Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“Excellent idea, Perdoo, excellent.”
“Uh . . . Oh, well you pick out the one
you
want, okay?”
“The
one?
”
“Yeah. This is the one,” turning it to show him as the faces of threatened girls are
roughly turned by villains, “that I picked out, see?”
“But but I thought we were both going to—” gesturing feebly toward what he still cannot
quite accept as Perdoo’s melon, in whose intaglio net now, as among craters of the
pale moon, a face is indeed emerging, the face of a captive woman with eyes cast downward,
lids above as smooth as Persian ceilings. . . .
“Well, no, I usually, uh—” this is
embarrassing
for Perdoo, it’s like being called on to, to justify eating an apple, or even popping
a
grape
into your mouth—“just, well, sort of, eat them . . . whole, you know,” chuckling
in what he hopes is a friendly way, to indicate politely the social
oddness
of this discussion—
—but the chuckle is taken the wrong way by Speed: taken as evidence of mental instability
in this slightly bucktoothed and angular American, who is dancing now from stoop to
English stoop, lank as a street-puppet in the wind. Shaking his head, he nevertheless
selects his own whole canteloupe, realizes he’s been left to pay the bill, which is
exorbitant, and goes skipping off after Perdoo, hippety hop both of them, tra-la-la-la
slam
right into another dead end:
“Jenny? No—no Jenny here. . . .”
“A Jennifer, perhaps? Genevieve?”
“Ginny” (it could’ve been misspelled), “Virginia?”
“If you gentlemen are looking for a good time—” Her grin, her red, maniacally good-morning-and-I-mean-
good!
grin, is wide enough to hold them both right, shivering, smiling, here, and she’s
old
enough to be their Mother—their joint Mother, combining the worst traits of Mrs.
Perdoo and Mrs. Speed—in fact she is turning now into
just
that, even as they watch. These wrecked seas are full of temptresses—it’s watery
and wanton out here all right. As the two gawking soft-boiled shamuses are drawn along
into her aura, winking right here in the street, brassy with henna-glare, with passion-flowers
on rayon—just before the last stumbling surrender into the lunacy of her purple eyes,
they allow themselves, for the sinful tickle of it, a last thought of the project
they’re supposed to be here on—Slothropian Episodic Zone, Weekly Historical Observations
(SEZ WHO)—a thought that comes running out in the guise of a clown, a vulgar, loose-ends
clown bespangled with wordless jokes about body juices, bald-headed, an amazing fall
of nose-hair out both nostrils which he has put into braids and tied with acid-green
bows—a scrabbling dash now out past sandbags and falling curtain, trying to get back
his breath, to garble to them in a high unpleasant screech: “No Jenny. No Sally W.
No Cybele. No Angela. No Catherine. No Lucy. No Gretchen. When are you going to see
it? When are you going to see it?”
No “Darlene” either. That came in yesterday. They traced the name as far as the residence
of a Mrs. Quoad. But the flashy young divorcée never, she declared, even knew that
English children were named “Darlene.” She was dreadfully sorry. Mrs. Quoad spent
her days lounging about a rather pedicured Mayfair address, and both investigators
felt relieved to be out of the neighborhood. . . .
When are you going to see it?
Pointsman sees it immediately. But he “sees” it in the way you would walking into
your bedroom to be jumped on, out of a bit of penumbra on your ceiling, by a gigantic
moray eel, its teeth in full imbecile death-smile, breathing, in its fall onto your
open face, a long human sound that you know, horribly, to be a
sexual sigh. . . .
That is to say, Pointsman avoids the matter—as reflexively as he would any nightmare.
Should this one turn out not to be a fantasy but
real
, well . . .
“The data, so far, are incomplete.” This ought to be prominently stressed in all statements.
“We admit that the early data seem to show,” remember,
act sincere
, “a number of cases where the names on Slothrop’s map do not appear to have counterparts
in the body of fact we’ve been able to establish along his time-line here in London.
Establish
so far
, that is. These are mostly all first names, you see, the, the Xs without the Ys so
to speak, ranks without files. Difficult to know how far into one ‘far enough’ really
is.
“And what if many—even if most—of the Slothropian stars
are
proved, some distant day, to refer to sexual fantasies instead of real events? This
would hardly invalidate our approach, any more than it did young Sigmund Freud’s,
back there in old Vienna, facing a similar violation of probability—all those Papi-has-raped-me
stories, which might have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth
clinically.
You must realize: we are concerned, at PISCES, with a rather strictly defined, clinical
version of truth. We seek no wider agency in this.”
So far, it is Pointsman’s burden alone. The solitude of a Führer: he feels himself
growing strong in the rays of this dark companion to his public star now on the rise . . .
but he doesn’t want to share it, no not just yet. . . .
Meetings of the staff, his staff, grow worse and worse than useless. They bog down
into endless arguments about trivia—whether or not to rename PISCES now that the Surrender
has been Expedited, what sort of letterhead, if any, to adopt. The representative
from Shell Mex House, Mr. Dennis Joint, wants to put the program under Special Projectiles
Operations Group (SPOG), as an adjunct of the British rocket-scavenging effort, Operation
Backfire, which is based out of Cuxhaven on the North Sea. Every other day brings
a fresh attempt, from some quarter, to reconstitute or even dissolve PISCES. Pointsman
is finding it much easier of late to slip into a l’état c’est moi frame of mind—who
else
is doing anything?
isn’t
he holding it all together, often with nothing beyond his own raw will . . . ?
Shell Mex House, naturally, is frantic about Slothrop’s disappearance. Here’s a man
running loose who knows everything it’s possible to know—not only about the A4, but
about what
Great Britain
knows about the A4. Zürich teems with Soviet agents. What if they’ve already got
Slothrop? They took Peenemünde in the spring, it appears now they will be given the
central rocket works at Nordhausen, another of the dealings at Yalta. . . . At least
three agencies, VIAM, TsAGI, and NISO, plus engineers working out of other commissariats,
are even now in Soviet-occupied Germany with lists of personnel and equipment to be
taken east. Inside the SHAEF sphere of influence, American Army Ordnance, and a host
of competing research teams, are all busy collecting everything in sight. They’ve
already rounded up von Braun and 500 others, and interned them at Garmisch. What if
they
get hold of Slothrop?
There have also been, aggravating the Crisis, defections: Rollo Groast assumed back
into the Society for Psychical Research, Treacle setting up a practice, Myron Grunton
again a full-time wireless personality. Mexico has begun to grow distant. The Borgesius
woman still performs her nocturnal duties, but with the Brigadier ill now (has the
old fool been forgetting his antibiotics? Must Pointsman do everything?) she’s beginning
to fret. Of course Géza Rózsavölgyi is still with the project. A fanatic. Rózsavölgyi
will
never
leave.
So. A holiday by the sea. For political reasons, the party is made up of Pointsman,
Mexico, Mexico’s girl, Dennis Joint, and Katje Borgesius. Pointsman wears rope-soled
shoes, his prewar bowler, and a rare smile. The weather is not ideal. An overcast,
a wind that will be chilly by midafternoon. A smell of ozone blows up from the Dodgem
cars out of the gray steel girderwork along the promenade, along with smells of shellfish
on the barrows, and of salt sea. The pebbled beach is crowded with families: shoeless
fathers in lounge suits and high white collars, mothers in blouses and skirts startled
out of war-long camphor sleep, kids running all over in sunsuits, nappies, rompers,
short pants, knee socks, Eton hats. There are ice cream, sweets, Cokes, cockles, oysters
and shrimps with salt and sauce. The pinball machines writhe under the handling of
fanatical servicemen and their girls, throwing body-english, cursing, groaning as
the bright balls drum down the wood obstacle courses through ka-chungs, flashing lights,
thudding flippers. The donkeys hee-haw and shit, the children walk in it and their
parents scream. Men sag in striped canvas chairs talking business, sports, sex, but
most usually politics. An organ grinder plays Rossini’s overture to
La Gazza Ladra
(which, as we shall see later, in Berlin, marks a high point in music which everybody
ignored, preferring Beethoven, who never got further than statements of intention),
and here without snaredrums or the sonority of brasses the piece is mellow, full of
hope, promising lavender twilights, stainless steel pavilions and everyone elevated
at last to aristocracy, and love without payment of any kind. . . .
It was Pointsman’s plan today not to talk shop, but to let the conversation flow more
or less organically. Wait for others to betray themselves. But there is shyness, or
constraint, among them all. Talk is minimal. Dennis Joint is watching Katje with a
horny smile, with now and then a suspicious stare for Roger Mexico. Mexico meantime
has his troubles with Jessica—more and more often these days—and at the moment the
two aren’t even looking at each other. Katje Borgesius has her eyes far out to sea,
and there is no telling
what
is going on with this one. In some dim way, Pointsman, though he can’t see that she
has any leverage at all, is still afraid of her. There is still a lot he doesn’t know.
Perhaps what’s bothering him most right now is her connection, if any, with Pirate
Prentice. Prentice has been down to “The White Visitation” several times asking rather
pointed questions about her. When PISCES recently opened its new branch office in
London (which some wag, probably that young imbecile Webley Silvernail, has already
dubbed “Twelfth House”) Prentice began hanging heavily around up there, romancing
secretaries, trying for a peep into this file or that. . . . What’s up? What afterlife
have the Firm found, this side of V-E Day? What does Prentice want . . . what’s his
price? Is he in love with La Borgesius here? Is it possible for this woman to be in
love?
Love?
Oh, it’s enough to make you scream. What would her idea of love be. . . .
“Mexico,” grabbing the young statistician’s arm.
“Eh?” Roger interrupted eying a lovely looks a bit like Rita Hayworth in a one-piece
floral number with straps that X across her lean back. . . .
“Mexico, I think I am hallucinating.”
“Oh, really? You think you are? What are you seeing?”
“Mexico, I see . . . I see. . . . What do you mean, what am I
seeing
, you nit? It’s what I’m
hearing.
”
“Well, what are you hearing, then.” A touch of peevishness to Roger now.
“Right now I’m hearing
you
, saying, ‘What are you hearing, then.’ And I
don’t like it!
”
“Why not.”
“Because: unpleasant as this hallucination is, I find I still
much
prefer it to the sound of your voice.”
Now this is odd behavior from anybody, but from usually correct Mr. Pointsman, it
is enough to stop this mutually-paranoid party in their tracks. Nearby is a Wheel
of Fortune, with Lucky Strike packs, kewpie dolls and candy bars stuffed among the
spokes.
“I say, what d’you think?” blond, hale-fellow Dennis Joint nudges Katje with an elbow
as broad as a knee. In his profession he has learned to make instant evaluations of
those with whom he deals. He judges old Katje here to be a jolly girl, out for a spot
of fun. Yes, leadership material here, definitely. “Hasn’t he gone a bit mental suddenly?”
Trying to keep his voice down, grinning in athletic paranoia vaguely over in the peculiar
Pavlovian’s direction—not
right
at him you understand, eye contact might be suicidal folly given his state of mind. . . .
Meantime, Jessica has gone into her Fay Wray number. This is a kind of protective
paralysis, akin to your own response when the moray eel jumps you from the ceiling.
But this is for the Fist of the Ape, for the lights of electric New York white-waying
into the room you thought was safe, could never be penetrated . . . for the coarse
black hair, the tendons of need, of tragic love. . . .
“Yeah well,” as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive 18-volume
study of
King Kong
, “you know, he
did
love her, folks.” Proceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left
nothing out, every shot including out-takes raked through for every last bit of symbolism,
exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, extras, grips, lab people . . .
even interviews with King Kong Kultists, who to be eligible for membership must have
seen the movie at least 100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam. . . .
And yet, and yet: there is Murphy’s Law to consider, that brash Irish proletarian
restatement of Gödel’s Theorem—
when everything has been taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise
us . . . something will.
So the permutations ’n’ combinations of Pudding’s
Things That Can Happen in European Politics
for 1931, the year of Gödel’s Theorem, don’t give Hitler an outside chance. So, when
laws of heredity are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece
of hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating items like the “S-Gerät”
Slothrop thinks he’s chasing like a grail. And so, too, the legend of the black scapeape
we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the
fullness of time, to generate its own children, running around inside Germany even
now—the Schwarzkommando, whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not anticipate.