Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Did she goad him into the street, was she the death of him? In his view from the other
side, no. In love, words can be taken too many ways, that’s all. But he does feel
he was sent across, for some particular reason. . . .
And Ilse, vamping him with her dark eyes. She can say his name, but often, to flirt
with him, she won’t, or she’ll call him
Mama.
“No-no, that’s Mama. I’m Peter. Remember? Peter.”
“Mama.”
Leni only gazes, a smile held between her lips almost, he must say, smug, allowing
the mix-up in names to fall, to set up male reverberations she can’t be ignorant of.
If she doesn’t want him out in the street, why does she only keep her silence at such
moments?
“I was only glad she wasn’t calling
me
Mama,” Leni thought she’d explain. But that’s too close to ideology, it’s nothing
he can be comfortable with yet. He doesn’t know how to listen to talk like that as
more than slogans strung together: hasn’t learned to hear with the revolutionary heart,
won’t ever, in fact, be given enough time to gather a revolutionary heart from the
bleak comradely love of the others, no, no time for it now, or for anything but one
more breath, the rough breath of a man growing afraid in the street, not even enough
time to lose his fear in the time-honored way, no, because here comes Schutzmann Jöche,
truncheon already in backswing, the section of Communist head moving into view for
him stupidly, so unaware of him and his power . . . the Schutzmann’s first clear shot
all day . . . oh, his timing is perfect, he feels it in arm and out the club no longer
flabby at his side but tensed back now around in a muscular curve, at the top of his
swing, peak of potential energy . . . far below that gray vein in the man’s temple,
frail as parchment, standing out so clear, twitching already with its next to last
pulsebeat . . . and, SHIT! Oh—
how
—
How beautiful!
During the night, Sir Stephen vanishes from the Casino.
But not before telling Slothrop that his erections are of high interest to Fitzmaurice
House.
Then in the morning Katje comes storming in madder than a wet hen, to tell Slothrop
that Sir Stephen’s gone. Suddenly everybody is telling Slothrop things, and he’s barely
awake. Rain rattles at the shutters and windows. Monday mornings, upset stomachs,
good-bys . . . he blinks out at the misted sea, the horizon mantled in gray, palms
gleaming in the rain, heavy and wet and very green. It may be that the champagne is
still with him—for ten extraordinary seconds there’s nothing in his field but simple
love for what he’s seeing.
Then, perversely aware of it, he turns away, back into the room. Time to play with
Katje, now. . . .
Her face is as pale as her hair. A rain-witch. Her hat brim makes a chic creamy green
halo around her face.
“Well, he’s gone then.” Keenness of this order might work to provoke her. “It’s too
bad. Then again—maybe it’s good.”
“Never mind him. How much do you know, Slothrop?”
“What’s that mean, never mind him? What do you do, just throw people away?”
“Do you want to find out?”
He stands twisting his mustache. “Tell me about it.”
“You bastard. You’ve sabotaged the whole thing, with your clever little collegiate
drinking game.”
“What whole thing, Katje?”
“What did he tell you?” She moves a step closer. Slothrop watches her hands, thinking
of army judo instructors he’s seen. It occurs to him he’s naked and also, hmm, seems
to be getting a hardon here, look out, Slothrop. And nobody here to note it, or speculate
why. . . .
“Sure didn’t tell me you knew any of that
judo
. Must of taught you it in that
Holland
, huh? Sure—little things,” singing in descending childish thirds, “give you away,
you know. . . .”
“Aahh—” exasperated she rushes in, aims a chop at his head which he’s able to dodge—goes
diving in under her arm, lifts her in a fireman’s carry, throws her against the bed
and comes after her. She kicks a sharp heel at his cock, which is what she should’ve
done in the first place. Her timing, in fact, is drastically off all through this,
else she would likely be handing Slothrop’s ass to him . . . it may be that she wants
her foot to miss, only scraping Slothrop along the leg as he swerves now, grabs her
by the hair and twists an arm behind her, pushing her, face-down, on the bed. Her
skirt is up over her ass, her thighs squirming underneath him, his penis in terrific
erection.
“Listen, cunt, don’t make me lose my temper with you, got no problems at all hitting
women, I’m the Cagney of the French Riviera, so look out.”
“I’ll kill you—”
“What—and sabotage the whole thing?”
Katje turns her head and sinks her teeth in his forearm, up near the elbow where the
Pentothal needles used to go in. “Ow,
shit
—” he lets go the arm he’s been twisting, pulls down underwear, takes her by one hip
and penetrates her from behind, reaching under to pinch nipples, paw at her clitoris,
rake his nails along inside her thighs, Mister Technique here, not that it matters,
they’re both ready to come—Katje first, screaming into the pillow, Slothrop a second
or two later. He lies on top of her, sweating, taking great breaths, watching her
face turned ¾ away, not even a profile, but the terrible Face That Is No Face, gone
too abstract, unreachable: the notch of eye socket, but never the labile eye, only
the anonymous curve of cheek, convexity of mouth, a noseless mask of the Other Order
of Being, of Katje’s being—the lifeless nonface that is the only face of hers he really
knows, or will ever remember.
“Hey, Katje,” ’s all he sez.
“Mm.” But here’s only her old residual bitterness again, and they are not, after all,
to be lovers in parachutes of sunlit voile, lapsing gently, hand in hand, down to
anything meadowed or calm. Surprised?
She has moved away, releasing his cock into the cold room. “What’s it like in London,
Slothrop? When the rockets come down?”
“What?” After fucking he usually likes to lie around, just smoke a cigarette, think
about food, “Uh, you don’t know it’s there till it’s there. Gee, till
after
it’s there. If it doesn’t hit you, then you’re O.K. till the next one. If you hear
the explosion, you know you must be alive.”
“That’s how you know you’re alive.”
“Right.” She sits up, pulling underpants back up and skirt back down, goes to the
mirror, starts rearranging her hair. “Let’s hear the boundary-layer temperatures.
While you’re getting dressed.”
“Boundary-layer temperature T sub e, what
is
this? rises exponentially till Brennschluss, around 70 miles range, a-and then there’s
a sharp cusp, 1200 degrees, then it drops a little, minimum of 1050, till you get
out of the atmosphere, then there’s another cusp at 1080 degrees. Stays pretty steady
till re-entry,” blablabla. The bridge music here, bright with xylophones, is based
on some old favorite that will comment, ironically but gently, on what is transpiring—a
tune such as “School Days, School Days,” or “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine,”
or even “There’ll Be a HOT TIME in the Old Town Tonite!” take your pick—slowing and
fading to a glassed-in porch downstairs, Slothrop and Katje tête-à-tête, alone except
for a number of musicians in the corner groaning and shaking their heads, plotting
how to get César Flebótomo to pay them for a change. Bad gig, bad gig. . . . Rain
bats against the glass, lemon and myrtle trees outside shake in the wind. Over croissants,
strawberry jam, real butter, real coffee, she has him running through the flight profile
in terms of wall temperature and Nusselt heart-transfer coefficients, computing in
his head from Reynolds numbers she flashes him . . . equations of motion, damping,
restoring moments . . . methods of computing Brennschluss by IG and radio methods . . .
equations, transformations . . .
“Now jet expansion angles. I’ll give you an altitude, you tell me the angle.”
“Katje, why don’t you tell
me
the angle?”
She was pleased, once, to think of a peacock, courting, fanning his tail . . . she
saw it in the colors that moved in the flame as it rose off the platform, scarlet,
orange, iridescent green . . . there were Germans, even SS troops, who called the
rocket
Der Pfau. ‘
Pfau Zwei.’ Ascending, programmed in a ritual of love . . . at Brennschluss it is
done—the Rocket’s purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its
target, has submitted. All the rest will happen according to laws of ballistics. The
Rocket is helpless in it. Something else has taken over. Something beyond what was
designed in.
Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts
that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her—over its peak and down, plunging,
burning, toward a terminal orgasm . . . which is certainly nothing she can tell Slothrop.
They sit listening to gusts of rain that’s nearly sleet. Winter gathers, breathes,
deepens. A roulette ball goes rattling, somewhere back in another room. She’s running.
Why? Has he come too close again? He tries to remember if she always needed to talk
this way, in draw-shots, rebounding first before she could touch him. Fine time to
start asking. He’s counter-conspiring in the dark, jimmying doors at random, no telling
what’ll come out. . . .
Dark basalt pushes up out of the sea. A vaporous scrim hangs across the headland and
its châteaux, turning it all to a grainy antique postcard. He touches her hand, moves
his fingers up her bare arm, reaching. . . .
“Hm?”
“Come on upstairs,” sez Slothrop.
She may have hesitated, but so briefly that he didn’t notice: “What have we been talking
about all this time?”
“That A4 rocket.”
She looks at him for a long time. At first he thinks she’s about to laugh at him.
Then it looks like she’ll cry. He doesn’t understand. “Oh, Slothrop. No. You don’t
want me. What they’re after may, but
you
don’t. No more than A4 wants London. But I don’t think they know . . . about other
selves . . . yours or the Rocket’s . . . no. No more than you do. If you can’t understand
it now, at least remember. That’s all I can do for you.”
They go back up to her room again: cock, cunt, the Monday rain at the windows. . . .
Slothrop spends the rest of the morning and early afternoon studying Professors Schiller
on regenerative cooling, Wagner on combustion equations, Pauer and Beck on exhaust
gases and burning efficiency. And a pornography of blueprints. At noon the rain stops.
Katje is off on chores of her own. Slothrop passes a few hours downstairs in the bar,
waiters who catch his eye smiling, holding up bottles of champagne, wiggling them
invitingly—“No, merci, non. . . .” He’s trying to memorize the organization charts
at that Peenemünde.
As light begins to spill from the overcast sky, he and Katje are out taking a walk,
an end-of-the-day stroll along the esplanade. Her hand is gloveless and icy in his,
her narrow black coat making her taller, her long silences helping to thin her for
him nearly to fog. . . . They stop, lean against a railing, he watching the midwinter
sea, she the blind and chilly Casino poised behind them. Colorless clouds slide by,
endlessly, in the sky.
“I was thinking of the time I came in on you. That afternoon.” He can’t quite bring
himself to get specific out loud, but she knows he means the Himmler-Spielsaal.
She has looked around sharply. “So was I.”
Their breaths are torn into phantoms out to sea. She has her hair combed high today
in a pompadour, her fair eyebrows, plucked to wings, darkened, eyes rimmed in black,
only the outboard few lashes missed and left blonde. Cloudlight comes slanting down
across her face, taking away color, leaving little more than a formal snapshot, the
kind that might appear on a passport. . . .
“A-and you were so far away then . . . I couldn’t reach you. . . .”
Then.
Something like pity comes into her face and goes again. But her whisper is lethal
and bright as sudden wire: “Maybe you’ll find out. Maybe in one of their bombed-out
cities, beside one of their rivers or forests, even one day in the rain, it will come
to you. You’ll remember the Himmler-Spielsaal, and the skirt I was wearing . . . memory
will dance for you, and you can even make it my voice saying what I couldn’t say then.
Or now.” Oh what is it she smiles here to him, only for that second? already gone.
Back to the mask of no luck, no future—her face’s rest state, preferred, easiest. . . .
They are standing among black curly skeletons of iron benches, on the empty curve
of this esplanade, banked much more steeply than the waking will ever need: vertiginous,
trying to spill them into the sea and be rid of this. The day has grown colder. Neither
of them can stay balanced for long, every few seconds one or the other must find a
new footing. He reaches and turns up the collar of her coat, holds her cheeks then
in his palms . . . is he trying to bring back the color of flesh? He looks down, trying
to see into her eyes, and is puzzled to find tears coming up to fill each one, soaking
in among her lashes, mascara bleeding out in fine black swirls . . . translucent stones,
trembling in their sockets. . . .
Waves crash and drag at the stones of the beach. The harbor has broken out in whitecaps,
so brilliant they can’t be gathering their light from this drab sky. Here it is again,
that identical-looking Other World—is he gonna have
this
to worry about, now? What th’—lookit these
trees
—each long frond hanging, stung, dizzying, in laborious drypoint against the sky,
each
so perfectly placed. . . .
She has moved her thighs and the points of her hips up to touch him, through her coat—it
might still, after all, be to help bring him back—her breath a white scarf, her tear-trails,
winter-lit, ice. She feels warm. But it’s not enough. Never was—nope, he understands
all right, she’s been meaning to go for a long time. Braced for the wind the whitecaps
imply, or for the tilt of the pavement, they hold each other. He kisses her eyes,
feels his cock again begin to swell with good old, bad old—old, anyhow—lust.