“But then you don’t actually
talk
to him,” ah, Sammy’s so good at this, softly-softly, “I mean it’s none of your telegraphers
in the middle of the night having a bit of a chat sort of thing. . . .”
“No. No.” Eventyr understanding now that they’ve been seeing transcripts of everything
that comes through from Peter Sachsa—that what Eventyr himself gets to read is already
censored. And that it may have been this way for a while now. . . . So relax, grow
passive, watch for a shape to develop out of Sammy’s talking, a shape that really
Eventyr knows already, as we do working out acrostics—he’s called up to London, but
they aren’t asking to be put in touch with anyone, so it’s Sachsa himself they’re
interested in, and the purpose of this meeting is not to commission Eventyr, but to
warn him. To put a part of his own hidden life under interdiction. Bits, tones of
voice, choices of phrasing now come flying together: “. . . must’ve been quite a shock
to find himself over there . . . had a Zaxa or two of me own to worry about . . .
keep
you
out of the street at least. . . see how you’re holding up, old Zaxa too of course,
need to filter out
personalities
you see from the data, easier for us that way. . . .”
Out of the street?
Everyone knows how Sachsa died. But no one knows why he was out there that day, what
led up to it. And what Sammy is telling Eventyr here is:
Don’t ask.
Then will they try to get to Nora too? If there are analogies here, if Eventyr does,
somehow, map on to Peter Sachsa, then does Nora Dodson-Truck become the woman Sachsa
loved, Leni Pökler? Will the interdiction extend to Nora’s smoky voice and steady
hands, and is Eventyr to be kept, for the duration, perhaps for his life, under some
very sophisticated form of house arrest, for crimes that will never be told him?
Nora still carries on her Adventure, her “Ideology of the Zero,” firm among the stoneswept
hair of the last white guardians at the last stepoff into the black, into the radiant. . . .
But where will Leni be now? Where will she have wandered off to, carrying her child,
and her dreams that will not grow up? Either we didn’t mean to lose her—either it
was an ellipsis in our care, in what some of us will even swear is our love, or someone
has taken her, deliberately, for reasons being kept secret, and Sachsa’s death is
part of it too. She has swept with her wings another life—not husband Franz, who dreamed
of, prayed for exactly such a taking but instead is being kept for something quite
different—Peter Sachsa, who was passive in a different way . . . is there some mistake?
Do They never make mistakes, or . . . why is he here rushing with her toward her own
end (as indeed Eventyr has been sucked along in Nora’s furious wake) her body blocking
from his sight everything that lies ahead, the slender girl strangely grown oaken,
broad, maternal . . . all he has to go by is the debris of their time sweeping in
behind from either side, looping away in long helices, into the dusty invisible where
a last bit of sunlight lies on the stones of the road. . . . Yes: however ridiculously,
he is acting out Franz Pökler’s fantasy for him, here crouched on her back, very small,
being
taken:
taken forward into an aether-wind whose smell . . . no
not that smell
last encountered just before his birth . . . the void long before he ought to be
remembering . . . which means, if it’s here again . . . then . . .
then . . .
They are being pushed backward by a line of police. Peter Sachsa is jammed inside
it, trying to keep his footing, no escape possible . . . Leni’s face moving, restless,
against the window of the Hamburg Flyer, concrete roads, pedestals, industrial towers
of the Mark flying away at over a hundred miles an hour the perfect background, brown,
blurred, any least mistake, in the points, in the roadbed at this speed and they’re
done for . . . her skirt is pulled up in back, the bare bottoms of her thighs, marked
red from the train seat, turn toward him . . . yes . . . in the imminence of disaster,
yes, whoever’s watching yes. . . . “Leni, where are you?” She was at his elbow not
ten seconds ago. They’d agreed beforehand to try and keep together. But there are
two sorts of movement out here—as often as the chance displacements of strangers,
across a clear skirmish-line from the Force, will bring together people who’ll remain
that way for a time, in love that can even make the oppression seem a failure, so
too love, here in the street, can be taken centrifugally apart again: faces seen for
the last time here, words spoken idly, over your shoulder, taking for granted she’s
there, already last words—“Will Walter be bringing wine tonight? I forgot to—” it’s
a private joke, his forgetting, going around in some adolescent confusion, hopelessly
in love too by now with the little girl, Ilse. She is his refuge from society, parties,
clients . . . often she is his sanity. He’s taken to sitting for a little while each
night beside her bed, late at night, watching her sleep, with her bottom up in the
air and face in the pillow . . . the purity, the
rightness
of it . . . But her mother, in her own sleep, grinds her teeth often these nights,
frowns, talks in a tongue he cannot admit he might, some time or place, know and speak
fluently. Just in this past week . . . what does he know of politics? but he can see
that she has crossed a threshold, found a branching of the time, where he might not
be able to follow—
“You’re her mother . . . what if they arrest you, what happens to her?”
“That’s what they—Peter can’t you see, they
want
a great swollen tit with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere
in its shadows. How can I be
human
for her? Not her
mother.
‘Mother,’ that’s a civil-service category, Mothers work for
Them!
They’re the policemen of the soul . . .” her face darkened, Judaized by the words
she speaks, not because it’s out loud but because she means it, and she’s right. Against
her faith, Sachsa can see the shallows of his own life, the bathtub stagnancy of those
soirees where for years not even the faces changed . . . too many tepid years. . . .
“But I love you . . .” she brushes hair back from his sweating forehead, they lie
beneath a window through which street- and advertising-light blow constantly, lapping
at their skins, at their roundings and shadows, with spectra colder than those of
the astrologers’ Moon. . . . “You don’t have to be anything you aren’t, Peter. I wouldn’t
be here if I didn’t love who you are. . . .”