Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Out at sea a single clarinet begins to play, a droll melody joined in on after a few
bars by guitars and mandolins. Birds huddle bright-eyed on the beach. Katje’s heart
lightens, a little, at the sound. Slothrop doesn’t yet have the European reflexes
to clarinets, he still thinks of Benny Goodman and not of clowns or circuses—but wait . . .
aren’t these
kazoos
coming? Yeah, a
lotta
kazoos! A Kazoo
Band!
Late that night, back in her room, she wears a red gown of heavy silk. Two tall candles
burn an indefinite distance behind her. He feels the change. After making love she
lies propped on an elbow watching him, breathing deep, dark nipples riding with the
swell, as buoys ride on the white sea. But a patina has formed on her eyes: he can’t
even see her accustomed retreat, this last time, dimmed, graceful, to the corner of
some inner room. . . .
“Katje.”
“Sshh,” raking dreamy fingernails down the morning, over the Côte d’Azur toward Italy.
Slothrop wants to sing, decides to, but then can’t think of anything that’d work.
He reaches an arm, without wetting his fingers snuffs the candles. She kisses the
pain. It hurts even more. He falls asleep in her arms. When he wakes she is gone,
completely, most of her never-worn clothes still in the closet, blisters and a little
wax on his fingers, and one cigarette, stubbed out before its time in an exasperated
fishhook. . . . She never wasted cigarettes. She must have sat, smoking, watching
him while he slept . . . until something, he’ll never be asking her what, triggered
her, made it impossible to stay till cigarette’s end. He straightens it out, finishes
it, no point wasting smokes is there, with a war on. . . .
• • • • • • •
“Ordinarily in our behavior, we react not singly, but complexly, to fit the ever present
contents of our environment. In old people,” Pavlov was lecturing at the age of 83,
“the matter is altogether different. Concentrating on one stimulus we exclude by negative
induction other collateral and simultaneous stimuli because they often do not suit
the circumstances, are not complementary reactions in the given setting.”
Thus [Pointsman never shows these excursions of his to anyone], reaching for some
flower on my table,
I know the cool mosaic of my room
Begin its slow, inhibitory dissolve
Around the bloom, the stimulus, the need
That brighter burns, as brightness, quickly sucked
From objects all around, now concentrates
(Yet less than blinding), focuses to flame.
Whilst there yet, in the room’s hypnotic evening,
The others lurk—the books, the instruments,
The old man’s clothes, an old
gorodki
stick,
Glazed now but with their presences. Their spirits,
Or memories I kept of where they were,
Are canceled, for this moment, by the flame:
The reach toward the frail and waiting flower . . .
And so, one of them—pen, or empty glass—
Is knocked from where it was, perhaps to roll
Beyond the blank frontiers of memory . . .
Yet this, be clear, is no “senile distraction,”
But concentrating, such as younger men
Can easily and laughing dodge, their world
Presenting too much more than one mean loss—
And out here, eighty-three, the cortex slack,
Excitatory processes eased to cinders
By Inhibition’s tweaking, callused fingers,
Each time my room begins its blur I feel
I’ve looked in on some city’s practice blackout
(Such as must come, should Germany keep on
That road of madness). Each light, winking out . . .
Except at last for one bright, stubborn bloom
The Wardens cannot quench. Or not this time.
The weekly briefings at “The White Visitation” are all but abandoned. Hardly anyone
sees the old Brigadier about these days. There is evidence of a budgetary insecurity
begun to filter in among the cherub-crusted halls and nooks of the PISCES facility.
“The old man’s funking,” cries Myron Grunton, none too stable himself these days.
The Slothrop group are gathered for their regular meeting in the ARF wing. “He’ll
shoot down the whole scheme, all it’ll take is one bad night. . . .”
A degree of well-bred panic can be observed among those present. In the background,
laboratory assistants move about cleaning up dog shit and calibrating instruments.
Rats and mice, white and black and a few shades of gray, run clattering on their wheels
in a hundred cages.
Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong.
His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed
waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched
and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he
speaks, soothing: “There’s no danger.”
“No danger?” screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering
and growling.
“Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!”
“The whole thing’s falling apart, Pointsman!”
“Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of the scheme, and
there’ve been embarrassing inquiries down from Duncan Sandys—”
“That’s the P.M.’s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!”
“We’ve already begun to run into a deficit—”
“Funding,” IF you can keep your head, “is available, and will be coming in before
long . . . certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from
being ‘knocked out,’ is quite happily at work in Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home
there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active on the program,
and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we
are
budgeted well into fiscal ’46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head.”
“Your Interested Parties again?” sez Rollo Groast.
“Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before
yesterday,” Edwin Treacle mentions now. “Clive and I took an organic chemistry course
or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?”
“No,” smoothly, “Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I’m
afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over
this Schwarzkommando business.”
“The hell you were. I happen to know Clive’s at ICI, managing some sort of polymer
research.”
They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above.
But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction
of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force
operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing
so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh,
and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having
strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to
use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they
only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und
so weiter. “I do wish ICI
would
finance part of this,” Pointsman smiles.
“Lame, lame,” mutters the younger Dr. Groast.
“What’s it matter?” cries Aaron Throwster. “If the old man gets moody at the wrong
time this whole show can prang.”
“Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments,” Pointsman very steady,
calm, “we have made arrangements with him. The details aren’t important.”
They never are, in these meetings of his. Treacle has been comfortably sidetracked
onto the Mossmoon Issue, Rollo Groast’s carping asides never get as far as serious
opposition, and are useful in presenting the appearance of open discussion, as are
Throwster’s episodes of hysteria for distracting the others. . . . So the gathering
breaks up, the conspirators head off for coffee, wives, whisky, sleep, indifference.
Webley Silvernail stays behind to secure his audiovisual gear and loot the ashtrays.
Dog Vanya, back for the moment in an ordinary state of mind if not of kidneys (which
are vulnerable after a while to bromide therapy), has been allowed a short break from
the test stand, and he goes sniffing now over to the cage of Rat Ilya. Ilya puts his
muzzle against the galvanized wire, and the two pause this way, nose to nose, life
and life. . . . Silvernail, puffing on a hook-shaped stub, lugging a 16 mm projector,
leaves ARF by way of a long row of cages, exercise wheels strobing under the fluorescent
lights. Careful youse guys, here comes da screw. Aw he’s O.K. Looie, he’s a regular
guy. The others laugh. Den what’s he doin’ in here, huh? The long white lights buzz
overhead. Gray-smocked assistants chat, smoke, linger at various routines. Look out,
Lefty, dey’re comin’ fer you dis time. Watch dis, chuckles Mouse Alexei, when he picks
me up I’m gonna
shit
, right’n his hand! Better not hey, ya know what happened ta Slug, don’tcha? Dey
fried
him when he did dat, man, da foist time he fucked up runnin’ dat maze. A hundrit
volts. Dey said it wuz a “accident.” Yeah . . .
sure
it wuz!
From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab
here is also a maze, i’n’t it now . . . behaviorists run these aisles of tables and
consoles just like rats ’n’ mice. Reinforcement for them is not a pellet of food,
but a successful experiment. But who watches from above, who notes
their
responses? Who hears the small animals in the cages as they mate, or nurse, or communicate
through the gray quadrilles, or, as now, begin to sing . . . come out of their enclosures,
in fact, grown to Webley Silvernail-size (though none of the lab people seem to be
noticing) to dance him down the long aisles and metal apparatus, with conga drums
and a peppy tropical orchestra taking up the very popular beat and melody of:
P
AVLOVIA
(B
EGUINE
)
It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a,
I was lost, in a maze . . .
Lysol breezes perfumed the air,
I’d been searching for days.
I found you, in a cul-de-sac,
As bewildered as I—
We touched noses, and suddenly
My heart learned how to fly!
So, together, we found our way,
Shared a pellet, or two . . .
Like an evening in some café,
Wanting nothing, but you . . .
Autumn’s come, to Pavlovia-a-a,
Once again, I’m alone—
Finding sorrow by millivolts,
Back to neurons and bone.
And I think of our moments then,
Never knowing your name—
Nothing’s left in Pavlovia,
But the maze, and the game. . . .
They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl their tails in
and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form into the
shape of a single giant mouse, at whose eye Silvernail poses with a smile, arms up
in a V, sustaining the last note of the song, along with the giant rodent-chorus and
orchestra. One of PWD’s classic propaganda leaflets these days urges the Volksgrenadier:
SETZT
V-2
EIN
!, with a footnote, explaining that “V-2” means to raise both arms in “honorable surrender”—more
gallowshumor—and telling how to say, phonetically, “ei ssörrender.” Is Webley’s V
here for victory, or ssörrender?
They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it’s
back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death—death in the service of the
one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die. . . . “I would set you free,
if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals,
even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an
elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.
I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out,
and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every
other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and
be like you instead, simply here, simply alive. . . .” The guest star retires down
the corridors.
Lights, all but a sprinkling, are out at “The White Visitation.” The sky tonight is
deep blue, blue as a Navy greatcoat, and the clouds in it are amazingly white. The
wind is keen and cold. Old Brigadier Pudding, trembling, slips from his quarters down
the back stairs, by a route only he knows, through the vacant orangery in the starlight,
along a gallery hung to lace dandies, horses, ladies with hard-boiled eggs for eyes,
out a small entresol (point of
maximum danger . . .)
and into a lumber-room, whose stacks of junk and random blacknesses, even this far
from his childhood, are good for a chill, out again and down a set of metal steps,
singing, he hopes quietly, for courage:
Wash me in the water
That you wash your dirty daughter,
And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall. . . .
at last to D Wing, where the madmen of the ’30s persist. The night attendant is asleep
under the
Daily Herald.
He is a coarse-looking fellow, and has been reading the leader. Is it an indication
of things to come, next election? Oh, dear . . .
But orders are to let the Brigadier pass. The old man tiptoes by, breathing fast.
Mucus rattles back in his throat. He’s at the age where mucus is a daily companion,
a culture of mucus among the old, mucus in a thousand manifestations, appearing in
clots by total surprise on a friend’s tablecloth, rimming his breath-passages at night
in hard venturi, enough to darken the outlines of dreams and send him awake, pleading. . . .