Gravity's Rainbow (5 page)

He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it—if they’re
really set on getting him (“They” embracing possibilities far far beyond Nazi Germany)
that’s the surest way, doesn’t cost them a thing to paint his name
on every one, right?

“Yes, well, that can be useful,” Tantivy watching him funny, “can’t it, especially
in combat to, you know,
pretend
something like that. Jolly useful. Call it ‘operational paranoia’ or something. But—”

“Who’s pretending?” lighting a cigarette, shaking his forelock through the smoke,
“jeepers, Tantivy, listen, I don’t want to upset you but . . . I mean I’m four years
overdue’s what it is, it could happen
any time
, the next second, right, just suddenly . . . shit . . . just zero, just nothing . . .
and . . .”

It’s nothing he can see or lay hands on—sudden gases, a violence upon the air and
no trace afterward . . . a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence
forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real
horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing
down all of Tantivy’s quiet decencies . . . no, no bullet with fins, Ace . . . not
the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day. . . .

It was Friday evening, last September, just off work, heading for the Bond Street
Underground station, his mind on the weekend ahead and his two Wrens, that Norma and
that Marjorie, whom he must each keep from learning about the other, just as he was
reaching to pick his nose, suddenly in the sky, miles behind his back and up the river
mementomori
a sharp crack and a heavy explosion, rolling right behind, almost like a clap of
thunder. But not quite. Seconds later, this time from in front of him, it happened
again: loud and clear, all over the city. Bracketed. Not a buzzbomb, not that Luftwaffe.
“Not thunder either,” he puzzled, out loud.

“Some bloody gas main,” a lady with a lunchbox, puffy-eyed from the day, elbowing
him in the back as she passed.

“No it’s the
Ger
mans,” her friend with rolled blonde fringes under a checked kerchief doing some monster
routine here, raising her hands at Slothrop, “coming to get
him
, they especially
love
fat, plump Americans—” in a minute she’ll be reaching out to pinch his cheek and
wobble it back and forth.

“Hi, glamorpuss,” Slothrop said. Her name was Cynthia. He managed to get a telephone
number before she was waving ta-ta, borne again into the rush-hour crowds.

It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart
by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more
than the day’s breath, more than dark strength—it is an imperial presence that lives
and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses
were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts smeared with
years’ pitiless use and no pleasure, into hazegray, grease-black, red lead and pale
aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving
curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries,
bicycles and cars, everyone here with different destinations and beginnings, all flowing,
hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks,
the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing
deeper, approaching black through an instant—perhaps the true turn of the sunset—that
is wine to you, wine and comfort.

The Moment was 6:43:16 British Double Summer Time: the sky, beaten like Death’s drum,
still humming, and Slothrop’s cock—say what? yes lookit inside his GI undershorts
here’s a sneaky
hardon
stirring, ready to jump—well great God where’d
that
come from?

There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity
to what is revealed in the sky. (But a
hardon?
)

On the old schist of a tombstone in the Congregational churchyard back home in Mingeborough,
Massachusetts, the hand of God emerges from a cloud, the edges of the figure here
and there eroded by 200 years of seasons’ fire and ice chisels at work, and the inscription
reading:

In Memory of Constant

Slothrop, who died March

year of his age.

Death is a debt to nature due,

Which I have paid, and so must you.

Constant saw, and not only with his heart, that stone hand pointing out of the secular
clouds, pointing directly at him, its edges traced in unbearable light, above the
whispering of his river and slopes of his long blue Berkshires, as would his son Variable
Slothrop, indeed all of the Slothrop blood one way or another, the nine or ten generations
tumbling back, branching inward: every one, except for William the very first, lying
under fallen leaves, mint and purple loosestrife, chilly elm and willow shadows over
the swamp-edge graveyard in a long gradient of rot, leaching, assimilation with the
earth, the stones showing round-faced angels with the long noses of dogs, toothy and
deep-socketed death’s heads, Masonic emblems, flowery urns, feathery willows upright
and broken, exhausted hourglasses, sunfaces about to rise or set with eyes peeking
Kilroy-style over their horizon, and memorial verse running from straight-on and foursquare,
as for Constant Slothrop, through bouncy Star Spangled Banner meter for Mrs. Elizabeth,
wife of Lt. Isaiah Slothrop (d. 1812):

Adieu my dear friends, I have come to this grave

Where Insatiate Death in his reaping hath brought me.

Till Christ rise again all His children to save,

I must lie, as His Word in the Scriptures hath taught me.

Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,

And in midst of prosperity, know thou may’st die.

While the great Loom of God works in darkness above,

And our trials here below are but threads of His Love.

To the current Slothrop’s grandfather Frederick (d. 1933), who in typical sarcasm
and guile bagged his epitaph from Emily Dickinson, without a credit line:

Because I could not stop for Death

He kindly stopped for me

Each one in turn paying his debt to nature due and leaving the excess to the next
link in the name’s chain. They began as fur traders, cordwainers, salters and smokers
of bacon, went on into glassmaking, became selectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers
of marble. Country for miles around gone to necropolis, gray with marble dust, dust
that was the breaths, the ghosts, of all those fake-Athenian monuments going up elsewhere
across the Republic. Always elsewhere. The money seeping its way out through stock
portfolios more intricate than any genealogy: what stayed at home in Berkshire went
into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into
paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money,
and the Word. They were not aristocrats, no Slothrop ever made it into the Social
Register or the Somerset Club—they carried on their enterprise in silence, assimilated
in life to the dynamic that surrounded them thoroughly as in death they would be to
churchyard earth. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the
American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate.

But they did not prosper . . . about all they did was persist—though it all began
to go sour for them around the time Emily Dickinson, never far away, was writing

Ruin is formal, devil’s work,

Consecutive and slow—

Fail in an instant no man did,

Slipping is crash’s law,

still they would keep on. The tradition, for others, was clear, everyone knew—mine
it out, work it, take all you can till it’s gone then move on west, there’s plenty
more. But out of some reasoned inertia the Slothrops stayed east in Berkshire, perverse—close
to the flooded quarries and logged-off hillsides they’d left like signed confessions
across all that thatchy-brown, moldering witch-country. The profits slackening, the
family ever multiplying. Interest from various numbered trusts was still turned, by
family banks down in Boston every second or third generation, back into yet another
trust, in long rallentando, in infinite series just perceptibly, term by term, dying . . .
but never quite to the zero. . . .

The Depression, by the time it came, ratified what’d been under way. Slothrop grew
up in a hilltop desolation of businesses going under, hedges around the estates of
the vastly rich, half-mythical cottagers from New York lapsing back now to green wilderness
or straw death, all the crystal windows every single one smashed, Harrimans and Whitneys
gone, lawns growing to hay, and the autumns no longer a time for foxtrots in the distances,
limousines and lamps, but only the accustomed crickets again, apples again, early
frosts to send the hummingbirds away, east wind, October rain: only winter certainties.

In 1931, the year of the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire, young Tyrone was visiting his
aunt and uncle in Lenox. It was in April, but for a second or two as he was coming
awake in the strange room and the racket of big and little cousins’ feet down the
stairs, he thought of winter, because so often he’d been wakened like this, at this
hour of sleep, by Pop, or Hogan, bundled outside still blinking through an overlay
of dream into the cold to watch the Northern Lights.

They scared the shit out of him. Were the radiant curtains just about to swing open?
What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to show him?

But this was a spring night, and the sky was gusting red, warm-orange, the sirens
howling in the valleys from Pittsfield, Lenox, and Lee—neighbors stood out on their
porches to stare up at the shower of sparks falling down on the mountainside . . .
“Like a meteor shower,” they said, “Like cinders from the Fourth of July . . .” it
was 1931, and those were the comparisons. The embers fell on and on for five hours
while kids dozed and grownups got to drink coffee and tell fire stories from other
years.

But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the next moment,
all of it, the complete night,
were
to go out of control and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at. . . .

6:43:16 BDST—
in the sky right now
here is the same unfolding, just about to break through, his face deepening with
its light, everything about to rush away and he to lose himself, just as his countryside
has ever proclaimed . . . slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn
hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose windows
taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the faces above the pulpits defining
grace, swearing
this is how it does happen—yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud
. . . .

• • • • • • •

On the wall, in an ornate fixture of darkening bronze, a gas jet burns, laminar and
gently singing—adjusted to what scientists of the last century called a “sensitive
flame”: invisible at the base, as it issues from its orifice, fading upward into smooth
blue light that hovers several inches above, a glimmering small cone that can respond
to the most delicate changes in the room’s air pressure. It registers visitors as
they enter and leave, each curious and civil as if the round table held some game
of chance. The circle of sitters is not at all distracted or hindered. None of your
white hands or luminous trumpets here.

Camerons officers in parade trews, blue puttees, dress kilts drift in conversing with
enlisted Americans . . . there are clergymen, Home Guard or Fire Service just off
duty, folds of wool clothing heavy with smoke smell, everyone grudging an hour’s sleep
and looking it . . . ancient Edwardian ladies in crepe de Chine, West Indians softly
plaiting vowels round less flexible chains of Russian-Jewish consonants. . . . Most
skate tangent to the holy circle, some stay, some are off again to other rooms, all
without breaking in on the slender medium who sits nearest the sensitive flame with
his back to the wall, reddish-brown curls tightening close as a skullcap, high forehead
unwrinkled, dark lips moving now effortless, now in pain:

“Once transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero, Roland found that all the signs
had turned against him. . . . Lights he had studied so well as one of you, position
and movement, now gathered there at the opposite end, all in dance . . . irrelevant
dance. None of Blicero’s traditional progress, no something new . . . alien. . . .
Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him. Discovered
it so . . . so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it. The wind had been blowing
all year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the secular wind . . . he
means, only his personal wind. Yet . . . Selena, the wind, the wind’s everywhere. . . .”