Authors: Thomas Pynchon
On a wire-backed chair, blunt hair hands picking quietly at a guitar, sits an American
sailor with an orangutan look to him. In 3/4 time and shit-kicking style, he is singing:
T
HE
D
OPER’S
D
REAM
Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in
To a bubblin’ hookah so high,
When all of a sudden some Arab jinni
Jump up just a-winkin’ his eye.
“I’m here to obey all your wishes,” he told me,
As for words I was trying to grope.
“Good buddy,” I cried, “you could surely oblige me
By turnin’ me on to some
dope!
”
With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand,
And we flew down the sky in a flash,
And the first thing I saw in the land where he took me
Was a whole solid mountain of hash!
All the trees was a-bloomin’ with pink ’n’ purple pills,
Whur the Romilar River flowed by,
To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow,
So pretty that I wanted to cry.
All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion,
Morning glories woven into their hair,
Bringin’ great big handfuls of snowy cocaine,
All their dope they were eager to share.
Well we dallied for days, just a-ballin’ and smokin’,
In the flowering Panama Red,
Just piggin’ on peyote and nutmeg tea,
And those brownies so kind to your head.
Now I could’ve passed that good time forever,
And I really was fixing to stay,
But you know that
jinni turned out, t’be a narco man,
And he busted me right whur I lay.
And he took me back, to this cold, cold world,
‘N’ now m’ prison’s whurever I be . . .
And I dream of the days back in Doperland
And I wonder, will I ever go free?
The singer is Seaman Bodine, of the U.S. destroyer
John E. Badass
, and he’s the contact Säure is here to see. The
Badass
is docked in Cuxhaven and Bodine is semi-AWOL, having hit Berlin night before last
for the first time since the early weeks of American occupation. “Things are so tight,
man,” he’s groaning, “Potsdam, I couldn’t believe it over there. Remember how the
Wilhelmplatz used to be? Watches, wine, jewels, cameras, heroin, fur coats, everything
in the world. Nobody
gave
a shit, right? You ought to see it now. Russian security all over the place. Big
mean customers. You couldn’t get near it.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be something going on over there?” sez Slothrop. He’s heard
scuttlebutt. “A conference or some shit?”
“They’re deciding how to cut up Germany,” sez Säure. “All the Powers. They should
call in the Germans, Kerl, we’ve been doing
that
for centuries.”
“You couldn’t get a gnat in there now, man,” Seaman Bodine shaking his head, dexterously
rolling a reefer one-handed on a cigarette paper he has first torn, with straightfaced
bravura, in half.
“Ah,” smiles Säure, flinging an arm over Slothrop, “but what if
Rocketman
can?”
Bodine looks over, skeptical. “That’s Rocketman?”
“More or less,” sez Slothrop, “but I’m not sure I want to go into that Potsdam, right
now. . . .”
“If you only knew!” cries Bodine. “Listen, Ace, right this minute, hardly 15 miles
away, there is six
kilos!
of pure, top-grade Nepalese hashish! Scored it from my buddy in the CBI, government
seals ’n’ everything, buried it myself back in May, so safe nobody’ll ever find it
without a map. All you got to do is fly over there or whatever it is you do, just
go in and get it.”
“That’s all.”
“A kilo for you,” offers Säure.
“They can cremate it with me. All those Russians can stand around the furnace and
get loaded.”
“Perhaps,” the most decadent young woman Slothrop has ever seen in his life, wearing
fluorescent indigo eye-shadow and a black leather snood, comes slithering past, “the
pretty American is not a devotee of the Green Hershey Bar, mm? ha-ha-ha. . . .”
“A million marks,” Säure sighs.
“Where are you going to get—”
Holding up an elfin finger, leaning close, “I print it.”
Sure enough, he does. They all troop out of the Chicago, half a mile down through
rubble piles, over pathways twisting invisible in the dark to all but Säure, down
at last into a houseless cellar with filing cabinets, a bed, an oil-lamp, a printing-press.
Magda cuddles close to Slothrop, her hands dancing over his erection. Trudi has formed
an inexplicable attachment to Bodine. Säure begins to crank his clattering wheel,
and sheets of Reichsmarks do indeed come fluttering off into the holder, thousands
on thousands. “All authentic plates and paper, too. The only detail missing is a slight
ripple along the margins. There was a special stamp-press nobody managed to loot.”
“Uh,” Slothrop sez.
“Aw, come on,” sez Bodine. “Rocketman, jeepers. You don’t want to do nothing no more.”
They help jog and square the sheets while Säure chops them up with a long glittering
cutter blade. Holding out a fat roll of 100s, “You could be back tomorrow. No job
is too tough for Rocketman.”
A day or two later, it will occur to Slothrop that what he should have said at that
point was, “But I wasn’t Rocketman, until just a couple hours ago.” But right now
he is beguiled at the prospect of 2.2 pounds of hashish and a million nearly-real
marks. Nothing to walk away from, or fly or whatever it is, right? So he takes a couple
thousand in front and spends the rest of the night with round and moaning Magda on
Säure’s bed, while Trudi and Bodine lark in the bathtub, and Säure slips back on some
other mission, out into the three-o’clock waste that presses, oceanic, against their
buoyed inner space. . . .
• • • • • • •
Säure to and fro, bloodshot and nagging, with a wreathing pot of tea. Slothrop’s alone
in bed. The Rocketman costume waits on a table, along with Seaman Bodine’s treasure
map—oh. Oh, boy. Is Slothrop really going to have to go through with this?
Outside, birds whistle arpeggios up the steps, along the morning. Trucks and jeeps
sputter in the distances. Slothrop sits drinking tea and trying to scrape dried sperm
off of his trousers while Säure explains the layout. The package is stashed under
an ornamental bush outside a villa at 2 Kaiserstrasse, in Neubabelsberg, the old movie
capital of Germany. That’s across the Havel from Potsdam. It seems prudent to stay
off the Avus Autobahn. “Try to get past the checkpoint just after Zehlendorf instead.
Come up on Neubabelsberg by canal.”
“How come?”
“No civilians allowed on VIP Road—here, this one, that runs on across the river to
Potsdam.”
“Come on. I’ll need a boat, then.”
“Ha! You expect improvisation from a German? No, no, that’s—that’s
Rocketman’s problem!
ha-ha!”
“Unnhh.” Seems the villa fronts on the Griebnitz See. “Why don’t I hit it from that
side?”
“You’ll have to go under a couple of bridges first, if you do. Heavily guarded. Plunging
fire. Maybe—maybe even mortars. It gets very narrow opposite Potsdam. You won’t have
a chance.” Oh, German humor’s a
fine
way to start the morning. Säure hands Slothrop an AGO card, a trip ticket, and a
pass printed in English and Russian. “The man who forged these has been in and out
of Potsdam on them a dozen times since the Conference began. That’s how much faith
he has in them. The bilingual pass is special, just for the Conference. But you mustn’t
spend time gawking like a tourist, asking celebrities for autographs—”
“Well say look Emil, if you’ve got one of these and they’re so good, why don’t
you
go?”
“It’s not my
specialty.
I stick to dealing. Just an old bottle of acid—and even that’s make-believe. Buccaneering
is for
Rocketmen
.”
“Bodine, then.”
“He’s already on his way back to Cuxhaven. Won’t he be upset, when he comes back next
week, only to find that Rocketman, of all people, has shown the white feather.”
“Oh.” Shit. Slothrop stares awhile at that map, then tries to memorize it. He puts
on his boots, groaning. He bundles his helmet in that cape, and the two, conner and
connee, set out through the American sector.
Mare’s-tails are out seething across the blue sky, but down here the Berliner Luft
hangs still, with the odor of death inescapable. Thousands of corpses fallen back
in the spring still lie underneath these mountains of debris, yellow mountains, red
and yellow and pale.
Where’s the city Slothrop used to see back in those newsreels and that National Geographic?
Parabolas weren’t all that New German Architecture went in for—there were the spaces—the
necropolism of blank alabaster in the staring sun, meant to be filled with human harvests
rippling out of sight, making no sense without them. If there is such a thing as the
City Sacramental, the city as outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual illness
or health, then there may have been, even here, some continuity of sacrament, through
the terrible surface of May. The emptiness of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping
of the white and geometric capital before the destruction—the fallow and long-strewn
fields of rubble, the same weight of too much featureless concrete . . . except that
here everything’s been turned inside out. The straight-ruled boulevards built to be
marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic
now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are
outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given way to cobbly
insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled rococo just behind the
shuttering. Inside is outside. Ceilingless rooms open to the sky, wall-less rooms
pitched out over the sea of ruins in prows, in crow’s-nests. . . . Old men with their
tins searching the ground for cigarette butts wear their lungs on their breasts. Advertisements
for shelter, clothing, the lost, the taken, once classified, folded bürgerlich inside
newspapers to be read at one’s ease in the lacquered and graceful parlors are now
stuck with Hitler-head stamps of blue, orange, and yellow, out in the wind, when the
wind comes, stuck to trees, door-frames, planking, pieces of wall—white and fading
scraps, writing spidery, trembling, smudged, thousands unseen, thousands unread or
blown away. At the Winterhilfe one-course Sundays you sat outside at long tables under
the swastika-draped winter trees, but outside has been brought inside and that kind
of Sunday lasts all week long. Winter is coming again. All Berlin spends the daylight
trying to make believe it isn’t. Scarred trees are back in leaf, baby birds hatched
and learning to fly, but winter’s here behind the look of summer—Earth has turned
over in its sleep, and the tropics are reversed. . . .
Like the walls of the Chicago Bar brought outside, giant photographs are posted out
in the Friedrichstrasse—faces higher than a man. Slothrop recognizes Churchill and
Stalin all right, but isn’t sure about the other one. “Emil, who’s that guy in the
glasses?”
“The American president. Mister Truman.”
“Quit fooling. Truman is vice-president. Roosevelt is president.”
Säure raises an eyebrow. “Roosevelt died back in the spring. Just before the surrender.”
They get tangled in a bread queue. Women in worn-plush coats, little kids holding
on to frayed hems, men in caps and dark double-breasted suits, unshaven old faces,
foreheads white as a nurse’s leg. . . . Somebody tries to grab Slothrop’s cape, and
there’s a brief tugging match.
“I’m sorry,” Säure offers, when they’re clear again.
“Why didn’t anybody tell me?” Slothrop was going into high school when FDR was starting
out in the White House. Broderick Slothrop professed to hate the man, but young Tyrone
thought he was brave, with that polio and all. Liked his voice on the radio. Almost
saw him once too, in Pittsfield, but Lloyd Nipple, the fattest kid in Mingeborough,
was standing in the way, and all Slothrop got to see was a couple wheels and the feet
of some guys in suits on a running-board. Hoover he’d heard of, dimly—something to
do with shack towns or vacuum cleaners—but Roosevelt was
his
president, the only one he’d known. It seemed he’d just keep getting elected, term
after term, forever. But somebody had decided to change that. So he was put to sleep,
Slothrop’s president, quiet and neat, while the kid who once imaged his face on Lloyd’s
t-shirted shoulderblades was jiving on the Riviera, or in Switzerland someplace, only
half aware of being extinguished himself. . . .
“They said it was a stroke,” Säure sez. His voice is arriving from some quite peculiar
direction, let us say from directly underneath, as the wide necropolis begins now
to draw inward, to neck down and stretch out into a Corridor, one known to Slothrop
though not by name, a deformation of space that lurks inside his life, latent as a
hereditary disease. A band of doctors in white masks that cover everything but eyes,
bleak and grown-up eyes, move in step down the passage toward where Roosevelt is lying.
They carry shiny black kits. Metal rings inside the black leather, rings as if to
speak, as if a ventriloquist were playing a trick, help-let-me-out-of-here. . . .
Whoever it was, posing in the black cape at Yalta with the other leaders, conveyed
beautifully the sense of Death’s wings, rich, soft and black as the winter cape, prepared
a nation of starers for the passing of Roosevelt, a being They assembled, a being
They would dismantle. . . .
Someone here is cleverly allowing for parallax, scaling, shadows all going the right
way and lengthening with the day—but no, Säure can’t be real, no more than these dark-clothed
extras waiting in queues for some hypothetical tram, some two slices of sausage (sure,
sure), the dozen half-naked kids racing in and out of this burned tenement so amazingly
detailed—They sure must have the budget, all right. Look at this desolation, all built
then hammered back into pieces, ranging body-size down to powder (please order by
Gauge Number), as that well-remembered fragrance Noon in Berlin, essence of human
decay, is puffed on the set by a hand, lying big as a flabby horse up some alley,
pumping its giant atomizer. . . .