Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Here the medium breaks off, is silent awhile . . . one groan . . . a quiet, desperate
moment. “Selena. Selena. Have you gone, then?”
“No, my dear,” her cheeks mottled with previous tears, “I’m listening.”
“It’s control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first
time it was
inside
, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under ‘outside
forces’—to veer into any wind. As if . . .
“A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could
create itself
—its own logic, momentum, style, from
inside.
Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened—that you had
dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The
illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can
do.
Things only happen, A and B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable. . . .”
“More Ouspenskian nonsense,” whispers a lady brushing by on the arm of a dock worker.
Odors of Diesel fuel and Sous le Vent mingle as they pass. Jessica Swanlake, a young
rosy girl in the uniform of an ATS private, noticing the prewar perfume, looks up,
hmm, the frock she imagines is about 15 guineas and who knows how many coupons, probably
from Harrods
and would do more for me
, she’s also sure. The lady, suddenly looking back over her shoulder, smiles oh, yes?
My gosh, did she hear? Around
this
place almost certainly.
Jessica’s been standing near the séance table with a handful of darts idly plucked
from the board on the wall, her head bent, pale nape and top vertebra visible above
the brown wool collar and through some of her lighter brown hair, fallen either side
along her cheeks. Brass throats and breasts warm to her blood, quake in the hollow
of her hand. She seems herself, gentling their feathered crosses, brushing with fingertips,
to have slid into a shallow trance. . . .
Outside, rolling from the east, comes the muffled rip of another rocket bomb. The
windows rattle, the floor shakes. The sensitive flame dives for shelter, shadows across
the table sent adance, darkening toward the other room—then it leaps high, the shadows
drawing inward again, fully two feet, and disappears completely. Gas hisses on in
the dim room. Milton Gloaming, who achieved perfect tripos at Cambridge ten years
ago, abandons his shorthand to rise and go shut the gas off.
It seems the right moment now for Jessica to throw a dart: one dart. Hair swinging,
breasts bobbing marvelously beneath each heavy wool lapel. A hiss of air, whack: into
the sticky fibers, into the dead center. Milton Gloaming cocks an eyebrow. His mind,
always gathering correspondences, thinks it has found a new one.
The medium, irritable now, has begun to drift back out of his trance. Anybody’s guess
what’s happening over on the other side. This sitting, like any, needs not only its
congenial circle here and secular, but also a basic, four-way entente which oughtn’t,
any link of it, be broken: Roland Feldspath (the spirit), Peter Sachsa (the control),
Carroll Eventyr (the medium), Selena (the wife and survivor). Somewhere, through exhaustion,
redirection, gusts of white noise out in the aether, this arrangement has begun now
to dissolve. Relaxation, chairs squeaking, sighs and throatclearings . . . Milton
Gloaming fusses with his notebook, shuts it abruptly.
Presently Jessica comes wandering over. No sign of Roger and she’s not sure he wants
her to come looking for him, and Gloaming, though shy, isn’t as horrid as some of
Roger’s other friends. . . .
“Roger says that now you’ll count up all those words you copied and graph them or
something,” brightly to head off any comment on the dart incident, which she’d rather
avoid. “Do you do it only for séances?”
“Automatic texts,” girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, “one or two Ouija-board episodes,
yes yes . . . we-we’re trying to develop a vocabulary of curves—certain pathologies,
certain characteristic shapes you see—”
“I’m not sure that I—”
“Well. Recall Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word
P sub n against its rank-order
n
on logarithmic axes,” babbling into her silence, even her bewilderment graceful,
“we should of course get something like a straight line . . . however we’ve data that
suggest the curves for certain—conditions, well they’re actually quite different—schizophrenics
for example tend to run a bit flatter in the upper part then progressively steeper—a
sort of bow shape . . . I think with this chap, this Roland, that we’re on to a classical
paranoiac—”
“Ha.”
That’s
a word she knows. “Thought I saw you brighten up there when he said ‘turned against.’”
“‘Against,’ ‘opposite,’ yes you’d be amazed at the frequency with this one.”
“What’s the
most
frequent word?” asks Jessica. “Your number one.”
“The same as it’s always been at these affairs,” replies the statistician, as if everyone
knew: “death.”
An elderly air-raid warden, starchy and frail as organdy, stands on tiptoe to relight
the sensitive flame.
“Incidentally, ah, where’s your mad young gentleman gone off to?”
“Roger’s with Captain Prentice.” Waving vaguely. “The usual Mysterious Microfilm Drill.”
Being transacted in some distant room, across a crown-and-anchor game with which chance
has very little to do, billows of smoke and chatter, Falkman and His Apache Band subdued
over the BBC, chunky pints and slender sherry glasses, winter rain at the windows.
Time for closeting, gas logs, shawls against the cold night, snug with your young
lady or old dutch or, as here at Snoxall’s, in good company. Here’s a shelter—perhaps
a real node of tranquillity among several scattered throughout this long wartime,
where they’re gathering for purposes not entirely in the martial interest.
Pirate Prentice feels something of this, obliquely, by way of class nervousness really:
he bears his grin among these people here like a phalanx. He learned it at the films—it
is the exact mischievous Irish grin your Dennis Morgan chap goes about cocking down
at the black smoke vomiting from each and every little bucktooth yellow rat he shoots
down.
It’s as useful to him as he is to the Firm—who, it is well known, will use anyone,
traitors, murderers, perverts, Negroes, even women, to get what They want. They may
not’ve been that sure of Pirate’s usefulness at first, but later, as it developed,
They were to grow very sure, indeed.
“Major-General, you can’t actually give your support to this.”
“We’re watching him around the clock. He certainly isn’t leaving the premises physically.”
“Then he has a confederate. Somehow—hypnosis, drugs, I don’t know—they’re getting
to his man and tranquilizing him. For God’s sake, next you’ll be consulting horoscopes.”
“Hitler does.”
“Hitler is an inspired man. But you and I are employees, remember. . . .”
After that first surge of interest, the number of clients assigned to Pirate tapered
off some. At the moment he carries what he feels is a comfortable case load. But it’s
not what he really wants. They will not understand, the gently bred maniacs of S.O.E.
ah very good, Captain
rattling sitreps, shuffling boots, echoes off of Government eyeglasses
jolly good and why not do it actually for us sometime at the Club
. . . .
Pirate wants Their trust, the good-whisky-and-cured-Latakia scent of Their rough love.
He wants understanding from his
own
lot, not these bookish sods and rationalized freaks here at Snoxall’s so dedicated
to Science, so awfully tolerant that this (he regrets it with all his heart) may be
the only place in the reach of war’s empire that he does feel less than a stranger. . . .
“It’s not at all clear,” Roger Mexico’s been saying, “what they have in mind, not
at all, the Witchcraft Act’s more than 200 years old, it’s a relic of an entirely
different age, another way of thinking. Suddenly here we are 1944 being hit with convictions
right and left. Our Mr. Eventyr,” motioning at the medium who’s across the room chatting
with young Gavin Trefoil, “could be fallen upon at any moment—pouring in the windows,
hauling dangerous tough Eventyr away to the Scrubs on pretending-to-exercise-or-use-a-kind-of-conjuration-to-cause-the-spirits-of-deceased-persons-to-be-present-in-fact-at-the-place-where-he-then-was-and-that-those-spirits-were-communicating-with-living-persons-then-and-there-present
my God what imbecile Fascist
rot . . .”
“Careful, Mexico, you’re losing the old objectivity again—a man of science shouldn’t
want to do that, should he. Hardly scientific, is it.”
“Ass. You’re on
their
side. Couldn’t you feel it tonight, coming in the door? It’s a great swamp of paranoia.”
“That’s my talent, all right,” Pirate as he speaks knowing it’s too abrupt, tries
to file off the flash with: “I don’t know that I’m really up to the
multiple
sort of thing. . . .”
“Ah. Prentice.” Not an eyebrow or lip out of place. Tolerance. Ah.
“You ought to come down this time and have our Dr. Groast check it out on his EEG.”
“Oh, if I’m in town,” vaguely. There’s a security problem here. Loose talk sinks ships
and he can’t be sure, even about Mexico. There are too many circles to the current
operation, inner and outer. Distribution lists growing narrower as we move ring by
ring toward the bull’s eye, Instructions To Destroy gradually encompassing every scrap,
idle memo, typewriter ribbon.
His best guess is that Mexico only now and then supports the Firm’s latest mania,
known as Operation Black Wing, in a statistical way—analyzing what foreign-morale
data may come in, for instance—but someplace out at the fringes of the enterprise,
as indeed Pirate finds himself here tonight, acting as go-between for Mexico and his
own roommate Teddy Bloat.
He knows that Bloat goes somewhere and microfilms something, then transfers it, via
Pirate, to young Mexico. And thence, he gathers, down to “The White Visitation,” which
houses a catchall agency known as PISCES—Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting
Surrender. Whose surrender is not made clear.
Pirate wonders if Mexico isn’t into yet another of the thousand dodgy intra-Allied
surveillance schemes that have sprung up about London since the Americans, and a dozen
governments in exile, moved in. In which the German curiously fades into irrelevance.
Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors,
Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking
royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer
to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before
the first crops were in . . . some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow
surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically
drunk or opiated for getting through the day’s reverses, most somehow losing, losing
what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game’s unending chatter,
its daily self-criticism, its demands for total attention . . . and what foreigner
is it, exactly, that Pirate has in mind if it isn’t that stateless lascar across his
own mirror-glass, that poorest of exiles. . . .
Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzantine exercise, probably
to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. “The White Visitation,” being devoted
to psychological warfare, harbors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there.
It’s none of Pirate’s business. But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger’s
enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction.
He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something
not quite decent.
What can he do? If Mexico wanted to talk about it he could find a way, security or
not. His reluctance is not Pirate’s own over the machinery of Operation Black Wing.
It looks more like shame. Wasn’t Mexico’s face tonight, as he took the envelope, averted?
eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer’s reflex . . .
hmm. Knowing Bloat, perhaps that’s what it is, young lady gamming well-set-up young
man, several poses—more wholesome than anything this war’s ever photographed . . .
life, at least. . . .
There’s Mexico’s girl, just entering the room. He spots her immediately, the clarity
around her, the absence of smoke and noise . . . is he seeing auras now? She catches
sight of Roger and smiles, her eyes enormous . . . dark-lashed, no make-up or none
Pirate can see, her hair worn in a roll down to the shoulders—what the hell’s she
doing in a mixed AA battery? She ought to be in a NAAFI canteen, filling coffee cups.
He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache in his skin, a simple love for
them both that asks nothing but their safety, and that he’ll always manage to describe
as something else—“concern,” you know, “fondness. . . .”
In 1936, Pirate (“a T. S. Eliot April” she called it, though it was a colder time
of year) was in love with an executive’s wife. She was a thin, speedy stalk of a girl
named Scorpia Mossmoon. Her husband Clive was an expert in plastics, working out of
Cambridge for Imperial Chemicals. Pirate, the career soldier, was having a year or
two’s relapse or fling outside in civilian life.
He’d got the feeling, stationed east of Suez, places like Bahrein, drinking beer watered
with his own falling sweat in the perpetual stink of crude oil across from Muharraq,
restricted to quarters after sundown—98% venereal rate anyway—one sunburned, scroungy
unit of force preserving the Sheik and the oil money against any threat from east
of the English Channel, horny, mad with the itching of lice and heat rash (masturbating
under these conditions is exquisite torture), bitter-drunk all the time—even so there
had leaked through to Pirate a dim suspicion that life was passing him by.