Authors: Thomas Pynchon
There is a general withdrawing from orifices after a while, drinking, doping and gabbing
resume, and many begin to drift away to catch some sleep. Here and there a couple
or threesome linger. A C-melody saxophone player has the bell of his instrument snuggled
between the widespread thighs of a pretty matron in sunglasses, yes sunglasses at
night, this is some degenerate company Slothrop has fallen in with all right—the saxman
is playing “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” and those vibrations are just driving her wild.
A girl with an enormous glass dildo inside which baby piranhas are swimming in some
kind of decadent lavender medium amuses herself between the buttocks of a stout transvestite
in lace stockings and a dyed sable coat. A Montenegran countess is being fucked simultaneously
in her chignon and her navel by a pair of octogenarians who wear only jackboots and
are carrying on some sort of technical discussion in what seems to be ecclesiatical
Latin.
The sun is still hours away, down the vast unreadable underslope of Russia. Fog closes
in, and the engines slow. Wrecks slide away under the keel of the white ship. Springtime
corpses caught in the wreckage twist and flow as the
Anubis
moves by overhead. Under the bowsprit, the golden jackal, the only being aboard that
can see through the fog, stares ahead, down the river, toward Swinemünde.
• • • • • • •
Slothrop here’s been dreaming about Llandudno, where he spent a rainy furlough once
drinking bitter in bed with a tug skipper’s daughter. Also where Lewis Carroll wrote
that
Alice in Wonderland.
So, they put up a statue of the White Rabbit in Llandudno. White Rabbit’s been talking
to Slothrop, serious and crucial talk, but on the way up to waking he loses it all,
as usual. He lies staring at ducts and raceways overhead, asbestos-covered elbows,
pipes, gages, tanks, switchboards, flanges, unions, valve-wheels and all their thickets
of shadow. It’s noisy as hell. Sunlight filters down the hatches, so that must mean
it’s morning. In a corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red.
“You mustn’t tell Margherita. Please.” That Bianca. Hair down to her hips, cheeks
smudged, eyes hot. “She’ll kill me.”
“What time is it?”
“The sun’s been up for hours. Why do you want to know?”
Why does he want to know. Hmm. Maybe he’ll go back to sleep, here. “Your mother upset
with you, or something?”
“Oh, she’s gone out of her mind, she just accused me of having an affair with Thanatz.
Mad
ness, of course we’re good
friends
, but that’s all . . . if she paid
any
attention to me she’d know that.”
“She sure was paying attention to your ass there, kid.”
“Oh, dear,” lifting her dress, turning so she can also watch Slothrop back over a
shoulder. “I can still feel
that.
Did she leave marks?”
“Well, you’ll have to come closer.”
She moves toward him, smiling, pointing toes each step. “I watched you sleep. You’re
very pretty, you know. Mother also said you’re cruel.”
“Watch this.” He leans to bite her gently on one cheek of her ass. She squirms, but
doesn’t move away.
“Mm. There’s a zipper there, could you . . .” She shrugs, twists as he unzips her,
red taffeta slides down and off and sure enough there’s one or two lavender bruises
starting to show up on her bottom, which is perfectly shaped, smooth as cream. Small
as she is, she’s been further laced into a tiny black corset, which compresses her
waist now to the diameter of a brandy bottle and pushes pre-subdeb breasts up into
little white crescents. Satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework,
run down each thigh to hold up stockings with tops of dark Alençon lace. The bare
backs of her legs come brushing softly across Slothrop’s face. He starts taking giant,
ass-enthusiast bites now, meantime reaching around to play with cuntlips and clit,
Bianca’s little feet shifting in a nervous dance and scarlet nails digging sharp as
needles underneath her stocking tops and into her legs as he goes planting hickeys,
red nebulae across her sensitive spaces. She smells like soap, flowers, sweat, cunt.
Her long hair falls to the level of Slothrop’s eyes, fine and black, the split ends
whispering across the small of her white back in and out of invisibility, like rain . . .
she has turned, and sinks to her knees to undo his pleated trousers. Leaning, brushing
hair back behind her ears, the little girl takes the head of Slothrop’s cock into
her rouged mouth. Her eyes glitter through fern lashes, baby rodent hands race his
body unbuttoning, caressing. Such a slender child: her throat swallowing, strummed
to a moan as he grabs her hair, twists it . . . she has him all figured out. Knows
exactly when to take her mouth away and stand up, high-heeled Parisian slippers planted
to either side of him, swaying, hair softly waving forward to frame her face, repeated
by the corset darkly framing her pubic mound and belly. Raising bare arms, little
Bianca lifts her long hair, tosses her little head to let the mane shiver down her
back, needle-tipped fingers drifting then down slowly, making him wait, down over
the satin, all the shiny hooks and laces, to her thighs. Then her face, round with
baby-fat, enormous night-shadowed eyes comes swooping in as she kneels, guides his
penis into her and settles slow, excruciating till he fills her, stuffs her full. . . .
Now something, oh, kind of
funny
happens here. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while it’s going on—but
later on, it will occur to him that he was—this may sound odd, but he was somehow,
actually, well,
inside his own cock.
If you can imagine such a thing. Yes, inside the metropolitan organ entirely, all
other colonial tissue forgotten and left to fend for itself, his arms and legs it
seems
woven
among vessels and ducts, his sperm roaring louder and louder, getting ready to erupt,
somewhere below his feet . . . maroon and evening cuntlight reaches him in a single
ray through the opening at the top, refracted through the clear juices flowing up
around him. He is enclosed. Everything is about to come, come incredibly, and he’s
helpless here in this exploding
emprise
. . . red flesh echoing . . . an extraordinary sense of
waiting to rise. . . .
She posts, his pretty horsewoman, face to the overhead, quivering up and down, thightop
muscles strung hard as cable, baby breasts working out the top of her garment . . .
Slothrop pulls Bianca to him by her nipples and bites each one very hard. Sliding
her arms around his neck, hugging him, she starts to come, and so does he, their own
flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower’s summit and
into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be
but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?
Somewhere in their lying-still are her heart, buffeting, a chickadee in the snow,
her hair, draping and sheltering both their faces, little tongue at his temples and
eyes on and on, silk legs rubbing his flanks, cool leather of her shoes against his
legs and ankles, shoulderblades rising like wings whenever she hugs him. What happened
back there? Slothrop thinks he might cry.
They have been holding each other. She’s been talking about hiding out.
“Sure. But we’ll have to get off sometime, Swinemünde, someplace.”
“No. We can get away. I’m a child, I know how to hide. I can hide you too.”
He knows she can. He knows. Right here, right now, under the makeup and the fancy
underwear, she
exists
, love, invisibility. . . . For Slothrop this is some discovery.
But her arms about his neck are shifting now, apprehensive. For good reason. Sure
he’ll stay for a while, but eventually he’ll go, and for this he is to be counted,
after all, among the Zone’s lost. The Pope’s staff is always going to remain barren,
like Slothrop’s own unflowering cock.
So when he disentangles himself, it is extravagantly. He creates a bureaucracy of
departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites . . .
but coming back is something he’s already forgotten about. Straightening his bow tie,
brushing off the satin lapels of his jacket, buttoning up his pants, back in uniform
of the day, he turns his back on her, and up the ladder he goes. The last instant
their eyes were in touch is already behind him. . . .
Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror will come
when the afternoon is brightest. And like Margherita, she has her worst visions in
black and white. Each day she feels closer to the edge of something. She dreams often
of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by that
same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. In a Pullman,
dictating her story. She feels able at last to tell of a personal horror, tell it
clearly in a way others can share. That may keep it from taking her past the edge,
into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her mind’s flank . . . when she
was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes,
would loom like a presence. . . . In her ruined towers now the bells gong back and
forth in the wind. Frayed ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide
above the stone. Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old daylight: late, and cold.
Horror in the brightest hour of afternoon . . . sails on the sea too small and distant
to matter . . . water too steel and cold. . . .
Her look now—this deepening arrest—has already broken Slothrop’s seeing heart: has
broken and broken, that same look swung as he drove by, thrust away into twilights
of moss and crumbling colony, of skinny clouded-cylinder gas pumps, of tin Moxie signs
gentian and bittersweet as the taste they were there to hustle on the weathered sides
of barns, looked for how many Last Times up in the rearview mirror, all of them too
far inside metal and combustion, allowing the days’ targets more reality than anything
that might come up by surprise, by Murphy’s Law, where the salvation could be. . . .
Lost, again and again, past poor dambusted and drowned Becket, up and down the rut-brown
slopes, the hayrakes rusting in the afternoon, the sky purple-gray, dark as chewed
gum, the mist starting to make white dashes in the air, aimed earthward a quarter,
a half inch . . . she looked at him once, of course he still remembers, from down
at the end of a lunchwagon counter, grill smoke working onto the windows patient as
shoe grease against the rain for the plaid, hunched-up leaky handful inside, off the
jukebox a quick twinkle in the bleat of a trombone, a reed section, planting swing
notes precisely into the groove between silent midpoint and next beat, jumping it
pah
(hm)
pah
(hm)
pah
so exactly in the groove that you knew it was ahead but
felt
it was behind, both of you, at both ends of the counter, could feel it, feel your
age delivered into a new kind of time that may have allowed you to miss the rest,
the graceless expectations of old men who watched, in bifocal and mucus indifference,
watched you lindy-hop into the pit by millions, as many millions as necessary. . . .
Of course Slothrop lost her, and kept losing her—it was an American requirement—out
the windows of the Greyhound, passing into beveled stonery, green and elm-folded on
into a failure of perception, or, in a more sinister sense, of will (you used to know
what these words mean), she has moved on, untroubled, too much Theirs, no chance of
a beige summer spook at
her
roadside. . . .
Leaving Slothrop in his city-reflexes and Harvard crew sox—both happening to be red-ring
manacles, comicbook irons (though the comic book was virtually uncirculated, found
by chance near nightfall by a hopper at a Berkshire sandbank. The name of the hero—or
being—was Sundial. The frames never enclosed him—or it—for long enough to tell. Sundial,
flashing in, flashing out again, came from “across the wind,” by which readers understood
“across some flow, more or less sheet and vertical: a wall in constant motion”—over
there was a different world, where Sundial took care of business they would never
understand).
Distant, yes these are pretty distant. Sure they are. Too much closer and it begins
to hurt to bring her back. But there is this Eurydice-obsession, this
bringing back out of
. . . though how much easier just to leave her there, in fetid carbide and dead-canary
soups of breath and come out and have comfort enough to try only for a reasonable
fascimile—“Why bring her back? Why try? It’s only the difference between the real
boxtop and the one you draw for Them.” No. How can he believe that? It’s what They
want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image,
all right, their whole economy’s based on
that
. . . but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay. . . .
Of all her putative fathers—Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving
film, Franz Pökler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth,
that
Alpdrücken
Night, on the other—Bianca is closest, this last possible moment below decks here
behind the ravening jackal, closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone
in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you
whose interdiction from her mother’s water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying
sure I know them
, omitted, chuckling
count me in
, unable, thinking
probably some hooker
. . . She favors you, most of all. You’ll never get to see her. So somebody has to
tell you.
• • • • • • •
Halfway up the ladder, Slothrop is startled by a bright set of teeth, beaming out
of a dark hatchway. “I was watching. I hope you don’t mind.” Seems to be that Nip
again, who introduces himself now as Ensign Morituri, of the Imperial Japanese Navy.