Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Well. He’s done now. Bag zipped, lamp off and moved back in place. Perhaps there’s
time to catch Tantivy over at the Snipe and Shaft, time for a comradely pint. He moves
back down the beaverboard maze, in the weak yellow light, against a tide of incoming
girls in galoshes, aloof Bloat unsmiling, no time for slap-and-tickle here you see,
he still has his day’s delivery to make. . . .
• • • • • • •
Wind has shifted around to the southwest, and the barometer’s falling. The early afternoon
is already dark as evening, under the massing rainclouds. Tyrone Slothrop is gonna
be caught out in it, too. Today it’s been a long, idiot chase out to zero longitude,
with the usual nothing to show. This one was supposed to be another premature airburst,
the lumps of burning rocket showering down for miles around, most of it into the river,
only one piece in any kind of shape and that well surrounded, by the time Slothrop
arrived, with the tightest security he’s seen yet, and the least friendly. Soft, faded
berets against the slate clouds, Mark III Stens set on automatic, mustaches mouthwide
covering enormous upper lips, humorless—no chance for any American lieutenant to get
a look, not today.
ACHTUNG, anyhow, is the poor relative of Allied intelligence. At least this time Slothrop’s
not alone, he’s had the cold comfort of seeing his opposite number from T.I., and
shortly after that even the man’s section chief, come fussing onto the scene in a
’37 Wolseley Wasp, both turned back too. Ha! Neither of them returning Slothrop’s
amiable nod. Tough shit, fellas. But shrewd Tyrone hangs around, distributing Lucky
Strikes, long enough to find at least what’s up with this Unlucky Strike, here.
What it is is a graphite cylinder, about six inches long and two in diameter, all
but a few flakes of its Army-green paint charred away. Only piece that survived the
burst. Evidently it was meant to. There seem to be papers stashed inside. Sergeant-major
burned his hand picking it up and was heard to holler
Oh fuck
, causing laughter among the lower paygrades. Everybody was waiting around for a Captain
Prentice from S.O.E. (
those
prickly bastards take their time about everything), who does presently show up. Slothrop
gets a glimpse—windburned face, big mean mother. Prentice takes the cylinder, drives
away, and that’s that.
In which case, Slothrop reckons, ACHTUNG can, a bit wearily, submit its fifty-millionth
interbranch request to that S.O.E., asking for some report on the cylinder’s contents,
and, as usual, be ignored. It’s O.K., he’s not bitter. S.O.E. ignores everybody, and
everybody ignores ACHTUNG. A-and what does it matter, anyhow? It’s his last rocket
for a while. Hopefully for good.
This morning in his
IN
basket were orders sending him TDY some hospital out in the East End. No explanation
beyond an attached carbon copy of a note to ACHTUNG requesting his reassignment “as
part of the P.W.E. Testing Programme.” Testing? P.W.E. is Political Warfare Executive,
he looked that up. Some more of that Minnesota Multiphasic shit, no doubt. But it
will be a change from this rocket-hunting routine, which is beginning to get a little
old.
Once upon a time Slothrop cared. No kidding. He thinks he did, anyway. A lot of stuff
prior to 1944 is getting blurry now. He can remember the first Blitz only as a long
spell of good luck. Nothing that Luftwaffe dropped came near him. But this last summer
they started in with those buzzbombs. You’d be walking on the street, in bed just
dozing off suddenly here comes this farting sound over the rooftops—if it just keeps
on, rising to a peak and passing over why that’s fine, then it’s somebody else’s worry . . .
but if the engine cuts off, look out Jackson—it’s begun its dive, sloshing the fuel
aft, away from the engine burner, and you’ve got 10 seconds to get under something.
Well, it wasn’t really too bad. After a while you adjusted—found yourself making small
bets, a shilling or two, with Tantivy Mucker-Maffick at the next desk, about where
the next doodle would hit. . . .
But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn’t adjust
to the bastards. No way. For the first time, he was surprised to find that he was
really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some
way he’d been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to keep on like
this
. . . .
“I say Slothrop, you’ve already got one in your mouth—”
“Nervous,” Slothrop lighting up anyway.
“Well not
mine
,” Tantivy pleads.
“Two at a time, see?” making them point down like comicbook fangs. The lieutenants
stare at each other through the beery shadows, with the day deepening outside the
high cold windows of the Snipe and Shaft, and Tantivy about to laugh or snort oh God
across the wood Atlantic of their table.
Atlantics aplenty there’ve been these three years, often rougher than the one William,
the first transatlantic Slothrop, crossed many ancestors ago. Barbarities of dress
and speech, lapses in behavior—one horrible evening drunken Slothrop, Tantivy’s guest
at the Junior Athenaeum, got them both 86’d feinting with the beak of a stuffed owl
after the jugular of DeCoverley Pox whilst Pox, at bay on a billiard table, attempted
to ram a cue ball down Slothrop’s throat. This sort of thing goes on dismayingly often:
yet kindness is a sturdy enough ship for these oceans, Tantivy always there blushing
or smiling and Slothrop surprised at how, when it’s really counted, Tantivy hasn’t
ever let him down.
He knows he can spill what’s on his mind. It hasn’t much to do with today’s amorous
report on Norma (dimply Cedar Rapids subdeb legs), Marjorie (tall, elegant, a build
out of the chorus line at the Windmill) and the strange events Saturday night at the
Frick Frack Club in Soho, a haunt of low reputation with moving spotlights of many
pastel hues,
OFF LIMITS
and
NO JITTERBUG DANCING
signs laid on to satisfy the many sorts of police, military and civilian, whatever
“civilian” means nowadays, who look in from time to time, and where against all chance,
through some horrible secret plot, Slothrop, who was to meet one, walks in sees who
but
both
, lined up in a row, the angle deliberately just for him, over the blue wool shoulder
of an engineman 3rd class, under the bare lovely armpit of a lindyhopping girl swung
and posed, skin stained lavender by the shifting light just there, and then, paranoia
flooding up, the two faces beginning to turn his way. . . .
Both young ladies happen to be silver stars on Slothrop’s map. He must’ve been feeling
silvery both times—shiny, jingling. The stars he pastes up are colored only to go
with how he feels that day, blue on up to golden. Never to rank a single one—how can
he? Nobody sees the map but Tantivy, and Christ they’re
all
beautiful . . . in leaf or flower around his wintering city, in teashops, in the
queues babushkaed and coatwrapped, sighing, sneezing, all lisle legs on the curbstones,
hitchhiking, typing or filing with pompadours sprouting yellow pencils, he finds them—dames,
tomatoes, sweater girls—yes it is a little obsessive maybe but . . . “I know there
is wilde love and joy enough in the world,” preached Thomas Hooker, “as there are
wilde Thyme, and other herbes; but we would have garden love, and garden joy, of Gods
owne planting.” How Slothrop’s garden grows. Teems with virgin’s-bower, with forget-me-nots,
with rue—and all over the place, purple and yellow as hickeys, a prevalence of love-in-idleness.
He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls don’t know about fireflies, which
is about all Slothrop knows for sure about English girls.
The map does puzzle Tantivy. It cannot be put down to the usual loud-mouthed American
ass-banditry, except as a fraternity-boy reflex in a vacuum, a reflex Slothrop can’t
help, barking on into an empty lab, into a wormholing of echoing hallways, long after
the need has vanished and the brothers gone to WW II and their chances for death.
Slothrop really doesn’t like to talk about his girls: Tantivy has to steer him diplomatically,
even now. At first Slothrop, quaintly gentlemanly, didn’t talk at all, till he found
out how shy Tantivy was. It dawned on him then that Tantivy was looking to be fixed
up. At about the same time, Tantivy began to see the extent of Slothrop’s isolation.
He seemed to have no one else in London, beyond a multitude of girls he seldom saw
again, to talk to about
anything.
Still Slothrop keeps his map up daily, boobishly conscientious. At its best, it does
celebrate a flow, a passing from which—among the sudden demolitions from the sky,
mysterious orders arriving out of the dark laborings of nights that for himself are
only idle—he can save a moment here or there, the days again growing colder, frost
in the morning, the feeling of Jennifer’s breasts inside cold sweater’s wool held
to warm a bit in a coal-smoke hallway he’ll never know the daytime despondency of . . .
cup of Bovril a fraction down from boiling searing his bare knee as Irene, naked as
he is in a block of glass sunlight, holds up precious nylons one by one to find a
pair that hasn’t laddered, each struck flashing by the light through the winter trellis
outside . . . nasal hep American-girl voices singing out of the grooves of some disc
up through the thorn needle of Allison’s mother’s radiogram . . . snuggling for warmth,
blackout curtains over all the windows, no light but the coal of their last cigarette,
an English firefly, bobbing at her whim in cursive writing that trails a bit behind,
words he can’t read. . . .
“What happened?” Silence from Slothrop. “Your two Wrens . . . when they saw you . . .”
then he notices that Slothrop, instead of going on with his story, has given himself
up to shivering. Has been shivering, in fact, for some time. It’s cold in here, but
not that cold. “Slothrop—”
“I don’t know. Jesus.” It’s interesting, though. It’s the weirdest feeling. He can’t
stop. He turns his Ike jacket collar up, tucks hands inside sleeves, and sits that
way for a while.
Presently, after a pause, cigarette in motion, “You can’t hear them when they come
in.”
Tantivy knows which “they.” His eyes shift away. There is silence for a bit.
“Of course you can’t, they go faster than sound.”
“Yes but—that’s not it,” words are bursting out between the pulses of shivering—“the
other kind, those V-ls, you can hear them. Right? Maybe you have a chance to get out
of the way. But these things explode first, a-and
then
you hear them coming in. Except that, if you’re dead, you
don’t
hear them.”
“Same in the infantry. You know that. You never hear the one that gets you.”
“Uh, but—”
“Think of it as a very large bullet, Slothrop. With fins.”
“Jesus,” teeth chattering, “you’re such a comfort.”
Tantivy, leaning anxiously through the smell of hops and the brown gloom, more worried
now about Slothrop’s shaking than any specter of his own, has nothing but established
channels he happens to know of to try and conjure it away. “Why not see if we can
get you out to where some of them have hit. . . .”
“What for? Come on, Tantivy, they’re completely destroyed. Aren’t they?”
“I don’t know. I doubt even the Germans know. But it’s the best chance we’ll have
to one-up that lot over in T.I. Isn’t it.”
Which is how Slothrop got into investigating V-bomb “incidents.” Aftermaths. Each
morning—at first—someone in Civil Defence routed ACHTUNG a list of yesterday’s hits.
It would come round to Slothrop last, he’d detach its pencil-smeared buck slip, go
draw the same aging Humber from the motor pool, and make his rounds, a Saint George
after the fact, going out to poke about for droppings of the Beast, fragments of German
hardware that wouldn’t exist, writing empty summaries into his notebooks—work-therapy.
As inputs to ACHTUNG got faster, often he’d show up in time to help the search crews—following
restless-muscled RAF dogs into the plaster smell, the gas leaking, the leaning long
splinters and sagging mesh, the prone and noseless caryatids, rust already at nails
and naked threadsurfaces, the powdery wipe of Nothing’s hand across wallpaper awhisper
with peacocks spreading their fans down deep lawns to Georgian houses long ago, to
safe groves of holm oak . . . among the calls for silence following to where some
exposed hand or brightness of skin waited them, survivor or casualty. When he couldn’t
help he stayed clear, praying, at first, conventionally to God, first time since the
other Blitz, for life to win out. But too many were dying, and presently, seeing no
point, he stopped.
Yesterday happened to be a good day. They found a child, alive, a little girl, half-suffocated
under a Morrison shelter. Waiting for the stretcher, Slothrop held her small hand,
gone purple with the cold. Dogs barked in the street. When she opened her eyes and
saw him her first words were, “Any gum, chum?” Trapped there for two days, gum-less—all
he had for her was a Thayer’s Slippery Elm. He felt like an idiot. Before they took
her off she brought his hand over to kiss anyway, her mouth and cheek in the flare
lamps cold as frost, the city around them at once a big desolate icebox, stale-smelling
and no surprises inside ever again. At which point she smiled, very faintly, and he
knew that’s what he’d been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly
canceled all they’d found her down in the middle of. What a damn fool thing. He hangs
at the bottom of his blood’s avalanche, 300 years of western swamp-Yankees, and can’t
manage but some nervous truce with their Providence. A
détente.
Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks
wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death . . .
Slothrop’s Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he
can find himself inside a parable.