Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Certainly he
could
have known Wimpe. Their lives, for a while, ran close enough in space and time. Wimpe
was a Verbindungsmann in the classic style, with a streak of unhealthy enthusiasm:
charming, handsome in a way that came at you in shelves or terraces of strength: amiable
gray eyes, vertical granite nose, mouth that never quivered, chin incapable of fantasies . . .
dark suits, immaculate leather belts and silver studs, horsehide shoes that gleamed
under the skylights in the Czarist entrance-halls and across the Soviet concrete,
always dapper, usually correct, informed and passionate about organic chemistry, his
specialty and, it’s been suggested, his faith.
“Think of chess,” in his early days around the capital, looking for a comparison that
Russians might take to, “an extravagant game of chess.” Going on to show, if his audience
was receptive (he had salesman reflexes, knew to steer automatically along lines of
least indifference) how each molecule had so many possibilities open to it, possibilities
for bonding, bonds of different strengths, from carbon the most versatile, the queen,
“the Great Catherine of the periodic table,” down to the little hydrogens numerous
and single-moving as pawns . . . and the brute opposition of the chessboard yielding,
in this chemical game, to dance-figures in three dimensions, “four, if you like,”
and a radically different idea of what winning and losing meant. . . . Schwärmerei,
his colleagues back home had muttered, finding excuses to drift away into other conversations.
But Tchitcherine would have stayed. Foolish and romantic, he would have kept listening,
even egged the German on.
How could they have failed to be observed? By and by, as the affair in its repressed
and bloodless way proceeded, the Soviet chain of command, solicitous as any 19th-century
family, would begin to take simple steps to keep the two apart. Conservative therapy.
Central Asia. But in the weeks of vague and soft intelligence, before the watchers
quite caught the drift of things . . . what heads and tails went jingling inside the
dark pockets of
that
indeterminacy? Since his earliest days as a detail man, Wimpe’s expertise had been
focused in cyclized benzylisoquinolines. Those of major interest being the opium alkaloids
and their many variations. Right. The inner rooms of Wimpe’s office—a suite at an
older hotel—were full of samples, German dope in amazing profusion, Wimpe the jinni
of the West holding them up, vial after vial, for little Tchitcherine’s face to wonder
at: “Eumecon, a 2% solution of morphine . . . Dionine (we add on an ethyl group, here,
to the morphine, as you see) . . . Holopon and Nealpon, Pantopon and Omnopon, all
mixtures of opium alkaloids as the soluble hydrochlorides . . . and Glycopon, as glycero-phosphates. . . .
Here is Eucodal—a codeine with two hydrogens, a hydroxyl, a hydrochloride”—gesturing
in the air around his basic fist—“hanging off different parts of the molecule.” Among
these patent medicines, trappings and detailing were half the game—“As the French
do with their dresses, nicht wahr? a ribbon here, a pretty buckle there, to help sell
a sparer design. . . . Ah, this? Trivalin!” One of the jewels of his line. “Morphine,
and caffeine, and cocaine, all in solution, as the valerates. Valerian, ja—root and
rhizome: you may have older relatives who took it years ago as a nerve tonic . . .
a bit of passementerie, you might say—some trimming over these bare molecules.”
What did Tchitcherine have to say? Was Tchitcherine there at all? sitting back in
the dingy room while the lift cables slapped and creaked through the walls, and down
in the street, rarely enough to matter, a droshky rattled whip-snapping over these
black old cobbles? Or while snow beat at the grimy windows? How far, in the eyes of
those who would send him to Central Asia, was too far: would his simple presence in
these rooms have gotten him death automatically . . . or was there still, even at
this stage of things, enough slack to let him reply?
“But once the pain has been taken care of. . . the simple pain . . . beyond . . .
below that zero level of feeling . . . I have heard . . .” He has heard. Not the subtlest
way to get into it, and Wimpe must have known every standard opener there is. Some
military men are only blunt, while others are of such reckless blood there is never
a question of “holding back”—it’s a positive insanity, they not only will commit horse
against cannon, they will lead the charge themselves. It’s magnificent, but it’s not
war. Wait until the Eastern Front. By his first action, Tchitcherine will have gained
his reputation as a suicidal maniac. German field commanders from Finland to the Black
Sea will develop for him a gentlemanly distaste. It will be seriously wondered if
the man has any sense of military decency at all. They will capture him and lose him,
wound him, take him for killed in action, and he will go on, headlong, a raving snowman
over the winter marshes—there’ll be no wind adjustment, no field-change to the bottleneck
fairing or deadly ogive of their Parabellum rounds that can ever bring him down. He
is fond, as was Lenin, of Napoleon’s
on s’engage, et puis, on voit
, and as for plunging ahead, well, that IG man’s hotel room may have been one of his
earlier rehearsals. Tchitcherine has a way of getting together with undesirables,
sub rosa enemies of order, counterrevolutionary odds and ends of humanity: he doesn’t
plan it, it just happens, he is a giant supermolecule with so many open bonds available
at any given time, and in the drift of things . . . in the dance of things . . . howsoever . . .
others latch on, and the pharmacology of the Tchitcherine thus modified, its onwardly
revealed side-effects, can’t necessarily be calculated ahead of time. Chu Piang, the
Chinese factotum in the red džurt, knows something of this. The first day Tchitcherine
came to report in to the place, Chu Piang knew—and tripped over his mop, not so much
to divert attention as to celebrate the meeting. Chu Piang has a bond or two available
himself. He is a living monument to the success of British trade policy back during
the last century. This classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity
of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China—howdy Fong, this
here’s opium, opium, this is Fong—ah, so, me eatee!—no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee,
smokee
, see? pretty soon Fong’s coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic
demand for the shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three
disastrous wars over the right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are
describing as sacred. You win, China loses. Fantastic. Chu Piang being a monument
to all this, nowadays whole tourist caravans come through to look at him, usually
while he’s Under The Influence . . . “Here ladies and gentlemen, as you may have observed,
the characteristic sooty-gray complexion. . . .” They all stand peering into his dreamstruck
facies, attentive men with mutton-chop sideburns, holding pearl-gray morning hats
in their hands, the women lifting their skirts away from where horrid Asian critters
are seething microscopically across the old floorboards, while their tour leader indicates
items of interest with his metal pointer, an instrument remarkably thin, thinner than
a rapier in fact, often flashing along much faster than eyes can really follow—“His
Need, you will notice, retains its shape under all manner of stresses. No bodily illness,
no scarcity of supply seems to affect it a whit . . .” all their mild, their shallow
eyes following gently as piano chords from a suburban parlor . . . the inelastic Need
turns luminous this stagnant air: it is an ingot beyond price, from which sovereigns
yet may be struck, and faces of great administrators engraved and run off to signify.
It was worth the trip, just to see this shining, worth the long passage by sleigh,
over the frozen steppe in an enormous closed sleigh, big as a ferryboat, bedizened
all over with Victorian gingerbread—inside are decks and levels for each class of
passenger, velvet saloons, well-stocked galleys, a young Dr. Maledetto whom the ladies
love, an elegant menu including everything from Mille-Feuilles à la Fondue de la Cervelle
to La Surprise du Vésuve, lounges amply fitted out with stereopticons and a library
of slides, oak toilets rubbed to a deep red and hand-carved into mermaid faces, acanthus
leaves, afternoon and garden shapes to remind the sitter of home when he needs it
most, hot insides poised here so terribly above the breakneck passage of crystalline
ice and snow, which may be seen also from the observation deck, the passing vistas
of horizontal pallor, the wheeling snowfields of Asia, beneath skies of metal baser
by far than this we have come to watch. . . .
Chu Piang is also watching them, as they come, and stare, and go. They are figures
in dreams. They amuse him. They belong to the opium: they never come if it’s anything
else. He tries not to smoke the hashish out here, actually, any more than courtesy
demands. That chunky, resinous Turkestan phantasmagoric is fine for Russian, Kirghiz,
and other barbaric tastes, but give Chu the tears of the poppy any time. The dreams
are better, not so geometrical, so apt to turn everything—the air, the sky—to Persian
rugs. Chu prefers situations, journeys, comedy. Finding the same appetite in Tchitcherine,
this stocky, Latin-eyed emissary from Moscow, this Soviet remittance man, is enough
to make anybody trip over his mop, suds hissing along the floor and the bucket gong-crashing
in astonishment. In delight!
Before long these two wretched delinquents are skulking out to the edges of town to
meet. It is a local scandal. Chu, from some recess within the filthy rags and shreds
that hang from his unwholesome yellow body, produces a repulsive black gob of the
foul-smelling substance, wrapped in a scrap torn from an old
Enbekši Qazaq
for 17 August of last year. Tchitcherine brings the pipe—being from the West he’s
in charge of the technology of the thing—a charred, nasty little implement in red
and yellow repetitions over Britannia metal, bought used for a handful of kopecks
in the Lepers’ Quarter of Bukhara, and yes, nicely broken in too by that time. Reckless
Captain Tchitcherine. The two opiomaniacs crouch behind a bit of wall wrecked and
tilted from the last earthquake. Occasional riders pass by, some noting them and some
not, but all in silence. Stars overhead crowd the sky. Far into the country, grasses
blow, and the waves move on through, slow as sheep. It’s a mild wind, carrying the
last smoke of the day, the odors of herds and jasmine, of standing water, settling
dust . . . a wind Tchitcherine will never remember. Any more than he can now connect
this raw jumble of forty alkaloids with the cut, faceted, polished, and foiled molecules
that salesman Wimpe showed him once upon a time, one by one, and told the histories
of. . . .
“Oneirine, and Methoneirine. Variations reported by Laszlo Jamf in the ACS Journal,
year before last. Jamf was on loan again, this time as a chemist, to the Americans,
whose National Research Council had begun a massive program to explore the morphine
molecule and its possibilities—a Ten-Year Plan, coinciding, most oddly, with the classic
study of large molecules being carried on by Carothers of du Pont, the Great Synthesist.
Connection? Of course there’s one. But we don’t talk about it. NRC is synthesizing
new molecules every day, most of them from pieces of the morphine molecule. Du Pont
is stringing together groups such as amides into long chains. The two programs seem
to be complementary, don’t they? The American vice of modular repetition, combined
with what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain
without causing addiction.
“Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature,
much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia
and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can’t
have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify
position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle’s velocity—”
“I could have told you that. But why—”
“
Why.
My dear captain.
Why?
”
“The money, Wimpe. To pour funds down the latrine on such a hopeless search—”
A man-to-man touch then on his buttoned epaulet. A middle-aged smile full of Weltschmerz.
“Trade-off, Tchitcherine,” whispers the salesman. “A question of balancing priorities.
Research people come cheap enough, and even an IG may be allowed to dream, to hope
against hope. . . . Think of what it would mean to find such a drug—to abolish pain
rationally, without the extra cost of addiction. A
surplus
cost—surely there is something in Marx and Engels,” soothe the customer, “to cover
this. A demand like ‘addiction,’ having nothing to do with real pain, real economic
needs, unrelated to production or labor . . . we need fewer of these unknowns, not
more. We know how to produce real pain. Wars, obviously . . . machines in the factories,
industrial accidents, automobiles built to be unsafe, poisons in food, water, and
even air—these are quantities tied directly to the economy. We know them, and we can
control them. But ‘addiction’? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts
will even agree on how to define the word. ‘Compulsion’? Who is not compelled? ‘Tolerance’?
‘Dependence’? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories.
A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could not
plan. . . .”
What premonition has begun to throb in Tchitcherine’s right knee? What direct conversion
between pain and gold?
“Are you really this evil, or is it just an act? Are you really trafficking in pain?”
“Doctors traffick in pain and no one would dream of criticizing their noble calling.
Yet let the Verbindungsmann but reach for the latch on his case, and you all start
to scream and run. Well—you won’t find many addicts among us. The medical profession
is full of them, but we salesmen believe in real pain, real deliverance—we are knights
in the service of that Ideal. It must all be real, for the purposes of our market.
Otherwise my employer—and our little chemical cartel is the model for the very structure
of nations—becomes lost in illusion and dream, and one day vanishes into chaos. Your
own employer as well.”