Authors: Thomas Pynchon
(By Säure’s black-market watch, it’s nearly noon. From 11 to 12 in the morning is
the Evil Hour, when the white woman with the ring of keys comes out of her mountain
and may appear to you. Be careful, then. If you can’t free her from a spell she never
specifies, you’ll be punished. She is the beautiful maiden offering the Wonderflower,
and the ugly old woman with long teeth who found you in that dream and said nothing.
The Hour is hers.)
Black P-38s fly racketing in formation, in moving openwork against the pale sky. Slothrop
and Säure find a café on the sidewalk, drink watered pink wine, eat bread and some
cheese. That crafty old doper breaks out a “stick” of “tea” and they sit in the sun
handing it back and forth, offering the waiter a hit, who can tell? that’s how you
have to smoke armies too, these days. Jeeps, personnel carriers, and bicycles go streaming
by. Girls in fresh summer frocks, orange and green as fruit ices, drift in to sit
at tables, smiling, smiling, checking the area continuously for early business.
Somehow Säure has got Slothrop to talking about the Rocket. Not at all Säure’s specialty,
of course, though he’s been keeping an ear tuned. If it’s wanted, then it has a price.
“I could never see the fascination. We kept hearing so much about it on the radio.
It was our Captain Midnight Show. But we grew disillusioned. Wanting to believe, but
nothing we saw giving us that much faith. Less and less toward the end. All I know
is it brought disaster down on the cocaine market, Kerl.”
“How’s that?”
“Something in that rocket needed potassium permanganate, right?”
“Turbopump.”
“Well, without that Purpurstoff you can’t deal cocaine honestly. Forget honesty, there
just wasn’t any
reality.
Last winter you couldn’t find a cc of permanganate in the whole fucking Reich, Kerl.
Oh
you should’ve seen the burning that was going on. Friends, understand. But what friend
hasn’t wanted to—in terms you can recognize—
push a pie
in your face? eh?”
“Thank you.” Wait a minute. Is he talking about
us?
Is he getting ready to—
“So,” having continued, “there crept over Berlin a gigantic Laurel and Hardy film,
silent, silent . . . because of the permanganate shortage. I don’t know what other
economies may have been affected by the A4. This was not just pie-throwing, not just
anarchy on a market, this was chemical irresponsibility! Clay, talcum, cement, even,
it got this perverse, flour! Powdered milk, diverted from the stomachs of little sucklings!
Look-alikes that were worth even more than cocaine—but the idea was that someone should
get a sudden noseful of milk, haha-hahah!” breaking up here for a minute, “and that
was
worth the loss!
Without the permanganate there was no way to tell anything for sure. A little novocain
to numb the tongue, something bitter for the taste, and you could be making enormous
profits off of sodium bicarbonate. Permanganate is the touchstone. Under a microscope,
you drop some on the substance in question, which dissolves—then you watch how it
comes out of solution, how it recrystallizes: the cocaine will appear first, at the
edges, then the vegetable cut, the procaine, the lactose at other well-known positions—a
purple target, with the outer ring worth the most, and the bull’s-eye worth nothing.
An anti-target. Certainly not the A4’s idea of one,
eh, Rocketman.
That machinery of yours was not exactly the doper’s friend. What do you want it for?
Will your country use it against Russia?”
“I don’t want it. What do you mean, ‘my country’?”
“I’m sorry. I only meant that it looks like the Russians want it badly enough. I’ve
had connections all over the city taken away. Interrogated. None of them know any
more about rockets than I do. But Tchitcherine thinks we do.”
“Oboy. Him again?”
“Yes he’s in Potsdam right now. Supposed to be. Set up a headquarters in one of the
old film studios.”
“Swell news, Emil. With my luck . . .”
“You don’t look too good, Rocketman.”
“Think that’s horrible? Try this!” and Slothrop proceeds to ask if Säure has heard
anything about the Schwarzgerät.
Säure does not exactly scream
Aiyee!
and run off down the street or anything, but squeeeak goes a certain valve all right,
and something is routed another way. “I’ll tell you what,” nodding and shifting in
his seat, “you talk to der Springer. Ja, you two would get on fine. I am only a retired
cat burglar, looking to spend my last several decades as the Sublime Rossini did his:
comfortable. Just don’t mention me at all, O.K., Joe?”
“Well, who is that der Springer, and where do I find him, Emil?”
“He is the knight who leaps perpetually—”
“Wow.”
“—across the chessboard of the Zone, is who he is. Just as Rocketman flies over obstacles
today.” He laughs nastily. “A fine pair. How do I know where he is? He could be anyplace.
He is everywhere.”
“Zorro? The Green Hornet?”
“Last I heard, a week or two ago, he was up north on the Hanseatic run. You will meet.
Don’t worry.” Abruptly Säure stands up to go, shaking hands, slipping Rocketman another
reefer for later, or for luck. “I have medical officers to see. The happiness of a
thousand customers is on your shoulders, young man. Meet me at my place. Glück.”
So the Evil Hour has worked its sorcery. The wrong word was Schwarzgerät. Now the
mountain has closed again thundering behind Slothrop, damn near like to crush his
heel, and it might just be centuries before that White Woman appears again. Shit.
The name on the special pass is “Max Schlepzig.” Slothrop, feeling full of pep, decides
to pose as a vaudeville entertainer. An illusionist. He has had a good apprenticeship
with Katje, her damask tablecloth and magical body, a bed for her salon, a hundred
soirées fantastiques. . . .
He’s through Zehlendorf by midafternoon, inside his Rocketman rig and ready to cross.
The Russian sentries wait under a wood archway painted red, toting Suomis or Degtyarovs,
oversize submachine guns with drum magazines. Here comes also a Stalin tank now, lumbering
in low, soldier in earflapped helmet standing up in the 76 mm mount yelling into walkie-talkie . . .
uh, well. . . . On the other side of the arch is a Russian jeep with a couple officers,
one talking earnestly into the mike of
his
radio set, and the air between quickens with spoken Russian at the speed of light
weaving a net to catch Slothrop. Who else? He sweeps his cape back with a wink, tips
his helmet and smiles. In a conjuror’s flourish he’s out with card, ticket ’n’ bilingual
pass, giving them some line about a command performance in that Potsdam.
One of the sentries takes the pass and nips into his kiosk to make a phone call. The
others stand staring at Tchitcherine’s boots. No one speaks. The call is taking a
while. Scarred leather, day-old beards, cheekbones in the sun. Slothrop’s trying to
think of a few card tricks he can do, sort of break the ice, when the sentry sticks
his head out. “Stiefeln, bitte.”
Boots? What would they want with—
yaaahhh!
Boots, indeed, yes. We know beyond peradventure who has to be on the other end, don’t
we. Slothrop can hear all the man’s metal parts jingling with glee. In the smoky Berlin
sky, somewhere to the left of the Funkturm in its steelwool distance, appears a full-page
photo in
Life
magazine: it is of Slothrop, he is in full Rocketman attire, with what appears to
be a long, stiff sausage of very large diameter being stuffed into his mouth, so forcibly
that his eyes are slightly crossed, though the hand or agency actually holding the
stupendous wiener is not visible in the photo.
A SNAFU FOR ROCKETMAN,
reads the caption—“Barely off the ground, the Zone’s newest celebrity ‘fucks up.’”
We-e-e-ll, Slothrop slides off the boots, the sentry takes them inside to the telephone—the
others lean Slothrop up against the arch and shake him down, finding nothing but the
reefer Säure gave him, which they expropriate. Slothrop waits in his socks, trying
not to think ahead. Glancing around for cover, maybe. Nothing. Clear field of fire
for 360 degrees. Smells of fresh asphalt patch and gun oil. The jeep, crystal verdigris,
waiting: the road back to Berlin, for the moment, deserted. . . . Providence, hey
Providence
, what’d you do, step out for a beer or something?
Not at all. The boots reappear, smiling sentry right behind them. “Stimmt, Herr Schlepzig.”
What does irony sound like in Russian? These birds are too inscrutable for Slothrop.
Tchitcherine would’ve known enough not to arouse any suspicion by asking to see those
boots. Nah, it couldn’t’ve been him on the phone. This was probably some routine search
for that contraband, was all. Slothrop is being seized right now by what the Book
of Changes calls Youthful Folly. He swirls his green cape a few more times, chisels
a stubby Balkan army off of one of the tommyguns, and moseys away, southward. The
officers’ jeep stays where it is. The tank has vanished.
Jubilee Jim, just a-peddlin’ through the country,
Winkin’ at the ladies from Stockbridge up to Lee—
Buy your gal a brooch for a fancy gown,
Buggy-whip rigs for just a dollar down,
Hey come along ev’rybody, headin’ for the Jubi-lee!
Two miles down the road, Slothrop hits that canal Säure mentioned: takes a footpath
down under the bridge where it’s wet and cool for a minute. He sets off along the
bank, looking for a boat to hijack. Girls in halters and shorts lie sunning, brown
and gold, all along this dreaming grass slope. The clouded afternoon is mellowed to
windsoftened edges, children kneeling beside the water with fishing lines, two birds
in a chase across the canal soaring down and up in a loop into the suspended storm
of a green treetop, where they sit and begin to sing. With distance the light gathers
a slow ecru haze, girls’ flesh no longer bleached by the zenith sun now in gentler
light reawakening to warmer colors, faint shadows of thigh-muscles, stretched filaments
of skin cells saying touch . . . stay. . . . Slothrop walks on—past eyes opening,
smiles breaking like kind dawns. What’s wrong with him? Stay, sure. But what keeps
him passing by?
There are a few boats, moored to railings, but always somebody with an eye out. He
finally comes on a narrow flat-bottomed little rig, oars in the locks and ready to
go, nothing but a blanket upslope, a pair of high heels, man’s jacket, stand of trees
nearby. So Slothrop climbs right in, and casts off. Have fun—a little nasty here—
I
can’t, but I can steal your
boat!
Ha!
He hauls till sundown, resting for long stretches, really out of condition, cape smothering
him in a cone of sweat so bad he has to take it off finally. Ducks drift at a wary
distance, water dripping off of bright orange beaks. Surface of the canal ripples
with evening wind, sunset in his eyes streaking the water red and gold: royal colors.
Wrecks poke up out of the water, red lead and rust ripening in this light, bashed
gray hullplates, flaking rivets, unlaid cable pointing hysterical strands to all points
of the compass, vibrating below any hearing in the breeze. Empty barges drift by,
loose and forlorn. A stork flies over, going home, below him suddenly the pallid arch
of the Avus overpass ahead. Any farther and Slothrop’s back in the American sector.
He angles across the canal, debarking on the opposite bank, and heads south, trying
to skirt the Soviet control point the map puts someplace to his right. Massive movement
in the dusk: Russian guardsmen, green-capped elite, marching and riding, pokerfaced,
in trucks, on horseback. You can feel the impedance in the fading day, the crowding,
jittering wire loops, Potsdam warning stay away . . . stay away. . . . The closer
it comes, the denser the field around that cloaked international gathering across
the Havel. Bodine’s right: a gnat can’t get in. Slothrop knows it, but just keeps
on skulking along, seeking less sensitive axes of suspicion, running zigzags, aimed
innocuously south.
Invisible. It becomes easier to believe in the longer he can keep going. Sometime
back on Midsummer Eve, between midnight and one, fern seed fell in his shoes. He is
the invisible youth, the armored changeling. Providence’s little pal.
Their
preoccupation is with forms of danger the War has taught them—phantoms they may be
doomed now, some of them, to carry for the rest of their lives. Fine for Slothrop,
though—it’s a set of threats he doesn’t belong to. They are still back in geographical
space, drawing deadlines and authorizing personnel, and the only beings who can violate
their space are safely caught and paralyzed in comic books. They think. They don’t
know about Rocketman here. They keep passing him and he remains alone, blotted to
evening by velvet and buckskin—if they do see him his image is shunted immediately
out to the boondocks of the brain where it remains in exile with other critters of
the night. . . .
Presently he cuts right again, toward the sunset. There’s still that big superhighway
to get across. Some Germans haven’t been able to get home for 10, 20 years because
they were caught on the wrong side of some Autobahn when it went through. Nervous
and leadfooted now, Slothrop comes creeping up to the Avus embankment, listening to
traffic vacuuming by above. Each driver thinks he’s in control of his vehicle, each
thinks he has a separate destination, but Slothrop knows better. The drivers are out
tonight because They need them where they are, forming a deadly barrier. Amateur Fritz
von Opels all over the place here, promising a lively sprint for Slothrop—snarling
inward toward that famous S-curve where maniacs in white helmets and dark goggles
once witched their wind-faired machinery around the banked brick in shrieking drifts
(admiring eyes of colonels in dress uniforms, colonel’s ladies in Garbo fedoras, all
safe up in their white towers yet belonging to the day’s adventure, each waiting for
his own surfacing of the same mother-violence underneath . . .).